Modern Asian Studies

• 1. Introduction

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  Modern Asian Studies began with a sense of national alarm. In 1947, the Scarbrough Commission told the British government plainly that the country's knowledge of Asian histories, cultures, and languages was, in its own words, "quite inadequate for Britain's national purposes." That single report set in motion a decades-long institutional effort that would eventually produce one of the most influential academic journals in the field of Asian studies.

  How does a commission's finding become a journal? And what does it mean for a scholarly publication to be called a flagship? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer, tracing the arc from a postwar reckoning with British ignorance to a peer-reviewed journal that has shaped how scholars understand the history, sociology, economics, and culture of modern Asia.

• 2. A Commission's Verdict

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  The Scarbrough Commission arrived at its conclusions in 1947, just two years after the end of the Second World War, at a moment when Britain's relationship to Asia was being fundamentally renegotiated. Its finding was blunt: Asian knowledge had no permanent, secure place in British academic life, and that gap was a problem for the nation.

  Ralph Lilley Turner, the second Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, took on the task of translating that verdict into institutional reality. Turner sought state funding to act on the commission's recommendations, and that funding began flowing in 1948. The plan was ambitious: SOAS intended to appoint 18 professors, 35 readers, and 114 lecturers over a five-year period. The scale of the ambition reflected just how seriously the commission's warning had been taken.

• 3. A Joint Academic Effort

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  No single university could build this field alone. The effort that led to Modern Asian Studies was structured as a collaboration among five British institutions: SOAS University of London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Hull, the University of Leeds, and the University of Sheffield. Their shared vehicle was the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge, known as CSAS.

  When the journal launched in 1967, it was established formally by the Syndics of the University of Cambridge alongside the Committee of Directors at CSAS. Cambridge University Press became its publisher. The bimonthly journal was positioned from the start as a collective scholarly enterprise rather than the project of any single department or campus.

• 4. What the Journal Publishes

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  Modern Asian Studies focuses on monographic essays, long-form scholarly pieces that drill deeply into specific questions and back their arguments with empirical data. The journal spans history, sociology, economics, and culture, treating modern Asia as a subject broad enough to require that range of disciplines.

  The journal has been abstracted and indexed in the Bibliography of Asian Studies, Scopus, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its impact factor stood at 1.075 in 2021. Cambridge University Press has long regarded it as the flagship area studies journal in its catalog, a designation reflecting decades of accumulated scholarly weight.

• 5. Editors and Leadership

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  Norbert Peabody of the University of Cambridge served as the journal's editor before a leadership transition took effect in 2021. Since that year, Modern Asian Studies has been co-edited by four scholars: Johan Elverskog at Southern Methodist University, along with Sumit Guha, A. Azfar Moin, and Robert M. Oppenheim, all three based at the University of Texas at Austin.

  That editorial lineup stretches across two universities in the United States, a geographic shift from the British academic foundations that originally created the journal. The breadth of institutional homes in the current editorial team mirrors the journal's own subject matter, which refuses to confine the study of Asia to any single national scholarly tradition.