After the abortive coup of 1965, the army-based government of General Suharto became firmly established in Indonesia. From that year till 1971, a marked feature of the “New Order” government of Suharto was the rapid growth of the Golkar, an army-controlled confederation of anti-communist organizations which was founded in 1964. The name “Golkar” is actually an acronym for Golongan Karya which can be translated as “functional groups”. In the 1971 general election, Golkar won 236 out of 360 seats in Parliament and 64-5 per cent of the popular vote. The huge gains made by Golkar gave the impression then that functional groups had come to stay as a major factor in Indonesian politics. Supported and sponsored by the army, with financial means, transportation and communications facilities at its disposal, the power of the functional groups seemed to overshadow the influence of the other political parties (e.g. Nahdatul Ulama, Partai Nasional Indonesia) that had until recently been the major organizations that dominated Indonesian politics.

This article responds to recent calls to consider how religion is defined and deployed in and about Myanmar. Discussing local Pentecostal efforts to evangelise to Buddhists in contemporary Yangon, it presents the encounter with the religious other as one ground from which definitions of religion might emerge. I show that, by taking up new opportunities to share the gospel, believers entered into a long conversation between Christianity and Buddhism dating back to the colonial period. Tracing the different definitions of religion that this conversation generates, and attuning to the dissonances between them, might offer alternate ways for approaching what gets termed the religious and the secular in the study of Myanmar.

In the 1940s and 1950s, several organs of the newly independent Indonesian state oversaw the standardisation of the Indonesian national language. In this process, Western-oriented bureaucrats pushed the language towards European normativity, significantly decreasing the influence of Arabic. While this reform carried symbolic meaning, the practical ramifications on Indonesian orthography, spelling, and word selection also carried real, non-symbolic effects on the accessibility of this language to Indonesian Islamic leaders. Standardising orthography to use the Roman alphabet rendered many Muslims illiterate in a language they had been using for decades. Choices in word selection and spelling limited the Islamic meanings that the new language could carry, thus impacting how Muslims could use the national language for religious and other purposes. Indonesian linguistic reform carried serious social and political consequences in addition to the symbolic meanings often studied.

The end of the New Order regime and the passing of new legislation in Indonesia offered the mushrooming local broadcasting industry ample opportunities. This article examines how the changing circumstances have enabled television stations to foreground local identities within a national frame of reference. It focuses on developments in local television in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Central Java, between 1998 and 2009. Using various localising strategies, the stations provide a more diversified local content than was the case during the Soeharto period. The analysis is based on local resources and supported by inside information, generously provided by media workers and artists.

The shipping conference system in Singapore was under severe and sustained criticism three times in the last 60 odd years. In 1910 the colonial Straits Settlements legislative council in Singapore passed the Freight and Steamship Bill whose lengthy preamble contained the indictment that the conference system was ‘injurious to the trade of the colony and inconsistent with the public welfare’. In 1930, during the annual general meeting of the Singapore Branch of the Straits Settlements Association, a leading lawyer, Roland Braddell, launched a bitter attack on the conference. Subsequently a public meeting was held which called on the colonial government to see ‘if we cannot rid ourselves of this octopus which is strangling this Colony’.

World War II may have ended fifty years ago, yet it is clear that numerous evaluations, interpretations, and assessments made by historians and scholars on this period in Southeast Asian history have not sufficiently reflected the intrinsic values of the wartime events, personalities, and developments involved. This is particularly true in the case of two wartime leaders in Thailand — Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram and Pridi Phanomyong. The article attempts to re-assess and update both their place in Thai history and their contributions to the socio-political development of the country.

From prehistoric times rice (oryza sativa linn) has been cultivated in Burma but it was only about a century ago that Burma began to develop into the chief rice-exporting country of the world. Up to about the middle of the nineteenth century rice was cultivated mainly for home consumption and for a small, irregular internal trade mainly from Lower to Upper Burma. The earliest account we have of Burma's external rice trade is probably the one by Duarte Barbosa who mentioned that much rice was shipped from Pegu to Malacca and Sumatra in the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time Pegu was an independent kingdom peopled by Mons (known also as Talaings or Peguans). Their kings appeared to have viewed trade in a more favourable light than did the Burmans for during their time trade was much less hampered than after Pegu became subject to the Burmans.

“A national front without the active participation of the peasants is like a bale of jute without contents, empty and light, and hence easily blown away toy the wind”. These words of Dipa Nusantara Aidit, Central Committee Chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia – PKI), on the occasion of the party's “National Peasants' Conference” in April, 1959, may serve as an index to the theoretical and tactical importance assigned to the Indonesian peasant's role by the Indonesian Communist movement. Increasingly in the past few years the peasant and the “agrarian question”, i.e. “feudalism”, “landlordism”, debtor bondage and the problem of increasing agricultural productivity, have begun to figure prominently in the PKI program and the “essence of the Indonesian Revolution” is now described by the party as the “agrarian revolution”.

This article explores English–Thai translations of ‘political ideology’. It traces the evolution of the Thai term udomkān and discusses how the complexity of the foreign discourse was reflected in its Thai counterpart. There was a conflation of ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’. Udomkān is a uniquely Thai word, translations of which have never been stable. The contemporary political conflict is analysed through an attempt to catalogue the points on which opposing sides pivot. While this tangled ‘pre–post–ideological’ predicament is not unique to Thailand, it exemplifies the ways in which cross-country comparisons might be wary of coding political factions along universal standards of coherence, contrast or temporal stability.

This study will focus its attention on the entrepreneurial role of the overseas Chinese in Thailand and their changing status within the context of the Thai political dynamics. The 1960 census of Thailand reports a population of 26,257,860, of which 409,508 are Chinese citizens either because of birth in China or registration with Chinese diplomatic officials at the age of sixteen. However, observers generally place the number of persons who habitually speak a Chinese dialect and conform to Chinese behaviour patterns in most social situations at about three million to three and a half million. This would make the Chinese community in Thailand, after that in Malaysia, the largest single group of the fifteen odd million Chinese resident abroad.

The military side of British-Dutch diplomatic relations in the Far East at the end of the 1930s has received little attention. The issue is examined here on the basis of original source materials, with particular attention to the way the Netherlands abandoned its policy of diplomatic “aloofness”.

Between 1945 and 1965, what may be broadly defined as the politics of sugar in Indonesia passed through several critical stages. The industrial manufacture of sugar had begun in the Netherlands Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, but after a slump during the 1930s Depression, the industry virtually went into abeyance during the Japanese Occupation (1942–45). After the war, the years of struggle for Merdeka! (freedom) also saw a partial revival of the industry, which continued through national revolution and independence (1949) through to an incremental nationalisation in the late 1950s. Developments in the sugar industry culminated in massacre, rather than merdeka, however. The campaign against the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) which began in 1965 resulted in the murder of labour unionists and peasant activists associated with the sugar industry. This paper traces the course of events from Merdeka to massacre, focusing on the sugar industry of East Java's Brantas valley. Its themes, however, relate to the industry in Java as a whole, and the question of why the commodity production of sugar came to be so deeply embroiled in the politics of the new republic.

I recently discussed the response of Pham Su Mạnh and other fourteenth century Vietnamese officials to signs of peasant unrest when the Trṇn dynasty (1226–1400) weakened. I suggested that the officials were witnessing social and political conditions that compelled them to abandon their habitual sense of being the emperors' obedient subordinates and, instead, reluctantly to assume the responsibility of defining norms of good government. Their unwonted behaviour led me to believe that important changes were under way in fourteenth century Vietnam. Educated men, under pressure of events, were beginning to become monitors of government even though they served and wanted to protect the Tân autocracy.

During the period between the Great European War (1914–18) and the Pacific War (1941–45) the Japanese expansionist impulse in the South Seas expressed itself through emigration and economic enterprise abroad. There were Japanese settlements in almost every country in the region. The larger ones were in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies. On the eve of the Pacific War the estimated number of Japanese residents in the South Seas was 24,000, with investments totalling around ¥250 million. Compared to those of the Western colonial powers and the immigrant Chinese, the size of these investments was insignificant and their numbers meagre. But this only served to spur those interested in Japan's economic expansion in the South Seas to make greater efforts to achieve their aims. External events helped to realize these objectives. For a brief interregnum during the Japanese Occupation (1942–45) the Japanese became the politically dominant community in the region with control over its economic resources.

Early modern Malay historiography has been dominated by the history of European trading, colonial empires and local port-polities, often framed along indigenous-versus-foreign lines. Yet, mobility has long been a central feature of this region shaped by commerce, as evidenced by the historical phenomenon of the ‘stranger-king’. This study examines the cultural, political and economic impacts of intra-regional migration and diasporic communities in this region, specifically comparing the interconnected histories of the Chinese, Bugis, Arab, and Minangkabau communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locating this history within that of maritime Asia, this study provides a nuanced understanding of the historical Malay world beyond essentialism and communalism. This article highlights why scholars of the Malay world should take into account the important roles of mobility and ‘strangers’. It concludes that the Malay world was not a timeless or natural construct, but one whose contours and identity were continually shaped by significant diasporic communities and historical encounters.

This paper analyses the textual-mythographical transformation of Viet origin myths from their transcription in the distant past through their exploitation for political purposes in the 1950s by scholarly elites. It attempts to demonstrate that, as early as the fifteenth century, stories about the Hùng Kings were deliberately collected and codified by members of the Việt elite, who sought to exploit their potential as catalysts of identify-formation and unification under the leadership of the imperial state. However, as a result of the confluence of two currents, that of the monarchical state's mythographical construction and that of popular, village-based, animistic worship, the Hùng Kings came to be venerated as ancestral founders of the Việt quốc in temples throughout the Red River Delta and beyond. During the French colonial and early national periods, the codified myths were the object of severe criticism and strident defence by both French and Viet scholars.

The war between Bangkok and the Lao in the years 1827–29 constitutes a watershed in the relations between the Thai and the Lao. Up to now, this conflict has been accounted for largely by only one source: The Royal Chronicles of the Third Reign of the Bangkok Dynasty by Chao Phraya Thiphakarawong. It is time to go beyond this, and to explore the available Lao annals, Vietnamese primary documents, the archives of the Thai National Library and the accounts of western travellers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This paper also introduces Lao historiography and historians who have written about the war.

The Anglo-Burmese administrator, ostensibly another Anglo-Indian administrator and traditionally perceived as such, must be viewed as a special case. He served Company and Crown in a milieu and under circumstances that differed sharply from those known to his counterparts in the subcontinent. Burma was in a unique position in that it was a part of both the Indian and British Empires. The administrator in Burma found himself at the end of a chain of command that extended from London via Calcutta to Rangoon. London tended to view the remote province with an eye to diplomatic and mercantile considerations. Calcutta concentrated on local priorities and imposed a rigid economy that accorded with Indian priorities. Little attempt was made to understand the alien culture with its differing needs. To the Anglo-Burmese administrator fell the difficult task of governing the ancient land under the aegis of Calcutta and the eyes of London.

Police manuals produced in the Siak and Riau-Lingga sultanates during the 1890s reveal something of the concerns of each society in an early stage of colonial state formation, and how they dealt with changing understandings of crime and punishment. Despite their many similarities, the manuals show that each Malay state had a distinctive character, and differed in its approach to issues of modernisation.