The full story of the Indians in Malaya has yet to be told. Here an attempt is made to assemble the information relating to some aspects of their settlement in Singapore over the last one hundred and fifty years.

The ideas of the ancient Khmers about the connection between kings and gods, as known from sources bearing on the Angkorian kingdom, have received considerable attention from modern scholars. As early as 1904, Aymonier in the third volume of his history described the cult of the Devarāja as “une sorte de déification aux divinités brahmaniques, des rois et même des personnages de distinction, hommes ou femmes, qui érigent des temples ou contribuent d'une façon quelconque à rehausser le culte de ces divinités.” The stele of Sdok Kak Thom, edited by E. F. Aymonier in 1901, by L. Finot in 1915, and again by G. Coedès and P. Dupont in 1946, is particularly important in yielding fragmentary information about the history of the devarāja cult, and the introduction to the last-named of these editions contains a discussion of the cult, which appears to link the person of a king to the god Siva, or some other. G. Coedès has discussed aspects of royal divinity in several places, his most general and best-known account of the subject, originally presented as “Cultes Personnels à l'Epoque du Bayon” appearing as the third chapter of Pour mieux comprendre Angkor. The scholarly literature describing the statuary and architecture of the Angkor monuments abounds in references to the apparent deification of kings and their relatives, as represented in statues and in titles attributed to them. J. Filliozat's notable study of the symbolism of the Bakheng may be mentioned as an example of the attention which has been devoted to Khmer architecture as a reflection of ideas associating a king with a god. Among other relevant discussions, J. Przyluski's views on the nature. of the Angkorian monuments and B. P. Groslier's analysis of the kings' religious functions in the light of their social, political and economic rôles may be mentioned here. The representation of kings as gods is a theme commonly recognized in Angkorian studies, and even in other periods of Khmer history. A comparatively recent article suggests the existence of the “god-king” in pre-Angkorian times.

Historians have long recognised the fundamental importance of the withdrawal of Vietnamese mandarins from Cochinchina following the French colonial invasion. The departure of these scholar officials, first from the eastern provinces in the initial phase of the French advance which ended in 1862 and then from the western provinces after these were occupied in 1867, forced the French colonial administration to adopt a policy of direct rule. There has been some confusion over the nature of this rule, not least because various French officials in the eighteen sixties were able to convince themselves that the use of Vietnamese names for the positions filled by French administrators somehow represented a continuation of the Vietnamese pattern of administration. In particular the impression has remained that Vietnamese officials continued to play an important part in the administration of justice in Cochinchina until the advent of civil government for the colony in 1879.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had established a firm foothold in Burma. As a result of the Second Anglo-Burmese War which broke out in 1852, Britain acquired the delta area of the country's most important river, the Irrawaddy. This, added to what she had previously gained from the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824, had placed under her control, the entire Burmese seaboard.

Anglo-Burmese relations during Mindon Min's reign (1853–1878) fluctuated between settlement and unsettlement, between friendly gestures and frustrated hopes. By the early 1870's the Burmese ruler had given up dreams of regaining territories captured by the British in the second war, and was busy preserving the independence of his truncated kingdom. However, a Burmese mission failed to secure either direct relations with the British Government or diplomatic support from other European powers. All this while British commercial interests clamoured for the implementation of the Anglo-Burmese treaties of 1862 and 1867, and for the investigation of new trade routes via Burma to China.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Britain converted her paramountcy into effective control in the central and southern states of the Malay Peninsula (except Johore) through the device of British Residents whose advice the several Malay rulers were obliged to accept in “all matters of administration”. But strong local pressure for the extension of this system northwards into the Siamese part of the Peninsula was neutralized by the Foreign Office which sought alternative means of safeguarding British interests there. This paper examines the various arrangements considered when the intrusion of another European power appeared likely, culminating in a secret convention between Britain and Stem signed in April 1897.

Few areas of recent Thai history have been the target of as much guesswork as have Thailand's foreign relations in the years immediately preceeding the Pacific War. The educated guess has been the only resort of the historian who would venture into this field, for vernacular documentation has gone unexploited. As a result, the usual treatments of the Thai role in the 1940 Franco-Thai border dispute have followed unreliable or hostile Western sources and the Thai policies of the time have been viewed in an unfavourable light. In a real sense, the French view of the affair has been adopted, for lack of other alternatives.

Writing in June 1960 Donald Stephens, editor of the North Borneo News and Sabah Times, remarked that “… the Penampang Kadazans have seldom found much favour in official circles because of the bit of education they possess and because of the courage they have in fighting for their rights.” Certainly the observations of British North Borneo Chartered Company officials and others in the past often included disparaging comparisons between the then-called “Dusun” people of the Penampang, Papar and Membakut areas south of Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu), and the more tractable people of Tuaran to the north. Owen Rutter, for instance, delivered himself in 1922 of the opinion that “The Dusuns of Tuaran … are … the pleasantest of the lowland Dusuns, just as the people of Papar and Membakut are the most objectionable.” He went on to describe an incident occurring in 1910 in which the people of Papar led a protest movement against the sale of land by the Chartered Company to rubber companies. They contended that such compensation as they had received for fruit trees and ancestral graves was inadequate, and that the land itself was their heritage for which they should also be paid. “At one time”, wrote Rutter, “the agitation movement threatened to spread to Tuaran, but the good people of the district did not appreciate squandering on legal charges the comfortable sum they had extracted from the Tuaran Rubber Estate for their fruit trees, and the Papar envoys went home practically empty-handed.” K. G. Tregonning, alluding to the same incident, merely says “At Papar, a notorious trouble-maker, strongly influenced by the long-established Roman Catholic mission there, found for the Christian Dusuns imaginary faults in the change from traditional tenure.”

J. de V. Allen's recently published monograph on the Malayan Union will have served its purpose if it redirects the attention of historians to ‘an event whose importance was only possibly exceeded by the things which seem to crowd it out of the historical books — the Japanese occupation of 1943–1945, the emergency which began in 1948, and the declaration of independence from Britain in 1957’.1 In his often fascinating elaboration of what is essentially the accepted, almost traditional, account of the Malayan Union's demise, Allen argues that the scheme (which provided for the amalgamation of the pre-war Federated and Unfederated Malay States and the crown colonies of Periang and Malacca into a unitary colony which would provide the basis for eventual independence by granting citizenship to the great majority of the existing population) represented a recognition by British planners of the advantages of administrative centralisation, of the permanence of settlement of many Chinese and Indian inhabitants and of the loyal support of the Chinese during the Japanese occupation. The scheme failed because it was deliberately foisted upon the Malay Sultans (who were required to cede their sovereignty) in great haste, because it took inadequate consideration of Malay attitudes and political forms, thus arousing united Malay and ex-Malayan Civil Servant opposition, and because it aroused no interest among the Chinese and Indians. Therefore the Malayan Union was replaced by the Federation of Malaya, which safeguarded the traditional leadership role of the Sultans, which allayed Malay fears of ‘alien’ domination and which yet offered ‘generous’ citizenship rights to the non-Malays. In this manner, so the account goes, a gross error of judgement was rectified and the groundwork laid for progress towards independence.