Pacific Science and International Scientific Cooperation in Southeast Asia, 1950–65

This paper examines the emergence of Southeast Asian science after 1945, in the context of decolonization and the beginning of the Cold War in the Asia-Pacific. While the story of how Southeast Asia became a politically and culturally coherent region during the Cold War is well known, this paper breaks new ground by showing how Southeast Asian became a scientifically coherent region. European colonial geographers and environmental scientists had done research in Southeast Asia before World War II, but there was almost no effort to cooperate across national or imperial borders. This paper surveys the Pacific Science Congresses – the first of which was held in 1920 in Hawaii – and the part those regional gatherings played in promoting international scientific collaboration across Southeast Asia and the World. The paper focuses in particular on the post-war, 8^th Congress, held in 1953 at the University of the Philippines and 9^th Congress, held at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, four years later. The paper argues that the early 1950s were marked by a spirit of international cooperation promoted by North American scientists, in which Southeast Asian scientists were to be equal partners. This was epitomized by two of the Pacific Science Congresses of that decade being held in Southeast Asia. There were US funded research initiatives that drew Southeast Asian scholars into cooperative Asia-Pacific relationships as well as global networks. Aspiring Southeast Asian scientists who went abroad for graduate training, were increasingly doing so in the US and Canada, not in Europe. The paper concludes by showing how this nascent system of equitable global science in Southeast Asia devolved by the 1960s, into a system reminiscent of colonial power structures, in which an Asia-Pacific scientific network was dominated by scientists in the United States.