The recurrent questioning of racial politics in Malaysia in the past few decades has paved the way for the publication of a number of notable books and articles that interrogate the boundaries and conceptualisation of being Malay. Soda Naoki's book Conceptualizing the Malay world: Colonialism and pan-Malay identity in Malaya is a welcome addition to the still limited but expanding body of work on this area.

The book's main premise is straightforward: the historical and geographical knowledge produced by British scholar-administrators like R.J. Wilkinson and R.O. Winstedt had been indigenised or localised rather than passively received by the Malays, with ambivalent or contradictory results. This process reproduced colonial designs while simultaneously shaping the pan-Malay identity that underpinned Malay nationalism. One of Soda's key aims is to explain what he regards as the ‘paradoxical relationship between colonial education and Malay nationalism’ by examining the reproductive and transformative effects of the ‘transmission and appropriation of colonial knowledge’ (p. 54).

From the standpoint of the history of education, it is a notable contribution. This book offers a penetrating and comprehensive investigation of historical and geographical knowledge relevant to Malay identity formation in Malaya in the early decades of the twentieth century. The attempt to cover the multiple levels of knowledge production, transmission and appropriation, which is not often enough done in the context of Southeast Asia, is noteworthy. Chapters 2 and 3 paint a clear picture of the contents and framework of the vernacular education system implemented by the British in Malaya, with a focus on a teacher training college, Sultan Idris Training College (SITC). The description of SITC's curriculum, extracurricular activities and dorm life is valuable, shedding light on the educational practices and prevailing atmosphere which may have bred nationalist sentiments.

The contents of history and geography textbooks written by two British scholar-administrators (Wilkinson and Winstedt) and a Malay teacher (Abdul Hadi) are analysed in detail in chapter 4. This chapter also highlights the continuities as well as the shifts from the British to the local viewpoints in the conceptualisation of three major themes: the broad definition of a Malay community which was not based on religion and inclusive of ‘mixed races’ beyond the peninsula; flexible and expansive notions of a Malay ‘homeland’ at the provincial, peninsular and archipelago-wide levels; and, finally, the progressivist and evolutionary conception of time. From the standpoint of comparative historiography, I find this chapter illuminating.

The choice of the three themes cited above seems strategic. The running argument in the discussion of the life and thoughts of Ibrahim Haji Yaacob in chapter 5 is that he exemplified the appropriation and transformation of colonial knowledge into a nationalist ideology. The synthesis of a wide range of extant and new sources, including those written in Japanese and thus hitherto not accessible to many, as well as the way his life and thoughts are organised to support the book's main arguments, makes it a worthy read on its own amid the several works already published on Ibrahim Haji Yaacob.

As an analysis of Malay identity and nationalism, however, questions may be raised on the fundamental assumptions upon which the book's main arguments rest. Can't nationalism be other than reactive to Western colonialism? Can't it be other than modular in form and derivative of Eurocentric discourse, as Partha Chaterjee (Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative discourse?, 1986) has long reminded us? Can't nationalism be other than an intellectual exercise? Shouldn't nationalism as an act of self-formation be seen, felt and conceived from the standpoint of the nationalists themselves rather than of outside observers?

The use of colonial textbooks as key sources in the study effectively sets it up to privilege the role of British colonialism in the development of pan-Malayism and to narrowly conceive Malay nationalism as primarily anti-colonial. Apparently not oblivious to the limitations of this approach, Soda nonetheless opts to justify it by positing that ‘British colonialism … exercised a very powerful intellectual hegemony over the local population in Malaya’ (p. 3). Focusing mainly on Ibrahim Yaacob's ideas on community, space and time to illustrate this analytic scheme, what are missed or underplayed include the possibly broader and deeper sources of Malay nationalism (including Islam and anti-non-Bumiputera sentiments), as well as the plurality of Malay nationalisms that drew from the competing nations-of-intent of various shades: anti-colonial, pro-colonial, Islamic, et cetera. The use of Ibrahim, as a putative representative of non-elite, popular and anti-colonial nationalism, creates the misleading impression that it is a big deal that colonial knowledge was appropriated for nationalist purposes. Pro-British nationalists can also be shown to have done essentially similar thing, but due to the book's narrow conception of nationalism, they are ignored in the analysis. It would have been instructive to compare how anti-colonial and pro-colonial nationalists in Malaya appropriated colonial knowledge for their respective purposes to determine if indeed it mattered at all. More importantly, expanding the category of nationalists to include both anti-colonial and pro-colonial, as well as non-colonial (groups who, by choice or by default, were outside the immediate ambit of colonial relations) highlights the apparent false dichotomy and strawman's fallacy that undergird the purported paradox between colonial education and Malay nationalism. Rather than being mutually exclusive or oppositional, there were instances where they may have been mutually reinforcing or co-constitutive.

The analytical framework may also have been weighed down by its intellectualist bias, conceiving nationalism primarily as a thought or ideology, or as an intellectual act or output. Had nationalism been conceptualised more holistically to include its affective, performative, processual, and banal or experiential attributes, the book would have adjusted its claims by giving less weight to textbook knowledge and more on the possibility that pan-Malay identity might have developed also as an offshoot of people's day-to-day life. Hardly was it mainly an end product of intellectual enterprise. This point can be glimpsed in the discussion of Ibrahim's early life, but due to the intellectualist preference of the book's analytic scheme, it was unfortunately glossed over as background information.

These misgivings do not invalidate the value of this book. It is well researched, empirically rich, well organised and lucidly written. It is a fine contribution to our understanding of the history of knowledge production, transmission and consumption in Malaysia.