The Last Stand of Autonomous States in Southeast Asia and Korea 1750-1870: Problems, Possibilities, and a Project

The historiography of the smaller countries of Asia moves slowly, and most of the scholarly effort has been on the more accessible periods and problems (especially as seen in the orderly colonial records)-notably colonialism, nationalism, economic development and cultural experiment in the period 1870-1950. Serious researches on the pre-colonial past remain few and far between, inhibited by the opacity and inaccessibility of indigenous sources and the generally negative and dismissive tone of most external ones. It is thus not entirely surprising that the images created by colonial writing are still largely with us