The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore in 1877 with the limited objective of preventing abuses in Chinese labour migration, but it evolved multiple functions dedicated to governing Chinese migrants and residents in colonised Malaya. The Protector possessed extensive statutory powers and he was regarded as the official authority on all matters ‘Chinese’. This was an important yet under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. This article narrates the history behind the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s when ‘racialised governmentality’ of the Chinese population was institutionalised in colonised Malaya. The article underscores the significance of imperial and local contexts of the Protectorate's creation, arguing that it was a product of flexible adaptation of empire-wide practices of ‘protecting’ and governing liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, indentured Indian labourers ‘humanely’. It is notable, therefore, that there was a coeval and conjoined discussion of migration control of Chinese as well as Indian labour migrants in Malaya during this period, but this history is hidden from plain sight by popular approaches studying labour migration as components of ethnic diasporas migrating from a single point of origin.

Existing accounts of the Madiun incident or revolt of September 1948 suggest that it was a mainly domestic incident, with little direct link to international communism, whether through instructions or the international communist line. This paper argues that there were in fact strong links to both. The revolt was closely linked to the return of veteran communist Muso, who arrived from Europe after discussions with communists there, and with a mandate to help the PKI to reform its policies.

There have been some changes to Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, a popular ethnographic theme park built nearly five decades ago during President Suharto's New Order era to present a utopian version of ‘Unity in Diversity’ (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), Indonesia's state motto. This article discusses the changes and continuities manifested in the present-day slightly expanded Taman Mini. Unlike earlier scholarship focusing on sociopolitical and symbolic aspects of the theme park, this article argues that Taman Mini's mainly domestic visitors understand and interact with its walk-in models of traditional architecture and ‘highlights’ of Indonesian culture and history in ways that often differ from the official script which presents cultural diversity through sanitised ethnographic displays. Moving beyond its official, touristic and commercial intentions and design, Taman Mini has become a lively place for everyday cultural production, engagement and negotiation for its many Indonesian visitors.

Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives, slaves and concubines is set in the late eighteenth century, Victorious wives in the nineteenth, and Realizing the dream in the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

The actor-dancers of the Kelantanese Thai Nuuraa theatre are often seen by Kelantanese as practitioners of love magic. Theoretically, the Nuuraa can be viewed as an ongoing process of mediation between cultural symbols. A Nuuraa performer inhabits an ambiguous and power-filled socio-ritualistic universe associated with unbridled magical know-how.

British planning for post-war Burma had been set back by the Cabinet's decision in April 1943 not to adopt the proposals put forward by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. Designed also to meet the need for wartime propaganda, the proposals had envisaged a programme of reconstruction aided by the British, carried forward during a period of direct rule, to be followed by advance towards self-government. There were doubts about the amount of aid Britain could promise. There were also doubts as to the wisdom of the concept of direct rule, though in fact the Cabinet accepted the principle without setting a limit to the period. Above all, the Prime Minister opposed further policy declarations on Burma. The war, Churchill believed, was not the time for them. Amery and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, thought that he really believed that no time would be right for them. They were not without hope that he would “come round”. Meanwhile, it was decided that the Burma Government, in exile in Simla, would remain in existence. “I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would [be] a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma.…”

In November of 1873 a force of a few hundred men — French marine troops,’ Chinese regulars from Yunnan, and the sweepings of the ports of East Asia — took? the citadel of Hanoi and gave France the opportunity to add Tonkin to her possessions in Indochina. It was a bold venture, but hardly unplanned. The two most prominent figures in the affair, Jean Dupuis and Francis Garnier, had long been interested in opening southwest China by a direct route through actual or potential French territory, and Dupuis had been taking steps in this direction; since 1868. The attempt had the discreet — if not actually surreptitious — support of the current governor of Cochinchina, admiral Dupré. Yet by the end of December Francis Garnier was dead, his conquests in the Red River delta had been given back to the Vietnamese, and France's chief negotiator for the liquidation of the affair had branded the acts of Dupuis and Garnier as “odious aggression”. Dazzling victory turned into stunning defeat almost overnight, and France was to wait eight years before taking up the initiative of Dupuis and Garnier in Tonkin.

To compare the twentieth-century Thai writer Angkarn Kalayanaphong and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche may seem absurd. Yet both reveal a particular concern with time, responding to the unprecedented acceleration of their respective cultures. Their numerous points of similarity and divergence raise broader questions concerning global capitalism's domination of time, and efforts to resist that domination.

By any measure, Trương Định (1820–64) was one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism. As such, he has received a good deal of scholarly attention in Vietnam, France, the United States, and elsewhere. This article analyses the anti-colonial movement led by Trương Định in southern Vietnam during the years 1859–64, focusing on the questions of Trương Định's relationship to the Vietnamese imperial government at Huế and his motivation for continuing the anti-French struggle after Huế had made peace with France in 1862. Its organization is as follows: first, the historical context is summarized; second, Trương Định's resistance movement and its relationship to the Huế court are analyzed; third, various explanations of Trươg Định's motivation are considered and my own hypothesis is offered.

Most writings on Sabah's socio-economic development tend to focus on the roles by the British and other Europeans but neglect contributions by the Japanese, who were at least equally important to Sabah's economic growth. This article provides a study of Japanese economic activity in Sabah, focusing on immigrant workers and highlighting the policies of successive Japanese governments toward emigration to Sabah.

Sir Winston Churchill's doctor has recalled the “stupefying” effect which the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 had upon his patient. Britain's wartime leader, Lord Moran suggests, knew that the surrender was “something more than a reverse. I think he wondered if it were a portent”. The spectre of one of the worst defeats in British military history was to return to haunt Churchill in later years. His torment was, perhaps, not solely portentous but also recollective for in the years 1924–29 Churchill himself, while serving in Stanley Baldwin's second government, had played the major role in delaying the building and defence of the Singapore naval base and in disparaging its associated strategy.