Between 1886 and 1891, four Japanese nationalist-activists – Yoko Tosaku, Sugiura Jugo, Suganuma Teifu and Fukumoto Makoto – described their plans for Japanese expansion to the Philippines. These men, writing during the time of ideological ferment in the early Meiji period, represented a significant trend of thought when Japan was greatly concerned with the problem of attaining an international position to assure her national security. This was also a period when the Japanese government, guided by the Meiji oligarchs, adopted a “policy of restraint” from territorial expansion which might involve Japan in foreign conflicts while they were undertaking the modernization as well the industrialization of the country.

In January of 1827 Chao Anu, the ruler of the Lao state of Vientiane, led his armies in a rapid and unopposed march across the Khorat Plateau of Northeast Siam in a sudden attack on his suzerain, the third king of Thailand's Chakri Dynasty. Reacting to Anu's presence only in late February when the Lao vanguard reached Saraburi, three days' march from Bangkok, the Thai soon mounted acounter attack which scattered and expelled the Lao forces. The sack and complete destruction of Vientiane followed, together with a massive resettlement of Lao people on what is now the Thai side of the Mekong, and in the next few years the Thai brought all the former Vientiane territories under direct administration.

Early in July 1698 the royal assent was received to an Act of Parliament which sanctioned the formation of a corporation, called the General Society, whose subscribers were vested with exclusive rights to trade in the East. The ‘New’ Company obtained its Royal Charter in September 1698 under the name of ‘The English Company Trading to the Indies' and it was to superced the ‘Old’ Company which was given a three-year grace to wind up its business. The ‘Old’ Company was expected to liquidate its East Indian assets, dismantle its Asian factories and recall its servants by September 1701.

In the Philippines a qualified system of centralism prevails today whereby most formal and all real power resides at the national level of government, though local units possess. some attributes of autonomy. Some local officials are elected but others are appointed by, and responsible to, the central government. Moreover it directs most local services and tightly controls local finances. Any explanation of this system must he sought on more than constitutional grounds. It becomes essential to examine the theory and practice of previous periods as regards central-local relations – for the interaction of these beliefs and practices are the historical antecedents of, and helped shape, this system.

It is now almost sixteen years since R.G, Menzies, then leader of a resurgent parliamentary opposition, informed his colleagues that it would be “the very ecstasy of suicide” for Australians to assist in the elimination of European colonialism from Asia. For better or worse, the right honourable gentleman was unable to stem the tide of Asian nationalism, and with the political facts of life so patently irreversible, most imperial-minded Australians seem to have conditioned themselves, however reluctantly, to some kind of co-existence with Asia. Again and again Australians are informed by their historians, political scientists and poets alike that theirs is the task of reconciling the legacy of a Europocentric history with the immutable and oft-times unpleasant facts of geography.

A brimming reservoir of Japanese materials on South-east Asian history is ready to serve scholars with appropriate research interests and the needed linguistic tools. In this brief paper an introduction to selected sources on Malayan history will be made. Readers will see that the materials to be described are of special usefulness to economic historians working on the 1930's and 1940's, to sociologists and political scientists analyzing the complexities of a plural society, and of course to students of the period of the Japanese occupation of Malaya. To tell the military story of the Japanese conquest, accusations and apologiae have appeared from the British side and Colonel Tsuji Masanobu proundly published the victor's account. Except, however, for books by guerrilla opponents or civilian victims of Japanese rule, the occupation years are an historical blank. Little imagination is required to sense that, in the years bwbween the collapse and the return of the British, the Japanese in Malaya were obliged to face the wide range of administrative problems imposed on a governing authority. Accordingly, studies of Japanese solutions and failures could be highly instructive. Furthermore, as is generally recognized, the terrorist units of the 1948–60 Emergency were direct descendents of elements in the anti-Japanese resistance campaign, and Malayan nationalism itself moved toward maturity under Japanese pressure. Clearly the occupation years form the most dynamic and the most neglected period in modern Malayan history.

Each period has special characteristics, amongst which the pattern of employment is not the least interesting. In all except the first and last, the industry was completely Chinese in capital, management and labour; this is a major fact of Malayan history.

Although, as a result of a boom in tin prices, Kuala Lumpur grew very rapidly in the last two years of the 1870s, and the headquarters of the British administration of Selangor were moved there from Klang in 1880, it still remained a pioneer mining town. A number of contemporary descriptions exist of the town (admittedly seen through European eyes), as it was in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These all portray a small, but bustling, “raw and rumbustious” settlement, with a very large Chinese element in its population; indeed, one visitor in 1879 termed it a “great Chinese village”. This settlement consisted almost wholly of wooden, attap or mud houses, arranged in the haphazard manner which had resulted from its rapid and unplanned growth. One of the major hazards which the town faced at this time was fire, and it was mainly through the fear of extensive fires that the town began to be replanned and rebuilt during the 1880s.

Einstein once refused to speculate on the types of weapons to be used in a hypothetical third world war; but he was succinct and specific in naming those of an ensuing fourth global contest – “rocks”. Just as nuclear arms have very possibly made World War II the penultimate great conflict, the super bombs have created a climate in which international rivalries contend through cold war confrontation, police actions and limited warfare. The total terror of our nuclear age has thus far served to confine military clashes to the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam and the Near East, all restricted arenas in comparison to those of 1914–18 and 1939–45. Fear of thermonuclear retaliation has prevented attacks on, to use MacArthur's term, the “privileged sanctuaries” of our era's prime combatants.

The more precise definition of the European impact upon South-East Asian trade and society prior to the nineteenth century has become an important pre-occupation of historians of that region in recent years. The hypothesis of J.C. van Leur that “modern capitalism” took shape only after 1820 impelled him to suggest an equality or near-equality between Asian and European commercial organization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A corollary of this view was his negative assessment of the Portuguese achievement in South-East Asia, his refusal to accord them technical or organizational superiority except in a limited military sense, his insistence upon the small and unimportant Portuguese share of inter-Asian trade, and his denunciation of the Portuguese as little better than a band of condottieri who lacked an effective central administration.