Learning Outcomes:
On completion of the module, students will be familiar with Southeast Asia's entry into modern global political and epistemological networks. They will have studied three European colonial empires at work simultaneously fashioning subjects and intellectual subjects of inquiry. They will be able to place the most dramatic episodes of recent Southeast Asian history - the genocide in Cambodia, the Indochina wars, the Indonesian massacres of 1965, the ongoing insurgencies in Myanmar - in broader historical and social context. They will be able to discuss the relative contributions of history and anthropology to our understanding of 'exotic' societies and their transitions to modernity.
Indicative Module Content:
Topics covered will include:
-Rice cultivation, irrigation and the village community.
-The Mandala or Galactic state in pre-modern Southeast Asia.
-Theravada Buddhism and society in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.
-Confucianism: state, society and economic growth in Vietnam and Singapore.
-Imperial rivalries and the colonial state.
-The colonial city: cultural contact and ethnic mixing.
-The environmental history of the colonial landscape.
-World War Two in Southeast Asia: the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere and the end of empire.
-Revolution and nationalism in the postwar years.
-Highlanders, ethnic minorities and twentieth-century war.
-Political violence, civil war and genocide (Burma, Indonesia and Cambodia).