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‘only game in town’ was conservative military-monarchical domination. This divergence was to have serious consequences at the height of the Vietnam War, when almost everyone studying Indonesia or Vietnam was strongly against the war, while those working on Thailand initially supported it. A gradual polarization took place among the faculty,which had serious effects on the morale of the program for some years after. It should be added that this emotional attachment to the individual countries we studied made it psychologically very difficult to study any other, aside from the linguistic problems involved.
    Here I have to say I owe a strange debt to the tyrant General Suharto, who expelled me from Indonesia in 1972 and kept me out till after his downfall in 1998. For this reason I was forced to diversify, studying Thailand mainly between 1974 and 1986, and the Philippines from 1988 to the present. I am grateful to him for forcing me beyond the ‘one country’ perspective. Had I not been expelled, it is unlikely that I would ever have written Imagined Communities . But I was a very unusual case, almost unique until very recently, with the exception of Yale’s James Scott, who was forced to work on Malaysia because the military in Burma banned all foreign scholars who were interested that country.
    By the 1960s, the programs at Cornell and Yale were no longer unique, even though their influence, mediated through alumni who secured jobs in other universities in the US and abroad, remained quite strong. Over time, comparable programs were created at big universities in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Seattle, Honolulu, Madison and Ann Arbor. Japanese students at Cornell, such as the late Nagazumi Akira, Goto Kenichi, Kato Tsuyoshi, Shiraishi Aiko and Shiraishi Takashi, played key roles in reviving and transforming Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Former Australian Cornell students, led by the late Herbert Feith, built programsbased on the Cornell model, which were reinforced by an influx of Americans in the late 1970s and 1980s (to be discussed later). In London, the famed School of Oriental and African Studies started to shake off its colonial past and broadened its teaching beyond the former British colonies. In this process Ruth McVey, my brilliant senior classmate, was decisive. France, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia moved in the same direction. This meant that ‘Southeast Asian studies’ gradually became internationalized, though with different traditions and specializations. One should add that, in the process, the proportion of women, as students and later as professors, rose impressively almost everywhere.
    Southeast Asian studies in the US had a much more dramatic history than in any other country because of America’s global power, ambitions and phobias. One reason why Southeast Asian studies got a head start in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s was that the region abutted China, where, by the end of 1949, Mao Tse-tung had taken power and effectively driven the West out. But in that same period, Southeast Asia was unique in witnessing the rapid rise in almost every country of powerful, usually armed, local communist parties. There can be no doubt that a crucial reason for this peculiarity was the brief but pivotal ‘Japanese period’. The Japanese not only brought down all the colonial regimes in the region, humiliating and imprisoning the ‘white’ colonials, and encouraging an identification with Asia. They also, for their own reasons, mobilized the local populations for the war effort, trained and armed indigenous auxiliary militaries, and largelydestroyed the prewar economies. Japanese military brutality and economic exactions gradually turned the mobilized populations against Japan and towards the left. When Japan was abruptly defeated, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a power vacuum emerged in Southeast Asia