This chapter zooms in on the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century quest to find India in Southeast Asia. Following a brief discussion of early European cartographic labels that anticipated the Greater India concept, the chapter examines the oeuvres of pioneering figures who energized the quest for the ancient past in Java/Cambodia, including the British amateur scholars-cum-administrators Stamford Raffles, Colin Mackenzie and John Crawfurd, the architectural historian James Fergusson, and the French explorers Henri Mouhot and Louis Delaporte. The early study of the Hindu-Buddhist templescapes of Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan was characterized by a strong Indocentric approach which postulated an ‘Indic’ Golden Age of cultural and artistic sophistication. This argument denied or downplayed Javanese and Khmer artistic agency and fed into a broader civilizational critique which framed the remainder of Javanese/Khmer history as a long story of decline, and the departure from classical ‘Indic’ standards as artistic degeneration.

Taking as its case study a cluster of schools, libraries, and learned societies in Southeast Asia, this chapter considers the operation of nineteenth-century colonial cultural institutions on multiple scalar and conceptual levels. First, as local, regional, and transnational networks of people, enabling both bonding networks with local and regional institutions and bridging networks with metropolitan institutions. Second, as geographical nodes and/or centres of regional knowledge collection, production, and accumulation that extend and disseminate knowledge gathered in the colonies to metropoles and regional centres via cultural goods such as journals, publication exchanges, and printed works. And third, as perceived beacons attracting European and non-European knowledge producers and consumers within a global system of useful knowledge societies for the diffusion of moral and intellectual improvement. Focusing on the transmission of what Andrew Sartori has called a global ‘culture concept’, the chapter argues that these institutions were critical both to British expansionism in Southeast Asia and to the creation of Chinese and Malay counterpublics that opposed British cultural hegemony.