Malaysia consists of Peninsular Malaysia and the two East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. Development planning in Peninsular Malaysia began as early as 1950, while the first plan for the whole of the Malaysian federation founded in 1963 was published in 1966. Have the two East Malaysian states been integrated properly into the various Malaysian plans? Or have they, with their somewhat different economic, political and social backgrounds, been treated as a nuisance element and appeared in the plans only as an afterthought? In any case, is the planning experience of Peninsular Malaysia relevant for solving the problems of the much less developed East Malaysian states?

In the final three decades of the nineteenth century, the world price of silver fell dramatically. On the London silver market, the price dropped almost without check, from an average of 60d. per ounce in 1870 to 28d. per ounce in 1900. For those countries on the silver standard (and at the beginning of the period this included all the states of Southeast Asia), the result was a substantial, continuous depreciation of their currencies against gold-based currencies, most notably sterling. In turn this threatened to disturb severely the foreign trade and capital inflows of those states at a time when they were becoming more closely integrated into the international economy. For example, frequent changes in the exchange rate introduced an element of speculation into trade with gold-standard countries, with the result that merchants' calculations of profit margins were frequently thrown into confusion by sudden fluctuations in the exchange. Moreover, with the exchange value of their currency falling, these states found themselves paying increasingly more in terms of the local currency to secure the same sterling value of imports. This was a particularly important consideration for those countries dependent upon imports of capital goods, for example, mining machinery or railway equipment, as these were obtained almost solely from the gold-standard states of western Europe.

Messrs. Chandler, Ebihara, Haines, and Whitmore have written thoughtful and stimulating essays. But they have not been overwhelmingly concerned with exposing any great differences between medieval Vietnam and its nearest Theravada Buddhist neighbour, Cambodia. No doubt unintentionally, the two societies have been made to seem rather similar to each other. After all, Vietnamese literati, like the authors of Cambodia's normative poems, also consecrated what David Chandler has called “the propriety of hierarchies, rote-learning, and tradition”. Vietnamese social theory, like that of the chbap, stressed “the teacher-pupil relationship”. May Ebihara's argument that Cambodian social strata were permeable, and were characterized by “fluidity of membership” rather than resembling “rigidly structured Indian castes”, could also be applied to Vietnam, as could, obviously, her theme of Cambodia's oscillation between periods of centralized and decentralized political power. Even the social categories the two societies used have similarities: the Vietnamese equivalent of the Khmer term neak chea (“good people”, meaning relatively free men) was also “good people” (lương dân) and referred to citizens like farmers, with morally valuable occupations, as opposed to people like actors who were thought to be “mean”. One is left with the impression that the countries of sixteenth-century Southeast Asia embraced much less social and economic diversity than the countries of sixteenth-century Europe, with all their sharp contrasts between Venetian patricians and Antwerp merchants, Italian rice fanners and Dutch market gardeners, conservative English craft guilds and revolutionary Flemish ones. Can any faith still be placed in Harry Benda's old suggestion that the “constant” clashes between Vietnamese and Khmers be “analyzed in terms of a basic polarization between different…social and political systems?”

Modern spoken theatre emerged in Vietnam in the context of the intellectual and social upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s. Plays in this period focused on the status of women, the effects of Westernization and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism. In Nam Xu′o′ng's 1930 play Ông Tây An-nam, women became conduits through which men expressed their Westernized or nationalist identities.

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

For a long time, the Central Plain of Thailand has been integrated within the market economy; the resulting tenancy has often been attributed to growing social differentiation. Landowner–tenant relations constitute a focal point that mirrors economic, social and political issues. This paper focuses on these relationships and their evolution during the twentieth century. The overall picture is more balanced than commonly assumed, especially for the last thirty years, during which time real rents are shown to have declined.

This article proposes to study nineteenth-century Cam sources as valuable materials for the history of the disappearance of the kingdom of Campā — or more precisely its last independent principality of Pāṇḍuraṅga — and its integration into the Vietnamese realm during the first half of the nineteenth century. The end of Campā is recorded mainly in metrical works known as ‘ariya’. These sources offer unique and detailed accounts of the incorporation of Campā as a Vietnamese province and the new administrative, economic, religious and cultural policies implemented by the Vietnamese. They also highlight the sufferings of the Campā population witnessing the imposition of a new and foreign order.

In July 1922 a small private school called Nationale Onderwijs Instituut Taman Siswa was born quietly at a traditional town Yogyakarta in Central Java. Taman Siswa means literally “Garden for Pupils”. Nobody expected then that this pupils' garden would become a tough ground of resistance to the Dutch colonial Government later in the 1930's. The political climate in Indonesia around 1922 was showing a remarkable uprising of nationalism centering around the labor union movement guided by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party) and Sarekat Islam (Islam Union).

Visual arts maintain a colourful presence at Buddhist funerals in Northern Thailand. These arts are not made for mere decoration but serve an active and essential role in the ceremonies that take place after death. They echo funerary themes of the impermanent nature of life and the importance of a life filled with merit. This article examines cremation structures and funeral banners of Northern Thailand and argues that these arts not only hold significance for the living and the dead, but that in giving form to abstract concepts they have the power to guide observers in their beliefs regarding the dynamics of life and death.

Preoccupied with French mission agitation in the late 1850s and during the Franco-Spanish invasion of southern Vietnam, scholarship has long neglected the dramatic change taking place in preceding decades at the local level between Catholics and mainstream society. Exploring negotiation between Catholic communities and authorities, as well as organisational shifts in mission activity, this article brings into sharper focus the turmoil of the late 1830s and 1840s Nguyên repression of Catholicism.

During the 130 years since Chinese settlers first began coming to Sarawak, the pattern of leadership and power within the Chinese community has changed in a number of important respects. The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of the changes manifested within the Chinese elite, and to analyze the ways in which the criteria for the selection of leaders and the exercise of power have changed from the establishment of Chinese settlement in the 1830's to the contemporary situation as part of the Malaysian Federation. The emphasis is on leadership and power within the Chinese community itself. At the same time the history of the Chinese elite is treated as a problem in local history.

1819 represents a highly charged moment in the Singapore imagination. It marks the birth of our modern city-state, yet it also signals the beginning of our colonisation: the domination of Malay and other Asian cultures by Western powers. Artists have thus responded to the event with widely variant attitudes, ranging from E.W. Jesudason's laudatory Raffles Institution Anthem (c.1963–66) to Isa Kamari's stridently anti-colonial novel, Duka Tuan Bertakhta / 1819 (2011). The prevailing sentiment, however, has been one of playful ambivalence. While accepting the fact of colonisation, artists have rejected a founding myth that glorifies our primary colonist, Sir Stamford Raffles. Instead, we have lampooned him in works like Robert Yeo's play The Eye of History (1991) and Colin Goh's film Talking Cock: The Movie (2002); raised ourselves to the height of his statue in Lee Wen's art event Untitled (Raffles) (2001); highlighted narratives of overlooked figures in the drama of colonisation: William Farquhar, Sophia Raffles, Nonio Clement, Sultan Hussein Shah, Munsyi Abdullah, and Sang Nila Utama. As a cultural researcher and author of the biographical drama The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles (2008), I shall examine trends behind these divergent representations of our colonisation. I argue that artists have chosen to retell 1819 not as a year of conquest, but as a polymorphous moment of transformative contact between East and West; one in which we may view ourselves, not as the victims of change, but as its agents.

In his short administration, President Kennedy was called upon to deal with several Southeast Asian developments but none that had reached such a high watermark of an international crisis as the question of Laos. As in Berlin, he inherited in Laos a situation aggravated by near-direct armed confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Kennedy's response to that situation was a complex set of policy moves and measures that alternately raised a spectre of large-scale, direct American military intervention and prospects of East-West agreement on Laotian neutrality, only to end eventually on the same note of anti-communist crusade as in the preceding Eisenhower administration.

This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.

The shadowplay of Southeast Asia has often been understood as a reflection of local cultural patterns, and it has therefore been the object of much scholarly interest. That interest has been directed especially at the Javanese play, although much has also been written about Balinese and Malaysian shadowplay performances. The shadowplay performance is not usually associated with Thailand, and the shadowplay there has not been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nevertheless, such a tradition is thriving among Tai-speaking Buddhist peoples in peninsular (Southern) Thailand, particularly in the provinces of Songkhla, Thammarat, and Phatthalung on the long-settled rice plain stretching from Songkhla near the Malay border to Nakhon Si Thammarat, where most puppeteers are found.

This article argues for understanding the reform of the Buddhist tradition in nineteenth-century Siam as a shift towards a secular conceptual grammar, and positions this shift within the dual imperial context of Siam. The binary conceptual structure that can be traced in the Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit (Elaboration on major and minor matters, 1867) also included an opposition between Buddhism and Islam, documenting not only the epistemic marks of the Christian missionary encounter, but also the inner-political imperial context of Siam's hegemony over the Islamic sultanate of Patani.

Christian Filipino legislators in the bicameral US civil administration played a hitherto unacknowledged role in pushing for the colonisation of Mindanao, as part of the Philippines, by proposing a series of Assembly bills (between 1907 to 1913) aimed at establishing migrant farming colonies on Mindanao. This legislative process was fuelled by anger over the unequal power relations between the Filipino-dominated Assembly and the American-dominated Commission, as well as rivalry between resident Christian Filipino leaders versus the American military government, business interests and some Muslim datus in Mindanao itself for control over its land and resources. Focusing on the motives and intentions of the bills' drafters, this study concludes that despite it being a Spanish legacy, the Christian Filipino elite's territorial map — emphasising the integrity of a nation comprising Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao — provided the basis for their claim of Philippine sovereignty over Mindanao.