Peter A. Coclanis, “Southeast Asia's Incorporation…”, vol. 24, no. 2 (1993):

Page 257, Table 1, the last two lines of data should read as follows:

Page 259, Table 2, the first line should be:

Ethnohistoric sources suggest that at the time of European contact, the coastlines and interior river valleys of most of the major islands of the Philippines were dotted with politically complex, socially stratified societies, organized on the level of what cultural evolutionists refer to as “chiefdoms”. Recent regional-scale archaeological research in the Philippines indicates that these coastal chiefdoms have considerable time depth. Settlement hierarchies, complex mortuary patterns, and other archaeological indicators of socio-political complexity extend well into the first millennium a.d. Spanish and Chinese texts refer to Philippine chiefs as the central figures in complex regional-scale economies and international-scale trade. Hereditary chiefs controlled the agricultural productivity of “commoners” through restrictive land tenure, they mobilized surplus for elite use through formalized tribute systems, and they amassed “wealth” through sponsorship of luxury good craftsmen and through participation in foreign prestige-good trade. The accumulated “material fund of power” was used competitively by-hiefs to enhance their social ranking, to strengthen political alliances, and to expand their regional political authority.

When trade between China and Southeast Asia blossomed between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, Chinese traders began to form overseas Chinese communities. Their presence had significant effects on the region, including the formation of new urban settlements and the introduction of new lifestyles in which imported items played an important part, not only among the elite, but among many hinterland groups who probably never saw a Chinese trader but rapidly integrated Chinese products into their displays of status.

In the colonial period many Europeans considered coconuts a lazy man's crop. For the Indonesian population, however, they were a profitable form of cultivation, especially from the 1880s when the European oil and fats industry increasingly started to use copra, the dried kernel of the coconut, as a raw material for the production of soap and later also for margarine. Around one-third of world copra exports originated in the Netherlands Indies (Table 1), and copra was especially important for the economy of East Indonesia, where in 1939 it constituted 80 per cent of the total volume and 60 per cent of the total value of exports. In some parts of Indonesia copra even received the nickname of “green gold”. European involvement in coconut cultivation and the coconut trade nonetheless was limited. In the first half of this century, coconut growing was dominated by the indigenous population, which accounted for 94 per cent of Indonesian production, while Chinese merchants dominated the intermediate trade in copra.

The opening of Philippine provincial ports to the world market in 1855 served to solidify the direct incorporation of regions outside Manila into the international capitalist system. This article reconstructs the events surrounding this important episode by situating it in the context of global capitalist dynamics and Spanish imperial decay, and the conjuncture in which local interest groups manoeuvred to intervene in the colonial state processes of the Spanish Philippines. In line with Philip Abrams' vision of history as the nexus of structure and action, the 1855 ports policy is reinterpreted as issuing from the articulation of macro and micro spheres, a perspective which allows for contingency in so far as the possibilities of human actors confronting structured totalities are multiple yet theoretically bounded. By eschewing the overdetermined view of socioeconomic change and by accounting for human agency in history, this article serves as a case study to overcome the notion of inexorability that, as David Booth rightly points out, has been frequently imputed to the epoch of global capitalist change.

Few works on modern imperialism (1880–1914) include Dutch political and military behaviour in the Indonesian archipelago. Theories concerning colonial expansion in this period have been based almost exclusively on the activities of the big powers, scrambling for new territories in Africa. The small country of the Netherlands, expanding its colonial frontiers within its nominal sphere of interest, did not arouse much interest, the less so as its history and sources are not easily accessible due to an internationally little known language.

The greater part of the historical literature concerning Southeast Asia says little about women because, following the western tradition, writers have concentrated on those individuals associated with decision making and power, areas where men have featured predominantly. Although women have contributed significantly to social and political movements, they have been neglected in historical accounts and often, their contribution has been excluded altogether. Even studies dealing specifically with legislation involving women's rights in Singapore such as the Women's Charter, have given insufficient attention to the part played by women in laying much of the preliminary groundwork.

The province of Maluku, otherwise known as the Moluccas, is divided into three main regions: the predominantly Muslim north, the mainly Christian central area, and the predominantly Christian southeast (see Map 1). The central region contains the “mother island” (nasa ina) of Seram which Maluku people believe to be the original source of Maluku culture. In some relatively isolated parts of this large island the original inhabitants such as the Nuaulu and the Huaulu ethnic groups (known in colonial times as the Alifuru people) still practise their ancestral rituals including music and dance.