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.

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.

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).

Thailand's relations with Japan during the months surrounding the outbreak of the war in the Pacific are a topic of controversy in Thai historiography; and despite a growing number of studies which have endeavoured to explain, or at least shed light on, the rapid shift in Thai policy from neutrality on 8 December 1941 to an alliance and then declaration of war on the side of Japan by 25 January 1942, little progress or development in the debate has taken place over the decades since the war. This unsatisfactory situation has been largely due to the very limited knowledge available about the diplomatic activities that took place between Thailand and Japan during the period in question. The bulk of our information to date has come from records and recollections of Thais and Europeans involved in the events, and this has concentrated almost entirely on the activities and interplay of Thais and Europeans. The result has been to relegate Japan's presence in events of the period to some dimly perceived undertakings conducted by sinister characters who were nothing more than Thailand's enemies bent on absorbing that country into Japan's new East Asian order. The following article is an effort to redress this imbalance somewhat by directing attention toward Thai-Japanese relations. I have relied greatly on a number of dispatches that passed between Bangkok and Tokyo during the autumn of 1941. Some of the most important of these are available only from “Magic”, the files of intercepted and deciphered Japanese diplomatic messages accumulated by the United States government. The Japanese Foreign Ministry archive files on diplomatic correspondence with Thailand are extremely incomplete, and none of the messages I used from “Magic” are contained in the Japanese files.

In Indonesia the industry producing the most popular commercial TV programmes, known as sinetron, is largely dominated by Indonesians of Indian (Sindhi) origin. This article examines social relations within the sinetron production houses and argues that between the 1990s and the early 2010s the distribution of symbolic and material capital depended on ethnicity, as it was imagined and constituted by two rather different cultural frameworks and historical experiences. One is based on the occupational distinction, rooted in the South Asian caste system, while the other can be traced back to ethnic classifications in colonial Indonesia.

Though the appellation “Châu-B'an” designates particularly the dynasty archives viewed or critized by emperors personnally with minium ink, the Châu-B'an of the Nguyên has traditionally included “T'âu-B'an” (report),: Tnu'o'ng-Du” (decree), “Chi'ên-Ch'i” (edict), as well as other documents connected with official matters.

One of the major problems in the writing of Philippine history stems from inadequate knowledge of historical conditions in the rural Philippines. The problem is further complicated by a tendency to treat society as a monolithic structure susceptible to outside influence and change at a uniform rate. Consequently, it has proved difficult to judge accurately the impact on Philippine society of such phenomena as colonialism, the Revolution of 1896 and national politics in the twentieth century.

Over recent years some Portuguese politicians and historians have been very concerned to argue, with undoubted sincerity, as Armando Cortesão has argued, that:

‘The Portuguese never had any preconceived notions of race or colour. They always dealt and still do deal with Christian brotherhood towards all peoples, whether they are white, black, khaki or yellow’. and ‘they have always treated indigenes with humanity and, when civilized, as equals amongst equals,’

The expression of this viewpoint has taken a variety of forms, often expressed quite categorically and without any qualification whatsoever, and has been supported by official policy and, academically in particular, by the distinguished Brazilian socio-historian Gilberto Freyre. More recently it has been attacked by Professor Charles Boxer in his Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Clarendon, 1963), where the author has presented a substantial body of entirely reliable historical evidence of actual discrimination against indigenes and mestiços within the Portuguese Empire and Provinces, and has argued that whilst this viewpoint is sincerely held it is substantially incorrect in its extreme and bald form.

The most recent history of the Philippines makes no reference to guerrilla activities or the resistance movement in Negros, although brief comments are included about the rest of the Bisayas. Yet Negrenses, both indigenous and “adopted,” have been unusually active in recording the history of their island during the war years. Recently two additional books were added to the expanding literature on wartime Negros. Since 1946 seven books have been published (one is a mimeographed monograph) on this broad topic for Negros. Unfortunately, many of these sources have not been utilized in more general accounts of occupied Philippines. Probably there is more material on this historic period for Negros than the rest of the Bisayas, with the exception of Leyte.

In the year 1814, Great Britain, recuperating from the effects of the Napoleonic Wars and anxious to protect itself against another outbreak of “Revolutionary Madness”, determined to restore the balance of power in Europe. To this end, it turned its attention towards the problem of rebuilding a strong and united Kingdom of Holland. Because the stability of this new Kingdom depended on the prosperity it could derive from its colonial possessions, Britain restored to it, by the Anglo-Dutch Convention of 1814, all the factories and establishments which Holland had possessed in the Eastern Seas at the commencement of 1803. These were Java and its dependencies, Celebes and the smaller islands situated in the Straits of Macassar, the Moluccas, Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, and various establishments on the island of Sumatra. Great Britain also ceded to the Dutch the island of Banca.

At the end of a Cornell seminar a few weeks ago, a student remarked that the great difficulty in studying Southeast Asian history lay in the immense size of the area, and in the fact that it contained so many different countries. I agreed, but commented that they all belonged to Southeast Asia, and I went on, “If you were. to take indigenes from the different countries and dress them all exactly alike, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the country of origin of each and all.”

On the eve of its foundation in 1954, the Republic of Vietnam had five motorised fishing boats; 20 years later, that figure had swelled to over sixty thousand. This conversion to fossil fuels, along with associated developments like the intensified exploitation of marine ecologies and the use of new synthetic materials, form part of what has come to be called the ‘Great Acceleration’. This article follows a Japanese fisheries expert who spent six years in Vietnam in the early 1960s to explore the physical and conceptual work this process entailed, its entanglement with projects of war-making and nation-building, and the way it was both a product of and producer of the collapse of local ecologies.