Through an examination of an essay written by a Balinese intellectual in the 1930s, this article explores how notions of modernity and nationalism can take root in particular localities. The essay makes a case for modernization and nationalism in Bali, and points to the existing caste system, which it identifies as largely a colonial creation, as an obstacle to progress that should be eliminated.

The Asian–African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 has been written into twentieth-century history as ‘a moment’ made up of ‘little histories’, as the titles of the two volumes reviewed here suggest. Both belong to the literature on the Bandung Conference published since its fiftieth anniversary, the broad scope of which underscores the intricate and diffuse nature of the Conference. While offering new perspectives, the contributors also add to its ambiguity: Was Bandung a continuation of the struggle against imperialism? An episode of the Cold War? A protest against centuries of racial humiliation? Or a communist plot? It may well have comprised elements of all these.

In the nineteenth century the British, Dutch, French and Russians bit deep into the Islamic world. European colonial power rested on the active support of Moslem rulers who, as leaders of clearly defined and hierarchical societies possessed of laws and monarchs, were attractive collaborators in the exercise of imperialism. With a pragmatism born of frontier experience, Europeans reached agreements with Islamic regimes throughout Asia and Africa. The dictum of Usuman dan Fodio — “The government of a country is the government of its king. If the king is Moslem, his land is Moslem” — was echoed in many a European statement on the principles and practices of colonial rule. The British, for their part, struck deals with Indian princes and Fulani emirs, with the Egyptian Khedive and the Sultan of Zanzibar, with the royal houses of the Arab world and the rulers of the Malay states.

The origins of political consciousness and nationalism among the hua-ch'iao or overseas Chinese in Malaya occurred during the period 1895–1911, between the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Revolution. The major defeat suffered by China at the hands of Japan and the subsequent Reform Movement which arose in China awakened the overseas Chinese to the political situation in their homeland. The presence of reformist leader K'ang Yu-wei and revolutionary advocate Sun Yatsen and their colleagues in Malaya served to enhance hua-ch'iao concern for China. By the Revolution of 1911, nationalism among the Malayan Chinese had emerged.

The history of Srivijaya has been one of the most controversial subjects in premodern Southeast Asian history. Among the crucial issues in relation to this subject are the timing and cause of its decline and, in particular, to what extent changes in trade patterns contributed to such a development. Recent scholarship, largely derived from new interpretations of the epigraphical and archaeological findings in Southeast Asia, has contributed much to advance our understanding of this ancient empire. Yet, information available in those sources is still far from adequate to make a conclusive historical judgment. It is thus imperative to re-examine Chinese accounts of Srivijaya in the light of this new scholarship.

The role of Indian textiles in Southeast Asian trade in the seventeenth century was important in three ways. First, there was a great, almost unlimited, demand for these goods in all the Southeast Asian markets; second, they constituted the principal medium of exchange for the trade of Southeast Asia with the outside world; and third, they shaped the pattern of Inter-Asian trade of the European Companies, which laid the foundation of their wealth and commerce and later political power in the eighteenth century. The first two were important for Southeast Asian history only, but the last was of very great importance from the point of view of world history, not less important, in its far-reaching effects, than the voyages of discovery at the beginning of the modern period or the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. The poor Indian weavers shaped the course of world history by unconsciously laying the foundation of British and Dutch colonial empires.

Recent political events, such as the coup of 2006 or the ‘Red Shirt’ uprisings of 2010 underlined the divisions in Thai society between the provinces and the capital. As one of the world's most primate cities, Bangkok exerts a tremendous political, economic and cultural force upon the rest of Thailand. But how is such pressure interpreted, internalised and/or subverted? In this article, I look at Thailand's second-largest city, Chiang Mai, in Thailand's North, and the struggle to cure an increasing sense of urban crisis and thereby assert the former independent capital's symbolic authority vis-à-vis Bangkok. I examine this by looking at two specific discourses: that of architecture and spirit mediumship. Northern Thai architects attempt to cure Chiang Mai's ills through recourse to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the city's urban space, while spirit mediums call upon the sacred power of that space in order to restore Chiang Mai's ‘lost’ prosperity. The focal point for each effort lies at the city's centre: the Three Kings Monument and its surrounding plaza (khuang). Here, each group casts themselves as those most able to put Chiang Mai's past in physical form and thereby ensure Chiang Mai's future. In this article, I examine how ideas of cultural heritage become entwined with magico-religious concepts of power (sak). In each, there is a search for efficacious power in the face of political and cultural domination from Bangkok.

Throughout the Nanyang and beyond, Chinese communities have been under attack of one sort or another at various times. The anti-Chinese riots in Batavia in 1740 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 are but the first and last major examples of violent attacks by indigenes on Chinese communities. More routinely, most countries in the region have resorted to legal restrictions that “nationalize” various occupations and professions. Some of these countries have also required their resident Chinese to clarify their citizenship, choosing between Chinese and local citizenship, some even forcing them to adopt the citizenship of their country of residence, as occurred in Vietnam in 1978.

The Javanese Weltanschauung (Javanism) is based on the conviction of the essential unity of all Existence. This worldview is more encompassing than religion: it views human existence within a cosmological context, making life itself a religious experience. In this view of life it is not possible to separate the religious from the non-religious elements; human existence is inescapably related to supernature and it is senseless to sharply distinguish between the here and now and the beyond and timeless.

Tan Cheng Lock was born in Malacca in 1883. His father Tan Keong Ann, his illustrious grandfather Tan Choon Bock, and his great grandfather were also born there, while his great great grandfather Tan Hay Kwan, who had migrated from Fukien as a youth to Malacca in the latter part of the eighteenth century (circa 1765), had died there in 1801. The Tans by now have been part of Malacca for over two hundred years.

The ancient history of the countries of South-East Asia prior to the arrival of Europeans and the capture of Malacca in 1511, began to attract the interest of historians at a much later date than did that of India and China. It was still possible in 1861 for a French historian, a Professor at the Collège de France, to write in the Journal des Savants that, with perhaps the exception of Burma, “the Indian countries situated beyond the Ganges hardly deserve the attention of History”.

The South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) was established under the aegis of the Manila Pact which was formed in September 1954. As an international organization with its headquarters in Bangkok, SEATO had two functions; first, it was to provide limited economic assistance and counter-insurgency advice to its Southeast Asian members — Thailand and the Philippines. Second, its Military Planning Office comprised a group of senior officers drawn from member countries whose job it was to prepare plans for an alliance response in the event of a Communist invasion of Indochina. In this sense SEATO was created to ensure that the Vietnamese Communists would observe the Geneva agreements of July 1954.

This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Straits Chinese political identity as one of conservative loyalty to the Empire, I show that the Straits Chinese developed multiple and hybrid political identities that were postcolonial in character, which would later influence the politics of decolonisation and nation-building after the war.

Malaya at the start of the twentieth century, in common with much of the non-European world, had a peasant economy upon which a highly capitalized export economy was being grafted. The main export in the 19th century was tin, but tin took second place to rubber by 1916. There was, as is characteristic of export economies, a great disparity between the resources, particularly capital, available to the indigenous peasant population and those available to the export sector. There were, however, distinctive features to the Malayan situation, the most important being that the capitalist export economy did not draw on the subsistence sector for produce, labour, or food; food was imported, as was the labour used in mining and on estates. The output from rubber and coconut smallholdings, many of which were Malay owned, augmented Malaya's exports, particularly after 1910, but mines and estates operated independently from the indigenous rural population. There was a high level of coincidence between ethnic groupings and occupational specializations, and the economic division between peasant cultivation and the export sector also marked the ethnic division between Malays and non-Malays. Because the colonial administration nominally held power on behalf of the Malay population, the question of the welfare and economic role of the Malays had political implications disproportionate to its economic importance.

This article, which looks at Indigenous communities in the multiethnic, multicultural region of Sabah, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, argues that indigeneity is not primordial, but exists in relation to dominant identities as well as other non-dominant, Indigenous groups. Moreover, Indigenous Peoples are not passive recipients of colonial or even postcolonial Othering: their identity is contextualised and contested within majority–minority relations. The article begins with a brief history of the dominant Kadazandusun nationalism in Sabah, in the context of the overarching Bumiputra policy of Malaysia, which privileges constructed Malayness, as background to the discourses and practices of smaller groups of land-based Murut and the sea-oriented ‘Bajau’, where identity switching is taking place in tandem with environmental justice claims. The land-based communities (Murut) have found leverage in making identity and livelihood claims attached to place (here, state-declared forest reserves that seek to exclude them) in line with the recent global environmental justice focus on participatory conservation rather than the older ‘fortress conservation’ model still dominant in state conservation thinking. However, the sea-oriented peoples (Bajau) require other social symbols than land for making their identity claims, in this instance, via claims to ‘modern’ livelihoods and as managers of marine resources with reference to the newly established Tun Mustapha Park. In Sabah, participatory conservation is being reappropriated by Indigenous Peoples to assert claims about place and /or livelihoods; if bureaucratised, however, this form of conservation might turn out to be less than participatory.

In the colonial period many Europeans considered coconuts a lazy man's crop. For the Indonesian population, however, they were a profitable form of cultivation, especially from the 1880s when the European oil and fats industry increasingly started to use copra, the dried kernel of the coconut, as a raw material for the production of soap and later also for margarine. Around one-third of world copra exports originated in the Netherlands Indies (Table 1), and copra was especially important for the economy of East Indonesia, where in 1939 it constituted 80 per cent of the total volume and 60 per cent of the total value of exports. In some parts of Indonesia copra even received the nickname of “green gold”. European involvement in coconut cultivation and the coconut trade nonetheless was limited. In the first half of this century, coconut growing was dominated by the indigenous population, which accounted for 94 per cent of Indonesian production, while Chinese merchants dominated the intermediate trade in copra.

The category of rebellion has held a special place in the epistemological construction of Southeast Asian culture, as studies of anti-colonial movements and their underlying ideological foundations have revealed strikingly similar modes for articulating protest. In particular, the combination of religion with resistance has endured as a useful framework for not only understanding how particular Southeast Asians may have conceptualised the historical processes associated with colonialism, but for how ‘autonomous’ vocabularies remained intact and available to rural communities in times of crisis. Among the several regional cases, British Burma's Saya San rebellion (1930–32) has emerged in scholarship as a quintessential example of one such social movement where protest was articulated through a mixture of millenarian expectations, ritual and Buddhist sensibilities. This study explores the role of scholarship in the historical construction of Saya San and retraces the interpretive strategies that link the various ways in which the rebellion has been imagined. Though different understandings of the Saya San rebellion have been offered since the 1930s, the remains of colonial administrative rule lay deeply embedded in this scholarship.

Human nature is inevitably concerned with the past which, for nations no less than for individuals, forms a framework for present attitudes and sometimes a justification for present actions. In the developed countries of the West this framework is easily and frequently obscured, although its presence can be readily demonstrated. For those nations which have, until recently, been controlled by one or other of the European powers, however, the past provides a framework to which national appeal is often made in a particularly explicit way.

Central Thailand comprises three ecologically distinctive areas, i.e. the mountain area, the floodplain and the delta, as shown in Fig. 1.

These three areas relied on irrigation agriculture making full use of the distributary system of intermountain basins. The mountain area was the main stage for the traditional “Muang” during the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries.