![]() These societies helped carve out a place for national narratives cross-cut with the movements of migrants, attune to the complexities of local and minority histories, and embedded within a distinct regional history. It traces the development of independent learned societies in the Straits throughout the 19th century to the founding of the Siam Society and Burma Research Society in the early 20th century that laid the basis for knowledge about Southeast Asia. It seeks to complicate the theoretical frameworks of Orientalism and nationalism by investigating the circumstances under which such societies were founded, examining the personal networks between Asians and Europeans and within a transnational network of learned societies. This paper looks at the role of the learned society in Southeast Asia as a space of cross- cultural sociability and intellectual exchange between Western and Asian intellectuals in the colonial-era port-city. The vibrant, outward-looking atmosphere of the colonial port-city as a node of information and cultural exchange made Rangoon and Penang the intellectual staging grounds for new visions of the nation. Penangites transformed their society using the tenets of imperial citizenship to make political and cultural claims. By the 1930s, Burmese in Rangoon, imbued with a renewed sense of cultural pride, absorbed the rising tide of anti-colonialism nationalism echoing across the globe. Diverse Asian communities sought platforms to articulate their concerns and inform themselves of the affairs of the wider world, and their place within it. ![]() The advent of the Victorian era fostered new class and racial divisions between them, yet also created more cosmopolitan port-cities with the mushrooming of print-culture. Though Rangoon and Penang had starkly different relationships to colonial rule, they shared a history as multi-ethnic ports where various communities existed side-by-side over centuries. From the mid-nineteenth century, vast improvements in steamship and communication technology created an inter-linked network of port-cities in the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia. ![]()
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