A Book about Books, and Where to Find Southeast Asia

This is a book about books; and specifically about the books that were written on the subject of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century.

Before proceeding any further, I would like to make it clear that this is not a book about the historical development of the region that is commonly known as ‘Southeast Asia’ today: Scores of erudite scholars have already done sterling work in that regard, and names like Steinberg, Roff, Chandler and Taylor come to mind. Nor am I disputing the fact that the peoples of that region were already in constant contact with each other, and had formed networks of commercial and cultural exchange between themselves long before the term ‘Southeast Asia’ had been coined – a fact well researched and documented by Anthony Reid and K.N. Chaudhuri in particular.

Rather, I propose to look at how the idea of Southeast Asia – long before the term was current – was arrived at, developed and put to instrumental use by a succession of scholars, adventurers and merchants from 1800 to the end of the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on the writers who were themselves part of the colonial enterprise and the products of empire. It is thus a book about the idea of the place and the worldviews of those who had imagined a region that lay before them, ripe for colonisation and conquest. In its pace and progression I propose to take tiny Hobbit-steps rather than emulate the stride of giants, and the claims that I shall make are modest in nature, though not, I believe, entirely inconsequential.