III.
Only much later did I realize that Agoncillo's A Short History of the
Filipino People typified for Wolters the genre called “nationalist history.” There
were two kinds of “bad” Southeast Asian history at that time, at opposite
poles to each other. The earlier type was Eurocentric history, which bred its
antithesis, Asia-centric history, usually conflated with nationalist history. Both
were regarded as two sides of the same coin. Wolters was avowedly critical of
Eurocentric history. His teacher DGE Hall—nearly 25 years his senior—was in
fact the first to castigate Eurocentrism in his 1955 general history of Southeast
Asia. Both Hall and Wolters, however, were equally critical of some of the
forms that the indigenous response to Eurocentric history took—particularly
the one labeled “nationalist.” For the theoretical working out of a solution,
they deferred to the essay by the younger scholar Smail.