This article proposes that Singapore should be considered as a settler colony during its first years of settlement. The first Residents, William Farquhar, Thomas Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd all attempted to build Singapore as a settler colony, similar to those in Australia and North America. The difference was, however, that they looked to attract Chinese, Malay and Indian settlers as well as Europeans. By viewing Singapore as a settler colony, this article reinterprets our understanding of who constitutes a settler within settler colonial frameworks. It concludes that settler colonialism was not directly about moving indigenous people off the land, but rather establishing a new system of sovereignty in which individuals (regardless of race) were allowed to own land and become settlers. Nevertheless, the actions of the settlers and the British authorities created violent tensions with the original Malay inhabitants that were only resolved by the transfer of sovereignty from Sultan Hussein to the East India Company.

This article attempts to illuminate Duncan McCargo's influential yet ambiguous concept of ‘network monarchy’ — the source of political power wielded by Thailand's royalist establishment. Drawing on Thai-language primary sources, especially cremation volumes, I argue, first, that many individuals who have made up various institutional components of the network monarchy come from a constellation of traditional royalist families that have intermarried with each other. Contrary to what McCargo suggests, these people are not just bound by their devotion to the monarchy alone, but also by their families’ pervasive intermarriage ties forged over many decades. These ties have given the network monarchy additional resilience, even though not all its members toe the ideological line all the time. My second argument concerns the temporal context in which the network monarchy has come into being. Although McCargo makes it seem that the late King Bhumibol developed the network monarchy — his personal patronage network — as a political tool from scratch in the post-1973 period, it has actually grown, in part, out of the pre-existing elite family networks. I develop these twin arguments by using the case of one royalist prime minister — Anand Panyarachun — as a focal point of analysis.

This paper derives from a larger study of the nature of Japan's relations with colonial South and Southeast Asia in the period between the Russo-Japanese War and the Pacific War. By means of a detailed examination of a single facet of Japanese-Philippine relations, it is hoped that a greater insight may be gained into the often convolute processes of the interactions between, on the one hand, the dominant Asian power of the inter-war period, and on the other hand, colonial entities and personalities still beholden to Western European or North American rulers. However, two caveats need to be put forward about this essay: (1) the case of the Philippines was unique in colonial Asia since the United States had fully committed itself to a policy of withdrawal, thus facilitating contacts between the local ruling elite and Japanese diplomats; (2) despite pre-war and wartime propaganda to the contrary, the principal concern of Japan in all its dealings with colonial South and Southeast Asia before the Pacific War was economic. In the prior instance, therefore, the paragraphs that follow will demonstrate an apparently remarkable degree of freedom of action on the part of the Filipinos in authority under the Commonwealth Administration (1935–46) in spite of the continuing legal responsibility of the United States for Philippine foreign affairs under the provisions of the Tydings-McDuffie (Independence) Act of 1934. The second caveat will be evidenced by the unstinting and continuous attention of Japanese diplomats to the development of ever closer economic ties between the Philippines and Japan.

This article is a re-examination of Chinese student activism in Singapore through the lens of cultural performance, which has yet to garner due attention. Tracing the ebb and flow of Chinese school concerts in the politically volatile atmosphere of Cold War era Singapore and Malaya complicates current understanding about student activism in the city state. Whereas the official narratives by the British colonial administration and later, the PAP, often cast Chinese student activism as part of a communist insurgency, this article argues that school concerts—comprising folk dances, songs, choirs and theatre—were an alternative space for Chinese youth to articulate their visions of building an independent socialist state and an integrated multiracial Malayan nation. Unlike the student activism expressed through mass strikes, these school concerts enable one to see how the Chinese students displayed sophisticated ways of discipline, organisation skills, and creative energy through the performing arts in 1950s and 1960s Singapore.