The term ‘transfer’, most of us realize, is a misleading description of how scientific or technological knowledge travels. It reduces a partial, unpredictable, and culturally nuanced process to the simple action of sending a parcel through the mail. Historians of religion or art are not likely to write of the ‘transfer’ of their subject from one geographic location to another. Yet historians of science and technology, whose topic is in no sense less complex, still sometimes fall back on ‘transmission’ or ‘replication’, terms too casually borrowed from the mechanisms or laboratory procedures of the actors we study. Even when the perfect transfer of a technical or scientific regime from one place to another is the actor's intention—and one cannot invariably assume that it is— different circumstances at the ‘receiving’ end invariably produce different narratives, events, and forms. Certainly it is part of our job to notice these, even when historical actors invested in a story of transfer dismiss them as ‘local anomalies’.

Meiji Japan is one of the most iconographic sites of scientific and technological ‘transfer’ in world history narratives. In the last decade or so, historians have begun to revisit and retell this story with cultural issues foregrounded, giving the narrative more depth and life than it was allowed as a prop to modernization theory. This article is an attempt to further that scholarly trend. I intend to focus on an example of scientific knowledge-making in the Meiji academy at a time when it was still staffed largely by foreign professors—men whose official role was to perform as switches through which foreign knowledge flowed. My story is about how they were not perfect switches; how the ‘Western knowledge’ that was taught to the first generation of Japanese was in fact a local conversation, even when European teachers were speaking mainly to themselves. It is about how ‘Western knowledge’ in Meiji Japan inevitably mixed words, references, concepts, and evidence from far away with others invented or discovered close-at-hand.

It has been more than fifty years since the processes of decolonization changed the political, economic and cultural landscape in Asia and its relations with its former European colonizers. For a long time, academic discussions on Europe and Asia have focused on the political implications of their colonial histories. More recently, debates have centred on contemporary aspects of the Europe-Asia partnership in terms of international relations and economic linkages. In all these discussions, relations between Asia and Europe have been predominantly studied in hegemonic terms, with Europe as the dominant political and economic and cultural centre. This centre-periphery conception of Europe-Asia relations has contributed to the establishment of seemingly unproblematic notions of a clear divide between two monolithic regions. Nevertheless such conceptions of Europe and Asia have come under increasing scrutiny given recent material realities of globalization.

Global movements of capital, knowledge and people have shown us that social spaces and cultures cannot exist next to each other as areas with boundaries around, but have to be viewed as articulated moments in a network of relations and understandings. The present volume contributes to this scrutiny by providing a critique of Europe-Asia relations from a multi-disciplinary angle. Its aims are to interrogate the dominant conceptions of Europe-Asia and to delineate the underlying complexities of the linkages between the two. To complement the predominantly political and economic interest in the Europe-Asia relationship, this volume focuses on the academic, social and cultural relations that bring Europe and Asia together, from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

The use of the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ merits qualification. European political and cultural landscapes have undergone vast changes since World War II. More recently, the establishment of the European Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the succeeding reintegration processes set in motion have completely transformed the map of Europe. On the other hand, the more restrictive idea of the Far East has given way to amorphous politico-economic constructs like East Asia (China, Japan and Korea), South Asia (the Indian subcontinent and her neighbours) and Southeast Asia (a Cold War construct).

The term ‘alternative discourses’ refers to works that attempt to both critically assess mainstream ideas in the social sciences that are generally regarded as unproblematic, as well as generate alternative concepts and theories. To the extent that mainstream social science is Eurocentric, the practioners of alternative discourses often see themselves as contributing to counter-Eurocentric social science. This chapter introduces the notion of alternative discourses by way of providing illustrations from Southeast Asia.

Introduction

That the social sciences in much of the Third World lack creativity and originality is something that has long been recognized by social scientists everywhere and has even become the topic of many research papers and books. To be sure, part of the problem has to do with the fact that the social sciences in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America were introduced by colonial powers and failed to be sufficiently indigenized, domesticated, or nationalized in order that they could be more relevant. This is due in part to the lack of continuity between the European tradition of knowledge and indigenous systems of ideas (Watanuki 1984, p. 283) and the non-existence of an organic relationship with the cultural history of the colony (Kyi 1984, p. 94).

While it is not true that there was nothing approximating social scientific theory in Asian and other non-Western societies prior to the introduction of the social sciences from Europe and America from the eighteenth century onwards, it is certainly worth noting that no indigenous schools or traditions in sociology or any other social science discipline ever came into being autochthonously in non-European societies. What I am referring to here is a general problem of knowledge even in countries like India, Egypt, Turkey, Korea and the Philippines where the social sciences are relatively more developed. In Korea in the 1970s, for example, scholars were ‘awakened’ to the need to establish a more creative Korean sociology (Shin 1994).

What does it mean to explore the boundaries and the ambiguities surrounding the notion of racial frontiers at a time when mixed race identity is more a norm than an exception? Clearly, the meanings of race and skin colour are mediated by language, religion, nationality and culture. Given the socially constructed character of race and the detrimental effects that these classifications have had on non-white peoples and especially on mixed race persons in the colonies, I would like to argue that a positive reconstruction of mixed race identities needs to be developed in postcolonial cultures.

Edouard Glissant, the Francophone Caribbean poet and writer, says that in today's world ‘métissage’ is operational as a rule. He adds that the ‘single-root’ (racine unique), purist definitions of racial identities have to be necessarily replaced by what he terms as rhizome identities or relational identities. Glissant's theory of cultural creolization (‘métissage’), is not some kind of vague humanism but an attempt to recover concealed histories by establishing a cross-cultural relationship in an egalitarian way:

To Francoise Lionnet, feminist literary critic, renowned for her reading of Francophone women writers of African origin and her work on women's autobiographies, ‘métissage’ is an aesthetic concept to “illustrate the relationship between historical context and individual circumstances, the socio-cultural construction of race and gender and traditional genre theory, the cross-cultural linguistic mechanisms that allow a writer to generate polysemic meanings from deceptively simple or seemingly linear narrative techniques.”

International migration, although certainly not a new phenomenon, has increased over the past few decades (Appleyard 1991, p. 5). People of South Asian origin, in particular from India, have always formed a significant part of this migration process. The Indian diaspora as it exists today gained momentum in modern times after the abolition of slavery in the British empire, and the subsequent introduction of the indenture system in 1834, followed in the 1920s by the kangani or maistry system. Together with the smaller-sized ‘passage’ or ‘free’ migration, these forms of migration resulted in the fact that between 1834 and 1938 about 30 million Indians left their country of origin. Most of them went to British colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Although many of these migrants did return to India in the end, a substantial number of them settled down in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mauritius, South Africa, Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), British Malaya (Malaysia), British Guyana (Guyana), and Trinidad and Tobago. As a result, many of these countries still have today a sizeable population of Indian origin (Jain 1989, p. 165).

Migration from India to the West is a more recent phenomenon. At the end of the twentieth century, about 2 million persons of South Asian origin resided in Europe, the United States and Canada. The majority of them, about 1.26 million, live in Britain (Jain 1993, pp. 34–35). Over the past four decades, a substantial number of studies have been conducted on Indian migrants in Britain. Together, these studies provide us with insight into various historical and contemporary aspects of the migration patterns of different Indian communities. Geographically, Indian migrants in Britain are concentrated in the urban counties of England, from Kent in the Southeast to Lancashire in the Northwest. The largest number of them, about 36 per cent of the total Indian population, live in Greater London, while 22 per cent have settled in the Midlands area (Ram 1989, pp. 101–2).

On the evening of 2 December 1907, before an audience of noblemen and state officials who had gathered in the ruined city of Ayutthaya for a three-day festive extravaganza, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868– 1910) gave the inaugural speech to the Archaeological (or Antiquarian) Society (Borankhadi Samosom). Its objective, the sovereign explained, was the recovery of physical remains of the past as a means to compensate for the dearth of written documents and thus make possible the compilation of a history of Siam covering the last thousand years. The exhortation was put into practice the following day, which was devoted to a sightseeing tour of the local ruins. As the culmination of several decades of royal antiquarian pursuits and a response to the establishment of the Siam Society by a group of expatriates in 1904, the founding of the Archaeological Society signalled the intention of systematically investigating the realm's historical landscape in the wake of its territorial and cartographic configuration as a modern state at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is hardly surprising to see Siam's status as the only formally independent country in Southeast Asia highlighted at the very beginning of a recent book on Thailand's prehistory in order to distinguish the history of archaeology there from that of the rest of the region: “The colonial powers introduced their traditional methods for archaeological research. … Only Thailand stood firmly against the colonial tide, and in consequence, looked to its own resources. This came with royal inspiration.” Along with the three kings—Mongkut, Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh—whose reigns spanned the period 1851 to 1925, much of this inspiration is credited to Prince Damrong Rachanubhab (1862–1943), the leading antiquarian of his time as well as the architect of the administrative centralization of the kingdom. Prince Damrong, who is memorialized in the national pantheon as the ‘father of Thai history’, wrote extensively on a variety of historical subjects, surveyed ancient sites, and played a pivotal role in the establishment of the cultural institutions (that is, the National Library and the National Museum) that were inherited by the constitutional government after the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932.

The term modernity refers to a socio-historical transformative process which has its roots in the Western European experience from at least the 16th Century, marking a contrast to the medieval period. Implicit in this definition of modernity is the notion of historical progress that is based on a unilinear unfolding of time and experience whereby the Western mode of time and being is the norm against which all other experiences are judged. In recent years, this classical understanding of modernity has come under increasing critique with multiple formulations of the modern in the world that do not conform to the Western experience. The multiple formulations of modernity suggest that modernity is not necessarily only a Western phenomenon but that there are a variety of forms and meanings of the modern.

In parallel to these developments, the conceptualization of modernity has undergone radical changes. More recently, the idea that a rethinking of modernity can be positioned within or outside the West has increasingly given way to a conceptualization of modernity within the simultaneous processes of the global and the local and/or the East and the West. Traditional distinctions between the West and the non-West and the unfolding logic of modernity have been complicated. This paper explores displacements opened up by recent rethinking about both Western and non-Western experiences of the modern that provide ways out of the East-West binary and its associated unequal relations in the conceptualization of modernity.

I will take up two sets of debates on modernity to make my point. First, I identify recent studies that have reconceptualized modernity from the margins—both within as well as outside the West—in order to unsettle the centre-periphery hierarchy and locate equal force to knowledge and practices of non-Western contexts in constituting the modern condition. Second, I discuss how the recent reconceptualization of modernity poses a challenge to understanding the modern imaginaries and transformations in Southeast Asian societies in autonomous terms rather than resorting to invidious or derivative distinctions from that of the West.

Modern Vietnamese journalism and prose fiction owe a debt to French colonialism. The conditions and opportunities created in the early twentieth century by colonial rule allowed for the emergence of new types of literature—modern novels and short stories—which in turn posed a serious challenge to colonialism itself. This chapter will examine two prominent groups of Northern Vietnamese writers of the 1930s and 1940s, whose novels and short stories on poverty reflected Vietnamese intellectuals’ preoccupation with social and moral problems associated with colonialism and global capitalism.

The first group is the Tu luc van doan (Self-Reliance Literary group), an organization of Westernized liberal intellectuals. The second group is composed of left-leaning social realist writers. Although the fiction examined here provided contemporary readers with descriptive and seemingly apolitical portrayals of poverty, they were not simply critiques of society in general. The works of the first generation of Vietnamese modern prose writers were strong indictments against French colonialism. The treatment of female characters and use of gendered imagery made these short stories and novels expressions of anti-colonial sentiment. In these works, the symbolic feminine nation and masculine Confucian moral order were used to express the authors’ anguish over the moral degeneration of their society and the loss of their nation. By openly exhibiting scenes of absolute poverty and social deterioration after nearly half a century of colonization, these writers made a mockery of the French claim to a ‘civilizing’ mission.

Another underlying theme in this chapter is the issue of identity and representation. For the most part, the intellectuals of Northern Vietnam were men of middle to upper-middle class families, who had access to education and lived in an urbanized and Westernized environment. Many of the writers examined here lived a relatively comfortable life in comparison to the misery they described in their stories. Of interest is how these writers positioned themselves vis-à-vis the poor about whom they wrote. The Vietnamese intellectuals clearly saw themselves as beneficiaries of Western modernity in terms of scientific and technological advances as well as intellectual influences.

Outward orientation and an openness to trade and investment flows have been a key component of Singapore's growth strategy over the years. Its total trade volume currently accounts for about thrice of its GDP, and the country is often placed in the league of “super-trading” nations. Singapore has always been a leading advocate of global trade liberalization through the WTO. However, limited progress on many important issues in the WTO, related to trade and investment liberalization, has raised perceptions that the multilateral route to trade liberalization has been disappointingly slow and negotiations have been rather protracted and cumbersome. It is this perception that led highly open and trade-dependent economies like Singapore to simultaneously pursue a second track to trade liberalization through the regional route, which has involved Southeast Asia through the ASEAN grouping and the larger Asia and Pacific economies through the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) grouping.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the East Asian crisis of 1997–98 and its adverse impact on trade and liberalization efforts within ASEAN and APEC, the pace of and willingness to undertake trade and investment liberalization of Singapore's neighbours in ASEAN have slowed down. This has led Singapore to explore a third option of bilateralism to advance freer trade in Southeast Asia and the region in order to to complement its strong advocacy for multilateral liberalization. It is in this context that Singapore has been engaged in negotiating bilateral FTAs with its major trading partners who are “like-minded” in terms of willingness to undertake comprehensive measures to liberalize trade and investment among themselves. This strategy has also been interpreted as a way for Singapore to solve the “convoy problem” whereby least willing members within ASEAN could slow down the pace of trade liberalization.

In general, Singapore's FTA strategy has been pursued with twin goals. The first is to strengthen its economic linkages and gain a “first-mover” advantage vis-à-vis its major trading partners. The second goal has been to concomitantly enhance its market access in new, emerging market economies that have been equally committed to trade and investment liberalization across both goods and service sectors.

Although the idea of establishing an FTA between Singapore and the United States was thought of earlier, it was only on 16 November 2000, during the APEC meeting in Brunei, that the then U.S. President Bill Clinton and Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong officially announced the launch of the U.S.– Singapore FTA (USSFTA). After more than six rounds of negotiations spanning two years, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and Singapore's Minister for Trade and Industry BG George Yeo, jointly announced the substantive conclusion of the USSFTA in Singapore on 19 November 2002. The agreement was signed by the current U.S. President George W. Bush and Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in Washington, D.C. on 6 May 2003. With the passing of the USSFTA by the House of Representatives on 25 July 2003 and by the Senate on 1 August 2003, the agreement came into force from 1 January 2004.

The economic rationale behind the USSFTA is reflected in the de facto close trade and investment linkages between the United States and Singapore. The USSFTA strengthens the already strong economic ties between the two countries. The United States, being the world's largest economic and military superpower, is Singapore's second largest trading partner and is also the largest foreign investor. Nearly 1,300 U.S. companies and 15,000 U.S. citizens are based in Singapore, with many U.S. MNCs using Singapore as an export base to the rest of the world. Singapore has also been an important economic and strategic partner for the United States in Southeast Asia. It is the twelfth largest trading partner of the United States and the second largest Asian investor in the country, after Japan. The United States, which has a market of nearly 288 million people with a GDP per capita of US$36,273, offers great opportunities for Singapore and other ASEAN countries to expand their market access through FTAs.

The USSFTA is not only seen as a means of gaining greater market access, but also as a way of avoiding the imposition of possible protectionist measures by the United States in future, as well as managing future trade tensions.

Besides individual ASEAN countries continuing to negotiate on FTA deals with their emerging trading partners, there is also a surging interest among the ASEAN members to negotiate bilateral FTAs with their major trading partners as a single grouping during the past two years. To date, ASEAN as a grouping is negotiating bilateral FTAs with China and India; a Closer Economic Relations (CER) grouping consisting of Australia and New Zealand; and a comprehensive Economic Partnership with Japan. Each of these initiatives and their significance are discussed in this chapter.

ASEAN-CHINA FTA (ACFTA)

The ASEAN–China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) is the first such agreement that China has entered into after becoming a WTO member. It is very significant for regionalism in Asia as it is to be one of the largest FTAs ever negotiated, involving about 1.7 billion people, with a combined GDP of US$2 trillion, spanning across eleven diverse and heterogeneous economies, both in terms of their size and levels of development.

The idea of an ACFTA was first mooted by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji during the ASEAN–China Summit in November 2001. The Framework Agreement for this FTA was given concrete shape during the ASEAN Summit in Cambodia in November 2002. One of the key features of the ACFTA agreement is the “early harvest” clause. This clause commits ASEAN and China to reduce their tariffs for certain products (mainly agricultural products) within a span of three years, in order to demonstrate a reflection of their commitment to tariff reduction. The early harvest products belong to the following categories, viz. live animals, meat and edible meat offal, fish, dairy produce, other animal products, live trees, edible vegetables, and edible fruits and nuts. Tariff reduction or elimination for goods that are not included under this clause are to be negotiated through the ACFTA, scheduled to be completed by 30 June 2004. The timetable indicates the formation of the ACFTA in goods for the older ASEAN members (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, or ASEAN-6) by 2010, and that for the newer members (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, or CLMV) is scheduled to be by 2015, thus providing newer members more time to adjust to the requirements of the ACFTA.

SINGAPORE–JAPAN FTA

Singapore and Japan have entered into an FTA as part of the Japan– Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement (JSEPA). The idea of a JSEPA was first mooted in December 1999 by the Singapore Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, to his Japanese counterpart. A Joint Study Group was established to study the viability of the proposal. The group completed its work in September 2000 and the governments of Japan and Singapore entered into formal negotiations on a trade pact in October of that year. Following a series of negotiating rounds, the agreement was signed on 13 January 2002 in Singapore and came in force on 30 November 2002.

The economic linkages between Japan and Singapore are deep and well established. The recently concluded “New Age Economic Partnership” is aimed at fortifying and revitalizing these already strong linkages bilaterally as well as promoting joint Japan– Singapore trade and investments in third countries.

Highlights of the JSEPA Agreement

Trade in Goods and Rules of Origin

The JSEPA eliminates tariffs on goods covering 98.5 per cent of current trade between the two countries, much higher than the WTO zero-tariff commitments, which currently covers about 65 per cent of current Japan–Singapore trade. Singapore has committed to grant zero-tariff treatment on all imports from Japan. In turn, Japan has more than doubled its zero-tariff commitments to Singapore from the current 34 per cent to 77 per cent of total tariff lines. While preferential tariff-free market access has been granted to an extensive range of products, agriculture is the one area where tariff concessions have lagged because of the extreme political sensitivity of this sector in Japan, on the one hand, and its relative unimportance to Singapore, on the other. Both countries are prohibited from maintaining any export duties that may distort bilateral trade. Appropriate rules of origin have been designed in this respect.

Trade Facilitation

As tariff barriers have progressively come down worldwide, focus of trade agreements has shifted to other potential barriers to the flow of goods that may restrict market access opportunities.