At the end of a Cornell seminar a few weeks ago, a student remarked that the great difficulty in studying Southeast Asian history lay in the immense size of the area, and in the fact that it contained so many different countries. I agreed, but commented that they all belonged to Southeast Asia, and I went on, “If you were. to take indigenes from the different countries and dress them all exactly alike, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the country of origin of each and all.”