IN this study Southeastern Asia is limited to the land area on the continent of Asia which is south of China and east of India. In particular it includes Burma, Thailand, Indo-China, and Malaya.

Nationalism has more than one connotation. Every people has a nationalism or a patriotism of some sort and perhaps always has had. However, in previous ages it was more the expression of a feeling of cultural, tribal or ethnic oneness. In modern times the word has acquired a political connotation so that it is possible to say that some peoples have developed a modern political nationalism and others have not.

The origin of the various languages of Southeastern Asia is veiled by the same mist, broken by only occasional glimmers of light, which hides from the ethnologist and even the historian the steps by which the territory was populated, its culture diffused. Nevertheless, a rough outline appears practicable.

Among the most ancient inhabitants of the area are the various tribes of Negritos, the Eta, the Semang, and the Andaman Islanders. One of their characteristics, in this region just as in Africa, seems to be that, with the exception of but one group, they everywhere abandoned their original language and adopted in its place that spoken by their respective neighbors, that is, the Sakai, Malayan, or African Negro dialects.

The islands of Indonesia are of exceeding interest to the ethnologist for a variety of reasons. This is an ancient area of human habitation, where the history of man runs back to its very beginnings. Java Man stands at the head of Indonesian genealogy, and he lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Since then, countless waves of migrants have moved into the islands. The ancestors of the primitive Tasmaniane and Australians, the Oceanic Negroes of Melanesia, and the Polynesians of the Pacific all trod the soil of the Indies in long past ages. The texture of history is deep here, deeper than almost anywhere else on earth.

The Japanese campaign in the Shan States was a shrewd tactical maneuver in the battle for Burma. It hastened the fall of Burma by weeks, if not months, and increased greatly the amount of materiel captured by the invaders or which had to be destroyed by the British and Chinese. The righting began in that area in mid-March with patrol action on the Thailand border of Karenni, a small British protectorate adjoining the Shan States on the south; but it was not until April, following the fall of Toungoo, Burma, that serious fighting occurred. Previously the only approach the Japanese had to this mountainous district was by boat up the swift, treacherous Salween river, or over jungle trails from Thailand. But with the capture of Toungoo at the end of March, they had a road from Burma to Karenni and on to the Shan States.

Throughout history floods and droughts have undoubtedly been the two greatest natural scourges of China. Being thus far primarily an agricultural nation with a close dependence upon nature, China's concern with floods and droughts is clearly understandable.

As is generally well known among sinologists, China has a heritage of unbroken recorded history, covering a period of approximately three millennia. Partly owing to the important role floods and droughts played in the life of the nation and partly because of the supernatural significance attached to the occurrence of these phenomena, numerous instances of floods and droughts have been recorded usually with definite dates and places.

At A time when the whole political system of Southeast Asia seems to be on the verge of complete reshapement and when a new cycle of development, dominated by native forces, may be expected to emerge from the present turmoil, an inquiry into the ideological foundations of native government will not be out of place and, perhaps, will even be of more than purely theoretical interest. What were the religious and philosophical conceptions which underlay and shaped the states of Southeast Asia? Are they still living forces with which we have to count or are they dead and gone? Is it possible to inoculate new ideas into old traditions, thereby avoiding a complete break with the past, a dangerous uprooting of oriental thought and culture?

Afrail, deaf, dyspeptic little man is still, after some three decades of governmental service, one of the outstanding politicians in Australia. Although he left the cabinet when the Labor Party took charge in the fall of 1941, William Morris Hughes is now a member of the Advisory War Council. He is also the leader of the United Australian Party. There is little doubt that he will be one of the representatives of the Commonwealth when the next group of statesmen sit around the peace table, and that he will voice his convictions quite determinedly. An examination of some of his past views on foreign policy may well afford clues as to the position that he will take at the next peace conference.

The origin of Japan's interests in Manchuria may be regarded as the base-point from which during the past half century a variety of economic, political and territorial ambitions has radiated, enveloping today virtually all of Eastern Asia and leading directly to war with the United States and Great Britain. In the historical development of this vast program of overseas expansion, paramount attention is usually centered on the vigorous activity which characterized Japanese relations with the ancient kingdom of Korea during the second half of the nineteenth century. This movement played a vital part in shaping Japanese imperialism, but it is significant to recall that Japan's first bid for an actual territorial position on the continent was not concerned with Korea. The fiction of Korean independence was supported by Japanese statesmen until 1910, when Korea was finally annexed to Japan. On the other hand, Japanese territorial ambitions on the mainland were positively revealed fifteen years earlier by the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 by which Japan appropriated the Liaotung Peninsula of Manchuria as one of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese War. Economic and political factors determined this demand for territory, and were in turn the progenitor of the vast program of continental expansion which has since been the basis of Japanese policy.

Netherlands indies occupies a position somewhat unique in the sphere of colonial administration, or at least did so until its conquest by the Japanese. For one thing, it is not a dependency of the ‘mother country’ for it forms a component part, along with the Netherlands, Curacao and Surinam, of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As such its nationals are Dutch subjects and stand on an equal footing, legally, with the citizens of other sovereign nations. In the event of legal controversy involving a resident of the Netherlands Indies and a citizen of another nation, the principles of private international law, better known in this country as conflict of laws, come into play to determine what body of legal rules, which of the two legal systems shall be applied in the particular case. The position of the Indies with respect to Holland—or Curacao or Surinam—introduces another, somewhat different, aspect of conflict of laws. For interregional law, as it has been termed, does not involve diverse sovereignties but concerns controversies that arise between subjects of the same state, controversies that flow from the fact that Indies private law is not identical to that of the Netherlands.

On September 26, 1792, George Lord Viscount Macartney, the first British envoy ever to reach China, sailed from Portsmouth with a commission as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. The aims of the mission were to put Sino-British relations upon a treaty basis, redress various grievances in the existing commercial arrangements at Canton, open new ports to trade in north and central China, and, if possible, establish a permanent legation in China. As the objectives of the embassy were important and as it would establish precedents for future British missions to China, the government had planned it with care, and had placed at its head an especially competent diplomat and colonial administrator. The British were well aware that the Chinese considered foreign embassies as tribute-bearing missions and generally, if not always, demanded that the ambassador perform the kotow before the Emperor.

The diplomats, business men and publicists who were actively engaged in the penetration and exploitation of China during the latter part of the nineteenth century most frequently offered economic explanations for their actions. References to the commercial opportunities to be found in China appear with almost wearisome repetition in diplomatic correspondence, in treaties and conventions and in the press. Armed with a more complete knowledge of the situation, recent commentators upon European imperialism in China have been prone to discount this interest, and it is true that the China trade did receive notice that was out of proportion to its importance. However, the wisdom of hindsight may sometimes be misleading and unless we know the general opinion of the China market as it was expressed in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties the strong interest displayed both by governments and individuals in tapping that market is largely incomprehensible to us.

The first major schism to rend the inner core of the ruling group which had been in control in Japan since the Restoration in 1868, occurred in 1873 through differences of opinion over the proposal to send an expedition to Korea. For several years previous to 1873 there had been a growing demand, particularly on the part of the ex-samurai group, to make war on Korea. The dynamics, in this case, were neither obscure nor occult; they simply represented another example of the intimate relation which often exists between domestic policy and foreign policy.

Until the arrival of the Europeans, sea traffic to the Indies was merely coastal. Sailing ships went from port to port along the coasts. As the Strait of Malacca was, of old, the gateway to the Indonesian Archipelago, it is no wonder that Islam was introduced first in the settlements along the coast of this Strait.

In all probability, Moslem merchants from Hindustan, especially from Gujarat, brought Islam to the Indonesian Archipelago. They arrived in the same way and by the same means as their ancestors who brought Hindu civilization twelve centuries earlier. Islam was introduced by merchants and not by conquering Arab legions, or even by missionaries.

The history of the discoveries of Early Man in Indonesia has been marked by bold speculations and surprising successes alternating with frustrated hopes and discouraging lulls from the time when the first explorer in search of his remains set foot on Java's soil. This explorer was Eugène Dubois. He came to the island in 1889 for the outspoken purpose of finding the “missing link” and—he found it. What particular considerations induced him to seek after such a creature—at this time rather an idea than á substantiality—on this seemingly forlorn outpost of the Asiatic continent, we do not know. Dubois never told what prompted, him to look for such a phantom in Indonesia. But the fact is that he quit his position at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Amsterdam and entered the military service of the Dutch colonies as a health officer. In April 1889, he was delegated to “extend his studies to the tertiary and diluvial fauna of Java.” From that year until 1895 Dubois explored all the localities known from earlier investigations to be particularly rich in fossil remains, and assembled from them a large collection of plants and animals.