In the currency system of early modern Japan, concurrent with gold coins and silver ingots issued under monopoly by the Tokugawa shogunal government from the beginning of its rule, in 1636 a new standard for copper coins was introduced with the Kan'ei tsūhō 寛永通宝, and subsequently a three-currency system spread throughout the country. Prior to that, no central Japanese authority had issued its own copper currency since the ancient imperial court discontinued minting coins bearing its own era-names in the tenth century. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, imitation Chinese Song copper coins minted domestically, known as kyōsen 京銭, played an indispensable role in interregional payments, while separate regional coinages circulated in many of the feudal domains. Imitation Song coins from Japan were also in such strong demand in Southeast Asia that merchants Japanese as well as foreign made large profits by exporting them. The decision to mint the Kan'ei tsūhō arose in part from a strategy to unify the currency domestically, and also to prevent further production and export of the kyōsen at a time when the Tokugawa government was seeking to limit and control foreign trade. This study explores the context in which the Kan'ei tsūhō was introduced, drawing on both documentary and archaeological evidence, to establish a more comprehensive picture of the new coinage than has previously been available. It will be demonstrated that currency unification within the Japanese archipelago represented a breakaway from the East Asian currency sphere, which was dominated by purer silver ingots and Song coins, both originals and later imitations. As a result of the diffusion of the Kan'ei tsūhō, coins circulating domestically tended to become increasingly homogenized nationwide, though in fact a greater degree of regionality and stratification remained than has previously been thought.

Western historiography has both turned its back on the Portuguese in the East after their ascendancy during the sixteenth century, and largely misunderstood the changed seventeenth-century realities of that presence. While scholars recognize how the missionary blueprint overtook the military one, the Portuguese population, particularly in areas outside official Crown control, in fact had very little to do with Europe, nowhere more so than in its racial composition. One might think of this entity as a “clan” or “tribe”. The internal social structure of this entity, and the reasons it was able to gain mass allegiance on the part of native populations, remains to be ascertained. This article examines how the “tribe” responded to two successive displacements as a result of the Dutch conquests of Melaka in 1641 and Makassar in the 1660s, considering why it moved to mainland South-East Asia and what this movement tells us about the group's dynamics.

This article describes the transformation of the Philippine currency system from a gold exchange standard to a dollar exchange standard during the first half of the twentieth century. During the American colonial period, Philippine foreign trade was closely bound to the United States. In terms of domestic investment, however, it was domestic Filipino or Spanish entrepreneurs and landowners who dominated primary commodity production in the Philippines, rather than American investors. How were both this US-dependent trade structure and the unique production structure of domestic primary commodities reflected in the management of the Philippine currency system? To answer this question, this article first discusses the introduction of the gold standard system in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Second, the de facto conversion of the Philippine currency system from the gold standard to the dollar exchange standard in the 1920s is described, together with the mismanagement of the currency reserves and the debacle of the Philippine National Bank that functioned as the government depository of the currency reserves in the United States. Third, the formal introduction of the dollar exchange standard during the Great Depression is outlined, a clear example of the dependency of the Philippine currency system on the US in the 1930s.

Mainstream histories of the Cold War have tended to reduce the events surrounding Southeast Asian decolonization and nationalism to the universal notions of ideological confrontation, bipolarity, and the global division between a capitalist and communist camp. This obscures how multiple entities – the former colonial powers, different classes and ethnic groups, and local elites of different ideological and political persuasion – come into contention as they negotiate for a place in postcolonial society. Thus this article examines the case of Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s and argues that these forms of contention provincialize experiences with nationalism, communalism, and communism and by so doing disconnect them from the dominant narratives of the Cold War. I examine various texts by British colonial officials, communist and non-communist political figures, and university students that show how British attempts at managing a decolonizing entity were offset by the local intelligentsia's ambivalence in coming to terms with nationalism and communism.

Fantan 番攤 is a Chinese gambling game based on a draw from a random number of hidden coins or tokens, requiring the player to guess a number out of one, two, three or four. It currently survives only in Macao, but during the Late Qing and Republican periods, fantan was one of the most popular games in South China. Through the investigation of a wide range of sources, this article challenges the bias of standard accounts of gambling, which emphasize its corrupting influence and depict players as powerless victims cheated by the unscrupulous operators of gambling houses.

The reality was less negative. Cheating by proprietors was by no means common and fantan was considered a socially acceptable leisure activity. For many people, it was part of daily life, and tanguan 攤館, the establishments where it was played, were popular venues both enjoyable and secure. They generated a specific kind of conviviality derived from complex interactions among participants. By underestimating the role of fantan (and gambling more generally), one risks overlooking a socially significant activity, something that influenced the way not only heavy gamblers but also ordinary people perceived their own lives and destinies.

Until a few decades ago, most labour histories did not bother to address women as workers in the domestic or public domain who contributed to a household income or the overall economy. Patriarchal spaces of historical discourse rendered women invisible (or effected distortions) that can only be contested by a rigorous study of women's unrecorded presence in the economy of the household and the broader domain of production. This article is an effort to understand the “being” and “doing” of women, and to map the interrelations of women and work over a vast historical span of time, beginning with women's writings on the theme of women and work and going on to plot women's agency historically in labour processes. In order to make the historical evidence more cohesive, it has been written with special reference to Peninsular India, while also drawing comparisons from the regions to the north of the Vindhya mountains that geographically and culturally mark the north–south divide.

The ethnolinguistic history of early East Asia depends on the comparative-historical study of the different languages. Scholars have long studied the early interrelationships among the major languages of East Asia, but only rarely according to the theory and methodology of scientific comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology, in which theories are expected to conform to the data. Among the many highly contested genetic relationship proposals in the region is the “Korean-Japanese theory”. Despite nearly a century of work by some very prominent scholars, no one has given a convincing demonstration of such a relationship, partly due to the paucity of supporting data, despite the fact that the two languages in question are vibrant and well attested. Now two leading scholars of Japanese and Korean linguistics who are familiar with each other's work, J. M. Unger and A. Vovin, have almost simultaneously published new books on the topic, one in favor of the theory, one against it. The contributions and flaws of the two books, and their position relative to the development of a scientific tradition of comparative-historical linguistics, are discussed. Special attention is paid to Koguryo, the extinct Japanese-related language once spoken on the Korean Peninsula that is crucial to any discussion of the historical relationship of Japanese and Korean.