Several years ago Wong Lin Ken noted that, as yet, no general economic history of Malaysia had been written. Since then a considerable number of studies in both article and bookform have appeared; too many for a comprehensive listing here. These range from specialised works on particular industries, or aspects such as immigration, to more wide-ranging analyses of the political, social and administrative structure. The periods surveyed also vary considerably, but the tendency is towards relatively short time-spans of some twenty to forty years in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only one recent book, Economic Development of Modern Malaya by an economist, Lim Chong Yah, seeks to cover the economy as a whole over a longer period, roughly 1874–1963. But from the historian's viewpoint, much primary research still remains to be done before the pattern of changes in this period can be explained in full detail. However, the work done to date makes it possible to re-examine certain broad aspects such as the effects which can be directly attributed to the introduction of British administration. This is facilitated if some account is also taken of the very extensive literature on economic development, and colonialism, as well as on the situation in other countries with a similar historical experience. It must be emphasised that the following survey is necessarily selective in terms of the topics included and the published materials referred to.

In Bugis-Makassar society a king was identified in terms of his function in assuring the spiritual and material well-being of the whole community. Though distinguished from the rest of the population by the paraphernalia and “white blood” of kingship, the individual ruler did not reign in splendid isolation from the people. He was a visible presence whose active participation in the affairs of the community was an expected norm. On one level, he was regarded as an essential intermediary or link between mankind on this earth and the gods (or God) of the Upperworld; and, on another level, he was seen as an instrument of the people in maintaining the adat, or the laws and customs of the land. These two variant but co-existing beliefs in the role of kings reflect an existing tension between the rulers and the adat guardians, which had its roots at the very inception of kingship in this society.

The Federation of Malaysia was formed in 1963, comprising the Malay Peninsula and the states of Sabah and Sarawak. In Peninsular Malaysia, archaeological activities including the protection of archaeological sites is under the jurisdiction of the Museums Department while the East Malaysian states have their own enactments and programmes covering this aspect of research. For this reason I restrict this paper to the archaeology of Peninsular Malaysia.

Rubber, derived from the latex of the tree Heva brasiliensis, has from the First World War been the economic mainstay of the Malayan peninsula. Not only has rubber constituted Malaya's leading economic sector, but from 1914 down to the outbreak of war in Southeast Asia (with the two marginal exceptions of 1939 and 1941) Malaya was the world's largest single supplier of natural rubber. The revival of Malayan rubber was therefore of prime significance not only for the economic rehabilitation of Malaya but also for the global recovery of rubber consuming industries.

We find this a most curious attack, both in tone and in substance; Loofs-Wissowa appears to believe that we, Solheim, Gorman, and the media have been engaged in a conspiracy to cloud the minds of Westerners and Southeast Asians alike on the origins of metallurgy in the region. Loofs-Wissowa evidently feels that Southeast Asian laymen view this question as equal in importance to contemporary issues there (which is of course not the case). He also believes that it is the most burning issue in archaeology since Piltdown or Glozel, splitting the profession into “Believers” in the “long dates” and “Non Believers”. This is again rather an exaggeration; we would estimate the “Believers” to number not more than a few hundred, while the “Non Believers” may be counted on the fingers of one hand (Marschall, Sørensen, Sieveking, and of course Loofs-Wissowa himself). The remainder of the archaeological world (i.e., over 90%) has other questions to occupy it. However, Loofs-Wissowa is certainly correct in pointing out the attention paid to the question of early metallurgy over the past few years, and we welcome this opportunity to counter his arguments and distinguish between our views and those published by the media. This may best be done by first pointing out errors of omission in the facts presented by Loofs-Wissowa, by examining basic errors in his conceptual framework, and finally by answering the three specific questions he poses.

Southeast Asian states are often referred to as “nations” (for example, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN), thus implying that the peoples of each state form only one national group and are easily distinguished and characterized. In fact, more often than not, each population of the various states shows not only differences of nationality but also many other differences. Among these factors of differentiation, the political geographer attaches particular importance to the two factors of language and nationality. These two cultural factors are elements of the “state-idea” and can affect the cohesion and strength of a state. All the newly independent states of Southeast Asia are seeking to establish their state-ideas and, i n the analysis of each state's population, these two factors can throw much light on the cohesion, functioning, and viability of that particular state.

Through an examination of an essay written by a Balinese intellectual in the 1930s, this article explores how notions of modernity and nationalism can take root in particular localities. The essay makes a case for modernization and nationalism in Bali, and points to the existing caste system, which it identifies as largely a colonial creation, as an obstacle to progress that should be eliminated.

On early European maps of what is now called Southeast Asia, the sea lies in the foreground, its whales and mermaids, waves and ships precisely drawn and prominent. To a modern reader looking back through centuries, with hindsight, such maps may illustrate ignorance, science lapsing into art, the greater scale ofsea features compared to those on land a straightforward function of the ocean's being a larger, blanker slate on which to draw. Yet the aquatic monster big enough to swallow Singapore, the headlands and inlets of Java's northern coast a finely charted fringe setting off the vagueness of a hinterland marked incognita — these anomalies-in-retrospect are altogether faithful to the thoroughly seagoing way in which the West first gained acquaintance with the region.

On the Foundation Day of the University of Malaya on 8 October 1949, Malcolm MacDonald, the Chancellor of the new university and British Commissioner-General in Southeast Asia, proudly declared that the university was founded “at a timely and auspicious moment” when “we are witnessing in Malaya the birth of a nation”. MacDonald rested his inspiring theme on the British postwar policy of preparing Malaya for eventual self-government within the British Commonwealth. Under this policy Singapore was constituted a distinct crown colony with a legislature in which only six of the twenty-two members were popularly elected, whereas the other Settlements and the Malay States were merged into the Malayan Union which had fully nominated federal and state legislatures. It seems clear from the postwar political reorganization that the British policy-makers had intended to take Malaya slowly, stage by stage, to self-government and eventual independence.

When Burma was separated from India in 1937, the production and distribution of opium in the trans-Salween area became an important issue for the British since the Government of Burma would be expected to adhere to the various international agreements to control the opium trade. Initiatives by British officials in London to tighten restrictions were necessary since this region produced over and above the licit requirements of opium for the Shan States, but they were never fully implemented owing to resistance from local authorities and traders and the lack of any alternative cash crop to substitute for opium.

The Asian–African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 has been written into twentieth-century history as ‘a moment’ made up of ‘little histories’, as the titles of the two volumes reviewed here suggest. Both belong to the literature on the Bandung Conference published since its fiftieth anniversary, the broad scope of which underscores the intricate and diffuse nature of the Conference. While offering new perspectives, the contributors also add to its ambiguity: Was Bandung a continuation of the struggle against imperialism? An episode of the Cold War? A protest against centuries of racial humiliation? Or a communist plot? It may well have comprised elements of all these.

The origins of political consciousness and nationalism among the hua-ch'iao or overseas Chinese in Malaya occurred during the period 1895–1911, between the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Revolution. The major defeat suffered by China at the hands of Japan and the subsequent Reform Movement which arose in China awakened the overseas Chinese to the political situation in their homeland. The presence of reformist leader K'ang Yu-wei and revolutionary advocate Sun Yatsen and their colleagues in Malaya served to enhance hua-ch'iao concern for China. By the Revolution of 1911, nationalism among the Malayan Chinese had emerged.

In the colonial period many Europeans considered coconuts a lazy man's crop. For the Indonesian population, however, they were a profitable form of cultivation, especially from the 1880s when the European oil and fats industry increasingly started to use copra, the dried kernel of the coconut, as a raw material for the production of soap and later also for margarine. Around one-third of world copra exports originated in the Netherlands Indies (Table 1), and copra was especially important for the economy of East Indonesia, where in 1939 it constituted 80 per cent of the total volume and 60 per cent of the total value of exports. In some parts of Indonesia copra even received the nickname of “green gold”. European involvement in coconut cultivation and the coconut trade nonetheless was limited. In the first half of this century, coconut growing was dominated by the indigenous population, which accounted for 94 per cent of Indonesian production, while Chinese merchants dominated the intermediate trade in copra.

Malaya at the start of the twentieth century, in common with much of the non-European world, had a peasant economy upon which a highly capitalized export economy was being grafted. The main export in the 19th century was tin, but tin took second place to rubber by 1916. There was, as is characteristic of export economies, a great disparity between the resources, particularly capital, available to the indigenous peasant population and those available to the export sector. There were, however, distinctive features to the Malayan situation, the most important being that the capitalist export economy did not draw on the subsistence sector for produce, labour, or food; food was imported, as was the labour used in mining and on estates. The output from rubber and coconut smallholdings, many of which were Malay owned, augmented Malaya's exports, particularly after 1910, but mines and estates operated independently from the indigenous rural population. There was a high level of coincidence between ethnic groupings and occupational specializations, and the economic division between peasant cultivation and the export sector also marked the ethnic division between Malays and non-Malays. Because the colonial administration nominally held power on behalf of the Malay population, the question of the welfare and economic role of the Malays had political implications disproportionate to its economic importance.

Tan Cheng Lock was born in Malacca in 1883. His father Tan Keong Ann, his illustrious grandfather Tan Choon Bock, and his great grandfather were also born there, while his great great grandfather Tan Hay Kwan, who had migrated from Fukien as a youth to Malacca in the latter part of the eighteenth century (circa 1765), had died there in 1801. The Tans by now have been part of Malacca for over two hundred years.

Human nature is inevitably concerned with the past which, for nations no less than for individuals, forms a framework for present attitudes and sometimes a justification for present actions. In the developed countries of the West this framework is easily and frequently obscured, although its presence can be readily demonstrated. For those nations which have, until recently, been controlled by one or other of the European powers, however, the past provides a framework to which national appeal is often made in a particularly explicit way.

The role of Indian textiles in Southeast Asian trade in the seventeenth century was important in three ways. First, there was a great, almost unlimited, demand for these goods in all the Southeast Asian markets; second, they constituted the principal medium of exchange for the trade of Southeast Asia with the outside world; and third, they shaped the pattern of Inter-Asian trade of the European Companies, which laid the foundation of their wealth and commerce and later political power in the eighteenth century. The first two were important for Southeast Asian history only, but the last was of very great importance from the point of view of world history, not less important, in its far-reaching effects, than the voyages of discovery at the beginning of the modern period or the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. The poor Indian weavers shaped the course of world history by unconsciously laying the foundation of British and Dutch colonial empires.

The ancient history of the countries of South-East Asia prior to the arrival of Europeans and the capture of Malacca in 1511, began to attract the interest of historians at a much later date than did that of India and China. It was still possible in 1861 for a French historian, a Professor at the Collège de France, to write in the Journal des Savants that, with perhaps the exception of Burma, “the Indian countries situated beyond the Ganges hardly deserve the attention of History”.

The South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) was established under the aegis of the Manila Pact which was formed in September 1954. As an international organization with its headquarters in Bangkok, SEATO had two functions; first, it was to provide limited economic assistance and counter-insurgency advice to its Southeast Asian members — Thailand and the Philippines. Second, its Military Planning Office comprised a group of senior officers drawn from member countries whose job it was to prepare plans for an alliance response in the event of a Communist invasion of Indochina. In this sense SEATO was created to ensure that the Vietnamese Communists would observe the Geneva agreements of July 1954.