All observers and stakeholders agree that the Cambodian state's capacity for development has been rather limited, although there are signs of expansion. The management of its important fisheries is no exception. Drawing upon existing literature, primary documents, and field interviews in two provinces and in Phnom Penh with various state and non-state actors, this study provides a background to the reasons for Cambodia's failure to manage its fisheries, enforce compliance within fishing lots, and curtail corruption in the fishing industry. It shows how fishing concessionaires' power has grown vis-à-vis that of the state and other actors. This study concludes that the considerable power held by concessionaires to make and enforce their own rules, together with their ability to accommodate or co-opt relevant state agents, has impeded Cambodia's capacity to fully benefit from, conserve, and manage its fisheries.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the revenue of the Straits Settlements Colony was derived to a very considerable extent from opium. Imported from India, opium in bulk was sold by the Government to Chinese merchants in Malaya who applied for the right to retail it. This monopoly, or farm, supplied the Government with almost half of its annual revenue. By 1904, in fact, it accounted for 59% of the revenue, and although measures of control were introduced in 1910, leading reluctantly to measures of restriction, the sale of opium provided Singapore and the two other Straits Settlements (Penang and Malacca), with a revenue right up to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

This paper argues that Lao bureaucrats who migrate to the uplands offer possibilities for re-thinking the immutability of upland–lowland distinctions and the power of the modern state. The specific focus is on low-ranking government officials on the Nakai Plateau in central Laos who are positioned at the nexus of state authority, development schemes and the rural poor. Nakai is a site of nationally significant resource utilisation and practices that has provided a model for development across the country. Officials' experiences in Nakai suggest that the upland–lowland contrast can provide valuable understandings of power when combined with an awareness of social processes that reproduce and shift the meanings ascribed to these nominally distinct domains. Significantly, the experiences of mobile marginal officials highlight an idea of state power as the potential to grant prosperity.

The Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1941, and Burma and Indonesia in 1942. French Indochina, then called Futsuin by the Japanese, continued to remain in French hands until 9 March 1945. It seemed to present a contrasting picture vis-à-vis Japanese policies in other Asian countries and to contradict the declared policy as expressed in the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (in Japanese Dai-Tōa-Kyoei-Ken). On 9 March, however, this was reversed by the Japanese military action, which disarmed the French Indochinese Army. This action has come to be known as the Meigo Sakusen (Meigo [bright moon] Action).

Religious conversion juxtaposes new beliefs and practices with previous ones, the relationship between the old and new often put in terms of substitution, superimposition, renaming, or rejection. Conversion in Anakalang, a district of West Sumba in the Indonesian Province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, differs from many of the situations of recent religious change in Southeast Asia in that it is not motivated primarily by the demands of creating a distinctive ethnic identity, differentiating status groups within a single society, or compelling personal visions. This paper focuses on some of the ramifications that religious change has for Anakalangese understandings of history and tradition. In contrast to many students of ethnicity and religion elsewhere in Southeast Asia, I would argue that in Sumba, at the present historical moment, identity formation and boundary maintenance do not serve as major motives and are not sufficient explanations for local historical responses to religious change. The need for an explicit “identity” may not be given requiring no further explanation, for it arises under specific historical and political circumstances.

The French Annales historians have made the study of popular mentalites into a fascinating and important field of historical research. This approach has yet to gain ground in Southeast Asian historical studies, especially in Malaysian history, with respect to the thinking of subject classes. If we take the Malay traditional ruling class and the Malay peasantry in Melaka and other states from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, we know very little about the ideological hegemony which the former exercised over the latter, or what the thinking of the dominated class was like. One problem, of course, has been the lack of sources, but such a problem has not deterred the Annales historians from making their attempt.

The Franco-British rivalry over Siam in the last decades of the nineteenth century was one of the most serious of the world wide colonial conflicts between the two Powers after 1875 resolved by the Entente Cordiale agreements of 1904. Like the other colonial conflicts along the Niger and the Nile, in Morocco and Madagascar, and over the Newfoundland fisheries, the rivalry in Siam complicated and strained Franco-British relations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and made diplomatic cooperation in European affairs very difficult, if not at times impossible.

Over a half century after the great ‘classical’ kingdom of Pagan that produced the ‘golden age’ of Myanmar had declined in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu appeared. Thereafter, for the next century and a half, both dominated the land. While Ava was an ‘upstream’ agrarian kingdom ruling mostly Upper Myanmar, Pegu was a ‘downstream’ commercial polity with hegemony over Lower Myanmar. However, and contrary to convention that the history of fifteenth-century Myanmar was an ethnic struggle between two irreconcilable Burmese and Mon populations, their relationship should be characterised more as a dualism of different geo-political and economic factors instead. Indeed, the history of that ‘upstream–downstream’ relationship between Ava and Pegu established lasting patterns that became, thereafter, part of the fabric of Myanmar's history until today.

In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis of Buddhist–Muslim coexistence in the Songkhla Lake area in southern Thailand as it unfolds on the margins of a violent conflict in the Deep South (Patani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces). I argue that in the Songkhla Lake area, social, religious, economic and political alliances are reflected in multi-religious ritual traditions that have the potential to transcend cultural difference or manage difference constructively. The article then analyses the transformation of multi-religious coexistence and concludes that the revitalisation of Theravada Buddhism and Islam results in the uneasy coexistence of old and new practices and in a dialectic of sharing and competition.

This first attempt to include women in the pre-1949 history of Chinese immigration to Thailand examines the dialectical relationship between immigration and marital practices through a gender lens. It is argued that labour immigration is not simply an economic endeavour, but rather a complex process of cultural production in which Thai and Chinese regimes compete to produce gendered citizens.

In 1934 the Siamese Council of Ministers agreed to participate in an international rubber control scheme without understanding either the dynamics of the expansion process or the extensiveness of the planting of small stands of rubber trees in peninsular Siam. The area estimates and export statistics available in Bangkok caused the government to believe that the quota offered by the International Rubber Regulation Committee was generous, and they consequently signed agreements with the producers' organizations and cooperating countries subject only to the ratification of the People's Assembly. The State Councilors were so confident of perfunctory approval of what appeared to be a technical issue that they delayed submitting the proposal until three months after the effective date of the agreement. But when the debate opened the representatives from the South sharply challenged the government estimates for failing to account for the areas of immature trees or to recognize that low prices had depressed production below current capacity. Neither Premier Bahol's plea that negotiations with countries “which are already civilised require something substantial in the way of evidence, such as statistics,” nor the need to honor the government's commitment dissuaded them.1 A minor political crisis was precipitated as the Assembly rejected the proposal and Siam's first constitutional government resigned.

Throughout Sukarno's long and colourful political career, China constituted one of the central objects in his construction of the outside world. What did the PRC stand for in his intellectual and political imagination? How relevant was Sukarno's China perception to the evolution of his own socio-political thought? This paper suggests that Sukarno's favourable view of the PRC reflected more of his predispositions about Indonesia than it did Chinese realities. China as seen through Sukarno's eyes became the point of reference for both intellectual judgement and political thinking. Furthermore, Sukarno employed his perception of China as a cultural metaphor, social symbol, and political model in his drive to establish and consolidate the Guided Democracy regime.

Since NEP, the ethno-political measure of Malay progress has emphasised Malay capital ownership, leading social scientists who study the Malay middle class to focus almost exclusively on what this article calls the ‘two poles of consumption and dependency’. This ethnography suggests that certain middle-class Malays use a different calculus to mark out their place in contemporary Malay life. It argues that these Malays portray themselves not only in terms of material and entrepreneurial success, but through their frequent experiences of failure. To them, failure becomes, paradoxically, a virtue that can establish their moral and Islamic distance from the Malays they characterise as the ‘indolent’ poor and the ‘politicking’ rich.

The early postwar years witnessed serious and acrimonious controversies over the constitutional order the British intended to introduce in Malaya (including Singapore). The first set of proposals called the Malayan Union Scheme encountered strong Malay opposition. Partly because of this, the British advanced an alternative known as the Federation Proposals. This in turn was condemned by the non-Malays. Together with leftwing Malay leaders, non-Malay politicians organised an anti Federation movement, consisting of the Pan-Malayan Council of Joint Action (PMCJA) and the Pusat Tenaga Ra'ayat (PUTERA), to oppose the Federation Proposals. This paper examines the origin, leadership and organisation of the PMCJA-PUTERA as well as its agitation against the Federation scheme during the years, 1946–48.

The study of the political in Myanmar over the past 200 years has been conducted in circumstances and with methods that have resulted in only partial and often unsatisfactory outcomes. Difficulties of accessing data and problems in its analysis have forced analysts to seek to understand Myanmar's politics often through informed hunches from a comparative perspective. As the field has grown, it has also become somewhat more politicised and there is a necessity to be analytically self-critical in order to avoid making ‘facts’ fit theories.

This study of Timor and the surrounding islands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries provides evidence that, after the demise of the Portuguese Estado da India, an ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ empire persisted but in uniquely localised ways. It describes the emergence of the ‘black Portuguese’ community known in Timor and the Solor archipelago as the Topasses. Their singular identity was based on the melding of indigenous and Portuguese blood and cultural forms. Their ability to access the sources of spiritual authority in both the Catholic and the Timorese domains assured their survival and that of the Portuguese in Timor until well into the twentieth century.

The recent rebuilding of the house of the clan from which a “king” of Manggarai was chosen during direct Dutch rule on the island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago has brought to light several different histories of that clan's rise to power and the meaning of the house in those histories. This paper explores the contestation over both time and place in Todo, Manggarai, relating them to people's present-day concerns.

Japan's economic expansion into Southeast Asia which began during World War I laid the foundations for the contemporary regional order. Based mainly upon Dutch sources, this article reviews the interwar expansion of Japanese trade, shipping and investment in Indonesia, examines its corporate structure, and considers how the phenomenon should be interpreted.

This article describes the communal associations of the “Dayak” communities in Sarawak, and their functions of relating to the state and articulating local interests of the indigenous minorities. The significance of communal associations to the ethnogenesis of indigenous peoples is considered as well. Overall, communal associations are useful for projecting the presence of indigenous peoples in a communally stratified nation-state.

Holy men were respected leaders in early Thai and Lao society. As Thai society became more complex, traditional holy men disappeared, to be replaced by modern charismatic monks. But, in Southern Laos and the Khorat Plateau, holy men found a new role as leaders of protest movements.