On the basis of a new database of stock and commodity prices, along with measures of government revenues, commodity exports and immigration, the article assesses the impact of the opium trade on the economies of colonial Malaya, the Netherlands Indies and China from 1873 to 1911. Stock returns for a few Malayan industries related to international trade are significantly correlated with opium price changes, as are prices for labour-intensive, Chinese-dominated export commodities such as tin and gambier. However, opium price changes explain, at most, only a small fraction of the behaviour of stock and commodity prices. On balance, stock and commodity markets ascribed only secondary importance to ups and downs in the opium trade as measured by the price of the drug.

Southeast Asia is the world centre of mangrove development. Not only is there a greater diversity of species, but the areas covered by mangrove forests are more extensive. This paper is concerned with the utilization of the mangrove forests in Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia (along the west coast), which is bounded by that part of the Indian Ocean called the Andaman Sea. The Burmese mangrove forests are probably very similar to these, but they will not be treated in this paper.

In two recent review articles, I.W. Mabbett summarizes the prehistoric and historic sources bearing on the question of “Indian influence on the development of Southeast Asian societies”. Asimilar review was undertaken by Paul Wheatley in “Satyantra in Suvarnadvipa” and more recently by Ken Hall. Each of these authors make similar points: that there are essentially three major hypotheses that have been advanced over the years to account for the spread of “Indian influence” (the Brahmana, Ksatriya, and Vaisya respectively, to which we will return); and that evidence on which to decide amongst these hypotheses is lacking. After a “brief outline of the sources on ‘Indianization’ which is practically complete”, I.W. Mabbett concludes that:

It is unlikely that prolongation of the catalogue of possible sources would add much to what has already been gleaned — more Indian trade goods, more inscriptions recording the activity of pious Hindu or Buddhist rulers, more unreliable Chinese second-hand accounts of Indian priests and Indianized “kingdoms”. The purpose in extending the catalogue this far had been twofold. In the first place, it is to make quite clear that the actual process of “Indianization” is nowhere reliably portrayed; what is portrayed by the earliest evidence is the operation of kingdoms already Indianized; and therefore the various theories that have been offered are speculation. One may seem more plausible or attractive than another, but none has been established.

Singapore became an independent sovereign state on August 9, 1965 It may be alleged that to attempt an analysis of a country's foreign policy only three years after its independence is premature. Yet there are certain basic facts about Singapore which no political leader can ignore, and these become the determinants or roots of Singapore's foreign policy. To that extent, Singapore's foreign policy is predictable because the range for manoeuvre is limited.

This paper is a reflection on a number of theatre performances held in Singapore, each of which probed problematic or traumatic historical events occurring either in Singapore itself or in other parts of Southeast Asia. These avant-garde performances were inspired by or built around actual testimonies of individuals in ways which, for this author, suggest a striking fluidity in the boundaries between testimony and performance, one that raises difficult questions about performance ethics and the processes by which collective memories are shaped. The plays also made use of visual media: one had been recorded on video while others incorporated photographic and video materials into the actual performance. At the time I witnessed these plays, I had already become interested in the way that, over the course of the twentieth century, documentary films had come to play an increasingly important role in the recording of testimony concerning traumatic events. Testimony on film, I have argued, functions simultaneously as evidential trace, and as performative event. Films of testimony develop their own trajectories as they enter into the realms of public remembering. They preserve and extend the record of personal experiences, thereby adding them to the pool of collective memory about an event. Theatrical performances, too, develop their own trajectories through repetition, as Marvin Carlson's statement (cited above) suggests. But what exactly might be different when testimony is performed as drama before a live audience? What are the purposes of such performances, and what might be their possible effects upon both participants and audiences? Is the trace left by a live theatre performance inevitably more ephemeral than those captured on film, or might it be in some respects even more powerful? These are some of the questions I raise – without necessarily being able to present definitive answers – in what follows. I conclude by arguing that in the Singapore context, because censorship laws place very specific constraints on the making of documentary films with openly political content, in recent years theatre has been able to offer a slightly greater space than film as a medium for critical reflection. How theatre directors and actors have tried to use this space is a subject correspondingly deserving of our close attention.

Working from recently declassified Australian and British government files, this paper examines the archival evidence on policy thinking in London and Canberra towards the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) during the period 1970–75. The article argues that one of the main reasons for the Heath government's decision to deploy a token military force in Southeast Asia as part of a multilateral defence arrangement with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore was the desire to uphold these Commonwealth connections. By contrast, Canberra was beginning to question the value of such arrangements in a rapidly changing Southeast Asian strategic environment.

The geo-political and cultural-historical context, more than any other single factor, has shaped the notion of Mranma Pran in pre-colonial times. It is derived from a longstanding reality embodied in the term anya (‘upstream’), representing Upper Burma (hence, the term anyatha, ‘offspring of Upper Burma’). Although Lower Burma also has an equivalent in the term akriy (‘downstream’), it was Upper Burma more than any other region in the country that initially exemplified the term Mranma Pran, the ‘heartland’ of the country's culture and society for over a millennium. The meaning of the term Mranma Pran (or its colonial term, ‘Burma’), therefore, depends on the context in which and by whom it is viewed.

Shrimp farming in Southeast Asia is often touted as a globalisation success story. The region emerged as a key area for farmed shrimp production in the 1990s, and it remains a leading producer of shrimp for export to international markets to this day. This achievement has not, however, been without cost. Small-scale shrimp farmers in Southeast Asia have suffered persistent social, economic and environmental dislocations stemming from price pressures imposed by globalisation and neoliberal economic policies in the seafood sector. Community supported fisheries (CSF) represent an alternative marketing model which could potentially support small-scale producers in Southeast Asia whose viability is threatened by the intensification of shrimp production by large corporate interests. This article investigates opportunities for CSF in the region, encourages research that builds social capital in aquaculture communities, and identifies opportunities to link small-scale shrimp farming operations with local markets that seek high quality seafood produced in an environmentally sustainable and socially responsible manner.

Responding to the new forces unleashed by the Second World War, Whitehall planners devised a new scheme that envisaged the creation of Malayan Union Citizenship. In a fundamental break from past practice, the new scheme sought to confer citizenship privileges on Malaya's non-Malay population. In the aftermath of the War the implementation of the new policy embroiled the Colonial Office in a major constitutional controversy that threatened not only Britain's traditional relationship with the indigenous Malay community but also the bases of British rule in Malaya.

Set in Manila in 1813 during the implementation of the Liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812, this case study of the conflict between natives and Chinese mestizos over seating arrangements in a small parish church demonstrates how the new charter challenged the hierarchies of colonial political space. Despite its centralist aim, the Constitution instead empowered multiple ethnic groups, while reinforcing local notions of self-government and autonomy. Though a brief period, it was a significant one, as natives and Chinese mestizos constructed complex political identities. In turn, these identities set a political precedent which re-emerged during the second constitutional period (1820–23) with more wide-ranging political consequences.

Indonesia's state-owned mosques are important sites for observing changes in religious life that have taken place since the demise of the Suharto regime. During the New Order period, ideological and political factors restricted access to mosques owned and managed by provincial and regency governments. In contemporary West Java, access to such mosques has been broadened, and they now display a diversity of religious programs and practices. Drawing on recent fieldwork, this article makes a case study of the intercession ritual known as manakiban which has recently emerged in government-owned mosques of West Java. It identifies two dominant factors behind the new inclusiveness: a desire for visibility and public legitimacy on the part of some members of the Sufi order that promotes the ritual, and secondly, a broadening of access to state-owned mosques as a result of more inclusive participation in the electoral process. The article contributes to knowledge of the politicisation of religion in contemporary Indonesia, and suggests new possibilities for understanding the meanings of public Islamic infrastructure.

Across the Theravada Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, the Vessantara Jataka has long been the most famous of the stories (jatakas) of the previous lives of the Buddha. However, little attention has been paid to the jataka's historical vicissitudes. Drawing on comparisons with neighbouring Thailand, this essay suggests there have been significant differences in the jataka's performances and interpretations in Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia and Laos. This essay seeks to historicise understandings of the Vessantara Jataka, showing how social movements, state policies and global pressures have shaped understandings of the jataka differently in each country.

The importance of the Portuguese sources for our knowledge of Malayan history has long been recognized. Fortunately, most of them are now available in translation, and thus accessible to historians who have difficulty in reading 16th or 17th century Portuguese.

In the first place we should mention the English translations issued by the Hakluyt Society. These are:

Messrs. Chandler, Ebihara, Haines, and Whitmore have written thoughtful and stimulating essays. But they have not been overwhelmingly concerned with exposing any great differences between medieval Vietnam and its nearest Theravada Buddhist neighbour, Cambodia. No doubt unintentionally, the two societies have been made to seem rather similar to each other. After all, Vietnamese literati, like the authors of Cambodia's normative poems, also consecrated what David Chandler has called “the propriety of hierarchies, rote-learning, and tradition”. Vietnamese social theory, like that of the chbap, stressed “the teacher-pupil relationship”. May Ebihara's argument that Cambodian social strata were permeable, and were characterized by “fluidity of membership” rather than resembling “rigidly structured Indian castes”, could also be applied to Vietnam, as could, obviously, her theme of Cambodia's oscillation between periods of centralized and decentralized political power. Even the social categories the two societies used have similarities: the Vietnamese equivalent of the Khmer term neak chea (“good people”, meaning relatively free men) was also “good people” (lương dân) and referred to citizens like farmers, with morally valuable occupations, as opposed to people like actors who were thought to be “mean”. One is left with the impression that the countries of sixteenth-century Southeast Asia embraced much less social and economic diversity than the countries of sixteenth-century Europe, with all their sharp contrasts between Venetian patricians and Antwerp merchants, Italian rice fanners and Dutch market gardeners, conservative English craft guilds and revolutionary Flemish ones. Can any faith still be placed in Harry Benda's old suggestion that the “constant” clashes between Vietnamese and Khmers be “analyzed in terms of a basic polarization between different…social and political systems?”

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

Scholars of Southeast Asia have for several decades moved away from theories of ‘Indianisation’, in favour of theories of ‘localisation’. So far, however, there has been little attempt to apply the methodological shift from Indianisation to localisation to an important living relic of the prime agents of older Indianisation theories: the royal court Brahmans of Thailand. In this article, I examine the history of this still-functioning Southeast Asian Brahmanical institution, with respect both to evidence of its ties to India and to the ways it has been ‘localised’. I argue that it is best understood as a local articulation of kingship, negotiating a necessary tension between the foreign and the familiar in royal ritual.

Modern spoken theatre emerged in Vietnam in the context of the intellectual and social upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s. Plays in this period focused on the status of women, the effects of Westernization and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism. In Nam Xu′o′ng's 1930 play Ông Tây An-nam, women became conduits through which men expressed their Westernized or nationalist identities.

In the final three decades of the nineteenth century, the world price of silver fell dramatically. On the London silver market, the price dropped almost without check, from an average of 60d. per ounce in 1870 to 28d. per ounce in 1900. For those countries on the silver standard (and at the beginning of the period this included all the states of Southeast Asia), the result was a substantial, continuous depreciation of their currencies against gold-based currencies, most notably sterling. In turn this threatened to disturb severely the foreign trade and capital inflows of those states at a time when they were becoming more closely integrated into the international economy. For example, frequent changes in the exchange rate introduced an element of speculation into trade with gold-standard countries, with the result that merchants' calculations of profit margins were frequently thrown into confusion by sudden fluctuations in the exchange. Moreover, with the exchange value of their currency falling, these states found themselves paying increasingly more in terms of the local currency to secure the same sterling value of imports. This was a particularly important consideration for those countries dependent upon imports of capital goods, for example, mining machinery or railway equipment, as these were obtained almost solely from the gold-standard states of western Europe.

There was a stone fort at Malacca from 1512 to 1807. Only twice during the three centuries of its existence did this fort change hands, and it was taken by storm only once. Yet it was many times besieged, and nations which did not possess it regarded it with disfavour as a threat to the security of their communications and a hindrance, if not a barrier, to the freedom of their trade. In relation to the Malay Peninsula the fort at Malacca was of small account, for it was never used as a base for the furthering of territorial ambitions in the interior. Its importance lay rather in its. position on the flank of the main sea route between India and China. Beneath its guns fleets could be assembled and lie at anchor in security, and these fleets could be, and were, employed to attack the shipping of rival powers passing through Malacca Straits.