Insignificant as it may seem, not only to the layman but also to professional scholars dealing with Southeast Asian affairs such as political scientists, economists, sociologists, and even historians, the Metal Age of Southeast Asia clearly is a force to reckon with, in the sense that it now seems to occupy everyone's mind in the various countries of the region just as much as contemporary issues do. The Metal Age, in other words, is linked with the present in Southeast Asia as nowhere else in the world, and has become a “contemporary issue” too.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) secured in March 1602, by charter from the States General of the Netherlands, a monopoly of eastern trade. Throughout its history of two centuries, it sought zealously to maintain and safeguard this monopoly against all interlopers and against any attempts at private trade by its own officers. With its establishment and expansion in the east the Company extended this concept of monopoly to embrace as much of Asian trade as it could master. It developed early the policy of acquiring a monopoly of certain key commodities of Asian trade by controlling the areas of production and hence the supply. It soon went further and declared a total monopoly of the entire seaborne trade of specific trading areas by virtue of conquest, enforced contracts and naval domination. Thus the close monopoly of the Europe/Asia trade and of large areas of their inter-Asian trade constituted a commercial system to which the Company's Directors and its officers in Asia became closely attached and it formed a major plank in its commercial policy in the two centuries of its existence. Through this period, its energies and exertions were largely directed to the acquisition and maintenance of this many-sided monopoly system. Monopolistic policies and practices in trading dominated the thinking and activities of the Company at all levels of operation. The VOC was held as the archetype of such a trading body.

When the Burmese military junta implemented a repressive economy that nationalised trade and industry during the socialist period (1962–88), a black market economy sprang up and predominated. Despite regime change in 1988 and the subsequent adoption of a market-oriented economy, the underground trade has nevertheless continued and thrived. The Yunnanese Chinese merchants of Burma have played a significant role in the contraband economy over the span of regimes. Based on a non-state-centred perspective, this paper aims to look into the everyday politics of the underground trade conducted by the Yunnanese Chinese moving between Burma, Thailand and Yunnan and analyses the country's politico-economic landscape since 1962.

This article examines one case of the ceremonial preservation of a Buddhist monk's body in rural Cambodia. While consistent with Buddhist relic veneration traditions and regional death ritual patterns, the case shows local actors and conditions influencing practice. The study discusses whether there is a recent efflorescence of such practices in Cambodia and whether the ‘post-socialist’ moment has tended to foster their revival.

When Joseph Conrad sailed on the Vidar from Singapore harbour tothe small coastal trading stations on the eastern coast of Borneo, the round trip took three weeks. The most difficult part of the journey occurred at the estuary of the Berau River where the Vidar would have run in, past the shifting bar and mud flats, and followed slowly up the mangrove-lined banks of the main branch to a settlement almost forty miles inland. It was here in 1887 that Conrad encountered the trader Charles Olmeyer whose existence in this remote place provided such an enduring focus for Conrad's imagination. In his first novel, Almayer's Folly, Conrad drew a portrait of Almayer (Olmeyer) as an exile, living on the banks of the Berau River in a sullen recoil both from the wilderness that gripped the settlement in its green immensity, and from the customs and values of those with whom he shared almost the entire course of his adult existence. Drawn to the outermost reaches of the earth by greed, Almayer's life, as conceived by Conrad, was the very symbol of rootlessness and alienation.

The growth of the pre-World War II rubber industry in British Malaya is, in contrast to the staple industries of many less-developed countries, exceptionally well-researched. P.T. Bauer and J.H. Drabble have written seminally on the rubber industry, while a number of others, including C. Barlow, have made important contributions. Yet an outstanding feature of the British Malayan industry remains relatively overlooked: the development of the Singapore rubber market.

In Malaysia, the influence of the hegemonic or ‘authority-defined’ discourse on nation appears so pervasive that it obscures the fact that ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ identities are in fact highly contested concepts or categories. There is a need, therefore, to examine alternative constructions of ethnic and national identity where dominant notions are challenged, reconstituted and problematized. In keeping with recent developments in critical and literary theory, this article examines selected works of a leading Malaysian novelist, K. S. Maniam, to argue that it is his commitment to the cultural politics of diaspora that problematizes state constructions of a coherent or homogeneous Malaysian identity.

The “holy man's” (nak sel) rebellion against the Vietnamese that broke out in 1820 along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border is the best-documented one of its kind in pre-colonial Cambodia, and makes a useful addition to the literature of such revolts in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Its importance in Cambodian terms lies in its anti-Vietnamese character, the participation in its ranks of Buddhist monks, the collusion of Cambodian authorities, and the way in which these themes foreshadow Cambodian political thinking, before and after the arrival of the French.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the revenue of the Straits Settlements Colony was derived to a very considerable extent from opium. Imported from India, opium in bulk was sold by the Government to Chinese merchants in Malaya who applied for the right to retail it. This monopoly, or farm, supplied the Government with almost half of its annual revenue. By 1904, in fact, it accounted for 59% of the revenue, and although measures of control were introduced in 1910, leading reluctantly to measures of restriction, the sale of opium provided Singapore and the two other Straits Settlements (Penang and Malacca), with a revenue right up to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

This paper attempts to survey the development of a Malaysian Sino-Malay spirit cult, known as Nadugong in Chinese, or Datuk Keramat in Malay. The development of this cult shows that Malaysian Chinese are increasingly aware of their ethnic identity vis-à-vis the Malay identity, whereby local-born Chinese seek to adapt themselves to the patterns of multi-ethnic cultures while at the same time trying very hard to maintain their ethnic boundaries through the organization of their own socio-cultural institutions.

The outcome of this adaptive response may be seen in what is known as localization — a multilateral acculturative rather than a unilateral assimilative process. This process renders the existing syncretized elements more complex and has served as an internal defence-mechanism against, rather than as an unconditional submission to, the on-going proselytizing ideologies of “Malay nationalism” and “Malay national-culturism” based on the parameters of Malay culture, Malay language, Islam, and Malay esthetic values.

Through the analysis of a Bentian Dayak ritual – the nalin taun – this article discusses how this ritual went through a change that reflected a transformation of the social organisation of the Bentian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus revealing the complex and important interaction between Malays and Dayaks in eastern Borneo. The conclusions overturn stereotypes of Dayak isolation and critique ahistorical analyses of cultural traditions in Southeast Asia.

The French Annales historians have made the study of popular mentalites into a fascinating and important field of historical research. This approach has yet to gain ground in Southeast Asian historical studies, especially in Malaysian history, with respect to the thinking of subject classes. If we take the Malay traditional ruling class and the Malay peasantry in Melaka and other states from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, we know very little about the ideological hegemony which the former exercised over the latter, or what the thinking of the dominated class was like. One problem, of course, has been the lack of sources, but such a problem has not deterred the Annales historians from making their attempt.

The Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1941, and Burma and Indonesia in 1942. French Indochina, then called Futsuin by the Japanese, continued to remain in French hands until 9 March 1945. It seemed to present a contrasting picture vis-à-vis Japanese policies in other Asian countries and to contradict the declared policy as expressed in the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (in Japanese Dai-Tōa-Kyoei-Ken). On 9 March, however, this was reversed by the Japanese military action, which disarmed the French Indochinese Army. This action has come to be known as the Meigo Sakusen (Meigo [bright moon] Action).

One of the most arresting periods in modern Thai history is the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a process of social and political development begun in the previous century reached its fruition when a single bureaucratic family obtained a virtual monopoly on high state office in the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68) and the first half of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910). This situation had profound effects on the course of modern Thai history; and its study enlightens our understanding of Thailand's foreign relations and of the course of reform and modernization in a period when the successful conduct of these was crucially vital to the survival of the kingdom.

In September 1990 the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam (CASA) organized an International Workshop on “Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia”. Most of the presented papers dealt with plantations where the workforce had to be imported from distant regions, sometimes even from abroad. The type of human community originating from such recruitment policies often resulted in a typical frontier society, characterized by extreme harshness on the part of the white planters, and by a sense of utter alienation and isolation among the Asian labourers.

The advance to the South, or Nam-tien, is a major theme of Vietnamese history. Other themes, such as the influence of Chinese civilization or the development of an independent Vietnamese state after the tenth century, are in their ways just as important to the study of Vietnamese history as is the Nam-tien. The Nam-tien is unique, however, for it transcends the different periods in Vietnamese history — pre-Chinese, Chinese, independent, colonial, and contemporary — each with its own theme. It is also important because it provides the opportunity to study Vietnamese history on its own themes and not as part of, for example, French colonial history. Despite the importance which this writer believes it to be, though, the advance to the South has not been the subject of extensive investigation and publication. Only a few scholars, such as Pierre Gourou and Le Thanh Khoi, have looked beyond the usual framework of dates, dynasties, and wars to suggest the existence of social changes in Vietnamese history resulting from the expansion of settlements into new areas.

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.

the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typically been a result of economic growth, and that the general sparsity of the population in early historical times reflected the low ‘carrying capacity’ of the environments in question under the prevailing economic conditions.

The first monolingual Malay dictionary was compiled by Raja Ali Haji out of concern that the Malay language and culture were in a process of ongoing degeneration. He also included words referring to sex and bodily functions so that Malays would know when and where not to use them. The dictionary is thus a refreshing alternative to somewhat Victorian-inspired dictionaries from the nineteenth century.

The trade between India and the Malay Peninsula was an important link in the inter-Asian trading system. It took in a wide assortment of goods, embracing not only the produce of these two countries but also serving as a vehicle for the transhipment and distribution of goods from neighbouring and even distant regions that are assembled at these centres of trade. Thus the import trade from India to Malaya had cotton piece-goods as its staple and other produce of India in lesser quantities such as rice, wheat, butter, sugar, oil, hemp, leather and sometimes slaves. Among the items of import, goods that have an obviously non-Indian origin are Arabian incense, amber, red corals, rhinoceros horns and most of the elephant tusks. The articles exported show an even wider area of distribution. From the Malay peninsula itself and neighbouring regions there was tin, pepper, cloves, tortoise shells, sandal wood, sappan wood, benzoin, gumlac, coconut fibre, white and brown sugar, diamonds, besoar stones, quick silver and elephants. Chinese porcelain and copper were obviously brought from the far east. Even allowing for some exaggeration in Tome Pires's figures of Gujerati merchants in Malacca and of his account of the trade from Coromandel, Malabar and Bengal, there seems no doubt of the economic importance of the trade to societies on the two ends of the Bay of Bengal. Indeed the Bay seems to have formed a wellknit commercial unit exchanging surplus produce from its various regions for which the Indian traders were an invaluable medium. The main participants of this trade were the Muslims of the Gujerat ports, Muslims of Bengal and Golconda and Hindu and Muslim traders settled in Coromandel and Malabar coasts.