Professor Wolters may wen be right in his suggestion that the desire to be "modern" was a feature of Southeast Asian societies from early times. But one scholar has recently warned against subscribing to a "myth of unchanging modernity" in the region, and has pointed to the need to identify discontinuities and ruptures.) With the expansion of the global and cross-cultural network during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the sources of inspiration became more competing and even antagonistic.