ABSTRACT
National history and agrarian history tended to dominate the agenda in Asia when all of us were young. By hindsight we can perhaps say that from about the 1930s to the 1970s, as new states were struggling to define or assert themselves, these preoccupations appeared quite natural. The natural peasantries of each country, even thought in many cases only having become demographically dominant during the previous ‘high-colonial’ century, tended to be romanticised as the mystical heart of the new nation state, and the cultural homogeneity of these peasantries was often exaggerated to make the case stronger. The multiplicity and mobility of identities, which had always marked the Asian maritime world, was downplayed in this period. Both Marxist and nationalist historiography tended to see commercial and other minorities as marginal, elitist, and even anti-national because they clouded the vision of a ‘people’ in search of national self-expression.
