J. de V. Allen's recently published monograph on the Malayan Union will have served its purpose if it redirects the attention of historians to ‘an event whose importance was only possibly exceeded by the things which seem to crowd it out of the historical books — the Japanese occupation of 1943–1945, the emergency which began in 1948, and the declaration of independence from Britain in 1957’.1 In his often fascinating elaboration of what is essentially the accepted, almost traditional, account of the Malayan Union's demise, Allen argues that the scheme (which provided for the amalgamation of the pre-war Federated and Unfederated Malay States and the crown colonies of Periang and Malacca into a unitary colony which would provide the basis for eventual independence by granting citizenship to the great majority of the existing population) represented a recognition by British planners of the advantages of administrative centralisation, of the permanence of settlement of many Chinese and Indian inhabitants and of the loyal support of the Chinese during the Japanese occupation. The scheme failed because it was deliberately foisted upon the Malay Sultans (who were required to cede their sovereignty) in great haste, because it took inadequate consideration of Malay attitudes and political forms, thus arousing united Malay and ex-Malayan Civil Servant opposition, and because it aroused no interest among the Chinese and Indians. Therefore the Malayan Union was replaced by the Federation of Malaya, which safeguarded the traditional leadership role of the Sultans, which allayed Malay fears of ‘alien’ domination and which yet offered ‘generous’ citizenship rights to the non-Malays. In this manner, so the account goes, a gross error of judgement was rectified and the groundwork laid for progress towards independence.

Throughout the Nanyang and beyond, Chinese communities have been under attack of one sort or another at various times. The anti-Chinese riots in Batavia in 1740 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 are but the first and last major examples of violent attacks by indigenes on Chinese communities. More routinely, most countries in the region have resorted to legal restrictions that “nationalize” various occupations and professions. Some of these countries have also required their resident Chinese to clarify their citizenship, choosing between Chinese and local citizenship, some even forcing them to adopt the citizenship of their country of residence, as occurred in Vietnam in 1978.

In recent discussions of trade and industrialization strategies in Asia, much attention has focused on the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of Northeast Asia and ASEAN's rapid industrial growth, but the experience of some other, more inward-looking countries has been largely ignored. The NICs and most of the ASEAN countries have completed a phase of import-substituting industrialization and have subsequently embarked on a vigorous export-oriented drive, especially in the field of labour-intensive manufactures. Their record, however, is in sharp contrast to that of some other countries in the region, where the manufacturing sector is still in a relatively early stage of development.

In the spring of 1957 a large stone tablet was found in a dilapidated temple in Canton. It was half buried in earth. The stone is still in good condition and the inscription on it is well preserved. On the head of the tablet there are 6 big characters reading “Chung Siu Tien. Ching Kuan Chi (Record of reconstruction of the Tien Ching Temple).

Recent political events, such as the coup of 2006 or the ‘Red Shirt’ uprisings of 2010 underlined the divisions in Thai society between the provinces and the capital. As one of the world's most primate cities, Bangkok exerts a tremendous political, economic and cultural force upon the rest of Thailand. But how is such pressure interpreted, internalised and/or subverted? In this article, I look at Thailand's second-largest city, Chiang Mai, in Thailand's North, and the struggle to cure an increasing sense of urban crisis and thereby assert the former independent capital's symbolic authority vis-à-vis Bangkok. I examine this by looking at two specific discourses: that of architecture and spirit mediumship. Northern Thai architects attempt to cure Chiang Mai's ills through recourse to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the city's urban space, while spirit mediums call upon the sacred power of that space in order to restore Chiang Mai's ‘lost’ prosperity. The focal point for each effort lies at the city's centre: the Three Kings Monument and its surrounding plaza (khuang). Here, each group casts themselves as those most able to put Chiang Mai's past in physical form and thereby ensure Chiang Mai's future. In this article, I examine how ideas of cultural heritage become entwined with magico-religious concepts of power (sak). In each, there is a search for efficacious power in the face of political and cultural domination from Bangkok.

The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was a compilation of documents translated from the Spanish and edited by Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson. The former was the brains behind the project. The editors received assistance from a reviewer, one James A. LeRoy, who introduced himself as an expert in Philippine matters. The personal correspondence amongst the three persons showed how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was constructed. Blair fully trusted LeRoy's knowledge and consulted him with doubts about translation. In turn, LeRoy advised Robertson to select documents for publication and warned him about unreliable Spanish, Filipino and English scholars. The correspondence helps to explain how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 developed into a political tool in the service of the United States in order to explain the problems the Americans confronted in their new colony – a Spanish inheritance and the difficulties of training uneducated Filipinos for self-government.

This study grapples with two key puzzles: first, what happens when companies established as ethnic-based enterprises, including by migrants, are passed on to the next generation? Second, do these migrant businesses remain as ethnic enterprises after generational transitions? The empirical focus of this study is Malaysia, a country with one of the largest ethnic Indian populations outside India. To provide insights into these questions, this article pays particular attention to how an ethnic enterprise functions, in terms of types of goods and services produced and its targeted market, after the emergence of a new generation of owners with more class resources. The evidence from this study will provide insights into the validity of the concept of ethnic enterprise following a generational transition.

Since the 2008 rice crisis, Malaysia's rice policies have been caught between government efforts to raise production and its support of the country's monopoly rice importer (Bernas). This article argues that when the politics behind the country's policies are revealed, the paradox is more apparent than real. The three principal policy components — gratifying Barisan Nasional's coalition partners in East Malaysia by expanding the acreage devoted to rice; buttressing the rural Malay economy by providing subsidies through a yield-enhancing programme; and relying on big business for financial support (Bernas's new owner is one of Malaysia's richest businessmen) — aim to serve the same end: to perpetuate UMNO's political power amid increasing electoral competition.

This article uses recently declassified archival documents from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) concerning the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948. This evidence contradicts speculation that ‘orders from Moscow’ were passed to Southeast Asian communists at this time, helping to spark the rebellions in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma and the Philippines later that year. Secret working papers now available to researchers show no signs that the Soviet leadership planned to call upon Asian communists to rise up against their national bourgeois governments at this point in time. This article outlines the real story behind Soviet involvement in events leading up to the Calcutta Youth Conference, showing both a desire to increase information and links, and yet also a degree of caution over the prospects of local parties.

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.

Based on Cambodian and French archival records, which include colonial and local administration reports, tax rosters and judicial sources, this paper explores landownership in Cambodia in the 1930s. It shows that, contrary to common belief, land access was already an issue in the 1930s. The study of tax registers of three communes in the province of Kompong Thom presents a Khmer rural society dominated by peasants with average-sized landholdings, but where landless peasants or those with very small holdings also existed. It also stresses that women were able to become efficient farm operators. In addition, this analysis of the different sources available shows that Khmer rural society in Kompong Thom was a form of gerontocracy dominated by men aged over 40.

In the classical Burmese state, land and labour were categorized as either crown or private. State or crown land (mye-taw) was composed largely of the best irrigated tracts in the dry zone, usually worked by crown labour called kyun taw or ahmudan—depending upon the period of study—subject to service tenure, whose produce went to kyi-taw or royal granaries. These crown lands and labour were administered by temporary and permanent clients of the king in return for certain rights and privileges. Exempt communal or ancestral land (bòbábaing mye) was owned collectively, usually by villages of non-indentured people (athi) who, in lieu of corvée, submitted per capita taxes to the crown, determined by a complicated system based on their occupations. Sańghika or religious lands (wáthúkan mye) were either owned outright by the church or held in perpetuity as endowments. The tax exempt produce from glebe lands paid for the maintenance of religious buildings and monasteries, the monks, and for the care of their students and their servants (hpayà-kyun) who were exempt from both corvée as well as per capita tax.

Plantations, which originated as agricultural enterprises within colonial economic systems and which came to be established particularly in tropical dependencies, have occupied an equivocal position in the economic development philosophies and plans of less developed countries. Their colonial origin and their traditionally export-oriented and often mono-cultural characteristics have subjected them to a wide range of adverse criticism, despite their undoubted earning capacity.

My essay in celebration of the Journal's anniversary sketches what may be the concluding chapter in a study of Vietnam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Tran dynasty reigned (1226–1400). In 1225 the Tran family overthrew the last emperor of the previous dynasty, the Ly (1009–1225) and hitherto the only long lived one. The Ly imperial line, in fact, lasted nearly fifty years longer than its successor. Nevertheless, the Tran is unquestionably the most renowned of all Vietnamese dynasties on account of its victories when Kubilai Khan's armies attacked three times in the thirteenth century. Yet one has to ask what kind of dynasty it was and how the country it ruled should be defined. Should one look to China, the source of the dynastic institution, for guidance or should one look elsewhere? An event in 1237 suggests ambiguity. That year officials were required to offer betel and tea to the emperor when he was departing from the Eastern Pier near the capital. “Betel and tea” bring Southeast Asia as well as China into the picture.

The Fisheries Act of 1875 altered the leasing arrangements for Burma's most valuable inland fisheries, the inn. It withdrew leases from the “innthugyis” who had traditionally handled these fisheries, and instituted a system of five-year auction leases. Expectations that local fishermen would secure these leases were never realised, and the fishing industry came to be dominated by capitalist interests, which made extortionate profits by subletting the fisheries.

The article reassesses the economic role of the late colonial state in Malaya. It seeks to dispel the view that the colonial government served British business interests, and that broad-based development policies only followed independence in 1957. Rather the developmentalist orientation of the state began earlier in the 1940s, and was not fully in accordance with existing economic interests.

An important problem in comparing bureaucratic organizations in different societies involves separating “cultural” from “structural” explanations of behaviour. Theories involvingstructural characteristics such as size and span of control permit uniform, parsimonious statements to be made. Yet such explanations fail to account for observed differences in output, goal choice, adjustment, etc., between structurally similar organizations in different settings. A requirement exists to develop theory which integrates cultural factors into organizational theories without resulting in mere reductionist arguments.

This paper is an effort to examine the dynamics of a major famine in the private domains of Indramayu and Kandanghaur in 1883–84, which was reportedly a result of drought, but a closer look at the evidence, including a unique survey of peasant families engulfed in the famine, reveals a rather complex situation. The local peasantry confined to a narrow subsistence economy found its food supply being seriously undermined by the landlords' efforts to extract more and more rice for sale at a time when Java was being closely drawn into the world market.

This article attempts to fill two gaps in two sets of inter-related historiographies, that of the diplomatic history of Singapore and that of the Vietnam war. For a number of reasons, not much had been published about the foreign policy of Singapore from the historical perspective. The Southeast Asian dimension of the Vietnam war is also starkly missing from the voluminous literature on the war. This article thus tries to describe and explain Singapore's attitude towards the war as it evolved over the ten years — from 1965, when the war really began and which coincided with the year that Singapore became independent, to 1975, a period which overlaps with the first ten years of Singapore's independence. Hopefully, this study will provide an understanding of one aspect of Singapore's foreign policy in its first 10 years as well as offer one Southeast Asian perspective on the Vietnam war.

Western secular historiography has conventionally viewed the history of Catholicism in Vietnam through a political optic, a perspective which has distorted the early nineteenth-century religious situation in both Vietnam and France. This article discusses how Vietnamese understood Catholicism at the popular level and what attracted people to the religion, as well as introducing an important European Catholic fund-raising society whose interventions into Vietnam long predated any serious French political designs on the country.