I agreed in the fall of 1979 to be the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies on the state of the art of archaeology and anthropology in Southeast Asia. This special issue was to be published in March 1984 and I was to have the papers to the editor by the 15th of October 1983; plenty of time I thought. I first attempted to get two senior American anthropologists to be associate editors, one for Mainland Southeast Asia and one for Island Southeast Asia. This did not work out so in the fall of 1980 I started to organize authors for each country. By the summer of 1981 I had arranged authors for thirteen reports.

Modern Vietnamese history is generally considered to begin with the seventeenth century. The final destruction of the Cham kingdom and the concurrent territorial expansion presided over by the Nguyễn lords of Hue increased the visibility of the Vietnamese people along the South China Sea and attracted the attention of refugees, merchants, and missionaries from China, Japan, and Europe. These foreign contacts were symptomatic of basic changes occurring in Vietnam; they were not the cause. From the decline of the Lê dynasty early in the sixteenth century, political life was dominated by militarized family alliances. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the two most successful families in the competition for power were locked in a grim testing of wills. Mutually aggressive policies remained inconclusive after half a century of warfare, however, and were eventually abandoned by both parties. This resulted from the rise of new interests tied to the internal social, political, and economic conditions of Vietnam. The rise of these new interests was the most significant development in the seventeenth century.

Dirges mark endings. And though it may seem strange to begin a report on archaeology and anthropology in East Malaysia and Brunei with a “dirge”, it is precisely the ritual form suited to set the tone for this review.

Unity within the Malay-Indonesian region evolved as an economic force from within and was not artificially superimposed by any political authority. The region was inextricably linked as a ‘geo-economic’ unit which was of paramount importance to international trade. Although it was trade which laid the area open to external intrusions which ultimately forced the region into a single matrix, colonial authority was imposed largely upon a pre-existing inter-regional economic infrastructure.

The paradox can be expressed simply: the population of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia apparently grew much more rapidly than precedent or demographic theory would have led us to expect. In the two areas for which we have the most and best data — Dutch Java and the Spanish Philippines — almost all the statistical evidence points to rates of natural increase reaching 1 per cent a year by the early nineteenth century and rising well above that level for most of the rest of the century. Though the evidence is much less clear for other countries in the region, it is generally compatible with a hypothesis of comparably rapid growth. In Siam, for example, the trend line passing through most nineteenth-century estimates reaches 1.3 per cent by the 1860s, 3 per cent by the 1890s.

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.

Since the very beginning, archaeological activity in Indonesia was centered on three main aspects, namely:

1. Collecting and inventory of archaeological data;

2. Research;

3. Preservation of artifacts.

This study aims to reconstruct a neglected chapter in the history of the Singapore Chinese. The opium farm, which was the monopoly for the manufacture and sale of chandu, or smokeable opium, was one of the primary Chinese-dominated economic institutions of nineteenth-century Singapore. A study of the farm provides the historian with an institutional focus which can increase our understanding of the history of the Chinese community in Singapore during its formative years.

In 1809, representatives of Chiang Mai and the Kayah State of Kantarawaddy marked their mutual boundary by releasing a buffalo on the summit of a range of mountains and erecting markers on the line it followed. As this episode suggests, these Kayahs and Thais (and also Burmans) translated the world into cognitive maps quite different from those of the British colonialists who would later rule in Burma. The anthropologist, Edmund Leach, noted this difference in his “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, observing that European concepts of frontier, state, and nation are not always applicable to Burma where the frontier is not an absolute division but “a border zone through which cultures interpenetrate in a dynamic manner”. This paper examines the interaction between the Kayah-Thai-Burman and the British conceptions of frontier in the working out of demarcated borders between the Kayah states and Thailand during the nineteenth century.

The development of anthropology in Indonesia is based on a vast accumulation of records on Indonesian peoples and cultures left by foreign visitors who had come to the islands from time immemorial. Compared to the records left by the Chinese, Indians, and Arab merchants who had visited the islands centuries ago, those left by the earliest Western Europeans (travellers, sailors, missionaries, translators of the Bible, explorers, and the Dutch colonial civil servants) are the most important.

This paper comprises an enquiry into the unrest in the Belait and Tutong districts of Brunei at the turn of the twentieth century. After outlining the course of the disturbances, I shall examine their causes, explain why the recrudescence of violence (after a period of calm) early in 1901 led to a departure in British policy towards the Sultanate, and finally, show how the factors which had given rise to the original disaffection were removed, and lasting peace restored, under a reformed administration introduced at the beginning of 1906. First, however, some background information is necessary.

The purpose of the present essay is not to present a history of Philippine archaeology; several preliminary attempts have been made in this regard which may be consulted. Rather, the aim of this paper is to pause for a moment and look across the landscape of Philippine archaeology to assess what has been accomplished to date, to ponder strength and weaknesses of the field at this time, and to consider future directions. Nevertheless, the shape of any landscape is the result of historical events and processes that need to be taken into account if we want to understand its present form and assess its future potential and development. Thus, it will be necessary to include in the following thoughts historical perspectives which will help to explain how and why certain concepts, methods and research practices arose in the context of Philippine archaeology and came to determine our picture of Philippine prehistory.

The Zhuang of south China are the most numerous of the Chinese minority peoples. In Vietnam the Zhuang were identified historically as the Nung, and more recently as the combined Tay-Nung minority, the largest of Vietnam's 36 minority peoples. One of the most critical points in Zhuang history occurred in the Song era [960–1126 A.D.], when the expanding Han Chinese and the Vietnamese began to make a sustained impact in the Zhuang heartlands. Many Zhuang resisted foreign control, striving for continued independence. Their subsequent defeat meant that the Zhuang were never again to have an opportunity for autonomous development.

The philosophical basis of the Indonesian state, first framed in 1945, is the Panca Sila or Five Principles. Since 1985 all political and social organizations including religious ones have had to subscribe to the Panca Sila as their sole philosophical principle (Azas Tunggal). The first of the Five Principles is belief in Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, normally, though not entirely satisfactorily, translated as the One Supreme God. The founders of the state had accepted this principle rather than a more specific statement of belief in the God of Islam, the religion of the majority of the people. Its formulation was clearly a compromise, aimed at stressing the importance of religion in the state, but avoiding declaring Islam as the state religion. As it stood, the principle was generally acceptable to followers of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, and all religions which did acknowledge the existence of God, in one form or another.

Thailand's relations with Japan during the months surrounding the outbreak of the war in the Pacific are a topic of controversy in Thai historiography; and despite a growing number of studies which have endeavoured to explain, or at least shed light on, the rapid shift in Thai policy from neutrality on 8 December 1941 to an alliance and then declaration of war on the side of Japan by 25 January 1942, little progress or development in the debate has taken place over the decades since the war. This unsatisfactory situation has been largely due to the very limited knowledge available about the diplomatic activities that took place between Thailand and Japan during the period in question. The bulk of our information to date has come from records and recollections of Thais and Europeans involved in the events, and this has concentrated almost entirely on the activities and interplay of Thais and Europeans. The result has been to relegate Japan's presence in events of the period to some dimly perceived undertakings conducted by sinister characters who were nothing more than Thailand's enemies bent on absorbing that country into Japan's new East Asian order. The following article is an effort to redress this imbalance somewhat by directing attention toward Thai-Japanese relations. I have relied greatly on a number of dispatches that passed between Bangkok and Tokyo during the autumn of 1941. Some of the most important of these are available only from “Magic”, the files of intercepted and deciphered Japanese diplomatic messages accumulated by the United States government. The Japanese Foreign Ministry archive files on diplomatic correspondence with Thailand are extremely incomplete, and none of the messages I used from “Magic” are contained in the Japanese files.

Rapid urban growth, in spite of some limited success in controlling population expansion, will likely continue over the next two decades in much of the developing world. Growing evidence suggests that this surge of urbanization poses significant problems for urban development and management as well as for national economic progress in general. Despite relatively strong economies and development programmes this trend is quite conspicuous in Southeast Asia where policy concerns about resource allocation, informal sector development, fiscal capacity and urban services delivery have emerged.

With two large volumes, the Derde and Vierde Stuk (third and fourth volumes), containing 1794 pages, Drs R. C. Kwantes has brought to an end, the ZWO funded collection of colonial documents on the indigenous nationalist movement in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. After the appearance of the first tome, dealing with the nationalist movement up to the year 1917 and compiled in 1967, by the now deceased Professor S. L. van der Wal, Kwantes has been responsible for the coverage of the period 1917–23 (published in 1975), the period 1923–28 (published in 1978), and the present two volumes, here under review, one for 1928–33 (published in 1981) and the other for 1933–42 (published in 1982). All these volumes bear the hallmarks of meticulous professional polish and careful selection, and anyone even fleetingly familiar with the documentary opulence of the Dutch colonial archives has all the reason to deeply appreciate Kwantes' editing labours of the past few years. Moreover, in annotations, bibliographical references, the listing of detailed person- and subject-indexes, and of source-data against their origin, together with lengthy 34 pages in the Derde, and 33 in the Vierde Stuk content-abstracts in English, Kwantes did surpass the skills of his deceased predecessor, thus adding an extra degree of distinction and flavour to the entire multi-work collection he compiled.

The professionalization of management is a function of the stage of economic development, both of the enterprise and the economy in which it operates, for these stages influence the size, number, nature, and complexity of problems to which the enterprise is exposed. The nature of personnel problems, for example, are influenced by the relative maturation of the labour force in motivation, commitment and skill development, and management's responses to these problems evolve with the inducement of professionalism from the growing size, complexity, and diversity of industrial institutions. Compared to 1950, the labour force of Thailand in 1986 is more urban, better educated, more materially motivated, more ethnically uniform, and better disciplined to factory work. Hence, it should be more receptive to modern management practices. Yet, by American or Japanese standards, the Thai labour force is still comparatively primitive, and personnel are administered in a diverse milieu of work environments that condition the style and progress of management. As a consequence, the practice of management varies as widely in Thailand as it does in other developing countries between metropolitan and provincially located establishments, between large and small firms, among Thai, Thai-Chinese, Japanese, or Western firms.