The writing of Southeast Asian history, as distinct from the history of its several parts, is a comparatively recent development. The first major history of the region as a whole, D. G. E. Hall’s A History of South-East Asia, appeared only in 1955. Hall’s work, though describing itself as ‘a bare outline, perilously compressed and oversimplified in many parts’, was a massive achievement, basing itself on the detailed work of other scholars and reflecting a knowledge of the critical issues of debate amongst them. Apart from urging that Southeast Asia be studied as an area ‘worthy of consideration in its own right’ and not as an appendage of India, China or the West, it offered no new conceptual or methodological approaches of its own. But in bringing together the fruits of existing scholarship it provided a kind of stocktaking of the state of that scholarship.

Since then the suitability of the region as a whole as an object of study has been more readily accepted. Cornell University had already established, in 1950, its Southeast Asia Program, and a number of other institutions in various countries followed suit. And, increasingly, comparative works focused on the region as a whole. Charles Fisher’s social, economic and political geography (London, 1964) was entitled simply South-east Asia, and other works with a similar ambit followed: John F. Cady’s Southeast Asia: its Historical Development (New York, 1964) and his Post-War Southeast Asia (Athens, Ohio, 1974) and Nicholas Tarling’s Southeast Asia: Past and Present (Melbourne, 1966) are but a few examples.