The report upon the shortcomings of the Malacca jurisdiction which Extraordinary Councillor Willem de Roo sent to Johan van Hoorn, Governor-General of the Netherlands East Indies, in November 1705 offered reasons for the initiative which he and his colleagues had taken in relations with the Johor Court: ‘… business in Malacca is wholly fallen into decay, with, it seems to me, little appearance of a big improvement, let alone a full recovery of the formerly flourishing trade, because people have indulgently too long allowed contracts concluded with surrounding rulers and allies to be broken without making much complaint thereupon, or themselves maintaining (the force of the contracts), principally concerning the Johorese …’

Thanks to Clifford Geertz, the terms and concepts of abangan, santri, and prijaji have become familiar and frequently used by students of Javanese history, politics, and society. While he did not invent them, Geertz is responsible for their earliest and most thorough development as explicit and interrelated concepts, as seen most notably in his The Religion of Java and The Social History of An Indonesian Town. These studies are based upon his academic work as an anthropologist and his intermittent field work in “Modjokuto”, Java, from May 1953 to September 1964.

In a previous study, an attempt was made to determine the extent to which South Vietnamese provincial elites represent a transition or “bridge” between the national elites and the rural values of the majority population by comparing data on the social, educational, political and occupational backgrounds among political leaders and elites supportive of the GVN from both the national and provincial levels. In that study, the conclusion was that a comparison of social background statistics in isolation may be seriously misleading. Western-educated urban elites at the provincial level who are aware of and empathisize with traditional rural concerns can serve as a transitional cultural and political bridge. Indeed a fairly recent study of constituency influence on United States' congressmen indicated that a representative's perceptions of the attitudes held by the enfranchised population of his district was the intervening variable accounting for his electoral behavior as measured by his voting on roll calls. Thus, in the United States, “;;constituency influence is not provided by candidate recruitment but by elite cognitions.”

Malaya's creditable economic performance prior to the Second World War was very much the product of growth without planning. It would be a mistake, to be sure, to attribute early Malayan economic growth solely to the initiative and enterprise of private individuals and firms acting independently of government. Certainly the British colonial administration, indirectly through fiscal measures and directly through the activities of an increasingly important public sector, had a significant role to play in determining the direction, and incidentally the magnitude, of pre-war economic expansion. Colonial government policy nevertheless remained compartmentalized and its objectives were defined narrowly. There was no idea of maximizing the development of Malaya's economy as a whole. Indeed, the Malayan economy during the decades before the War even lacked fundamental functional integration, for in the words of a World Bank mission, “… Malaya in many respects was rather a geographic region where capital and labor belonging to other economies found it convenient to carry on certain specialized operations, within the British monetary as well as political framework”. Whatever economic growth that did occur involved unplanned, and largely uneven, development.

Australia's defence commitment in Malaysia-Singapore is of long standing. In the 1920's and 1930's non-Labour governments in particular had seen the Singapore base as the linchpin of Australian security. Despite Singapore's failure to play this role during World War II, the Malaysian area continued to play an important role in Australian defence thinking in the post-1945 period. Australia began participating in the ANZAM arrangement in 1949, and subsequently committed forces in the campaign against the Malayan Communists. As early as May 1950 the Menzies Government decided to send a squadron of Dakota aircraft to Malaya. In April 1955 this commitment was considerably enlarged to include an infantry battalion, a fighter wing of two squadrons and a bomber wing of one squadron, as well as a permanent naval force of either two destroyers or two frigates. This commitment has provided the basis of the Australian military presence in the area ever since Australia “associated” herself with the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement in 1959, and the extension of this agreement to Malaysia in 1963. Australia adopted a cautious policy during the period of confrontation and, for fear of antagonising Indonesia unduly, did not finally make combat forces available for service in East Malaysia until February 1965. This article is concerned primarily with developments which have affected the Australian defence presence in Malaysia-Singapore since the Wilson Government took office in the United Kingdom in October 1964. It examines the Australian reaction to the march of events in Britaín which culminated in the decision to withdraw British forces from Malaysia-Singapore by the end of 1971, and the attempt by Australia to redefine her role in the light of the new situation.

The purpose of the present article is to analyse the voting at the Sarawak elections of 1970, particularly at the state, as opposed to the parliamentary, election. The administration of the elections, election issues, and the methods of campaigning used by the parties are described elsewhere. Nevertheless, a few words of background explanation may be useful.

Political scientists have long neglected the phenomena of rural development; this in spite of its overwhelming importance (See Figure 1) to lesser developed nations. In much of Africa, Asia and Latin America large proportions of the population live in villages and more scattered settlements. For Africa and Asia, 70–90 per cent of the population live and work in these areas. Their occupations are primarily agricultural.