I’d like to express my profound appreciation to Peter Drake and Ha-Joon Chang for coming all the way to Malaysia, and for participating in this book launch.

Excellencies and friends, my warmest thanks to all of you for taking time off on this Sunday morning to be here for my book launch.

But first, let us take a moment to remember two eminent and distinguished scholars, Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim and Dato’ Shaharil Talib, whose passing during the last year has been a loss to me personally, and to the nation. [PAUSE]

As you all know, Kay Kim and Shaharil were highly respected Malaysian historians—legends of the University of Malaya, and well respected by their peers and students alike. Their teaching and writing have contributed enormously to our appreciation of the country’s history. Both believed strongly in the value of inclusiveness. They greatly influenced my thinking over many years.

The task of a historian—it is often said—is not to judge but to explain. History is complex. It is long, winding, and ever changing, filled with countless perspectives and opinions. Indeed, young historians could spend their whole life ‘looking down’ when they do research, and by the time they look up they would be as old as Malaysia itself. Already, my family has listed me as ‘missing in action’!

In writing this book, I, too, have done my best to be objective and impartial. But as the influential Cambridge historian, E. H. Carr, wrote more than half a century ago: ‘It is possible to maintain that objective truth exists, but that no historian by himself can hope to achieve more than a faint and partial approximation of it.’And this is why my book is over 500 pages long, and has taken me almost two decades to write!

Robert Laurence Binyon, a famous English poet, who spent much of his working life at the British Museum, also wrote about history, and I quote: