Cross-border movements are often discussed as a high-level abstraction, but people cross borders as individuals. Their lives are reshaped by the experience, and in some cases they in turn reshape their own environment. For the ten individuals whose biographies appear in this volume, ""travel"" and its contingent and uneven processes of translation, circulation, and exchange helped forge patterns of political thought and action, and defined their contribution to the process of nation-making in Southeast Asia.