Historians of Southeast Asia have been inspired by Fernand Braudel's classic The Mediterranean because of its focus on the sea and multidisciplinary approach, and because it seems to solve two recalcitrant historiographical problems: the definition of time and space, and the reconciliation of local identities and external influence. But while Braudel's prose and intellectual ambition are justly seen as inspiring, conceptual confusion and analytic evasion limit his contribution.

Analysis of the earliest sculpture and epigraphy of Southeast Asia reveals contrasting geographic patterns regarding the worship of Hindu deities. During the seventh century, efforts to consolidate political authority by Khmer rulers led to the deployment of Harihara, a god that embodied multiple conceptions of power and could serve as a ready statement of political and religious unification.

Ayutthaya rose as a maritime power with involvement down the peninsula and in the China trade. Early Ayutthaya resembled coastal polities of the archipelago more than hinterland states of the mainland. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ayutthaya changed by absorbing people, political structures, and cultural practice from the north.

While some scholarship has found the roots of the modern Vietnamese idea of ‘nation’ in the distant past, this paper attempts to illuminate ways of thought which were in conflict with Western nationalist ideas. These ways of thought had to be transformed in the early twentieth century in order for the idea of a Vietnamese nation to take hold.

Colonial engineers and administrators often referred to the pre-colonial Mekong Delta landscape as a vast solitude yet to be reorganised through their hydraulic technology. However, the environmental history of the Delta's waterways is more complex, suggesting that colonial projects were to some extent embedded within an existing infrastructure. This problematises the rhetorical concept of Progress within a colonial context and its value as a metaphor to understand human changes to the landscape.

A comparison of European tobacco plantations and native shifting cultivation in North Borneo between 1881 and 1928 illustrates the discursive and political strategies through which colonial administrators justified intervention into native land matters and articulated their vision of ‘appropriate’ land management. The discourse of rational law, scientific agriculture and commercialisation provided the tools of colonial power that pushed native people and their customary laws into an increasingly peripheral position in relationship to the centralising state.

This first attempt to include women in the pre-1949 history of Chinese immigration to Thailand examines the dialectical relationship between immigration and marital practices through a gender lens. It is argued that labour immigration is not simply an economic endeavour, but rather a complex process of cultural production in which Thai and Chinese regimes compete to produce gendered citizens.