In 1958, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce had to decide whether to remain active in politics, representing not only the commercial interests of the rich but also the views of Chinese society at large, or to function solely as a commercial organisation. The eventual success of the pro-politics faction illustrates the buoyant aspirations of the Chinese merchant elite. The public battle for control over the Chamber shows that Chinese businessmen assessed their options by pragmatically balancing political, economic as well as cultural constraints and opportunities.

One of the most obscure periods in modern Burmese history comprises the reigns of King Tharrawaddy (1837–1846) and his eldest son, Pagan Min (1846–1852). Historians have relied, to varying degrees, on Colonel Henry Yule's unsympathetic and inaccurate retelling of court gossip which portrays the two monarchs as bestial lunatics who murdered and plundered at will. This assessment is as exaggerated as it is simplified and ignores the very real structural problems the Burmese nation experienced between the first and second Anglo-Burmese Wars.

This paper analyses the symbolic aspects of the tiger as perceived by the Madurese, both on Madura and in East Java. It focuses on people's relationship with the environment and the supernatural world as well as the way the tiger as symbol has adapted to both the progress of Islam and to the modern world in general.

Like most developing countries, the Philippines before the imposition of martial law towards the end of 1972 was characterized by the fact that the majority of her population, living in the small towns and the countryside, were actually peripheral to the national polity. The political process was largely concerned with the intra-elite conflicts and manoeuvrings. As the government did not derive the bulk of its revenue from the income and resources of the mass of the citizenry, the political system functioned mainly as a giant system of patronage.

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.

This article sets out to demonstrate the Southeast Asian nature of Nanzhao as a Sinitic state similar to Dai Viet. Previous studies have focused on Nanzhao's relations with Tang China, and emphasised the heavy Tang influence on its political organisation. Examining Nanzhao's expansion of governance into the Upper Ayeyarwady and Upper Mekong river regions during the eighth and ninth centuries, I argue that it was a kingdom characterised by a combination of Sinitic-style bureaucracy with indigenous Southeast Asian allegiance ties. I demonstrate how Nanzhao utilised these features to broaden its entire power base by administering conquered peoples and maintaining trade routes in the Upper Ayeyarwady and the Upper Mekong from a network of walled-cities. Though Confucianism exerted limited influence at the local level, the elite invoked Confucian civilising ideology to morally justify their governance of conquered peoples. The authority of the king extended beyond the core area, and his bureaucracy was powerful enough to loosely administer regional areas and to shift subdued peoples to populate strategic points within the kingdom, while governing Mon-Khmer polities at the southern periphery indirectly through their own leaders.

In 1950 Embree characterized Thai society as loosely structured in contrast with a Japanese-like, closely woven social system. Since then his article has served as a general guide-post for Thai studies. As data has accumulated, however, there have been reconsiderations of the application of his concept “loose structure” as applied to Thailand. For example, his analysis has been described as impressionistic: while it is phrased in structural terms, the evidences he adduces are stated in terms of individual behaviour rather than of social structure. This failure to distinguish the dimensions of culture, society, and personality makes the notion of structure, to say the least, fuzzy.

The facts and evaluations presented here were designed to outline some of the characteristics of the Burmese class-structure. Of particular relevance seems to be the occupational structure and its modification during the last three or four decades. The income distribution among various occupational groups also helped in this characterization. The differentiation and cooperation between the different elites was described, together with the setting in which they function, the qualification for admission and the patterns of mobility comparing the standard of aspirations with the channels available. In this context roles and status image were discussed including the rough after status components, status symbols and the preferred occupational hierarchy in terms of social prestige. Finally the internal cohesiveness of the social strata in so far as distinct self-conscious entities are concerned was examined.

The material presented may be summed up as follows:

1. The population of Burma was split into two main parts: a small elite concentrated in government administration, party bureaucracy and the military on the one hand, and the peasants, small traders, business and hired labourers on the other hand. In between the two is a very small group of middle-class people and skilled workers.

2. Although the average income level was exceedingly low, at least until 1962, the span between the highest and lowest income categories was rather great.

3. The modern elite was small and though the internal differentiation is slight the antagonism is considerable. Before the coup the main adversary groups (excluding the underground) were administrators, politicians and students. The elite groups enjoyed little autonomy and freedom of action as there was no alternative outlet except the government bureaucracy, the military and an underdeveloped party bureaucracy. The weakness of the legal opposition parties and trade unions, the small number of independent economic organizations made it difficult for oppositional elite to develop and be institutionalized in relatively independent power positions. This had many repercussions on the already limited ability of the political and social centre to cope with economic and political problems.

4. Despite the generally universalistic criteria, for acceptance in the various elite groups, and the not insignificant de facto mobility, channels for such upward mobility were few and restricted to certain sectors of the political and government bureaucracy. This enabled the ruling elite to exert much influence on the chanelling of desirable recruits, but created permanent pressure from unemployed or underemployed high school and university graduates.

5. Leaving the ethnic minorities aside, crystallized class-oriented groups were very rare, and the main criteria for belonging to the few that existed were the type of education received and the amount of exposure to Western culture. This dividing line drawn by these criteria did not coincide entirely with that between town and countryside. There was little difference in this respect between the majority of the urban and the rural population.

Accordingly, Burma's class structure appears to be in a state of extensive flux. It would seem, therefore, that the primary problem is to achieve a more institutionalized differentiation of the sub-elite strata. This would particularly bridge the gap between the elites and the rest of the population and facilitate communication as there would be more “non congruent” status groups capable of serving as intermediaries between the elites and the more sophisticated, differentiated population.

britain and indonesia approached the brink of war at the height of the sunda straits crisis in september 1964. using newly released declassified archival records, this study reviews the supposed british deterrence success. the factors behind successful indonesian deterrence during the crisis contradict the prevalent view that statesmen should refrain from brinkmanship since they are unlikely to achieve their political goals at minimum costs to themselves.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.

This article deals with the Namsang project in Burma, run in the late 1950s and early 1960s to engage demobilised soldiers in establishing a series of cooperative villages modelled on Israeli settlements with Israeli technical and other assistance. The article explores the Burmese modernisation project in the context of the unification of the country and the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. In its examination of the Namsang project, this article offers a microscopic view of the translation of planning practices to other contexts in general, but also asks some more specific questions, such as how Burmese and Israeli national identity, memory, and history defined the project agenda, what the planners’ ambitions were, and why the project failed.

In this article, I argue that Malaysia joined the South China Sea dispute during the 1970s as a reaction to the World Oil Crisis instead of asserting historical claims as in the cases of Vietnam and China. Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction to include several highly disputed maritime features at the height of the oil crisis. The crisis was initiated by an oil embargo imposed by the Arab states, which imposed domestic inflationary pressures on Malaysia's economy. These two factors, external and domestic, resulted in Malaysia's bolstering of its offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation culminating in the expansion of its maritime jurisdiction. In particular, Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction in 1976 and 1979, which coincidentally corresponded with the aftermath of major oil price hikes that occurred in October 1975 and December 1978. Compared to China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, all of whom issued their maritime claims on the South China Sea based on historical or new discoveries, Malaysia's expansion was a mere reaction towards the oil crisis rather than a deliberate move.

John Fairbank wrote of China that “the missionary movement … was a profound stimulus to China's modernization”, and he cited missionary medical, educational, and humanitarian work, including extensive rural contacts, as the basis for his conclusion. And George Antonius in his classic study of Arab nationalism noted that in the Arab revival of the last century, the American Presbyterian Mission in Syria played an important role in the rebirth of Arab literature and education. The Presbyterian missionaries were one important source of the emergence of the Arabs into the modern world. A reading of Thai history suggests that the missionaries in Siam might well have had a similarly important impact. However, the role of the missionaries after the decades of the 1830s to the 1850s has been little studied and is hardly understood. This has been especially true because the historical study of Thai modernization has focused primarily on national policies and strategies where the missionaries had less influence after the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68).