Challenges in Writing The New Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: A Joint Presentation by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y Andaya
In 1992 Nicholas Tarling edited the two volume Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Three decades later, a new edition comprising three volumes has been developed in response to historiographical shifts and the evolving contours of Southeast Asian studies. Leonard (editor of Volume II) and Barbara Watson Andaya (General Editor) will discuss the forthcoming edition of what is officially called The New Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, which should be with the press next year. While maintaining the focus on regional overviews, this 21st century version conceptualizes a Southeast Asian region that has generated its own dynamic narrative while participating in globalizing networks stretching back to the distant past. While continuing to honor Lord Acton’s vision of regionally focused and comparative historical syntheses, the new edition departs in important ways from its 1992 predecessor. Structurally, it adopts a more modular design, with shorter, thematically focused chapters that allow for greater topical breadth and interdisciplinary inclusion. The first volume brings together archaeologists, prehistorians, and philologists to highlight a “deep history” of human adaptation and agency. Volume 2 is devoted to the “early modern” period (1400-1800), which has garnered increased attention as a time of enhanced global interaction. Volume 3, taking up the story from the early nineteenth century, combines the expertise of political scientists and historians to place contemporary concerns in a historical framework. The aim of this new edition is not merely to update its predecessor but to reimagine how Southeast Asian histories are positioned in the globalized environment of the 21st century.
Barbara Watson Andaya is Emerita Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She holds a BA and a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. She taught history and English for three years at a high school in Sydney before obtaining an East-West Center grant, which enabled her to gain an MA in history at the University of Hawai‘i. She obtained a Ph.D. at Cornell University with a specialization in Southeast Asian history.
Dr Andaya took up her appointment at the University of Hawai‘i in 1994. Between 2003 and 2010 she was Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and in 2005-06 was elected President of the American Association of Asian Studies. In 2000 she received a John Simon Guggenheim Award, and in 2010 the University of Hawai‘i Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. She has lived and taught in Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. She maintains an active teaching and research interest across all Southeast Asia, but her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago during the early modern period (1400-1800) on which she has published widely. Her publications include Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth Century Malay State (1979), co-editor Tuhfat al-Nafis (The Precious Gift) (1982); To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993); The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (2006); (with Leonard Y. Andaya) A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia (2015), and a third edition of A History of Malaysia (2017), with a fourth edition in the planning stages. She is the General Editor of the new Cambridge History of Southeast Asia and is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asia.
Leonard Y. Andaya received a BA in History from Yale University, and an MA and PhD in Southeast Asian history from Cornell University. He has held positions at the University of Malaya, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, the National University of Singapore and, since 1993, at the University of Hawaii. He specializes in the history of Malaysia and Indonesia in the early modern period (c. 1500-c. 1800). His most recent books are Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008); and with Barbara Watson Andaya A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and a revised third edition of A History of Malaysia (London: Palgrave, 2017).