Only recently has it become possible to attempt to reconstruct a history of Javanese music in the nineteenth century. The relevant primary and secondary sources, including Javanese poems and treatises, colonial writings and scattered references in various historical tracts are only now beginning to emerge from cold storage to be published, translated, and made more widely available. This article is a preliminary attempt to draw together from them an overview of Javanese music in the nineteenth century, adopting a musicological, cultural and historical approach which is based partly on my own fieldwork over the past twenty years. An understanding of nineteenth century musical developments is clearly important not only in its own right but also as a means of facilitating our comprehension of the contemporary artistic scene.

The French move into what they came to call Indo-China began, as the Hong Kong Register was to put it, with motives hostile to British power. Pre-revolutionary France had indeed seen such a move as a means of contesting Britain's supremacy in Asia: placing themselves between the growing empire in India and the growing trade with China, the French could embarrass their European rivals. But establishing themselves in Vietnam was easier said than done. The limited help they were able to afford Gia-long reaped them no great reward, and his successor, Minh-mang, even turned against the Catholic missionaries whom he saw as sources of subversion of his Confucian-style reunification. Continued anti-Catholic activity on the part of his successor was to give Napoleon III an excuse to intervene in the 1850s. But by then, as the Register noted, the old rivalry with the British had died out. The British had sought to open up trade with Vietnam, but, both before and after their victory over neighbouring China, the Vietnamese had refused to accept a commercial treaty. The British thus did not oppose the more forceful attempt the French made to open up Vietnam. Their only concern was lest the French should trench upon the territory of Laos and Cambodia, and thus undermine the independence of Siam, which the British saw as an outwork of their empire in Burma and Malaya. There was indeed a crisis over Laos, and thus over Siam, in 1893, but the French and the British came to terms in 1896. Their agreement in Southeast Asia was consolidated by their agreement in Europe, which the apprehension of Germany promoted.

At the end of World War II, American Office of Strategic Service (OSS) officers in Bangkok were dismayed to discover that, contrary to their expectations, the Thai showed little animosity toward the Japanese. The OSS unit reported in August 1945 that ‘there has been very little in the way of hostile reaction’. Japanese accounts confirm this, with a Foreign Ministry study, for example, concluding: ‘The general attitude of Thai officials and citizens toward Japan just after the war's end was relatively sympathetic….’

It has become a commonplace of Malayan historiography that the period following the end of the Pacific War witnessed the establishment of a pattern of political life which has persisted in its main features into the present decade. Existing accounts have focused around the restructuring of the British presence in Malaya under a military administration and the introduction of, and opposition to, the Malayan Union scheme in 1946 and the Federal structure which succeeded it in April 1948. These years saw the emergence of an ethnically based nationalist movement and the defeat of a radical challenge to its predominance. The communal and insurrectionary violence which was a feature of the period has been represented as a constraint to subsequent political action — as a limit to what the structure of Malaya's pluralism could tolerate — and the constitutional struggles as a lost opportunity to effect its transformation. Whilst it is hard to exaggerate the importance of these events in shaping the landscape of Malaysian politics, there is a sense in which the sophistication of these political and constitutional preoccupations suggests uneven development within the historical writing as a whole. The social context which stimulated change, and the breadth of the local response which dignified it, has been marginalized in many accounts. There has been a tendency to conceive the state system and the colonial presence in Malaya within the bounds of a paradigm governed by the constitutional settlement, and the various phases of insurrection and political change as primarily the products of the subversive or nationalist imagination.

1988 was unlike any other year in Burma's short history as an independent nation. It began quietly, but erupted into a revolution for democracy and change which failed when the army violently restored its dictatorship; it ended quietly, but with the people living in fear under a military determined not to be challenged openly again. During this same period, while the world focused on Rangoon, the minorities continued to pursue a civil war which some have been fighting for the past forty years, hopeful that the changing situation in Burma's heartland would effect their struggles because both they, and the Burmans who rose in revolt, have the same enemy and seek the same ends — a peaceful and democratic Burma. Both looked to and sought help from the free nations of the world who spoke out vigorously when the rebellion began but whose voices either have been lowered or even stilled since the military made clear that it would decide the time and degree of change; only the U.S. continued to hold the high moral ground in support of the rebellion but its actions hardly matched its rhetoric.

Throughout Thai history there have been religious ascetics credited with the ability of precognition (mii yaan) as a result of accumulated virtues and meditation abilities. One such religious figure, perhaps the most widely acknowledged “saint” in modern times, was Phra Ajaan Man Phuurithatto (1870–1949). Of particular interest to this paper is the recorded prediction made by this ascetic monk shortly before his death, documented by a former disciple Phra Aajaan Wiriyang, that there would be a proliferation of self-proclaimed meditation masters and pupils and fragmentation into urban-based “cults” or religious movements (yaek pen kok pen lao).