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.

Given the great strides made over the past twenty years in our understanding of modern Southeast Asian history, it is surprising that many traditional and possibly outdated interpretations remain unchallenged. Despite the growing use of indigenous source materials, the willingness to take an Asian-centric (and occasionally nonelitist) perspective, and the increasing attention to social, economic, and cultural (rather than just political and diplomatic) history, a number of important themes need reinterpretation or reevaluation. Indeed, many modern historians continue to accept as valid traditional assessments of some nineteenth-century events. This is sometimes the case even when the original sources are compromised by a Western ethnocentric and colonialist bias, since European representatives of the imperialist imperative largely produced the documentary sources for the period. The colonial episode now seems a far less benevolent exercise than it did to an earlier generation of historians; yet, outmoded perspectives sometimes remain with us. Such a failure of reinterpretation characterizes the recent writings on one of the better-known episodes in Bornean history, the so-called “Chinese Rebellion” of 1857 in Sarawak. The time has come for a revisionist appraisal.

It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.

Over the years much has been written about the so-called attempted Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965. Many of the horrors depicted have concerned Balinese or abangan, nominal Muslims in Central and East Java, but little if anything has been written about the Catholic and Protestant inhabitants of those regions outside Java during the period 1965 and following, and how they coped with Communist activity in their districts. Hitherto there has been little said concerning the Christians' attitude towards the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI) — the Indonesian Communist Party — and few reasons given for some Christians becoming members of this political party. This paper is written to shed a little light on these questions and to analyse the reasons why in more than a few districts of the eastern islands the Communist Party was by no means seen by some Christians as the archetypal enemy of Christianity. This article does not, on the other hand seek to discuss the attempted coup in detail, nor specially reasons for its occurrence or its ultimate failure. Rather it intends to describe how Communism also reacted in the face of Christianity in the islands of Bali, Flores, Sumba and Timor, and how in a few cases, each flavoured, coloured and influenced the other.

This article investigates new religious movements that have emerged in post-Renovation Vietnam. The formation and development of movements that worship Hồ Chí Minh will be examined through the Way of the Jade Buddha. My analysis of this indigenous movement will discuss its controversial attempts to establish communication with the spirit of Hồ Chí Minh. It is argued that the movement is a channel through which people can empower themselves, seek legitimacy, and promote nationalistic aspirations. The emergence of such movements demonstrates the ongoing millenarian dream of social transformation in the face of the challenges of international integration and the tensions caused by maritime conflicts with China.

Probably the biggest single effect that the Emergency in Malaya has visibly accomplished has been the resettlement or regrouping of nearly 650,000 “squatters” into more than 550 “new villages.” It is the purpose of this paper to examine the conditions that necessitate the resettlement and regrouping of these “squatters”, the positive law measures utilized, and the direct and indirect results that were accomplished.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

Indigeneity, a concept and construct, is increasingly gaining currency in academia, in the political sphere, and in public debates. Indigeneity as an active political force with international support has become a resource in identity politics. This article focuses on the dynamics of how the transnational idea of indigeneity has been nationally installed and locally translated within the context of the ethnohistory of an Indigenous movement that stemmed from local–societal relations with the state. The idea of indigeneity is seen as both local and global because it is globally circulated but locally articulated as well as globally charged but locally framed. Focusing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia and home to 11 Indigenous groups in Bangladesh, the article argues that the local translation of global indigeneity is necessary for ensuring the rights and entitlements of Indigenous Peoples.

This article re-examines the history and historiography of the Saya San Rebellion (1930–32), Burma's most famous peasant uprising and one of Southeast Asia's most frequently examined anti-colonial movements. By retracing the documents most intimately connected to the rebellion's official narrative, this study reconstructs the legal and administrative context within which this particular history was made.

In southeastern China where most villages consisted of people with the same surname, lineage and clan became the foundation of the local community. As the village people moved to the cities of China or overseas, they organized clan associations to gather distant agnates and set up ancestral altars to strengthen kinship ties among clansmen. Clanship emerged in a new form to cope with changes encountered in different milieus and continued to serve its functions. The transformation, however, has never really changed the clan to a club as its membership has remained restricted even if the membership has remained restricted even if the. The clan associations retain enough kinship elements to function like a traditional clan.

The year 1819 is almost universally taken as a seminal date in Singapore historiography. Yet Stamford Raffles’ founding of a British trading post there was controversial from the start. The Dutch and the British haggled as to whether or not Raffles had overstepped his authority, and whether the trading post was legal. From the start, the Dutch demanded that the British quit their occupation of Singapore. During a three-year hiatus in the Anglo–Dutch negotiations (1820–23), Anton Reinhard Falck, the lead Dutch negotiator, decided to drop claims to Singapore in favour of a rearrangement of possessions in the archipelago. Crucially, he concluded that dropping claims over Singapore would not amount to a real loss. Instead, Falck hoped to use Singapore as a bargaining chip to squeeze additional concessions from the British. The Dutch formally relinquished their claim over Singapore in article 12 of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave full recognition and legitimacy to the British post, and sanctioned a breakup of the Johor-Riau Empire with the Singapore Straits acting as a notional dividing line. Earlier studies were substantially based on English-language materials and present the British as dominating the negotiations. The present article, based on Dutch archival materials as well as studies and sources in French, Dutch and English, reveals a fuller story of diplomatic disputes, territorial concessions, errors of judgement, and the triggering of the Dutch empire in the archipelago, in a paper war for the contested space of Singapore.

This paper examines the main factors behind the rise and decline of the Japanese fisheries based in Singapore before the Pacific War, and shows that, as the fisheries contributed greatly to the Singapore economy, they did not constitute a foreign economic enclave in the British colony. It also describes how the Japanese and local fishermen conducted fisheries during the period from 1942 to 1945, and argues that the legacy of the Japanese fisheries outlived the Japanese occupation.

Women's involvement in the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) since its establishment in 1930 until they laid down their arms in 1989 contributed much to the strength of the party. Women in the MCP have been presented largely as nurses, cooks, seamstresses, couriers, and wireless/radio operators, but they went through hardship and danger and fought the same battles as the male guerrillas. A few even climbed to the top party posts through hard work, intelligence and personal sacrifice. This paper recovers the role of women in the Malayan communist movement during the Second World War, the Emergency and after by tracing the careers and lives of party heroines / female role models as well as some ordinary cadres. Major questions include the motivations of women who joined the MCP and the challenges they faced in their roles as propagandists, comrades, guerrilla fighters and in the communist villages. This investigation provides more insight into how the revolutionary struggle transformed these Malayan women.

In the decade following the Second World War, two aspects of Malaya's political life were predominant. First, there was an increased political awareness among Malayans which led to the formation of political organizations, the political mobilization of a significant proportion of the population, and eventually, in 1955, to the holding of Malaya's first federal elections. Second, there was the “Emergency”, the name commonly given to the guerrilla war waged by the Malayan Communist Party (M.C.P.) and its supporters from June 1948 to August 1960. Both of these aspects have been chronicled and examined in some detail by students of Malayan history. And yet, interestingly enough, rarely have the effects of one upon the other been fully considered. Indeed, the usual pattern of analysis in the, often otherwise excellent, general studies that examine this period is for each aspect to be treated in a separate section or chapter. Moreover, accounts which focus solely on the Emergency are even less encouraging in this respect. Mr. Anthony Short's impressive history of the Colonial Government's activities in countering the Communist guerrillas is typical in the scant attention which is given to the political parties' role in undermining the Communists' cause. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore some of the links between the development of the political parties, especially the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the Malayan Chinese Association (M.C.A.), prior to 1955, and the course of the Emergency.

Despite the dominant role the timber industry now plays in the economy of Sabah, little is known of the development of the industry prior to the Pacific War. The small amount that has been published on the pre-war situation appears in the Malayan Forester, but the destruction of records in Sabah during the Japanese Occupation has greatly impeded detailed research. For the present study the papers of the British North Borneo (Chartered) Company now held in London have served as a source of far more comprehensive information than occurs in the oft-quoted secondary sources. The aim of this paper is to provide the first detailed account of forest policy and administration, and a systematic analysis of the development of the timber industry in pre-war North Borneo.

Southeast Asia's strategic position in the major pre-modern international maritime route connecting East and West brought inevitable interaction between Southeast Asian peoples and foreign merchants. Initially, foreign merchants were concerned only with passing through Southeast Asia on their way to China or India. Southeast Asian coastal centres (entrepôts) facilitated this trade by providing suitable stopping places for sailors and traders; available to them were food, water, and shelter as well as storage facilities and market places for exchange. Soon, however, Southeast Asian merchants began to supplement demand for Eastern and Western products by substituting the products of the jungles of the Indonesian archipelago for those from other sources, and then built upon this initial incursion to market other indigenous forest products. Foreign demand for Southeast Asian products reached a peak when spices from Indonesia's eastern archipelago began to flow out of the Java Sea region to the international ports in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

Vietnamese rulers of the Nguyên Dynesty showed considerable interest in foreign military technology. Their adoption and adaptation of this technology constitute an important chapter in the history Vietnam's relations with the West.

The tawassul is a ritual invocation popularly used in West Java at grave visits and in other Islamic observances. In simple terms, it consists of two acts; the naming of figures who are considered as mediators (wasilah) between a supplicant and Allah, and the making of an offering for the benefit of the mediator. Participants in tawassul hold contrasting understandings of what is achieved by performing it. Furthermore, the invocation is easily adapted for diverse settings while retaining its basic syntax. This multivocality and flexibility provide keys to understanding the popularity of the tawassul as a religious observance for Sundanese Muslims.

A seventeenth-century painting, ‘Pieter Cnoll and His Family’ by J. J. Coeman, reveals a number of entry points from which Indonesian histories can be explored. Through a discussion of the painting and its subjects, a variety of issues ranging from VOC (United East India Company) policies and mestizo relationships to gender, labour and legal rights in VOC-controlled ports are discussed.

Founded in 1979, the Thai popular monthly magazine Sinlapa watthanatham aimed to make history, art and culture into areas of contestation against long-established official interpretations, and thus encourage a broad-based readership to reassess their assumptions about Thai-ness. However, the question of magazine sales, the context of the economic boom, and the crisis that erupted in 1997 led the magazine to succumb to consumerism, as well as a conservative ideology.