“To understand the present and anticipate the future, one must know enough of the past, enough to have a sense of the history of a people.”

— Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore

While much has been written about the more recent political and economic changes that have characterised the countries of Southeast Asia, the history of the region has tended to be overlooked or treated in such detail as to make it difficult for busy people to digest. This material, drawn from the book of the same name, seeks, in the context of Lee Kuan Yew’s thought provoking words, to provide readable histories of the ten countries of Southeast Asia and give the reader an edge in understanding and predicting the future direction of the environments in which they are living and working.

About this edition:

The first edition of “Focus on Southeast Asia” was published in 1997 and the second edition, which was renamed “A Short History of South East Asia”, was published in 1999. With so much change taking place in South East Asia over the years the book has been revised several more times with the most recent 6th edition being published in March, 2017. A copy of the cover is opposite.

The 6th edition of “A Short History of South East Asia” is available to purchase from Amazon, as both an e-book and a paperback, and via its publisher, Wiley.