There was a tremendous acceleration in newspaper publishing between 1930 and 1941 despite the Great Depression. The Malay press began to evolve into a site for discussing and debating the circumstances of Malay life in the 1930s. Rather than news, opinions, commentaries, leading articles and editorials made up the bulk of column space in Malay newspapers and magazines of the 1930s. It was a ‘viewspaper’ rather than a newspaper. New forms of public-opinion making like the editorial, increased participation in the media through letters to the editor and contributors' articles, public readings of newspapers, and the extension of newspapers into classrooms meant that a broader cross-section of Malays were able to access debates and discussions on issues of the day and raises new questions about public life in Malaya among Malays.

The Great Depression (1929–35) seriously affected the world economy but it was also a catalyst of the development of political awareness among the Malays. In conjunction with the growth of political awareness there was the rise of consumerism, which also was accelerated by the Great Depression. People were taught to appreciate a new way of life centring around luxury goods that became cheaper and reportedly within the reach of everyone, if one only tried. The machines of this heightened consumerism were commercials that were disseminated through the rapidly expanding mass media, mainly financed by these advertisements. The huge boom in entertainment businesses and publishing houses defied the logic that the downturn would have a negative impact on the entertainment and popular culture industries. Rather the contrary occurred. The number of magazines, journals and newspapers published in this period increased dramatically, and theatre and dance companies met with great success in their performances in the towns and on tours throughout the region.

Prior to World War Two many of the Malay-language films released in Singapore and Malaya were made in Java and the Philippines. Beginning in 1940 the Shaw Brothers began producing Malay films in Singapore for distribution to their theatre network throughout Malaya. The first Malay film magazine, Film Melayu, which began publishing in May 1941, documented the production and release of a number of these pre-war films in Singapore, providing one of the few avenues for a better understanding of the origins of Malay cinema. More importantly, this periodical was firmly ensconced within the Malay publishing community and thus reflects debates over issues ranging from the proper script to use in publishing to technology and its relationship to the nation (or community, bangsa).

Abdul Rahim Kajai (1894–1943), his life and his work, are discussed against the background of socio-cultural developments on the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s. A journalist, writer and author, Kajai played an important role in the emergence of notions of ‘Malayness’ which made Malays feel different from and hostile to the growing numbers of ‘others’ in the colony. In particular, his stories, splendid exercises in fragmentariness, suggest a strong nostalgia for the pastoral way of life, at variance with Kajai's own life in urban areas.

Working from recently declassified Australian and British government files, this paper examines the archival evidence on policy thinking in London and Canberra towards the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) during the period 1970–75. The article argues that one of the main reasons for the Heath government's decision to deploy a token military force in Southeast Asia as part of a multilateral defence arrangement with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore was the desire to uphold these Commonwealth connections. By contrast, Canberra was beginning to question the value of such arrangements in a rapidly changing Southeast Asian strategic environment.

Historical studies of Burma–China relations have emphasised warfare, seen from the perspective of Chinese sources. One commonly studied event is the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Bagan. Burmese sources describe the flight of King Narathihapate (1257–87) from the Mongols, thus earning the Burmese epithet ‘Taruppye’. ‘Tarup’ now refers to the Chinese, but the identities of the people and region to which the term applies have not been constant. This paper discusses the question of the identity of ‘Tarup’ in the Burmese chronicles.

I argue that women's literacy was more common than is usually supposed and that women engaged extensively with written literature, both as readers and writers. I also discuss the role of traditional Islamic education in transmitting literacy among girls. The article is based on the examination of a group of narrative poems written by women at the court of Penyengat.