Comprehending the origins, dynamics and solutions to the ongoing violence in southern Thailand's Muslim majority border provinces has proved to be a challenge, not only to successive Thai governments and security forces but also to scholars and other investigators. Insurgent-instigated attacks, now paralleled by and intertwined with more opportunistic forms of violence, have afflicted the border region for nearly seven years (as of late 2010), with no sign of ultimate abatement, despite a considerable investment of resources by the Thai state. Arguably under-reported by the world media, this conflict has nonetheless attracted its fair share of parachute journalism and superficial reportage by instant-experts, single-issue rights advocates, wide-eyed postgraduate researchers and assorted cranks. Many of them have been ensnared by local ‘fixers’ with their own agendas. Despite some notable exceptions, much academic research effort in the region itself has been hit-and-run. As Duncan McCargo emphasises: ‘this is a messy, awkward, in-your-face conflict’ (p. 188) — as such it demands a comparable ‘in-your-face’ and sustained field-based research effort, which, as he rightly notes, has been sadly lacking.

Focusing on land, forests and coastal resources of Southeast Asia, this collection of articles explores an emerging interest in exploring local development and change in national, regional (Asia Pacific) and global terms. Specifically, the authors are interested in steering clear of viewing ‘global’ forces (of market production and environmentalism) as the privileged sites of action with the ‘local’ relegated to a ‘mediating’ role vis–à–vis these larger influences. On the contrary, the articles suggest that local groups actively engage in reshaping discourses and practices of the global (Majid Cooke, Tomforde). Local groups grow crops, often changing from subsistence to cash-producing ones or from one cash crop to another for a complexity of reasons – often not of their own choosing – which reflect local, regional, national and global power differentials (Majid Cooke, McKay, Sato).

That view of the history of maritime South East Asia which fixed a rigid dividing line in 1511 or 1600, and regarded the assertion of European dominance in the area as marking the frontier between traditional and modern history, has long ago been discredited and discarded. It led to the treatment of the earlier history of Malaya and Indonesia as a mere prelude to the coming of the Europeans, or at least as an era without relevance to later events, to which special criteria must be applied. The later history was treated predominantly as the story of European activities and rivalries, and purely western criteria were applied even to indigenous themes. All this is now regarded as unscientific, and labelled ‘Europe-centric’. Few, if any, contemporary historians would challenge this judgment so far as the internal history of Malaya and Indonesia and their component parts are concerned, and, though there is still ample room for discussion as to its application in practice, this paper does not seek to re-open the debate. It is concerned not so much with the development of maritime South East Asian society, or with the history of individual states within what are now Malaysia and Indonesia, as with the relations of these states with each other.

No Harvest but a Thorn opens with a sentence whose emphatic brevity outlines the macrocosm governing the interlocking spiritual, emotional, and physical environment inhabited by Lahuma and his family. That

Life and death, dearth and plenty, are in the hands of God. In the hands of Allah the Almighty. (p. 1)

is simultaneously religious doctrine and empirical attitude, declaration of faith and supplication. Moreover, the quartet of primeval forces, announced with stark simplicity of tone, creates a powerful, complementing sense of time as a cycle felt through significant events. Thus marshalled, the four key words emphasize further both their antithetical and complementing relationships (life-plenty, death-dearth) and the degree to which events, and the processes they embody, control the rhythms of life in Banggul Derdap. Allah presides over cause and effect. As the pair of sentences occurs four times in the first eight, relatively short paragraphs of Chapter 1, the realities of these basic equations are installed as constants in the readers' awareness. A vital point regarding what constitutes an essential part of Lahuma's existence is being urged vigorously for their benefit. Their world view, limited though it proves, derives from and remains utterly dependent on these dominant elements in the macrocosm. Village life, which takes hard, unremitting labour for granted, is prone to sudden, tragic turns — a fact that alters the scale we are inclined to adopt when assessing the tenor and the general quality of life.

Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia can be an easy academic exercise. Structure the courses after those of a department in an established university in Europe or America, use the textbooks produced by the major publishing companies, list the references carefully worked out by their counterparts in some western universities, organize the facts and points in the texts, present them in class, give one or two examinations to find out how much the students know, mark them strictly or leniently, hand in the grades to the Registrar's office and the academic year is over. With few exceptions, everything seems to be ready-made for the teacher and the student.

This article considers the implications of the popularisation of Facebook groups that share historical photographs for the writing of Thai national and photographic histories. Rather than dismissing these groups as lacking in historical rigour, I propose that the nostalgic impetus behind their formation indicates an important way through which we may rethink the continued relevance of Thailand's history to its current sociopolitical situation. Drawing from Craig J. Reynolds’ (1992) argument regarding the interrelationship between the ‘plot of Thai history’ and the narrative historical form, I consider how this plot might be challenged or displaced through a movement from text to image, and from the material to the digital.

For more than two decades, the standard account of the Filipino side of the Philippine-American War has been Teodoro Agoncillo's Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic. Agoncillo's book is, by the author's own admission, a celebration of the role of the Filipino “masses” in the second phase of the Philippine Revolution. “If I appear inclined to sympathize with the masses”, he writes, “it is because their faith in the cause of the Republic was unshaken and their patriotism and self-sacrifice unsullied by selfish motives.” The villains of his story are the “Haves” (Agoncillo also refers to them as the “plutocrats” and the “middle class”) who, in his view, betrayed their countrymen by collaborating with the Americans and undermining the war effort. He directs his harshest criticism at Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda, Cayetano Arellano, and other Manila-based men of means. Agoncillo repeats this story, albeit in briefer form, in a popular college-level text, which he coauthored with Milagros Guerrero.

Following Japan's announcement of unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers on 14 August 1945, almost three crucial weeks elapsed in Malaya before the landing of the British Royal Marines at Penang on 3 September. A day before the Marines landed, Vice-Admiral Walker had arrived off Penang aboard H.M.S. Nelson, and received the surrender of the local Japanese commanders. What happened in Malaya during the Interregnum still awaits a comprehensive study. The Interregnum is an important period in Malaya's social and political history which saw, on the one hand, the dramatic and cataclysmic collapse of the Japanese order and, on the other, the eruption of local political and social forces which were involved in a relentless and deadly struggle for power. True, there was no social revolution, as in Indonesia. What took place were conflicts along mainly communal rather than class lines. No class conflicts took place among the Malays, as in Sumatra between the traditional and religious groups, or among the Chinese and Indians. The social structures of the various communities in Malaya emerged relatively intact throughout the Interregnum and in the period thereafter. But there were bloody racial clashes, between Malays and Chinese. There were also bloody political feuds amongst the Chinese themselves. But, on the whole, the Malay-Chinese conflicts had far more serious repercussions on Malaya's post-war society and political development.

The focus of the article is on the policy perspectives of the colonial state in Malaya vis-à-vis business, Western and Chinese. It touches on the policy outlook of the periods preceding the inter-war years before exploring various related topics (the question of industrial development, tariff policy, private sector initiatives) with a view to ascertaining the relationship between state and business.

The VOC's Burma trade was based on Indian textiles, particularly the cheaper, coarser varieties which would have been surprisingly affordable to the common man or woman. Burmese profits helped fill the coffers of the Company's factories in Coromandel and Bengal. In the end, however, the VOC's establishment in Burma became the victim of a general change in Dutch fortunes.

History may regard the summer of 1976 as a watershed of sorts in the evolution of Southeast Asia's place in world politics. Following the official reunification of the two Vietnams, there occurred in rapid succession the removal of the last American combat troops from the Southeast Asian mainland and the first positive stirrings by Vietnamese officials in response to ASEAN overtures for a normalization of relations. Although it is too early to determine the ultimate consequences of these events, their combined symbolic significance is unmistakable.

The great commercial emporium of Melaka in the Malay peninsula, which was in Portuguese hands for over a century and a quarter (1511–1641), has received a good deal of attention from historians in the past. Of the available studies on Melaka in the 16th and 17th centuries, those of M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz. and Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz are particularly outstanding, being rich both in detail and in implications. Though less well-known than Meilink-Roelofsz.'s monumental work, Thomaz's essays on the early 16th century are particularly important for being based on a mass of fresh documentation, belying earlier beliefs that “a lack of relevant data” from the archives would force historians to rely heavily on a limited set of sources — notably Tomé Pires's Suma Oriental.