Dividing empires into new nations was a major political gift of modernity in Southeast Asia. These empires have been a very large part of my life ever since I became aware of the world around me. My parents talked about the Dutch, the British and the Japanese empires incessantly when I was a boy. Both of them were born in Qing China, an empire on its last legs. They were conscious that the end of that empire simply meant that China was at the mercy of other empires. They had grown up with the threat of the Japanese empire spreading from Korea to Manchuria, and poised in North China ready to invade the rest of China. But there was nowhere else for them to turn to get away from empires. After graduation from Southeastern University in Nanjing (itself once an imperial capital), my father was offered a job to go to the Nanyang to educate the children of overseas Chinese. He went to work, first in British Malaya and then in Dutch Java, both places ruled by Europeans who were confident that their empires would go on indefinitely. But even there, there was already the growing shadow of a powerful Japanese empire.

Thus, when I first met Nicholas Tarling over fifty years ago, I was struck by how he was immersed in the study of empires in the Malay world in which I had grown up. I had found the British and imperial history I was taught at school difficult to like. At the time I met Nick Tarling, I was looking forward to the decolonization taking place that would bring that history to an end. Therefore, I was intrigued to meet someone who was so deeply interested in the imperial story. Nick Tarling went on to devote his professional life to describing those empires. He was not content to study British power at its peak but followed the story to the retreat of all Western empires after the Japanese defeats of 1942–45. He then went further to examine the various ways each of the empires was wound down and how some of them developed other power systems to deal with the region.