The “holy man's” (nak sel) rebellion against the Vietnamese that broke out in 1820 along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border is the best-documented one of its kind in pre-colonial Cambodia, and makes a useful addition to the literature of such revolts in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Its importance in Cambodian terms lies in its anti-Vietnamese character, the participation in its ranks of Buddhist monks, the collusion of Cambodian authorities, and the way in which these themes foreshadow Cambodian political thinking, before and after the arrival of the French.

The growth of the pre-World War II rubber industry in British Malaya is, in contrast to the staple industries of many less-developed countries, exceptionally well-researched. P.T. Bauer and J.H. Drabble have written seminally on the rubber industry, while a number of others, including C. Barlow, have made important contributions. Yet an outstanding feature of the British Malayan industry remains relatively overlooked: the development of the Singapore rubber market.

It is widely acknowledged that colonial experience has greatly affected the political development of ex-colonial countries. In particular, colonialism has often been regarded as the most important, if not the sole, basis of national integration in many of these countries. At the same time, the literature on political development still lacks a critical evaluation of the impact of colonial rule on these ex-colonies. The following essay is an initial assessment of the contribution of Dutch colonialism to the national political integration of Indonesia. Such an evaluation has not been explicitly made, even though the literature on Indonesia does not lack sweeping judgments by both Indonesian nationalists and the apologists for the Dutch “mission interrupted”.

When Joseph Conrad sailed on the Vidar from Singapore harbour tothe small coastal trading stations on the eastern coast of Borneo, the round trip took three weeks. The most difficult part of the journey occurred at the estuary of the Berau River where the Vidar would have run in, past the shifting bar and mud flats, and followed slowly up the mangrove-lined banks of the main branch to a settlement almost forty miles inland. It was here in 1887 that Conrad encountered the trader Charles Olmeyer whose existence in this remote place provided such an enduring focus for Conrad's imagination. In his first novel, Almayer's Folly, Conrad drew a portrait of Almayer (Olmeyer) as an exile, living on the banks of the Berau River in a sullen recoil both from the wilderness that gripped the settlement in its green immensity, and from the customs and values of those with whom he shared almost the entire course of his adult existence. Drawn to the outermost reaches of the earth by greed, Almayer's life, as conceived by Conrad, was the very symbol of rootlessness and alienation.

In Malaysia, the influence of the hegemonic or ‘authority-defined’ discourse on nation appears so pervasive that it obscures the fact that ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ identities are in fact highly contested concepts or categories. There is a need, therefore, to examine alternative constructions of ethnic and national identity where dominant notions are challenged, reconstituted and problematized. In keeping with recent developments in critical and literary theory, this article examines selected works of a leading Malaysian novelist, K. S. Maniam, to argue that it is his commitment to the cultural politics of diaspora that problematizes state constructions of a coherent or homogeneous Malaysian identity.

The advance to the South, or Nam-tien, is a major theme of Vietnamese history. Other themes, such as the influence of Chinese civilization or the development of an independent Vietnamese state after the tenth century, are in their ways just as important to the study of Vietnamese history as is the Nam-tien. The Nam-tien is unique, however, for it transcends the different periods in Vietnamese history — pre-Chinese, Chinese, independent, colonial, and contemporary — each with its own theme. It is also important because it provides the opportunity to study Vietnamese history on its own themes and not as part of, for example, French colonial history. Despite the importance which this writer believes it to be, though, the advance to the South has not been the subject of extensive investigation and publication. Only a few scholars, such as Pierre Gourou and Le Thanh Khoi, have looked beyond the usual framework of dates, dynasties, and wars to suggest the existence of social changes in Vietnamese history resulting from the expansion of settlements into new areas.

One of the most arresting periods in modern Thai history is the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a process of social and political development begun in the previous century reached its fruition when a single bureaucratic family obtained a virtual monopoly on high state office in the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68) and the first half of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910). This situation had profound effects on the course of modern Thai history; and its study enlightens our understanding of Thailand's foreign relations and of the course of reform and modernization in a period when the successful conduct of these was crucially vital to the survival of the kingdom.

In September 1990 the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam (CASA) organized an International Workshop on “Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia”. Most of the presented papers dealt with plantations where the workforce had to be imported from distant regions, sometimes even from abroad. The type of human community originating from such recruitment policies often resulted in a typical frontier society, characterized by extreme harshness on the part of the white planters, and by a sense of utter alienation and isolation among the Asian labourers.

the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typically been a result of economic growth, and that the general sparsity of the population in early historical times reflected the low ‘carrying capacity’ of the environments in question under the prevailing economic conditions.

The first monolingual Malay dictionary was compiled by Raja Ali Haji out of concern that the Malay language and culture were in a process of ongoing degeneration. He also included words referring to sex and bodily functions so that Malays would know when and where not to use them. The dictionary is thus a refreshing alternative to somewhat Victorian-inspired dictionaries from the nineteenth century.

The trade between India and the Malay Peninsula was an important link in the inter-Asian trading system. It took in a wide assortment of goods, embracing not only the produce of these two countries but also serving as a vehicle for the transhipment and distribution of goods from neighbouring and even distant regions that are assembled at these centres of trade. Thus the import trade from India to Malaya had cotton piece-goods as its staple and other produce of India in lesser quantities such as rice, wheat, butter, sugar, oil, hemp, leather and sometimes slaves. Among the items of import, goods that have an obviously non-Indian origin are Arabian incense, amber, red corals, rhinoceros horns and most of the elephant tusks. The articles exported show an even wider area of distribution. From the Malay peninsula itself and neighbouring regions there was tin, pepper, cloves, tortoise shells, sandal wood, sappan wood, benzoin, gumlac, coconut fibre, white and brown sugar, diamonds, besoar stones, quick silver and elephants. Chinese porcelain and copper were obviously brought from the far east. Even allowing for some exaggeration in Tome Pires's figures of Gujerati merchants in Malacca and of his account of the trade from Coromandel, Malabar and Bengal, there seems no doubt of the economic importance of the trade to societies on the two ends of the Bay of Bengal. Indeed the Bay seems to have formed a wellknit commercial unit exchanging surplus produce from its various regions for which the Indian traders were an invaluable medium. The main participants of this trade were the Muslims of the Gujerat ports, Muslims of Bengal and Golconda and Hindu and Muslim traders settled in Coromandel and Malabar coasts.

This article is critical of the culturalist perspective as an explanation for the development of Chinese entrepreneurship. Drawing on Eu Tong Sen's business strategies and career between 1897 and 1920 as case study, it identifies the endogenous and exogenous conditions affecting Chinese business activities in colonial Malaya. Alfred Chandler's work on the rise of the modern business enterprise is argued to be particularly relevant for an economic history of Chinese business in Southeast Asia.

In modern Indonesia the demographic study of the population has become a major field of academic interest. The reason is obvious: the endeavour to develop the nation's economy in order to give every citizen a proper standard of living and to guarantee this in the future, bears a strong relation to the size of the population and the desire to stem the tide of excessive population growth. Demographic studies are only recent and the same is true for the statistical material with which these studies work: censuses at a national level and regular registrations of births, marriages and deaths at the basic local level. In Indonesia the first, still imperfect, censuses date from the final decades of the nineteenth century, while regular registration of births, deaths and marriages for the indigenous population has only taken place from the 1930s onwards.

Only in a handful of cases in world history has female rule been seen by contemporary observers as desirable and been sustained for long periods of time. Drawing on European, Malay and Chinese sources, this article investigates the reasons for the institutionalisation of female rule in the Malay sultanate of Patani (presently in southern Thailand) for most of the period between c. 1584 and 1711. It is concluded that the results of previous research, in which the Patani queens are characterised as powerless front figures and/or promiscuous, have insufficient support in the contemporary sources. Furthermore, the problems of female rule for dynastic stability are discussed comparatively. Finally, the decline of female rule in Patani after the mid-seventeenth century is explained with reference to the larger political, economic and military changes in maritime Southeast Asia at the time.

Our understanding of the transition from the last centuries of prehistory to the Pre-Angkorian period in northeast Thailand has been limited by a lack of projects bridging both periods. This article examines settlement patterns of the first to the ninth centuries CE in the Upper Mun River Valley based on recent (2012–14) surveys. The findings highlight the gradual settlement trends in the region, with a focus on local modification rather than the sudden adoption of external ideas. Results reinforce the fourth to sixth centuries CE as a pivotal period, when large centres consolidated and cautiously expanded upriver, into previously uninhabited regions. A relatively modest, flexible, and resilient settlement strategy developed, attuned to wider supra-regional trends, but allowing for the demands of the local cultural and physical landscape.

Through a discussion of language use in Kalimantan Barat (Western Borneo) a better understanding of cultural and sociolinguistic phenomena that are relevant to any discussion of Malay identity can be achieved. In this complex setting, the colonial nomenclature of Malay and Dayak, though widely adopted by the people of Kalimantan, does not adequately represent the intricacy and the fluidity of social relationships and identities. Colonial knowledge matches neither the results of linguistic research nor what the Malays and Dayaks know about themselves, their languages and their identities.

After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, Philippine policymakers became the first in Asia to recognise indigeneity and Indigenous rights. By law, Indigenous groups throughout the archipelago now have priority rights to their ‘ancestral domains’, but in return they are expected to maintain an ‘ecological balance’ and cooperate with environmental regulations. As in many other parts of the world, the conditionalities of recognition mean that invocations of Indigenous rights often serve to initiate ever-deeper entanglements with governmental power. At the same time, however, Indigenous Peoples and their advocates do not approach the dilemmas of recognition as hapless bystanders; rather, they negotiate them in strategic and often unexpected ways. This article considers how members of Indigenous Palawan communities in the southwestern Philippines have used dominant policy assumptions to intervene in dispossessory processes. Specifically, I examine instances in which they have: (1) codified a ‘tradition’ of inheritance to influence legislative outcomes; (2) performed the policy narrative of ‘ecological balance’ to shape the outcome of conservation interventions; and (3) filed a civil case tacitly challenging official expectations that they govern themselves as homogenous collectivities. These examples, I argue, offer broader insights into the paradoxical and at times unexpected consequences of legislating Indigenous rights.

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.

The development of anthropology in Indonesia is based on a vast accumulation of records on Indonesian peoples and cultures left by foreign visitors who had come to the islands from time immemorial. Compared to the records left by the Chinese, Indians, and Arab merchants who had visited the islands centuries ago, those left by the earliest Western Europeans (travellers, sailors, missionaries, translators of the Bible, explorers, and the Dutch colonial civil servants) are the most important.