The Indic orientation that informed the nineteenth-century scholarly engagement with the ancient cultural heritage of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina translated, under the impetus of colonial archaeology and Indology, in a more coordinated and systematic approach to the study of Southeast Asia’s past. This chapter explores the French-Dutch transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. It discusses the Indological study-trips undertaken by French and Dutch scholars to India, maps the institutional cooperation and exchanges that synchronized research agendas in Hanoi and Batavia, and critically probes the role of the Leiden school inaugurated by Hendrik Kern and the French strand of indianisme epitomized in Sylvain Lévi’s academic oeuvre, in energizing visions of Greater India. In the French and Dutch sphere, Indology came to imply a much broader research agenda, both in geographical scope and interdisciplinary content, than in Germany and Britain. European Indology was a highly differentiated field of studies, and colonial trajectories and a nation’s cultural politics vis-à-vis India translated in different research priorities.

In Chapter 2, we provide a critical review of how the terms “perspective” and “perspective taking” have been understood in both literary studies and social, personality, and cognitive psychology. We explain how current definitions of the term “perspective” and the process of “perspective taking” are too broad in what they implicitly encompass and we identify the components that should be excluded in the interest of clarity and precision. In this chapter, we also provide a conceptual and theoretical analysis of what perspective taking involves. In particular, we argue that a perspective is an interpretation of evaluations and that perspective taking depends on the construction of an analogy between the evaluations of the character and those of the reader. This analysis provides the background for our critiques of perspective taking in life and in literature in subsequent chapters.

“Achieving Modernity by Studying the Philippines” follows Chinese educators who conducted study tours of the Philippines to learn and borrow from Philippine advancements in education. High-profile Chinese educators who commented on the Philippine system, like Huang Yanpei, Kuo Ping-Wen, and Cai Yuanpei, praised girls’ education, physical education, and vocational education – all areas in which the Philippines excelled. The Chinese fact-finding tours also established many long-lasting relationships as educators from the Philippines, like Gan Bun Cho and Camilo Osias, conducted reciprocal tours of China to support Huang Yanpei’s educational endeavors. After establishing the depth and significance of Sino–Philippine educational exchanges, this chapter argues for a new historiographical understanding of Chinese borrowing in the early twentieth century. It argues that Chinese people viewed the Philippines as a model of modernity not just worthy but demanding of attention. Pivoting to the next chapter, it also argues that, while wealthier people or those with access to scholarships from China began sending their children to the United States instead of Europe after World War I, less-connected Chinese families began sending their children to the Philippines to study instead of Japan after this same crucial turning point.

Greater India projections had a strong bearing on the study of Southeast Asia’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural heritage. The scholarly quest for ‘origins’ and stylistic resemblances gave rise to the notion of Indian ‘colonial art’. This chapter explores different theories of ‘Indianization’, and their concomitant politics, which informed the French/Dutch/Indian scholarly engagement with the Cambodian and Javanese templescapes. It also pays attention to the work of Angkor-conservator Henri Marchal and the Dutch Indologist W.F. Stutterheim. Stressing local agency and ‘adaptation’ over diffusionist theories, they gradually paved the way for a more nuanced evaluation of the ‘Indic factor’ in Southeast Asia’s cultural heritage. All the same, in the Indian context, Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan became visual simulacra of an ancient cultural empire evoked as Greater India and were often claimed as Indian masterpieces superior to anything sculpted or built in India. According to the GIS, Indian aesthetic impulses had temporarily uplifted the arts in Southeast Asia, until degeneration set in with the withering of this ‘classical’ influence.

This study was conducted in one region in northern Kazakhstan. It involved visits to one urban and two rural schools and regional and district educational authorities. The chapter describes a case study of stakeholders’ perceptions of the implementation of the Renewed Content of Education (RCE). The key questions guiding the inquiry were as follows. (1) How are the aims of the new curriculum understood and being delivered? (2) How have views of the RCE changed over time? (3) Have teaching practices changed? (4) How has the availability of school resources impacted reform implementation? The findings demonstrate that discourses articulated by stakeholders were those of adjustment and attempts to make the reform work in the challenging circumstances of increased rural–urban migration that has left some rural schools more disadvantaged. While the intent of the RCE was to provide a modern, student-centred programme aimed at building the skills needed for twenty-first-century learners, there was not necessarily enough thought of the impact on rural and remote schools. School communities are now slowly adjusting to better understanding the long-term benefits of this initiative.

Schools had started piloting the Renewed Content of Education with Grade 1 in September 2015, then moved on to Grade 2 in 2016 and to Grade 3 in September 2017. The pilot schools acted as test sites one year ahead of the full roll-out to all mainstream schools in Kazakhstan. The research evidence collected over the two-year period comprises a mixed sample of primary grade (Grades 1–4) teachers, comparing those starting their second or third year of teaching the new content with those who were yet to have direct experience of it. Interviews and/or focus groups with teachers, school principals and vice-principals were conducted in each of six schools. In addition, primary grade teachers were invited to respond to surveys. The areas of inquiry included overall opinions as well as more targeted attitudes towards the revised content of the curriculum, changes to teaching and learning, new approaches to assessment and the support afforded to implement the new curriculum. The chapter will show that piloting had been a very worthwhile step in the implementation of a new curriculum, with a growing confidence and appreciation of what this curriculum aimed to achieve.

The introduction leverages the insights and interventions of world, global, and transnational histories to bring a rich world of interaction between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century to life. After overviewing the layered connections that formed the Sino–Philippine link, which is the subject of the book, the introduction turns toward methodological approaches that best expose and explore the depths of those connections. It starts this endeavor by highlighting some limitations of world, global, and transnational history, such as their tendency to be prescriptive rather than responsive, their tendency to privilege actors and institutions from the Global North, and the high cost of entry for new scholars to the field. It argues that, while these limitations are important to recognize, transnational, global, and world histories still have much to offer if they can become more accessible, flexible, and representative. Finally, the introduction outlines the approach of the book, which adopts an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected approach to world history that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender.

The aim of Chapter 16, written by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Nazarbayev University, is to ask: how coherent was implementation of the Renewed Content of Education? It bridges the gap between piloting and national implementation to report and analyse the experiences found in both pilot and non-pilot schools as reform took place at two longitudinal points: two and three years after implementation. Additionally, it reports on the third-year implementation experiences found in the district and regional layers of administration that sit above schools. In essence, it considers coherence across the entire school system as framed by the experiences of, and communications and interactions between, schools, districts and regional stakeholders.

In Chapter 7, we outline new empirical evidence that perspective taking depends on the reader’s analogy to their personal knowledge and experience. In the first experiment, participants read narratives that involved either familiar or unfamiliar cultural and social schemas. As predicted, we found that it was more difficult to take a character’s perspective when the events of the story world did not make sufficient contact with the reader’s own experience. A second experiment examined the use of prior knowledge and experience as it unfolds in the course of reading. When readers were asked to focus on places in the text where they were reminded of prior experience, the number of such remindings predicted perspective taking. In the third experiment, we manipulated the availability of relevant personal knowledge more directly: Before reading a story, participants were asked to think about a prior experience that either was or was not related to the experience of the character. As predicted, priming relevant prior experience promoted perspective taking.