An important problem in comparing bureaucratic organizations in different societies involves separating “cultural” from “structural” explanations of behaviour. Theories involvingstructural characteristics such as size and span of control permit uniform, parsimonious statements to be made. Yet such explanations fail to account for observed differences in output, goal choice, adjustment, etc., between structurally similar organizations in different settings. A requirement exists to develop theory which integrates cultural factors into organizational theories without resulting in mere reductionist arguments.

This article attempts to fill two gaps in two sets of inter-related historiographies, that of the diplomatic history of Singapore and that of the Vietnam war. For a number of reasons, not much had been published about the foreign policy of Singapore from the historical perspective. The Southeast Asian dimension of the Vietnam war is also starkly missing from the voluminous literature on the war. This article thus tries to describe and explain Singapore's attitude towards the war as it evolved over the ten years — from 1965, when the war really began and which coincided with the year that Singapore became independent, to 1975, a period which overlaps with the first ten years of Singapore's independence. Hopefully, this study will provide an understanding of one aspect of Singapore's foreign policy in its first 10 years as well as offer one Southeast Asian perspective on the Vietnam war.

My essay in celebration of the Journal's anniversary sketches what may be the concluding chapter in a study of Vietnam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Tran dynasty reigned (1226–1400). In 1225 the Tran family overthrew the last emperor of the previous dynasty, the Ly (1009–1225) and hitherto the only long lived one. The Ly imperial line, in fact, lasted nearly fifty years longer than its successor. Nevertheless, the Tran is unquestionably the most renowned of all Vietnamese dynasties on account of its victories when Kubilai Khan's armies attacked three times in the thirteenth century. Yet one has to ask what kind of dynasty it was and how the country it ruled should be defined. Should one look to China, the source of the dynastic institution, for guidance or should one look elsewhere? An event in 1237 suggests ambiguity. That year officials were required to offer betel and tea to the emperor when he was departing from the Eastern Pier near the capital. “Betel and tea” bring Southeast Asia as well as China into the picture.

Plantations, which originated as agricultural enterprises within colonial economic systems and which came to be established particularly in tropical dependencies, have occupied an equivocal position in the economic development philosophies and plans of less developed countries. Their colonial origin and their traditionally export-oriented and often mono-cultural characteristics have subjected them to a wide range of adverse criticism, despite their undoubted earning capacity.

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.

This paper is an effort to examine the dynamics of a major famine in the private domains of Indramayu and Kandanghaur in 1883–84, which was reportedly a result of drought, but a closer look at the evidence, including a unique survey of peasant families engulfed in the famine, reveals a rather complex situation. The local peasantry confined to a narrow subsistence economy found its food supply being seriously undermined by the landlords' efforts to extract more and more rice for sale at a time when Java was being closely drawn into the world market.

With few exceptions, commentators agree that bandits were a major socio-economic phenomenon of the nineteenth-century Philippines. Historians and contemporary observers are united in lamenting the deplorable state to which the countryside was reduced by their depredations. Bandits infested the roads and rivers, ravaged fields and farms, sacked towns, pillaged churches and set light to houses in an orgy of murder, robbery and rapine in which there was “hardly an evil deed that their rash boldness [did] not perform”. Modern historiography has usually been content to interpret such crimes as either being indicative of social tensions within a society or as representing “a basic social activity with its own internal logic and historical development”. Only superficial attention has been paid to the environment within which these crimes were committed, historians merely noting that such and such an offence was committed in an urban or rural setting.

In the classical Burmese state, land and labour were categorized as either crown or private. State or crown land (mye-taw) was composed largely of the best irrigated tracts in the dry zone, usually worked by crown labour called kyun taw or ahmudan—depending upon the period of study—subject to service tenure, whose produce went to kyi-taw or royal granaries. These crown lands and labour were administered by temporary and permanent clients of the king in return for certain rights and privileges. Exempt communal or ancestral land (bòbábaing mye) was owned collectively, usually by villages of non-indentured people (athi) who, in lieu of corvée, submitted per capita taxes to the crown, determined by a complicated system based on their occupations. Sańghika or religious lands (wáthúkan mye) were either owned outright by the church or held in perpetuity as endowments. The tax exempt produce from glebe lands paid for the maintenance of religious buildings and monasteries, the monks, and for the care of their students and their servants (hpayà-kyun) who were exempt from both corvée as well as per capita tax.

Western secular historiography has conventionally viewed the history of Catholicism in Vietnam through a political optic, a perspective which has distorted the early nineteenth-century religious situation in both Vietnam and France. This article discusses how Vietnamese understood Catholicism at the popular level and what attracted people to the religion, as well as introducing an important European Catholic fund-raising society whose interventions into Vietnam long predated any serious French political designs on the country.

The article reassesses the economic role of the late colonial state in Malaya. It seeks to dispel the view that the colonial government served British business interests, and that broad-based development policies only followed independence in 1957. Rather the developmentalist orientation of the state began earlier in the 1940s, and was not fully in accordance with existing economic interests.

Khaw Sim Bee's premature death in 1913 at the hands of an assasin, allegedly torn by jealousy over Sim Bee's advances towards his wife, marked the end of an era in the family politics of peninsular Siam. Sim Bee was the youngest son of Khaw Soo Cheang (1797–1882), a Hokkien immigrant who rose to the governorship of Ranong and founded the Khaw dynasty in Siam. Through his position as High Commissioner of Monthon Phuket, Sim Bee came to dominate the political and commercial life of the region. The man who King Vajiravudh ranked “as a personal friend who will be sincerely mourned by me as a personal loss” headed a family that was equalled by few others in the kingdom.

Based on Cambodian and French archival records, which include colonial and local administration reports, tax rosters and judicial sources, this paper explores landownership in Cambodia in the 1930s. It shows that, contrary to common belief, land access was already an issue in the 1930s. The study of tax registers of three communes in the province of Kompong Thom presents a Khmer rural society dominated by peasants with average-sized landholdings, but where landless peasants or those with very small holdings also existed. It also stresses that women were able to become efficient farm operators. In addition, this analysis of the different sources available shows that Khmer rural society in Kompong Thom was a form of gerontocracy dominated by men aged over 40.

The Fisheries Act of 1875 altered the leasing arrangements for Burma's most valuable inland fisheries, the inn. It withdrew leases from the “innthugyis” who had traditionally handled these fisheries, and instituted a system of five-year auction leases. Expectations that local fishermen would secure these leases were never realised, and the fishing industry came to be dominated by capitalist interests, which made extortionate profits by subletting the fisheries.

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 history of the Kuomintang (KMT) movement in both Malaya and Singapore during the pre-war years has remained largely under-explored since the appearance of Png Poh-seng's article on that topic twenty years ago. Its history deserves a deeper study as it would throw light not only on the China-oriented politics among the Chinese in these two territories but also on the causes and the rationale of the British authorities to contain and ban it. As the Colonial Office and Foreign Office records have now been made accessible to researchers, it is feasible and urgent that such a study be undertaken in a more systematic and analytical manner.

Before 1997 a number of social, political and academic movements combined to present a more negative image of luuk tung (Thai country music) than was warranted and as a result, the genre was understudied. This article identifies the forces that influenced the development of luuk tung's status in Thai society and demonstrates how the rising status of luuk tung since 1997 has influenced recent academic writing by Thai authors. This survey of the voices that speak on luuk tung is grounded by an analysis of the lyrics and melodies of Sorapet Pinyoo, a well-known luuk tung artist.

In contrast to the rich historical literature on Southeast Asia's peasants, there are few studies of their urban counterparts, the proletariat of the colonial port cities. The region's rural revolts have inspired a growing literature on peasant politics and social history. But there has been little parallel research on the urban working class — stevedores, transport workers, and millhands.

Using declassified British documents and Chinese-language newspapers, this paper seeks to supplement existing understanding of Chief Minister David Marshall's Labour Front-Alliance Government in Singapore from April 1955 to June 1956. From the outset, the government's reforms were hampered by its own weaknesses. It was viable only because British policy was to keep it ‘in position’.

As the founders of a revolutionary movement with an international ideology, the small group of men who led the Burmese communist parties for their first thirty years were concerned as to whether their ideological views and political tactics were consonant with those of foreign communist parties. While looking to Marx, Lenin, and their European interpreters as the original fount of ideological coherence, Asian parties nearer to Burma provided the most immediate and programmatic sources of interpretation. Since the 1950s the example of the Chinese Communist Party has been the leading inspiration for most Burmese communists. However, in the first decade of communist activity in Burma, the Indian Communist Party provided the closest and most congenial guidance.

This article integrates the history of the experience of rickshaw coolies into the larger history of Singapore in the period from 1880 to 1940. These were decisive years. They witnessed the extraordinary economic development of the vast potential for tin, rubber, oil palm, and tobacco in the Malay peninsula and on the east coast of Sumatra under colonial rule, and the evolution of Singapore as a “coolie town”, with a colonial administrative heart and an entrepôt port, with the birth of the rickshaw and a stream of emigrants from China who poured in faster and faster to pull it. This floodtide ofsingkeh singkeh (newcomers from China) came to Singapore with the hope of forming a foundation for a new and prosperous life. Expanding Singapore, especially at this stage of its growth from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was often considered by the migrants as a place of hope and betterment. There were in Singapore tens of thousands of Cantonese, Hengwah, Hockchia, and Foochow sojourners who hoped to find a pipeline to prosperity since the second half of the nineteenth century, when dire poverty and overpopulation plagued Southeast China.