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.

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.

Our recent discovery and excavation of a series of iron smelting furnaces, dated to the eighth and ninth century CE, near upland Rmet villages in northwest Laos, potentially sheds new light on the role of regional upland groups during the immediate pre-Tai period. The oral tradition associated with these furnaces emphasises the role of an ancient population of metallurgists who left the area under pressure from the Rmet. These stories could refer to the actual arrival and departure (immigration and emigration) of a population of metallurgists in that area sometime during the second half of the first millennium CE or they can support the scenario of a dissimilation process. The latter would explain the existence of a Rmet subculture that the locals regard as ‘Chueang Lavae’ villages, a differentiation that Karl G. Izikowitz had labelled ‘Upper Lamet’ in the 1930s. Our finds show that archaeology and ethnology can both contribute to a much-needed reformulation of upland Lao history.

It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.

This article integrates the history of the experience of rickshaw coolies into the larger history of Singapore in the period from 1880 to 1940. These were decisive years. They witnessed the extraordinary economic development of the vast potential for tin, rubber, oil palm, and tobacco in the Malay peninsula and on the east coast of Sumatra under colonial rule, and the evolution of Singapore as a “coolie town”, with a colonial administrative heart and an entrepôt port, with the birth of the rickshaw and a stream of emigrants from China who poured in faster and faster to pull it. This floodtide ofsingkeh singkeh (newcomers from China) came to Singapore with the hope of forming a foundation for a new and prosperous life. Expanding Singapore, especially at this stage of its growth from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was often considered by the migrants as a place of hope and betterment. There were in Singapore tens of thousands of Cantonese, Hengwah, Hockchia, and Foochow sojourners who hoped to find a pipeline to prosperity since the second half of the nineteenth century, when dire poverty and overpopulation plagued Southeast China.

Given the great strides made over the past twenty years in our understanding of modern Southeast Asian history, it is surprising that many traditional and possibly outdated interpretations remain unchallenged. Despite the growing use of indigenous source materials, the willingness to take an Asian-centric (and occasionally nonelitist) perspective, and the increasing attention to social, economic, and cultural (rather than just political and diplomatic) history, a number of important themes need reinterpretation or reevaluation. Indeed, many modern historians continue to accept as valid traditional assessments of some nineteenth-century events. This is sometimes the case even when the original sources are compromised by a Western ethnocentric and colonialist bias, since European representatives of the imperialist imperative largely produced the documentary sources for the period. The colonial episode now seems a far less benevolent exercise than it did to an earlier generation of historians; yet, outmoded perspectives sometimes remain with us. Such a failure of reinterpretation characterizes the recent writings on one of the better-known episodes in Bornean history, the so-called “Chinese Rebellion” of 1857 in Sarawak. The time has come for a revisionist appraisal.

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’.

Before 1997 a number of social, political and academic movements combined to present a more negative image of luuk tung (Thai country music) than was warranted and as a result, the genre was understudied. This article identifies the forces that influenced the development of luuk tung's status in Thai society and demonstrates how the rising status of luuk tung since 1997 has influenced recent academic writing by Thai authors. This survey of the voices that speak on luuk tung is grounded by an analysis of the lyrics and melodies of Sorapet Pinyoo, a well-known luuk tung artist.

The Zhuang of south China are the most numerous of the Chinese minority peoples. In Vietnam the Zhuang were identified historically as the Nung, and more recently as the combined Tay-Nung minority, the largest of Vietnam's 36 minority peoples. One of the most critical points in Zhuang history occurred in the Song era [960–1126 A.D.], when the expanding Han Chinese and the Vietnamese began to make a sustained impact in the Zhuang heartlands. Many Zhuang resisted foreign control, striving for continued independence. Their subsequent defeat meant that the Zhuang were never again to have an opportunity for autonomous development.

As the founders of a revolutionary movement with an international ideology, the small group of men who led the Burmese communist parties for their first thirty years were concerned as to whether their ideological views and political tactics were consonant with those of foreign communist parties. While looking to Marx, Lenin, and their European interpreters as the original fount of ideological coherence, Asian parties nearer to Burma provided the most immediate and programmatic sources of interpretation. Since the 1950s the example of the Chinese Communist Party has been the leading inspiration for most Burmese communists. However, in the first decade of communist activity in Burma, the Indian Communist Party provided the closest and most congenial guidance.

This article examines colonial nature-making in twentieth century Philippines. It particularly looks into natural history investigations of the American-instituted Bureau of Science and the ways in which it created a discursive authority for understanding the Philippine natural environment. These biological investigations, the article argues, did not only structure the imperial construction of the colony's nature, but also provided a blueprint for imagining notions of national integration and identity. The article interrogates the link between colonial scientific projects and nation-building initiatives, emphasising the scripting of the archipelago's nature and the creation of a national science through biological spaces.

In contrast to the rich historical literature on Southeast Asia's peasants, there are few studies of their urban counterparts, the proletariat of the colonial port cities. The region's rural revolts have inspired a growing literature on peasant politics and social history. But there has been little parallel research on the urban working class — stevedores, transport workers, and millhands.

There was a tremendous acceleration in newspaper publishing between 1930 and 1941 despite the Great Depression. The Malay press began to evolve into a site for discussing and debating the circumstances of Malay life in the 1930s. Rather than news, opinions, commentaries, leading articles and editorials made up the bulk of column space in Malay newspapers and magazines of the 1930s. It was a ‘viewspaper’ rather than a newspaper. New forms of public-opinion making like the editorial, increased participation in the media through letters to the editor and contributors' articles, public readings of newspapers, and the extension of newspapers into classrooms meant that a broader cross-section of Malays were able to access debates and discussions on issues of the day and raises new questions about public life in Malaya among Malays.

The history of the Kuomintang (KMT) movement in both Malaya and Singapore during the pre-war years has remained largely under-explored since the appearance of Png Poh-seng's article on that topic twenty years ago. Its history deserves a deeper study as it would throw light not only on the China-oriented politics among the Chinese in these two territories but also on the causes and the rationale of the British authorities to contain and ban it. As the Colonial Office and Foreign Office records have now been made accessible to researchers, it is feasible and urgent that such a study be undertaken in a more systematic and analytical manner.

Probably the biggest single effect that the Emergency in Malaya has visibly accomplished has been the resettlement or regrouping of nearly 650,000 “squatters” into more than 550 “new villages.” It is the purpose of this paper to examine the conditions that necessitate the resettlement and regrouping of these “squatters”, the positive law measures utilized, and the direct and indirect results that were accomplished.

This paper examines the main factors behind the rise and decline of the Japanese fisheries based in Singapore before the Pacific War, and shows that, as the fisheries contributed greatly to the Singapore economy, they did not constitute a foreign economic enclave in the British colony. It also describes how the Japanese and local fishermen conducted fisheries during the period from 1942 to 1945, and argues that the legacy of the Japanese fisheries outlived the Japanese occupation.

Indigeneity, a concept and construct, is increasingly gaining currency in academia, in the political sphere, and in public debates. Indigeneity as an active political force with international support has become a resource in identity politics. This article focuses on the dynamics of how the transnational idea of indigeneity has been nationally installed and locally translated within the context of the ethnohistory of an Indigenous movement that stemmed from local–societal relations with the state. The idea of indigeneity is seen as both local and global because it is globally circulated but locally articulated as well as globally charged but locally framed. Focusing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia and home to 11 Indigenous groups in Bangladesh, the article argues that the local translation of global indigeneity is necessary for ensuring the rights and entitlements of Indigenous Peoples.

This article re-examines the history and historiography of the Saya San Rebellion (1930–32), Burma's most famous peasant uprising and one of Southeast Asia's most frequently examined anti-colonial movements. By retracing the documents most intimately connected to the rebellion's official narrative, this study reconstructs the legal and administrative context within which this particular history was made.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

Over the years much has been written about the so-called attempted Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965. Many of the horrors depicted have concerned Balinese or abangan, nominal Muslims in Central and East Java, but little if anything has been written about the Catholic and Protestant inhabitants of those regions outside Java during the period 1965 and following, and how they coped with Communist activity in their districts. Hitherto there has been little said concerning the Christians' attitude towards the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI) — the Indonesian Communist Party — and few reasons given for some Christians becoming members of this political party. This paper is written to shed a little light on these questions and to analyse the reasons why in more than a few districts of the eastern islands the Communist Party was by no means seen by some Christians as the archetypal enemy of Christianity. This article does not, on the other hand seek to discuss the attempted coup in detail, nor specially reasons for its occurrence or its ultimate failure. Rather it intends to describe how Communism also reacted in the face of Christianity in the islands of Bali, Flores, Sumba and Timor, and how in a few cases, each flavoured, coloured and influenced the other.