This article is the first comprehensive evaluation of the provenance and reliability of the two enigmatic Kronik Tionghua texts of Semarang and Cirebon (the ‘Malay Annals of Semarang and Cerbon’). Initially published by M.O. Parlindungan in 1964, historians have increasingly begun to use these documents when reconstructing Java's early Islamic history. This article is a long overdue attempt to positively identify the Dutch colonial official (Cornelis Poortman) whom Parlindungan claims to have received the texts from. Although the article establishes that Parlindungan almost certainly knew this individual, discrepancies between his version of Poortman's career and official Dutch records raise questions about whether Poortman could have found the two Kronik Tionghua, at least in the manner described. The article then ends with a close textual analysis of both Kronik Tionghua which demonstrates the possibility that both texts were written by a modern, Dutch-educated author. The article therefore concludes that both texts are probable fabrications, albeit ones based on authentic texts.

The end of the New Order regime and the passing of new legislation in Indonesia offered the mushrooming local broadcasting industry ample opportunities. This article examines how the changing circumstances have enabled television stations to foreground local identities within a national frame of reference. It focuses on developments in local television in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Central Java, between 1998 and 2009. Using various localising strategies, the stations provide a more diversified local content than was the case during the Soeharto period. The analysis is based on local resources and supported by inside information, generously provided by media workers and artists.

In Indonesia the industry producing the most popular commercial TV programmes, known as sinetron, is largely dominated by Indonesians of Indian (Sindhi) origin. This article examines social relations within the sinetron production houses and argues that between the 1990s and the early 2010s the distribution of symbolic and material capital depended on ethnicity, as it was imagined and constituted by two rather different cultural frameworks and historical experiences. One is based on the occupational distinction, rooted in the South Asian caste system, while the other can be traced back to ethnic classifications in colonial Indonesia.

This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology mediated directly by foreign merchant houses. In both locations sugar planters opposed the colonial state, but whereas leaseholders in Calamba, led by Rizal's family, became intentionally political in their resistance, in Negros planters engaged in a persistent and calibrated evasion of the state.

The mother of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Princess Mother Sangwan, was the royal patron of the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) and an ardent supporter of its Cold War era civic action programmes. This article surveys the special relationship between the Princess Mother and the BPP and their development of royal projects among the highland minorities in northern Thailand to illuminate the implications of this collaboration for the spread of royalist nationalism and the evolving role of the monarchy from the 1960s to the present.

Scholars of Southeast Asia have for several decades moved away from theories of ‘Indianisation’, in favour of theories of ‘localisation’. So far, however, there has been little attempt to apply the methodological shift from Indianisation to localisation to an important living relic of the prime agents of older Indianisation theories: the royal court Brahmans of Thailand. In this article, I examine the history of this still-functioning Southeast Asian Brahmanical institution, with respect both to evidence of its ties to India and to the ways it has been ‘localised’. I argue that it is best understood as a local articulation of kingship, negotiating a necessary tension between the foreign and the familiar in royal ritual.