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.

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.

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.

The category of rebellion has held a special place in the epistemological construction of Southeast Asian culture, as studies of anti-colonial movements and their underlying ideological foundations have revealed strikingly similar modes for articulating protest. In particular, the combination of religion with resistance has endured as a useful framework for not only understanding how particular Southeast Asians may have conceptualised the historical processes associated with colonialism, but for how ‘autonomous’ vocabularies remained intact and available to rural communities in times of crisis. Among the several regional cases, British Burma's Saya San rebellion (1930–32) has emerged in scholarship as a quintessential example of one such social movement where protest was articulated through a mixture of millenarian expectations, ritual and Buddhist sensibilities. This study explores the role of scholarship in the historical construction of Saya San and retraces the interpretive strategies that link the various ways in which the rebellion has been imagined. Though different understandings of the Saya San rebellion have been offered since the 1930s, the remains of colonial administrative rule lay deeply embedded in this scholarship.

This article, which looks at Indigenous communities in the multiethnic, multicultural region of Sabah, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, argues that indigeneity is not primordial, but exists in relation to dominant identities as well as other non-dominant, Indigenous groups. Moreover, Indigenous Peoples are not passive recipients of colonial or even postcolonial Othering: their identity is contextualised and contested within majority–minority relations. The article begins with a brief history of the dominant Kadazandusun nationalism in Sabah, in the context of the overarching Bumiputra policy of Malaysia, which privileges constructed Malayness, as background to the discourses and practices of smaller groups of land-based Murut and the sea-oriented ‘Bajau’, where identity switching is taking place in tandem with environmental justice claims. The land-based communities (Murut) have found leverage in making identity and livelihood claims attached to place (here, state-declared forest reserves that seek to exclude them) in line with the recent global environmental justice focus on participatory conservation rather than the older ‘fortress conservation’ model still dominant in state conservation thinking. However, the sea-oriented peoples (Bajau) require other social symbols than land for making their identity claims, in this instance, via claims to ‘modern’ livelihoods and as managers of marine resources with reference to the newly established Tun Mustapha Park. In Sabah, participatory conservation is being reappropriated by Indigenous Peoples to assert claims about place and /or livelihoods; if bureaucratised, however, this form of conservation might turn out to be less than participatory.

This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Straits Chinese political identity as one of conservative loyalty to the Empire, I show that the Straits Chinese developed multiple and hybrid political identities that were postcolonial in character, which would later influence the politics of decolonisation and nation-building after the war.

Though the Persatuan Melayu Selangor (PMS) was not the first association of its kind in the peninsular states, there are several arguments in favour of selecting it for particular attention. To begin with, it is the only Malay political (or quasi-political) organisation of the 1930s for which anything like detailed records exist — a determinant of considerable, if perhaps chance, importance. That these records do exist may well, indeed, be more than a mere accident of time, reflecting rather the relative sophistication of the PMS in organisation and administrative procedure, its fondness for getting everything down on paper, preferably in multiple copies, and its very active life.1 Apart from this, however, the PMS is particularly interesting in other ways, in terms of its leadership (somewhat more variegate than that of other associations), of its close connection with at least one Malay national newspaper, and of the leading role it played not only in bringing about the two national congresses of state Malay associations before the war, but in providing the chairman for these meetings and helping to determine their agenda. This paper will be concerned primarily with the first year of the PMS, from June 1938 to May 1939 (the period covered by the records), but some attempt will be made to set it in context and to outline its later history.

In 1968 David E. Bell, vice-president of the Ford Foundation, said: “Fifteen years ago, many thought it was a relatively simple matter to raise farm output in less-developed countries. All that was needed was to make U.S. technology available to the farmers in those countries by establishing extension services or their equivalent. This notion rapidly proved to be a monumental misconception.” The monumental misconception was that peasants in less-developed countries would be eager to maximize food production in order to overcome perennial food shortages, if they had the opportunity to learn the techniques of Western agriculture. This did not happen. Indonesian peasants, after learning of the techniques of the Green Revolution, rejected full participation in it. Why? Many observers in Indonesia and elsewhere have partially explained this rejection but in my opinion they missed the main reason because they failed to recognize that peasant cultures have social values and institutions that act as strong restraints on food production.

Central Thailand comprises three ecologically distinctive areas, i.e. the mountain area, the floodplain and the delta, as shown in Fig. 1.

These three areas relied on irrigation agriculture making full use of the distributary system of intermountain basins. The mountain area was the main stage for the traditional “Muang” during the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries.

This article develops an argument about the business culture and managerial organization of the colonial Indonesian sugar industry. It argues that developments in both spheres during the third quarter of the nineteenth century — largely ignored in the relevant research literature — played an appreciable role in assuring the industry's survival in the crisis conditions of the 1880s, when the world price of sugar fell dramatically. An important explanation of such changes, it will be suggested, is to be found in the technological progress which took place in some sectors of the industry from the 1840s onward. This development, delineated here in terms of a “colonization” of the sugar factory or fabriek, began to set the industry apart from the dominant colonial socio-cultural environment in which it was situated, and to prefigure an ethos more commonly associated with the final decades of Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. A nascent business culture was paralleled, moreover, by changes to the ways in which both the fabriek itself and the industry in general were run — changes which pointed to the early growth of a specifically managerial type of enterprise within an industry where such developments have usually been allocated to the closing decades rather than the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Taken together, as will be argued, the two developments — however embryonic — formed one of the foundations which enabled the colonial sugar industry to survive a perìod of severe crisis in the mid-1880s and resume a vigorous expansion by the century's end.

While student movements have only recently become internationally prominent, they have been active political and social forces in many nations for a fairly long period of time. The European nationalist movements of the 19th century had strong student support, and European revolutionary movements, including the German revolutions of 1848 and the Russian revolutionary movements, saw students in instrumental roles. In the developing areas as well students have played an important and sometimes crucial political role. Asian students have a particularly long and active history of political involvement. India, China, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other nations have all seen nationalist upsurges in the 19th and 20th centuries in which university students and Western-oriented intellectuals have been active. Many Asian nations, after achieving independence, have seen student and youth movements in opposition or as politically volatile elements in their societies. In a few nations, such as Turkey, South Korea, South Vietnam, and indirectly Indonesia, Pakistan, and Japan, students have caused governments to fall or political crises to take place.

It is a commonplace that political development must be prepared for and planned for. Without adequate preparation and planning there will be chaos, perhaps approaching Congo-like proportions. The dangers are all the greater in multi-racial societies, such as Sarawak and North Borneo. A warning against the premature introduction of political parties in Sarawak was given by the Governor in 1959 only a few weeks before the Sarawak United Peoples' Party was founded. “It is … essential that party politics should not cause further divisions in our community but should have a unifying and binding effect. If a party tends to be dominated by one race or class … it may have a disintegrating effect on our community …… I frankly doubt if political parties at the present stage of development will spell faster progress in this small country …” These misgivings were echoed from North Borneo, by its Governor, some six months later. “People of like taste or like purpose are all too probably of like race, and nothing could promise greater disaster for this country than its division on communal lines.” The Governor knew of no multiracial society in the world “where as yet there has been evolved a satisfactory, stable or easy working form of fully representative Government”. Nearly four years later the next Governor of North Borneo warned of the danger of “mounting the tiger of political parties prematurely”. The formation of parties at this stage “carried the greatest danger of communal strife”.

This paper examines a system of economic relations in Northern Thailand linking Karen and Hmong communities in the western highlands with traders from the lowlands. I shall describe the salient features of this tripartite system as it existed in the late 1960s and argue that it was essentially a product of opium cultivation and commerce. I also argue that it contributed towards a serious level of indebtedness among Karen and that this indebtedness tended, in turn, to widen wealth differences in Karen communities. Finally, I shall consider some of the economic changes that have led to a breakdown in the system i n recent years.

Two nineteenth-century Balinese genres in which the erotic predominates are epic kakawin poetry and tutur (religious manuals) on sexual yoga. The article points to the strong intertextual links between these diverse genres. Through their focus on practical sexual matters and on the pursuit of sexual pleasure as integral to spiritual growth, tutur and kakawin also offer insight into notions of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Bali.

As issues of gender and sexuality become an increasingly important focus in cultural studies, the work of the once popular woman writer of the 1950s and 1960s, Thidaa Bunnaak, draws Thai literature into the debate. This paper investigates the sexually explicit nature of Thidaa's fiction and the multiple meanings that erotic references might hold.

The understanding of Angkorian pre-state society has been greatly enhanced by an increase in archaeological investigation in recent years. From excavations conducted at Cambodian Iron Age sites we have evidence that attests to a transformative period characterised by increasing sociopolitical complexity, intensified inter- and trans-regional mercantile activity, differential access to resources, social conflict, technological transfer and developments in site morphology. Among the growing corpus of Iron Age sites excavated, Phum Lovea, on the periphery of Angkor, is uniquely placed to provide insight into increasing sociopolitical complexity in this area. The site is one of the few prehistoric moated settlements known in Cambodia and the only one to date to have been excavated. Excavation of the site has revealed an Iron Age agrarian settlement whose occupants engaged in trade and exchange networks, craft specialisation, metal production, and emergent water management strategies. These attributes can be seen as antecedent to the profound developments that characterise the first millennium CE polity centred on Angkor.

The kingdom of Lingga-Riau, with its dependencies of Johor and Pahang, traced its line of authority back to the earlier Malay kingdoms of Melaka, Singapore, Bintan and to the ultimate source Bukit Siguntang, Palembang. It was officially ended by the Dutch in 1911 when Sultan Abdul Rahman Muazzam Syah refused to sign a treaty of total submission to the colonial government of the Netherlands East Indies, and was obliged to leave the Riau-Lingga area and live in exile in Singapore until his death in 1930. Although the end of the kingdom was, and still remains, a trauma for those of noble descent in Lingga and Riau, the sultanate had in fact survived longer than most of the other indigenous kingdoms of the Malay-Indonesian world. The trauma of the ending of the kingdom prompted one descendant of the Malay royal line in Lingga to compile in 1930 an account of the Malay kings from Bukit Siguntang to Lingga. It is an account which highlights particular concerns of the author (and presumably of others in his position) about the Melaka-Johor-Lingga Malay royal lines, their relationship with other Malay royal lines and their relationship with their subjects.

The writing of Lao history presents peculiar problems, not because of the quantity and quality of sources available (though these leave much to be desired for certain periods), but because of the difficulty in deciding what is meant by “Lao history”. There is a problem in identifying the object of study. Is Lao history the history of those territories inhabited by ethnic Lao, or of the state of Laos as it has existed at various times under various names? The Lao have spread far beyond the geographical boundaries of present-day Laos: many more ethnic Lao live in Thailand than in Laos. Moreover the Lao state ceased to exist as a unitary entity in the early eighteenth century. What was reconstructed by the French nearly two centuries later and exists today is but a fragment composed of territories belonging to former principalities inhabited by diverse peoples, many of whom are not ethnic Lao. They are divided into three broad groups: the Lao Loum, or Lao of the valleys, comprise not only ethnic Lao but also upland Tai and account for about 65 per cent of the population; the Lao Theung, or Lao of the mountain slopes, speaking Mon-Khmer languages, account for around 25 per cent; while the Lao Soung, or Lao of the mountain tops, speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, number perhaps 10 per cent. The terms Lao Loum, Lao Theung and Lao Soung will be used to refer to these groups in this paper.

Despite their profound differences all of Cambodia's post-independence regimes have exhibited a unique obsession with protecting the country's borders from the depredations of neighbouring states. Some of this is fall-out from the colonial inheritance but this paper argues that older indigenous categories related to Theravada Buddhism have also played a significant role in the aetiology of modern Khmer territorialism. By showing how the traditional maṇḍala arrangement of space was being eroded at around the same time as the old monastic conception of a ritual boundary was purified, rationalised and extended under the influence of Buddhism modernism the author seeks to provide a Southeast Asian illustration of Carl Schmitt's insight that certain important elements of the modern state are, in fact, secularised religious concepts.