Looking back at the formation of academic research and institutes in Asia, Syed Hussain Alatas wrote an influential paper describing the situation as “intellectual imperialism.” He argued that even if actual colonial power structures were dismantled, there still remained in large segments of contemporary Asian academic production, a “captive mind” which was “incapable of forming original problems” due to the continuation of structures which privilege modes of knowing directly imported from western scholarship. Syed Farid Alatas continued his father’s work, theorizing a “global division of labour” where the non-West continued to be dependent on Europe and North America for theoretical and material resources for academic production.
