Recent Malaysian Historiography

Abstract

Considering that, except for the initial period of the Emergency, Malaysia as a country attracted far less attention internationally than most of the other countries in Southeast Asia, it is somewhat surprising to find that many foreign historians did not hesitate to make Malaysian history the subject of their scholarly works. L.A. Mills wrote in 1924, 1942, and again in 1958; Rupert Emerson in 1937. In 1935, a Ph.D. thesis was completed by M.I. Knowles in the University of Wisconsin. In 1943, Virginia Thomson wrote Postmortem on Malaya. The post-1950 situation was even more exciting. Numerous theses on Malaysia were written in various universities in the world — among them SOAS, ANU, Hong Kong, California, Columbia, and Duke. Of course, by far the greatest volume of work was done in the University of Malaya (Singapore) itself where, between 1951 and 1961, more than a hundred theses were completed at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Understandably, in the mid-sixties, there was a growing feeling that the field was being exhausted.