Utsana Phloengtham's The Story of Jan Dara is one of the most widely known stories in Thailand. It is remembered as ‘erotic fiction’ as well as an ‘immortal classic’. It has also been praised as a Buddhist treatise. Yet, despite being replete with Buddhist terminology and references, it has never been analysed in English as a work of Buddhist fiction. This article argues that Jan Dara is one of the very few examples of Thai Buddhist modernist literature, and a highly original and highly layered one at that. The novel employs a diverse number of techniques and concerns derived from modernist authors such as D.H. Lawrence to explore sexual life in an aristocratic mansion of the 1930s. Understood with reference to the literary modernist tropes it employs and the debates in Buddhist cosmology and morality at the time of writing, it can be shown to be a scathing indictment of old-fashioned moralistic ‘hypocrites’ who practice decadent lives ‘while mouthing the Buddhist precepts’.

Oliver Gordon Young was a third-generation American Baptist missionary who served with the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and the United States Agency for International Development during the 1960s. He left Southeast Asia in 1974 disenchanted with his missions in the border areas of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. His ‘disenchantments’ with these two preeminent American Cold War agencies illustrated what the United States had increasingly failed to grasp, which was the ‘indigenising’ nature of the Cold War in Thailand. This essay examines Young's career in Thailand and bordering regions to better understand the limitations of American foreign policymaking establishments and their Cold War policies.

The cultural, technological, and socioeconomic dimensions of exotic animal introductions into the Malayan Peninsula have largely escaped the notice of scholars of British Malaya. At the same time, the scientific literature on exotic ichthyological introductions into Malaya has framed such introductions in largely biological terms. Biological factors alone, however, cannot explain the introduction and cultivation of exotic (sometimes temperate) fishes in tropical Malayan waters. Between 1923 and 1942, the Fisheries Department of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States experimented with introducing three categories of exotic fishes into the Malayan Peninsula. These fishes—the sepat siam, Chinese carp and English trout—were reared and released into demographic and geographical landscapes profoundly shaped by imperial power. These animals were thus ‘fishes of Empire’, their introduction and cultivation in the Malayan Peninsula significantly influenced by the scientific, socioeconomic, technological, and cultural contexts of the British Empire. Studying the places, peoples, and technologies that shaped (and were in turn shaped by) these fishes of Empire offers insights into the intersections of imperial power, colonial science, and environmental history.

Indigenous Mentawai on Siberut Island (Indonesia) consume sago and tubers as their staple foods. Since the early twentieth century, Dutch colonial officers, missionaries, migrants, and Indonesian state agencies have strongly encouraged the cultivation and consumption of rice in lieu of these native staples. While Mentawai find rice tastier, easier to serve, and more prestigious, they also discover that rice fails to satisfy their appetites or fortify their bodies. They show little interest in cultivating rice. Mentawai view rice as a symbol of modernity and associate it with powerful mainland people who have long diminished their autonomy. In this article, I argue that the desire to consume rice and the reluctance to produce it reflect a desire to be modern without losing autonomy. Further, this ‘rice ambiguity’ reveals that food is more than just a symbol of social processes and basic sustenance. Rather, food is a transformative agent that can be used to create, enact, and alter identities, values, and ideas.

While most studies of industrialisation and modernisation in Singapore have focused on the post-1960 period and the role of the new nation-state, multinational corporations, and government-linked companies, Lim Peng Siang's business career shows that these processes and engagements were already under way before the Second World War. This study seeks to foreground the dynamics of industrialisation and modernisation in the historiography of Chinese business in colonial Singapore, Malaya, and Southeast Asia through examining Lim's business career. It shows how the projects of industrialisation and modernisation that Lim and his contemporaries embodied extended beyond business and the economy, and were entangled in broader cultural, sociopolitical, and urban forces and developments in Singapore and other parts of colonial Southeast Asia, maritime Asia, and the world-at-large between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His experiences highlight the pitfalls of assuming a simple traditional–modern dichotomy, and any essentialistic and ethnic constructions of culture, and the discourses surrounding business strategy, behaviour, and thought.

Studies on opium consumption in Southeast Asia have thus far not addressed the issue from an economic welfare perspective. This article assembles data from colonial sources to derive estimates of aggregate opium consumption in Singapore during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows that an alternative measure of welfare that includes opium in the consumption basket led to a declining standard of living amongst unskilled labourers who depended on the drug for their work.

This article explores the colonial land tenure system which evolved in the municipalities of the Dutch Indies in the early twentieth century, resulting in structural differences in urban property ownership. The development of a formal and informal property regime during this period created the logic of racialised capitalism that underpinned settler colonialism. By looking at the actions of the Indo-Europeesche Verbond (IEV), the main Indo-European political party, this article seeks to understand why settler colonialism failed in the Dutch Indies. It finds that the success of the settler colonialism project depended on its relationship with global capitalism and imperial support. This study also finds that structural differences in property ownership have continued in postcolonial Indonesia.