All literate knowledge stemmed from the transmissions of sacred texts before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in Europe. By the twentieth century, following the expansion of the West, most scholars in Asia accepted that science education had an equal place with their own classical humanities. It was not until the second half of that century that social science was taken seriously in Asian universities. The impact of that on the humanities has yet to be fully felt, but many universities already treat traditional learning as something akin to pre–social science. For those who believe that the humanities are vital to any civilized society, the challenge is not only to protect the humanities from further erosion, but also to use scientific methods and ideas to study the nature of Asian traditions in changing societies without these studies becoming simply pale imitations of imperial knowledge from the West.

This chapter does not examine directly the implications of taking up that challenge. It only describes my experiences with an early stage of transition, one moving from what could be described as imperial knowledge brought from the West, to new local and national efforts in Southeast Asia to respond to the introduction of social science. In that context, the chapter deals primarily with the decade in the 1940s and 1950s of my own apprenticeship as a student, during which I studied in three places: Nanjing in China, 1947–48; Singapore as part of British Malaya, 1949–54; and London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1954–57.

I began my studies of history without thought of what social science was and what it was not. My history teachers certainly did not call themselves social scientists. However, from today's perspective, my educational background could be described as more than one-third social science and nearly two thirds humanities. So I may be said to represent something called pre–social science. I agreed to participate in this volume because I believe that the history and sociology of knowledge could be useful to those who wonder about current trends and potentials, and wish to see some of the problems today in a wider context. The fact is, I studied history in the imperial traditions of a humanities education and, while welcoming the stimulus of social science analysis, decided not to pursue any training in a specific social science discipline.