Southeast Asia is the world centre of mangrove development. Not only is there a greater diversity of species, but the areas covered by mangrove forests are more extensive. This paper is concerned with the utilization of the mangrove forests in Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia (along the west coast), which is bounded by that part of the Indian Ocean called the Andaman Sea. The Burmese mangrove forests are probably very similar to these, but they will not be treated in this paper.

Only a couple of decades ago, the prospects for socio-economic development in the Third World seemed much brighter than at present. The economic theories of the 1950s and early 1960s, at least those of the North American variety, prescribed more capital investment (from domestic and foreign sources) which then would lead to a “take-off” into sustained economic growth. Political theorists advocated Western political development as an irreversible step which would lead to modern democratic societies. Other social scientists suggested that the spread of modern values — “modernity” — to the developing world would solve the basic problems of underdevelopment. Those days of simpleminded theories were buoyed by the short-term euphoria of the decolonization process. If the political leaders of the newly-independent states were determined to achieve development, as indeed they were, it seemed possible that these strategies would lead to progressive social and economic changes.

The framing of British policy towards India in the twentieth century sought to reconcile its prime importance in the dependent empire with its political aspirations through some kind of evolution towards the status afforded the settler dominions. Though British policy towards other dependencies was rarely co-ordinated — even so far as concerned a region like “Further India” — it was influenced by their relationship with India. India in a sense defined the limits of those policies: they must not go so far as to undermine the British position in India by untoward example; nor, on the other hand, must they make so little advance as to alienate the Indians and inhibit the availability of Indian forces. For Burma the inter-relationship was particularly close. Burma had been acquired from India, partly in order to protect British commerce based in India, but mainly to provide for the security of British India. It had been administered from India. Indian commerce, Indian labour, Indian moneylending had as a result established new ties. But India also influenced the reshaping of the constitutional as well as the administrative structure. Working both within and outside those structures, Burman nationalism was itself influenced by developments in India, though directing its criticism at Indian, even more, perhaps, than at British economic exploitation. The Burman nationalists insisted that the constitutional advance of Burma must at least keep pace with that of India.

Theravada Buddhism as the traditional religion of the dominant ethnic Lao majority in Laos historically has played a key role in structuring Lao society and in assuring the continuity of Lao culture. Though the dhamma (the Buddha's teaching) may be only superficially understood and practised by most of the lay population, Buddhism has provided a set of moral values and a view of life which have strongly influenced modes of thought and action over the centuries. As a result, the sangha (the order of Buddhist monks) has come to command high respect and its activities pervade every aspect of the social and cultural milieu.

Southeast Asia's strategic position in the major pre-modern international maritime route connecting East and West brought inevitable interaction between Southeast Asian peoples and foreign merchants. Initially, foreign merchants were concerned only with passing through Southeast Asia on their way to China or India. Southeast Asian coastal centres (entrepôts) facilitated this trade by providing suitable stopping places for sailors and traders; available to them were food, water, and shelter as well as storage facilities and market places for exchange. Soon, however, Southeast Asian merchants began to supplement demand for Eastern and Western products by substituting the products of the jungles of the Indonesian archipelago for those from other sources, and then built upon this initial incursion to market other indigenous forest products. Foreign demand for Southeast Asian products reached a peak when spices from Indonesia's eastern archipelago began to flow out of the Java Sea region to the international ports in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

I recently discussed the response of Pham Su Mạnh and other fourteenth century Vietnamese officials to signs of peasant unrest when the Trṇn dynasty (1226–1400) weakened. I suggested that the officials were witnessing social and political conditions that compelled them to abandon their habitual sense of being the emperors' obedient subordinates and, instead, reluctantly to assume the responsibility of defining norms of good government. Their unwonted behaviour led me to believe that important changes were under way in fourteenth century Vietnam. Educated men, under pressure of events, were beginning to become monitors of government even though they served and wanted to protect the Tân autocracy.

In recent years a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical activity in social and historical demography has been directed towards assessment of the relationship between modernization and household size and structure. Largely stimulated by Levy's postulation of discrepancies between idea and actual household configurations, Burch's pioneering cross-national evaluation of the Levy thesis, and the monumental historical demographic research of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, studies have been conducted both historically in currently developed societies, as well as in contemporary developing societies. Focused on the co-residential domestic group, these social demographic investigations have questioned long-standing assumptions and conventional wisdom in family sociology with respect to such issues as the universality of extended family co-residential arrangements in pre-industrial societies, the implicit smooth evolutionary trend from extended to nuclear household structures, and the relative contribution of variations in the size of nuclear and extended (as well as non-relative) membership components to variations in overall household size.

This is the first part of a study made in my seminar on the relations between the German ports Hamburg and Bremen and the trading centres in the area of the Indian Ocean. The study covers the whole period from the end of the eighteenth century until the beginning of the First World War. For reasons of time and space this paper is limited to the first part of the study which deals with the period up to 1870.

Bureaucratic corruption is one of the most serious and embarrassing obstacles to national development in the developing countries, which include among others the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) viz., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. According to an official of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific:

Donor countries and the United Nations bodies working in developing countries are well aware that one of the most serious problems hampering development is corruption; so are the recipient countries. But no one seems prepared to discuss it publicly.