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Malaysia and Singapore Society
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15th James C. Jackson Memorial Lecture
The Malaysia Society 15th James C. Jackson Memorial Lecture was delivered on 3 July 2008 by Prof. Anthony Reid during the 17th Biennial Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference in Melbourne.
TITLE: Malaysia/Singapore as Immigrant Societies
LECTURER: Professor Anthony Reid
Prof. Anthony Reid delivering the Jackson Lecture |
Prof. Amarjit Kaur, MASSA President presents Prof. Reid with a gift on behalf of the ASAA Conference Organisers |
ABSTRACT:
It is conventional to divide our planet into the Old World and the New. The Old World is seen as the Eurasian mega-continent together with Africa, all part of a zone integrated by trade and the sharing of crops, domestic animals and disease pools since ancient times. The New World represents especially the Americas but also Australia and New Zealand, relatively isolated from the Old until 1492, but largely peopled by it thereafter. The countries that arose in the New World are usefully understood as immigrant societies, with their own kind of frontier mentality, alternately harsh and guilt-ridden racial relations with dispossessed aboriginal communities, and nationalisms that tend to stress the uniqueness of territory rather than ethnic particularity.
The Immigrant countries of the New World are still among the leaders in the acceptance of legal migrants and refugees. The foreign-born percentage of the population remains relatively high today, as it always has been in past periods. In statistical terms, however, the foreign-born component of the southern part of the Southeast Asian (Malayan) Peninsula has been comparably high. After a turn against immigration in the middle of the 20th Century, Singapore and Malaysia have since the 1990s again accepted a foreign-born population on at least the same scale as self-consciously immigrant societies like Australia and the United States. This lecture will compare their experience over the past two centuries with that of Australia in particular, to see what utility the category ‘immigrant society’ holds for them.
Anthony Reid is a Southeast Asian Historian at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, of which he was founding Director (2002-7). He was Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA from 1999-2002, and previously Professor of Southeast Asian History at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Australian National University.
He has worked on a variety of themes in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia. His books include An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (2004), Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (1999), Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (2 vols. 1988-1993), The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra (1979), The Indonesian National Revolution, 1945-1950 (1974), and The Contest for North Sumatra (1969).