The article studies migrants from Uttar Pradesh in Singapore who have historically identified themselves as ‘Hindustani’ – a group that has largely been ignored in historical literature of the Indian diaspora in Singapore. Through an examination of British expansion in India in the early nineteenth century, parallel developments in Southeast Asia, community publications and oral testimonies, the article attempts to ‘(re)discover’ the history of Hindustani migration in Singapore.

With the transformation from the Malay kerajaan rule based on economic extraction and the capability to take life to British colonial rule, Malays aspiring to govern others were now subject to a set of mundane disciplinary techniques seeking to promote a bureaucratic ethos that precipitated around academic merits, team spirit and above all the strange distinction between public and private spheres of action.

Using declassified British documents and Chinese-language newspapers, this paper seeks to supplement existing understanding of Chief Minister David Marshall's Labour Front-Alliance Government in Singapore from April 1955 to June 1956. From the outset, the government's reforms were hampered by its own weaknesses. It was viable only because British policy was to keep it ‘in position’.

The establishment of the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall marks the PAP government's charting of a revolutionary, modernising genealogy of seismic proportions for the fashioning of a ‘Big Singapore’ as the political, economic and cultural focus of the Chinese diaspora. Such effort in reorienting history is problematic and the ethnicisation of national identity is contested, not least by Singapore's Chinese-language intellectuals.

The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when understood in the context of the operating schema of the individuals experiencing such phenomena.

This article investigates images of men and masculinities in post-New Order Indonesian popular culture, focusing on a recent and path-breaking Indonesian film, Kuldesak. The theoretical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is utilised to suggest that if Indonesian women are to be assisted in their efforts to resist the gender inequality of Indonesia's patriarchal gender regime, then the social gendering of men and masculinity must also be understood.

Iranun and Balangingi. Globalization, maritime raiding and the birth of ethnicity By JAMES FRANCIS WARREN Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 585. Maps, Figures, Tables, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

James Warren's rewarding Iranun and Balangingi (2002) expands on his classic The Sulu Zone (1981) but retains the explanatory model: Southern Philippine slave-raiding (1768–1898) was caused by the capitalist world economy's demand for commodities. This essay suggests that Warren's depiction of servility is too undifferentiated, that he may have overestimated labour needs and elite control while underestimating free trade.