ABSTRACT
The historiography of the Malay world has, in a variety of ways, long revolved around the complex issue of Europe’s relationship with the region. In D.G.E. Hall’s History of South-East Asia (1955) European powers were still seen as dominant engines of change, but the view that the history of the region could and should be seen through the prism of European expansion was soon challenged (see Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee 2003: ix-x). The idea of writing an ‘autonomous’ history of Southeast Asia was furthered in the 1990s with the emergence of the concept of ‘early modern’ Southeast Asia. Here, this term was linked to the establishment of a periodisation from indigenous rather than European historical categories, on the premise that fundamental aspects of political and economic change were initiated before the arrival of Europeans. Since then, literature on the ‘early modern’ Malay world has flourished despite the fact that historians by necessity have had to lean principally on European sources (see, for example, Reid 1988, 1993). In recent commentaries, the era of European presence in the region is discussed as a ‘fleeting, passing phase’ (Tarling 2001).
