Double feature

Anne L. Foster. 2010. Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941. Durham and London: Duke University Press. xii + 241 pp, ISBN: 978-0-8223-4800-9 (paperback)

‘Nearly all works on United States relations with Southeast Asia have traditionally started their analysis with 1945, or perhaps 1941’, the author observes. (p. 9) Her book adopts a different line. That is welcome in at least two different ways. It tends to bring Southeast Asia into larger and more comparative studies, for example on US imperialism. That diminishes the risk, still prevalent, that Southeast Asia is ghettoised in more general works that draw their evidence and examples from other parts of the world, indeed other parts of Asia.

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