With the transformation from the Malay kerajaan rule based on economic extraction and the capability to take life to British colonial rule, Malays aspiring to govern others were now subject to a set of mundane disciplinary techniques seeking to promote a bureaucratic ethos that precipitated around academic merits, team spirit and above all the strange distinction between public and private spheres of action.

This article examines the emergence of twentieth-century technological development policies in the Netherlands East Indies from broader welfare policies formulated in the nineteenth century. Identity became particularly important in policymaking as officials disputed whether differences between Javanese and European culture could explain why the Javanese did not flourish under colonial rule, and whether encouraging Javanese to become more like Europeans would solve ‘Native’ welfare problems. Technical experts, whose development projects would increasingly define what a ‘developed’ Native would be, became crucially important players in debates about ‘Europeanizing’ the indigenous people.

This article examines the development in the trade of lakawood as an example of the passage of a commodity from its initial introduction to being highly prized by its recipient market from the Song to early Ming period, and attempts to understand the interactive dynamics of the maritime trade between China and the Malay world at a micro level during the classical period of the Malay world's history.

Australia's defence commitment in Malaysia-Singapore is of long standing. In the 1920's and 1930's non-Labour governments in particular had seen the Singapore base as the linchpin of Australian security. Despite Singapore's failure to play this role during World War II, the Malaysian area continued to play an important role in Australian defence thinking in the post-1945 period. Australia began participating in the ANZAM arrangement in 1949, and subsequently committed forces in the campaign against the Malayan Communists. As early as May 1950 the Menzies Government decided to send a squadron of Dakota aircraft to Malaya. In April 1955 this commitment was considerably enlarged to include an infantry battalion, a fighter wing of two squadrons and a bomber wing of one squadron, as well as a permanent naval force of either two destroyers or two frigates. This commitment has provided the basis of the Australian military presence in the area ever since Australia “associated” herself with the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement in 1959, and the extension of this agreement to Malaysia in 1963. Australia adopted a cautious policy during the period of confrontation and, for fear of antagonising Indonesia unduly, did not finally make combat forces available for service in East Malaysia until February 1965. This article is concerned primarily with developments which have affected the Australian defence presence in Malaysia-Singapore since the Wilson Government took office in the United Kingdom in October 1964. It examines the Australian reaction to the march of events in Britaín which culminated in the decision to withdraw British forces from Malaysia-Singapore by the end of 1971, and the attempt by Australia to redefine her role in the light of the new situation.

The formation of the Kuomintang in 1912 was the culmination of a period of reform and revolution. The reformist movement in China began with the rise of men like K'ang Yu-wei, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Chang Chih-tung, who saw in the foreign penetration a threat to China's territorial integrity. These reformists prevailed upon the Emperor Kuairg Hsu, to adopt modern measures with a view to strengthening China. In 1898 a series of edicts were speedily passed for the reformation of China. These edicts, commonly known as the “Hundred Days Reform”, came to. nought when the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi carried out a coup d'etat and China returned to her former ways.

One feature of the Malaysia Agreement of July 1963 was the provisions designed to restrict the political role of Singapore in the new Federation. To this end, in return for a fair measure of local autonomy, Singapore was to accept a reduced representation in the Federal legislature together with a minor disability through a dual Malaysian citizenship. While the government of Malaya, which was to assume the federal powers, was anxious to include Singapore in Malaysia so as to contain a subversive threat, it was concerned also to place limitations on a threat of a different order which seemed to be posed by the governing party in Singapore. The government in Singapore, which represented a predominantly Chinese electorate, was composed of men whose vision of a socialist society was not confined by the territorial bounds of the island-state. Indeed they had been long on record as to their ultimate objective. The government in Malaya — founded on a loose communal coalition which reflected Malay political dominance — was conservative in complexion and made little secret of its protection of traditional interests and of its advocacy of private enterprise. It could not but look with disfavour on the Administration in Singapore, while attitudes towards its Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, verged on the pathological.

Among the Chinese associations in Thailand which who have shown the highest rate of expansion the last decades have a philanthropic aim. This paper places such associations in their social, historical, and religious context, and describes their multifarious activities, showing that they play an important role in the persistence of Chinese identity in Thailand.

With the end of effective resistance to British rule after the Third Anglo-Burmese War, Burma experienced significant economic growth, which led to larger numbers of foreign travellers going there. This article traces the publications of three travel writers – Mrs Ernst (Alice) Hart, R. Talbot Kelley and V. C. Scott O'Connor – by investigating the ways in which they relied on the concept of ‘picturesque’ to understand Burmese landscapes.

This paper explores receptivity to agrarian change in a Malay rice farming village in Negri Sembilan in 1958–59. Villagers, who earlier were extremely resistant to agricultural change, were at that time experiencing an acceleration and convergence of several trends, among them population growth, governmental attempts to introduce new techniques in food production and increasing reliance on cash crops to buy food. A gradual acceptance of agricultural change was beginning to occur but acceptance was highly selective and the basis of selectivity was not immediately apparent. This paper attempts to specify factors responsible for the selective use of new techniques as well as those crucial to overall change.

The identity of “Southeast Asia” has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of “early modern”, a term which seems set to displace “precolonial” in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared “periods” that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of “early modern” in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a “modern Europe” against a “yet to be modernized non-Europe”. But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as “classical” and “colonial/modern”. The term “early modern” itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

While it can be accepted that the politics of the hua-ch”iao or overseas Chinese in Malaya during the pre-war period generally reflected the politics of China (overseas Chinese responses to such events as the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, the May Fourth Incident of 1919, the Tsinan Affair of 1928 and the Mukden Incident of 1931 strongly substantiate this), this quality of hua-ch”iao politics can give rise to misleading assumptions regarding other events. The Kuomintang (Nationalist)–Communist united front during the Sino-Japanese War is a case in point.

It is curious and probably quite significant that the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia has proven to be so elusive a quarry for several generations of academicians. Hundreds of thoughtful and scholarly books and articles have addressed this issue or some portion of it in one way or another, and yet our work remains on the whole strangely cautious. A sense of uneasiness hovers over our discussions. We reveal some discontent with both the textual and the conceptual underpinnings of our endeavors. To a greater or lesser extent we all appear to share David Wyatt's misgivings that we may “have it all wrong”. One might well ask why this should be so after all these years of effort.

The impact of the West's commercial intrusion in China towards the end of the eighteenth century had significant bearing on the growth of the slave trade in Southeast Asia. It led to the crystallization of a permanent slave traffic around organized markets and depots in the Sulu Archipelago. Jolo Island, as the centre of a redistributive network encompassing the Sulu zone, became the most important slave centre by 1800. This had not always been the case. Most accounts of the Sulu Sultanate written before 1780 indicate that the internal demand for slaves at Jolo was on a much smaller scale than it was destined to become in the nineteenth century. These early writers reported that it was often more profitable for the Taosug, the dominant ethnic group in the Sulu Archipelago, to deliver slaves to the Magindanao and Bugis merchants of Cotabato (Mindanao) and Pasir (Borneo) for trans-shipment to Makassar and Batavia, than employ them in their own settlements.

Squatter, and other vernacular, housing is found in almost all cities of Peninsular Malaysia. In 1976 such dwellings accounted for the majority of all residences in most urban areas, with squatter housing constituting over twenty per cent of the total in several cities. Squatter settlements are the most clearly defineable residential form outside of the modern sector and consequently their dimensions and history are better documented than others. These aspects of squatting provide the basis for this paper, by inference giving some insights into the evolution of all types of unconventional housing.

Southeast Asia in United States policy fell from a region of high priority during the Vietnam war to become, after the fall of Indochina, an area of relatively minor interest. For the United States, Southeast Asia evoked memories of misperception, intensified over-commitment, and simplistic assumptions that characterized the American effort to defeat local Vietnamese national communism. Since the formulation of the Nixon doctrine of disengagement in 1969, United States policy towards Southeast Asia has been undergoing a process of long-term readjustment in recognition of the exaggerated significance that the region had assumed in American thinking. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 was a major stimulus to this readjustment as it gave the Americans compelling reasons to anticipate a reassertion of Soviet influence in the region. Successive American administrations attempted to place the region in a wider global context to avoid the dangers of extreme reaction to local national communism while developing the flexibility to coordinate a response to the Soviet Union at a global level. The main concern of American policy was to remove the basis for direct United States involvement in the region in a way that would satisfy post-Vietnam war public and congressional opinion and the demands of strategic planners for greater freedom of manoeuvre against the Soviet Union.

Indian esoteric Buddhism: A social history of the Tantric movement. By Ronald M. Davidson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Pp. 475. Maps, Illustrations, Glossary, Bibliographies, Index.

Beginning in 2020, young people in Thailand have led rallies to protest the interference of the military and the monarchy in politics. They have also condemned the role played by Buddhist discourse and court ritual in celebrating kings as divine. ‘No God, No King, Only Human’ reads a protest sign. Simultaneously, however, some groups of protesters have used the same ‘religious’ repertoire, such as the astrological tradition of the court, in their activism, turning it into an instrument of resistance. This article explores this apparent ambivalence via an ethnographic focus on divination, a long-standing central feature of Thai politics. Drawing from a decade of fieldwork conducted with diviners (mo du) and their clients from both pro-regime and pro-democracy camps, including prominent young activists, I argue that progressive individuals do not necessarily need to reject cosmological ideas and rituals deemed conservative in order to resist. Rather, many proactively co-opt them to enhance their own position in the polity, further demonstrating the inability of those in power to live up to accepted moral standards. This strategy, which builds on a Southeast Asian tradition of millenarianism, mobilises dogmatic notions including karma in support of narratives and practices of resistance.

Dato Sir (now Tun) Cheng-lock Tan is best known today for his. leadership of the Malayan Chinese after the Second World War, in connection with the Federation of Malaya constitutional proposals, the Emergency, and the attainment of independence by Malaya. Even before the War, however, Dato Tan had established himself as a distinguished public figure and, in a sense, as a political leader.

The presence of large, often dissident, minority populations has been one of the most serious problems facing many of the nations which have attained independence since the close of World War II. This paper will examine the minority situation in Burma, where the problem has been of serious proportions, posing a threat to national unity and in some cases resulting in armed insurrection. There are at present an estimated 11,000 insurgents in Burma, most of whom represent ethnic minorities.