ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the contextual factors—historical, political, institutional, and academic—that are most relevant to the narrative and analysis carried out in this book. It focuses on areas that have a direct bearing on the argument being developed. First is the pattern of colonization and the nationalist responses to it. Second is the state-formation, state–society relations, and contrasting fate of the communist party in the two countries. Last are the patterns of development of the two countries’ nationalist historiography and historical profession. The main task is to demonstrate that the contrasting colonial experience, processes of state-formation, and roles of the left in the two countries paved for a less hegemonic nationalism and less restrictive state–civil society relations in the Philippines than there were in Indonesia in the 1970s and 1980s.
