Cold War historians have neglected the significance of the year 1948 for Indochina. Based on new sources, this paper shows critical shifts in politics within the Vietnamese nationalist movement in 1948. These were the result of converging developments during late 1947 and early 1948, including changes in international politics, in French–Vietnamese relations, and in the relationship between non-communist and communist leaders within the Việt Minh state. By late 1948, Party ideologues were already looking beyond national independence towards building a new socialist regime. The nationalist coalition that had led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was seriously damaged in 1948, even though civil war would only break out several years later. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, 1948 thus marked a new period: the beginning of the end of the ‘united front’ period and cooperation with bourgeois nationalists.

When historians refer to the “classical” period in Southeast Asia, they usually mean the era roughly between the ninth and fourteenth centuries A.d. When they speak of the “classical” states, they are referring most often to the region's first great kingdoms — Pagan, Sukhothai, Angkor, Dai Viet, Srivijaya, and Majapahit — the civilizations that gave birth to many of the nations in Southeast Asia today. Yet, the very idea of a “classical” Southeast Asia has not been debated sufficiently in the literature.

Converted by Salvation Army missionaries in the 1920s, Tobaku people in western Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, have made Protestantism indigenous by re-classifying deities and interpreting biblical texts and teachings to support local political, moral, and spiritual expectations. This article discusses twentieth-century changes in deity concepts and ritual practice among the Tobaku.

Recent trends in fertility in Malaysia1 have created uncertainty about the course of the demographic transition. While Chinese and Indian fertility continued to decline into the 1980s, since 1978, Malay fertility has levelled off and even risen slightly. Evidence up to the early 1980s suggests that the phenomenon may be temporary, attributed mainly to the bunching of births caused by the postponement of marriage among the Malays. More recent evidence, however, point to sustained levels of high Malay marital fertility through the late 1980s — TFRs (total fertility rate) among Malays averaged 4.5 and above between 1982 and 1987 while Chinese and Indian TFRs continued to fall from 2.7 to 2.3 and 3.8 to 3.5, respectively.

The establishment of the Royal Philippine Company by the Royal Charter of March 10th. 1785 promised the beginning of a new era in the history of the India-Manila trade. The concessions made by the Crown to the Company were many, and they were extended in the next two decades. The Company was intrinsically valuable as an organised agency with which trade could be conducted on a structurally modified line. Initially the Company provided a new axis of Spanish commercial operations in Asia between Manila and metropolitan Spain. This was in addition to the traditional Manila-Acapulco trade. From 1793 the Philippine Company also obtained the right of direct trade between Manila and Callao on the Peruvian coast, thus adding yet another axis to the trade of Manila. These concessions underlined and enhanced Manila's importance as an entrepot for all three lines of Spanish trade authorised in Asia. The opening of Manila in three stages by the decrees of 1785, 1787 and 1789 at the Company's insistence, further increased the entrepot stature of Manila. Thus from the viewpoint of the markets, the methods of trade and the volume of commerce, the potential of the trade from India was vastly increased, and improved.

The depression devastated export crop earnings from the Netherlands Indies, with consequent severe effects on a colonial economy dependent on them. For many Indonesians in the towns and cities of Java the depression was a time of difficulty but not a disaster — wage cuts, worsened conditions, slower promotions and reduced opportunities for their children may have been partially compensated by a decline in the cost-of-living. Many others, though, lost their jobs and were forced to take lower paid work or eke out a living as best they could with casual or day-wage work wherever they could get it. Some gave up on the cities for the time being and returned to their villages of origin where they were supported by family and relatives.

Lucien Hanks titled this symposium a “quest” into the nature of Southeast Asian societal organization prior to the eighteenth century. This paper represents such a quest in the sense of a journey of inquiry into post-Angkorean Cambodia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explore the basic problem posed by Hanks: whether pre-colonial society was organized into horizontal castes/classes or vertical “entourages/circles”. My attention will be directed primarily to sociopolitical organization, while David Chandler focuses more on norms and ideology.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) maintained a vast network of shipping connections with Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The extent of these connections was determined by the quantity of goods which was to be transported from Asia to Holland, and through the demand for ships in the inter-Asian trade. The periods of time and the ways in which the Holland-to-Asia connections were maintained did not necessarily depend upon commercial considerations. Considerations of safety, prevention of smuggling and above all the wind and current systems played an equally important role. Only recently has a survey become available of all journeys made to and from Asia during the Company's existence. It takes into account 4,730 outward-bound voyages and 3,358 homeward-bound voyages in the years 1602 to 1795. For the greatest portion of voyages, Batavia was both the destination and the port of departure. Columns I and II in Tables 1 and 2 will give one an overview. The preponderance of journeys from Batavia tapered off in time, mostly because of direct voyages made to Holland from other parts of Asia, such as Ceylon, Bengal, and China. Yet Batavia remained the metropolis, and where, at its zenith from around 1720 to 1740, an average of 33 ships per year arrived and 23 to 24 departed for the mother country. In the years thereafter, only the frequency of the return journeys diminished appreciably.

This article is concerned with social and moral cohesion in the wake of war and violence. In the Cambodian village of O'Thmaa, villagers are making tentative and at times ambiguous efforts to connect to their pre-Khmer Rouge past to recreate a sense of community and moral order. This article examines this process through a detailed ethnographic description and analysis of the production of O'Thmaa's harvest ritual and festival, Bon Dalien.

The Thai literary canon identifies three novels published around 1929 as the first authentic Thai novels. This pronouncement elides the importance of novels published before that date. Because literary scholars focus their teaching, writing and research on novels defined by the canon, lesser-known works have been overlooked or ignored. The current Thai canon obfuscates literary transmission, in particular, the significance of pre-1929 compositions. In this essay, three novels – Mae Wan's Khwam phayabat (1902), Khru Liam's Khwam mai phayabat (1915) and Nang neramid (1916) – are selected to show that these early compositions represent important genres of novels that should be considered for the canon, even though they are seen as less than ‘authentic’ Thai. This paper examines the three novels through the lens of critical, translation and postcolonial theories. It is a study of vernacularisation, authenticity, hybridity, mimesis, and bi-culturalism.

The greater part of the historical literature concerning Southeast Asia says little about women because, following the western tradition, writers have concentrated on those individuals associated with decision making and power, areas where men have featured predominantly. Although women have contributed significantly to social and political movements, they have been neglected in historical accounts and often, their contribution has been excluded altogether. Even studies dealing specifically with legislation involving women's rights in Singapore such as the Women's Charter, have given insufficient attention to the part played by women in laying much of the preliminary groundwork.

Tai Lue and Lua people are struggling to maintain access to resources in a northern Thai national park. Contrasting outcomes for Tai Lue and Lua relations with the park can largely be explained by political, economic and discursive structures and the interests, attitudes and actions they promote. In particular, the racialisation of resource use constrains the ability of minority upland groups like the Lua to secure recognition and legitimacy for their resource use practices.

Since 1989 ‘rites of cursing’, derived from Northern Thai folk-religious practices, have become common in public protests and demonstrations in Thailand. This essay argues that the employment of these practices and associated beliefs as aspects of civil society and contemporary nation-state making in the Thai context can only be understood in terms of the internal logic of sorcery and embedded conceptions of morality.

Writing in June 1960 Donald Stephens, editor of the North Borneo News and Sabah Times, remarked that “… the Penampang Kadazans have seldom found much favour in official circles because of the bit of education they possess and because of the courage they have in fighting for their rights.” Certainly the observations of British North Borneo Chartered Company officials and others in the past often included disparaging comparisons between the then-called “Dusun” people of the Penampang, Papar and Membakut areas south of Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu), and the more tractable people of Tuaran to the north. Owen Rutter, for instance, delivered himself in 1922 of the opinion that “The Dusuns of Tuaran … are … the pleasantest of the lowland Dusuns, just as the people of Papar and Membakut are the most objectionable.” He went on to describe an incident occurring in 1910 in which the people of Papar led a protest movement against the sale of land by the Chartered Company to rubber companies. They contended that such compensation as they had received for fruit trees and ancestral graves was inadequate, and that the land itself was their heritage for which they should also be paid. “At one time”, wrote Rutter, “the agitation movement threatened to spread to Tuaran, but the good people of the district did not appreciate squandering on legal charges the comfortable sum they had extracted from the Tuaran Rubber Estate for their fruit trees, and the Papar envoys went home practically empty-handed.” K. G. Tregonning, alluding to the same incident, merely says “At Papar, a notorious trouble-maker, strongly influenced by the long-established Roman Catholic mission there, found for the Christian Dusuns imaginary faults in the change from traditional tenure.”

The period from 1963 to 1966, which spans Indonesia's “confrontation” against Majaysia, marks an important benchmark in the history of Malaysian-American relations as it represents the first direct involvement of the United States into the political affairs of Malaysia. Before confrontation, the United States had maintained a low profile in the country and had confined the relationship to mainly economic issues. Politically, the United States had, for the most part, hovered in the background behind the British who had continued their close ties with Malaysia even after the granting of independence in 1957. America's deeper involvement with Malaysia because of confrontation, signified, therefore, a distinct departure from its earlier policy.

I make the following observations from the vantage point of a philologist and anthropologist. I presuppose Michael Aung-Thwin's paper, “Hierarchy and Order in Pre-Colonial Burma”, as background, and I do not propose to recapitulate his treatment of the facts.

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.

When Dr. Lim Boon Keng, an eminent Western-educated Chinese and one of the comparatively few Chinese Christians in Singapore, was converted to Confucianism in 1899, the grip of Confucianism on overseas Chinese intellectuals had shown its strength. In the intellectual history of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, the spread of Confucianism and nationalism were the chief causes of ferment and change in the period 1899–1911. Between them these new ideas did much to transform the overseas Chinese communities and make them more adaptable to the modern world. The Confucian revival movement was the first among the stimulants of change. To understand its influence on the development of the overseas Chinese communities, it is necessary to trace its origins back to China.