Melaka and George Town became the first Malaysian cultural properties to be inscribed on the World Heritage list. Until 2008 Malaysia had managed to designate only two natural heritage sites, and both were not in peninsular Malaysia but on Borneo: the Gunung Mulu National Park and Kinabalu Park. A second cultural heritage site was inscribed in 2012, the Archaeological Heritage of the Lenggong Valley. Taking into consideration the fact that this site includes open-air archaeological excavations and caves from the Palaeolithic era, concentrated within the natural landscape along the Perak River, Melaka and George Town still represent the only cultural heritage locales in a living urban milieu.

The process of World Heritage designation follows a specific transnational order of action. First, a ‘State Party’ – to use the nomenclature agreed upon by countries that have ratified the World Heritage Convention – must prepare an inventory known as a ‘Tentative List’ with sites that will possibly, in the following five to ten years, be submitted for inscription. In this way, the State Party can decide to prepare a nomination file, or dossier, to be sent to the World Heritage Centre. The latter, with its headquarters in Paris, acts as the secretariat for all matters concerning the convention. Among its most important tasks, the World Heritage Centre organizes annual sessions of the World Heritage Committee and provides advice to the States Parties in the preparation of nominations.

This is the epilogue, but Melaka goes on. As I have suggested in the title of this book, Melaka is a cityscape below the winds, but not just geographically as the old toponym for the region reminds us. Global and local forces blow, like winds, over the cityscape. Flows of ideas circulate and intermingle in this specific locale. My driving purpose throughout this book has been to show how global scientific conservation principles meet local heritage perspectives, and the complex ways they unfold on the ground, but without falling too easily into either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ narratives and conclusions. While you are reading, conservation policies are implemented – perhaps some of them circumvented – and new urban development projects are approved.

I am hesitant to make cy-oriented recommendations in relation to heritage conservation, although some of my own interlocutors would expect me to embark on such a mission. When I presented myself as an anthropologist working on heritage, people often expected me to write a book on how to preserve buildings or about their cultures, but this was not the trajectory of my research. I leave the task of heritage management exercise – with regard to technical matters – to the numerous gifted conservationists, architects, planners, archaeologists, and heritage aficionados I had the opportunity to meet. But perhaps I have a wish, rather than recommendations, which is linked to another purpose at the heart of this book. My goal has been to create space for different perspectives, including the most silent ones. I hope there will be more space for those unheard voices in the future everyday life of heritage management and urban planning.

On weekend evenings, after a chat at Mr. Chwee's house, I used to stroll westwards if I wanted to avoid the crowd of tourists gathering at the night market in Jonker Street. The opposite side would never be the right option for an escape, because hordes of tourists converge there to take a trishaw, to reach the Hard Rock Café, or to watch kung fu Master Ho (a Guinness World Record holder) pierce a coconut with his finger. I then used to turn right before the Tamil Methodist Church, into what is today best known as Harmony Street, where I often parked my motorbike. The real names of the three portions of Harmony Street are Jalan Tukang Besi (‘Blacksmith Street’), Jalan Tukang Emas (‘Goldsmith Street’), and Jalan Tokong (‘Temple Street’). Here, three among the oldest functioning places of worship in Malaysia stand together: Kampung Kling Mosque, Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, and Sri Poyyatha Vinayagar Moorthi Temple. For this reason, guidebooks began presenting these three streets as ‘Harmony Street’ back in the 1980s (e.g., Tan 1984; Hoyt 1993). By referring to it as ‘Three Temples Street’, the World Heritage nomination dossier displayed this proximity as an example of the ‘harmony of multi-racial groups’ (Malaysia 2008: 25).

In Chapter 3 I described the influence international actors had in shaping a pluralistic narrative, in line with interests in cultural diversity and multiculturalism inspired by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The World Heritage site of Melaka consists of a core area, the World Heritage property, of 45.3 hectares in the historic city centre, surrounded by a buffer zone of 242.8 hectares. When the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani visited Malaysia in the early 1990s, Melaka was not yet included in the prestigious World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At that time, however, the historical charm of its downtown and the ongoing urbanization changing its surroundings were perhaps anticipating its future international fame in the tourism industry. In this book, I explore the social and cultural processes of heritage designations in this Malaysian city with a particular focus on the effects of the World Heritage recognition obtained in 2008. Terzani was probably writing about one of the two hills that extends above what is today Melaka's World Heritage site. One is Bukit Cina (‘Chinese Hill’), which is located in the buffer zone – the area that adds a further layer of protection to the World Heritage property.

A stay in Melaka during the final procession organized by the Chetti community for their annual festival dedicated to the Hindu goddess Mariamman, would probably make any visitor fall in love with Melaka. Early in the morning, hundreds of devotees – Hindus, but also non-Hindus, including many local Chinese – gather in Harmony Street, in front of the Sri Poyyatha Vinayagar Moorthi Temple. The atmosphere is intense. Accompanied by the beat of drums, many devotees enter a trance state. Several of them will pierce their bodies, including their tongues and cheeks, with hooks and skewers. They are fulfilling their vows to Mariamman. Dressed in yellow clothes, many others carry golden pots on their heads, adorned with neem leaves and filled with milk, which will be used for abishegam (from the Tamil apiṭēkam, the ritual bathing of the deity). Neem has a special link with Mariamman, who is believed to cure skin diseases. Among Melakans, the festival is known as Datuk Chachar (cacar is ‘smallpox’ in Malay). Participants wait to follow a 200-year-old colourful wooden chariot carrying a statue of the goddess. Once the procession leaves the temple, devotees will usually march along Jonker Street and Heeren Street. Several pull small chariots with ribbons attached to their backs with hooks. A few even walk upon nail slippers. Along the way, others wait for the chariot, to which they will give their offerings, smashing coconuts, representing the shattering of the human ego.

Chapter 2 situates the book in the context of market associations in Lagos. It describes the structure of private trade associations around the world, and how such associations are organized in Lagos today, as well as their historical role. The chapter shows that the internal organization of trade associations is remarkably similar around the world; even specific executive positions like public relations officers can be found across continents. It demonstrates that within Lagos, there is only minor variation in the formal titles of association executives; the general structure of these groups is uniform. In the context of Lagos markets, the chapter shows how governments can meddle in the affairs of private associations, and how associations can counter these efforts. Chapter 1 outlined the theoretical importance of government intrusion in private groups. This chapter demonstrates, concretely, how these threats affect associations.

Chapter 4 starts by presenting two broad critiques of the private governance literature. First, this research sometimes assumes that groups can self-regulate without group leaders. While this might be the case for some small groups, leaders are critical for cooperation in many groups. Second, scholars have overlooked the obstacles group leaders must overcome in order to govern well – such as impediments to truthful information sharing and impartial dispute enforcement – which has generated the faulty assumption that private order will emerge when it is needed. It then develops the logic of the argument, which sheds light on the conditions that make private trade-promoting policies more likely. While previous studies of private groups suggest that private institutions substitute for public institutions, the book’s argument is that state threats can encourage private good governance; private associations will predate without public institutions that force them to behave otherwise. The chapter also introduces the role of within-groups competition, theorizing about how competition increases the hurdles to private group leaders implementing trade-promoting policies. It then discusses the possibility of group leader-politician collusion, along with the way that relational contracting relates to the argument.

Chapter 6 first tests the main premise of the project – that external threats should make private trade-promoting policies more likely – using the large sample of markets represented in the survey data. It then assesses whether (and how) competition mediates the role of these threats. Just as important, the chapter uses the survey data to assess alternative explanations that have been posited but rarely tested in the context of private governance with a sample of this size. The key finding is that markets facing government threats – i.e., those on local government land – are more likely to be governed well. This relationship between land type and private governance, however, is not uniform. It depends on the diversity of products sold in a market. Public land markets are governed better when they sell a variety of products, since traders are in less direct competition with each other.

Based on a year of fieldwork in Lagos markets, Chapter 5 looks in depth at four markets, demystifying leadership behavior and the role of politics, and testing the part of the theory that focuses on threats and leader strength. The first market is an archetype of private good governance, and the chapter assesses the extent to which the conditions that sustain these policies are consistent with the book’s theory. The other three markets are governed by leaders who fail to create supportive environments for traders. Prior studies assume that such groups disappear quickly, as current group members abandon them and prospective group members decide not to join. The chapter documents that these groups can persist for much longer than previously assumed. One of the markets highlights a special type of group: one in which the group leader extorts from their own members. Previous studies have assumed that group members are mobile and would simply move to a better group if a leader attempted to extort from them, and that group leaders would therefore refrain from extorting for fear of losing members. This case study illustrates how predatory leaders exploit traders’ immobility.