The 21st Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA), held on June 22-25, 2010, was organized by the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore and was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies/JSEAS). The Organizing Committee of the conference was headed by the editor-in-chief of this magazine Ion Mun Chen (Singapore). The conference was attended by more than two hundred researchers from Singapore, China, India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and other Eurasian countries. The conference opened with a welcome from the Chairman of the organizing committee, Ying Mun Chen, and a lecture by Wang Gongwu (Singapore) on "Rising Asia and Changing the Role of the Historian". Wang Gongwu noted the changes that have taken place in the world since the first IAHA conference in Manila, primarily the end of the cold war and the change in the balance of power in favor of the Asian giants - China, India and Japan. Historians of the mid-20th century focused on the concept of the national state, the institution of which is currently experiencing a crisis, and they understood history mainly as a political, event-based one. Over the past fifty years, the knowledge of the past has undergone tremendous changes: the penetration of natural science and mathematical methods into data processing, the emergence of new sources and research directions (oral history, gender studies, history of concepts), the blurring of boundaries between different disciplines (interdisciplinary approach). Under these circumstances, Wang Gongwu asked himself: what should a historian do now? In his opinion, a historian should strive to avoid being forced by the state, the environment, or the university to create an open-minded system of knowledge and accept and defend the thesis ... Read more