Historians & Their Discipline: The Call of Southeast Asian History

The Call of Southeast Asian History

The Call of Southeast Asian History By IAN NISH Ireadily acknowledge that I have heard the call of Southeast Asia for most of my life. Whether I can honestly claim to have heard the call of Southeast Asian history is more doubtful. My service in the British army took me as a Japanese language officer to Singapore in July 1946. I was posted to South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Centre (SEATIC) which was based in Johore Bahru where my work was connected with War Crimes in Singapore and also translation of the diaries of Japanese officers on the Burma front. Before long I was fortunate enough to be posted to Japan and, in the transit camp before I left Singapore, I was entrusted with making ex gratia payments to those who had assisted the allied cause during the Malayan campaigns. I left Singapore by s.s. Rajula of the British India Steam Navigation line late in October. This had sailed from Calcutta and picked up in Rangoon a few hundred Chinese who had collaborated with the Japanese armies in Burma and were being repatriated to China. At Singapore we picked up a number of Japanese officers who had been detained for interrogation in connection with War Crimes but had now been released and were being repatriated to Japan. The former were needless to say in dread of their lives when they returned to the jurisdiction of the Guomindang authorities. They staged a mutiny when the ship reached Hongkong. I happened to be duty officer for one of the days in port. The mutineers did not manage to escape though I can claim little credit for that. We did, however , succeed in getting a mention in the Hongkong newspapers. I then spent two and a half years in Japan. After my return to Britain, I took up postgraduate work at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 1950–51. I had already decided in my undergraduate days at the University of Edinburgh and, with the advance agreement of Professor W.G. Beasley, to undertake research on the AngloJapanese alliance of 1902–23. By great good fortune, the Foreign Office files of the British government had just been opened up to the year 1902 at the Public Record Office (then located at Chancery Lane). That seemed to be a good omen; and I have clung to that star ever since. My research work on the alliance directed me naturally towards Northeast Asia, Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia and North China. But, as the alliance progressed, 109 the scope of my research extended geographically to central China, then to south China and then to Singapore. The longer the alliance lasted, the more disputes grew on commercial and security grounds. When I joined the staff of the University of Sydney in the late 50s, I came into possession of some papers on and for a short period turned my research to the role of British chambers of commerce in the east. I had hoped to establish how British chambers of commerce spread from India through Singapore and Shanghai to Yokohama and the Japanese ports. I had come under the influence of Nathan Pelcovits and Michael Greenberg whose writings were then in vogue. The Bengal Chamber had been set up in March 1934, the Canton Chamber in August 1934, while that in Singapore was founded in 1837, Shanghai in 1851 and Yokohama in 1864. Was it, I asked, part of a coordinated movement or purely coincidental? Clearly it was related to the demise of the East India Company. But beyond that what was behind their founding, how much liaison was there between the various chambers, how much power had they in their country, how much influence did they wield with chambers in the United Kingdom? Since their aims were as much political as commercial, how much did they count for in Westminster and how much success did they achieve by their lobbying? Further, could we determine the amount of collaboration (if any) there was between chambers in the Indian Ocean/ China Seas area? The broader intention was to explore the administrative underpinning of Britain’s commercial expansion in the middle of the nineteenth century. My interest in this subject soon waned. One of my papers exploring this subject was presented to the first International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians held in Singapore in 1961.1 After I joined the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1962, I took part...