An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference of the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies, 30 September to 2 October, 1988 at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. The paper has been extensively revised while the author was a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California) during the 1993–94 academic year and supported, in part, by grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-9022192) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD21267). I am indebted to Peter Xenos, Norman Owen, and especially to Anthony Reid for their pioneering scholarship on the historical demography of Southeast Asia that inspired this essay. I am also grateful to George Immerwahr for his assistance and to the anonymous reader for a very constructive critique of an earlier version of this paper.

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⁶³ Hugo, et al., The Demographic Dimension in Indonesian Development, p. 108.

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