The article investigates the operation of the jade trading networks from Burma to Thailand during the period of the Burmese socialist regime. The trade, a significant ethnic enterprise undertaken by Yunnanese migrants, has relied on transnational networks that deal with different political and economic systems beyond the jurisdiction of the state. The network approach is used to analyse the intertwining of guanxi formation and regulatory observance.

Ayutthaya rose as a maritime power with involvement down the peninsula and in the China trade. Early Ayutthaya resembled coastal polities of the archipelago more than hinterland states of the mainland. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ayutthaya changed by absorbing people, political structures, and cultural practice from the north.

Based on archaeological evidence from the Phimai region and elsewhere in Northeast Thailand, late prehistoric exchange patterns, focused on local and regional centres of redistribution and perhaps markets, formed the foundation of the Khmer temple and market centred economy. Early regional exchange networks and the Khmer economic system into which they evolved were adaptive responses to the unpredictability of a monsoonal climate.

This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.

Extensive trade networks and Islam shaped Malay identity. The Dutch conquest of Makassar (1666-69) compelled the Malays there to redefine themselves, mastering new trade routes, political arenas and social alliances. During the eighteenth century they both evaded and exploited ethnic classification, as their enforced focus on regional commerce and integration into port society encouraged localisation.

This article investigates the processes of becoming Indigenous Peoples in Thailand by tracing the transnational relationships and influences of global Indigenous movements on the creation of the Network and the Council of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand (NIPT and CIPT). In addition, it examines the Indigenous Peoples’ movement toward both internal and external recognition. I argue that in Thailand the Indigenous Peoples movement stems from the global movement and exists in relation to international organisations. Within Thailand, the movement represents a deterritorialisation of the ethnoscape, with those now identified as Indigenous Peoples previously being identified as ‘tribal peoples’, ‘ethnic minorities’, or ‘Others’ who threatened national security. Indigenous Peoples are also self-identifying as native and marginalised peoples whose basic rights must be recognised and who advocate for equal treatment as citizens. Yet, the Indigenous Peoples’ movement in Thailand is developing through a process of ongoing negotiations with various internal and external sectors. As a Hmong anthropologist and long-time participant in the Indigenous movement in Thailand, in addition to secondary sources, I draw mainly on personal observations and interviews with key informants.

For the greater part of the period from 1940 to 1945, French Indochina occupied a peculiar place in the Co-Prosperity Sphere of Great East Asia. Following the capitulation of France before the German army in June 1940, the northern part of Indochina became the first area in Southeast Asia to admit Japanese troops — at that stage, as an extension of the Japanese campaign in southern China. In July 1941 the Japanese advance into southern Indochina marked the first step towards a full-scale attack on European and American possessions in the whole region, which materialized in December 1941. But this military advance into Indochina, precisely because it took place before the general assault on Southeast Asia and the Pacific, had to be achieved by means of agreements and treaties with an established government. These were possible only because the French in Indochina decided to recognize the pro-German government at Vichy, so that the Japanese were able to apply diplomatic pressure both in France and at Hanoi. Once the agreements had been made, the Japanese saw no need to change the basis of their occupation of Indochina even after December 1941; they were by then preoccupied with establishing their presence in other areas. Consequently they continued to recognize the French administration in Indochina and to maintain diplomatic relations with it, so long as diplomatic pressure was sufficient to ensure that Japanese military needs were fully met.

This study investigates how multicultural citizenship education is taught in a Chinese Christian school in Jakarta, where multiculturalism is not a natural experience. Schoolyard ethnographic research was deployed to explore the reality of a ‘double minority’ — Chinese Christians — and how the citizenship of this marginal group is constructed and contested in national, school, and familial discourses. The article argues that it is necessary for schools to actively implement multicultural citizenship education in order to create a new generation of young adults who are empowered, tolerant, active, participatory citizens of Indonesia. As schools are a microcosm of the nation-state, successful multicultural citizenship education can have real societal implications for it has the potential to render the idealism enshrined in the national motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ a lived reality.

During the Malayan Emergency, British High Commissioner Henry Gurney pushed the policy of repatriating to China thousands of ‘alien’ Chinese detainees suspected of supporting the Malayan Communist Party's guerrilla war. This article traces the stages of this controversial policy, which, despite obstacles, remained a key counter-insurgency strategy until 1953. But the policy ignored the civil war in China and risked jeopardising Sino–British relations. When China closed its ports, the British administration put forth more desperate proposals to continue repatriation, often in the face of Foreign Office objections, ranging from negotiations with the PRC, to dumping deportees on the coast of China, and even approaching the Formosan government. Yet, while the Chinese were the target of both harsh early counter-insurgency techniques and communist violence, when the faltering repatriation policy was replaced by the mass resettlement of ‘squatters’ in Malaya itself, the Chinese were given a path to citizenship, changing their political future and that of the nation.

Often typecast as sedentary and static in Western writings, Cambodians have long been on the move. This article explores the misrepresentation of such mobility in colonial narratives, and contrasts the stereotype of the static Khmer with the mobilization of recruits in the First World War, the activities of protesters in Cambodia and political devices like the Royal Tour.

Ethnohistoric sources suggest that at the time of European contact, the coastlines and interior river valleys of most of the major islands of the Philippines were dotted with politically complex, socially stratified societies, organized on the level of what cultural evolutionists refer to as “chiefdoms”. Recent regional-scale archaeological research in the Philippines indicates that these coastal chiefdoms have considerable time depth. Settlement hierarchies, complex mortuary patterns, and other archaeological indicators of socio-political complexity extend well into the first millennium a.d. Spanish and Chinese texts refer to Philippine chiefs as the central figures in complex regional-scale economies and international-scale trade. Hereditary chiefs controlled the agricultural productivity of “commoners” through restrictive land tenure, they mobilized surplus for elite use through formalized tribute systems, and they amassed “wealth” through sponsorship of luxury good craftsmen and through participation in foreign prestige-good trade. The accumulated “material fund of power” was used competitively by-hiefs to enhance their social ranking, to strengthen political alliances, and to expand their regional political authority.

The understanding of Vietnamese society and social relations remains problematic. Even for recent times there is a dearth of research on basic facets of Vietnamese social structure. Scholars remain all too indebted to Hickey's study of Khanh Hau, which, dealing with a single and in some ways unique Southern village, can hardly be taken as representative given the wide regional and class differences characteristic of Vietnamese society. Moving backwards through time, the central elements of social relations become increasingly difficult to examine. The reasons lie both in an inevitable emphasis on what can loosely be called political history (e.g., the effects of French colonial rule, the resistance against that rule, the administrative problems faced by the early Nguyễn dynasty, or the recurring issue of war—and peace—with China) and the increasing narrowness of the documents available for study (i.e., the inevitability of reliance on official documents such as dynastic histories and legal codes).

Recently the validity of the standard portrayals of plantation agriculture — phrased as they are in essentially descriptive terms revealing little about the functioning of this particular system of crop production — was called into question. It was suggested that a deeper understanding of the nature and mechanisms of plantation agriculture required the explicit recognition that this is not an undifferentiated, unchanging agricultural system, but that there are in reality different types of plantation; in identifying these, it is essential to consider variations in the individual form and range of combinations of selected key elements central to the organisation of production. This led to the conclusion that in view of their structure and modes of operation certain large-scale agricultural enterprises producing for export which adopt rotational patterns of land use whereby specific sites are cleared, cropped, exhausted and then left to revert to secondary growth for varying periods should be seen not as commercial variants of shifting cultivation but as a distinctive type of plantation agriculture. Producing high-quality wrapper-leaf tobacco for cigars, the renowned plantations of the Deli region of north-east Sumatra provide a classic illustration of this point. Although, in the absence of a fully-documented review of its history and organisation, it rarely receives notice, a similar plantation industry also developed in what is now the Malaysian State of Sabah in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Roughly the size of Ireland, Sabah — then known as North Borneo — was administered from 1881 until 1946 by the British North Borneo (Chartered) Company and this tobacco industry was of crucial significance in the economic history of the Company's territory. “Tobacco in the eighties,” wrote Rutter half a century ago, “played an even more important part in the destinies of the country than rubber has in later years. Until ousted by rubber it was the country's foremost planting industry…” This survey of the tobacco industry of North Borneo has a double objective therefore; it investigates the role of the industry in the process of economic development in the State and also seeks to indicate the particular features of this form of plantation agriculture.

Prostitution in Singapore was linked to economic factors in rural China and Japan. Congenital poverty, weak family economies, and rising economic expectations were all part of a set of prevailing conditions that created a vast source of supply of Chinese and Japanese women and young girls for international traffic. Life in both countries was exceptionally difficult in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although China had considerable wealth, most lived a hand to mouth existence in the over-populated rural areas. Poverty in the villages and outlying districts of southeastern China, where many agrarian families lived on the edge of starvation, not only drove women and girls out of the countryside into the ports but acted as a lever on parents already bowed under financial strain. Privation was a handicap which struck hardest at the daughters of peasants and rural labourers. Unable to feed the many mouths they were responsible for, and suffering from chronic economic insecurity, parents sold their daughters to would be benefactors, totally unaware of the future fate in store for so many of them who were taken to Singapore. Poverty and desperate hungry Chinese families were root causes of brothel prostitution in Singapore at the end of the nineteenth century.

While Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins off into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, where even remote peoples have shaped themselves to or against urban rule, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity, easily factored out and best forgotten. So village studies represent these city-centred nations, and few wonder if the entrepreneurs and middle class who now explain so much might themselves be explained as urban. Our disciplines divide so deeply that no one addresses how the city organizes society and shapes the region.

Using the chbap to analyze pre-cotonial Cambodian society is difficult because these gnomic, normative poems are only incidentally concerned with the ways in which that society was put together. Moreover, it is hard to determine how firmly they are anchored in the times when they were written: how useful is a seventeenth century chbap, after all, in helping us to understand eighteenth-century society? Another problem with using them is that they often provide an idealized picture, suggesting norms of behaviour rather than describing or analyzing the ways in which people behave. Because of this, the poems belong to more than one century at a time. Finally, like anything written down in a largely illiterate society, the chbap encapsulate and pass on the ideology of a minority élite. It can be argued that this ideology, in pre-colonial Cambodia at least, was rarely at odds with the ideology of the rural, illiterate poor; but this may be a circular argument, brought on by the widespread popularity, imposed by the elite over several centuries, of the chbap themselves.

This article rebuts recent attempts to diminish Sir Gerald Templer's role in the Malayan Emergency. It contends that the revisionists overlook the decisive psychological impact of Templer's Malayan sojourn. Fundamentally, through very deliberate words and deeds, he gave both government and Malayans confidence that the communists could and would be beaten.

The paper begins by documenting the meanings the labels ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Taoism’ carry locally and highlights the complexities and ambiguities in discussions that invoke them. I then present data which demonstrate significant points of convergence between these two religious traditions, viewed as ‘ethnic religions’ and asserted to be ‘different’ in the Singaporean context. The turn to the organisational domain is instructive in revealing how ‘Hindu’ and ‘Taoist’ institutions have talked about their respective religions in the public sphere. This focus allows me to highlight overlaps in the two sets of discourses, to ask why these affinities should exist and to reflect on the sociological implications of such a phenomenon.

Cambodia is now in the midst of reconstruction after decades of organised violence and socio-cultural disruption. This paper explores how rural Cambodians are trying to recreate order in their local worlds and it questions what impact the recent deluge of consumer values, delivered through a post-socialist political filter, is having on these efforts.

In 1925, Alexander Paterson, a Commissioner for Prisons in England and Wales, arrived in Rangoon to advise the local government on gaol conditions in Burma. This paper explores why the Burma prison administration invited Paterson, examines his findings and proposals – that included the suggestion that no convict should spend more than two years in gaol – and considers the fate of his recommendations. Paterson's visit and views are set in the social and political contexts of British rule in Burma at that time.