Professor Wang Gungwu has brought together eminent scholars of the history of Southeast Asian to arouse interest in an emerging regional consciousness. They examine issues of writing contemporary history of Southeast Asia, with particular reference to Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippiness, Singapore and Thailand. The book addresses questions such as: how should historians treat the earlier pasts of each country and the nationalism that guided the national-building task? Where did political culture come in, especially when dealing with modern challenges of class, securalism and ethnicity? What part do external or regional pressures play when the nations are still being built? The authors have thought deeply about the issues of writing nation-building histories and have tried to put them not only in the perspctive of Southeast Asian development of the past five decades, but also of the larger areas of historiography today.
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