This paper is an effort to examine the dynamics of a major famine in the private domains of Indramayu and Kandanghaur in 1883–84, which was reportedly a result of drought, but a closer look at the evidence, including a unique survey of peasant families engulfed in the famine, reveals a rather complex situation. The local peasantry confined to a narrow subsistence economy found its food supply being seriously undermined by the landlords' efforts to extract more and more rice for sale at a time when Java was being closely drawn into the world market.

This article examines colonial secularism in Burma through a history of the built environment of Rangoon. The creation of the colonial city in the 1850s as an ordered grid of ethnic neighbourhoods and established religions served as a pedagogy of the secular, teaching its population to internalise religious difference. And yet, against this secular vision in brick and pavement there were exceptional spaces that enacted alternative visions. The Thayettaw monastic complex began as home for the diverse displaced ethnic monasteries of the pre-colonial town, but it soon defied the boundaries of colonial rule. Its practice of Buddhism became a mechanism for mobility, interaction, and interconnection.

Using declassified British documents and Chinese-language newspapers, this paper seeks to supplement existing understanding of Chief Minister David Marshall's Labour Front-Alliance Government in Singapore from April 1955 to June 1956. From the outset, the government's reforms were hampered by its own weaknesses. It was viable only because British policy was to keep it ‘in position’.

The Zhuang of south China are the most numerous of the Chinese minority peoples. In Vietnam the Zhuang were identified historically as the Nung, and more recently as the combined Tay-Nung minority, the largest of Vietnam's 36 minority peoples. One of the most critical points in Zhuang history occurred in the Song era [960–1126 A.D.], when the expanding Han Chinese and the Vietnamese began to make a sustained impact in the Zhuang heartlands. Many Zhuang resisted foreign control, striving for continued independence. Their subsequent defeat meant that the Zhuang were never again to have an opportunity for autonomous development.

The history of the Kuomintang (KMT) movement in both Malaya and Singapore during the pre-war years has remained largely under-explored since the appearance of Png Poh-seng's article on that topic twenty years ago. Its history deserves a deeper study as it would throw light not only on the China-oriented politics among the Chinese in these two territories but also on the causes and the rationale of the British authorities to contain and ban it. As the Colonial Office and Foreign Office records have now been made accessible to researchers, it is feasible and urgent that such a study be undertaken in a more systematic and analytical manner.

This article integrates the history of the experience of rickshaw coolies into the larger history of Singapore in the period from 1880 to 1940. These were decisive years. They witnessed the extraordinary economic development of the vast potential for tin, rubber, oil palm, and tobacco in the Malay peninsula and on the east coast of Sumatra under colonial rule, and the evolution of Singapore as a “coolie town”, with a colonial administrative heart and an entrepôt port, with the birth of the rickshaw and a stream of emigrants from China who poured in faster and faster to pull it. This floodtide ofsingkeh singkeh (newcomers from China) came to Singapore with the hope of forming a foundation for a new and prosperous life. Expanding Singapore, especially at this stage of its growth from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was often considered by the migrants as a place of hope and betterment. There were in Singapore tens of thousands of Cantonese, Hengwah, Hockchia, and Foochow sojourners who hoped to find a pipeline to prosperity since the second half of the nineteenth century, when dire poverty and overpopulation plagued Southeast China.

In contrast to the rich historical literature on Southeast Asia's peasants, there are few studies of their urban counterparts, the proletariat of the colonial port cities. The region's rural revolts have inspired a growing literature on peasant politics and social history. But there has been little parallel research on the urban working class — stevedores, transport workers, and millhands.

Given the great strides made over the past twenty years in our understanding of modern Southeast Asian history, it is surprising that many traditional and possibly outdated interpretations remain unchallenged. Despite the growing use of indigenous source materials, the willingness to take an Asian-centric (and occasionally nonelitist) perspective, and the increasing attention to social, economic, and cultural (rather than just political and diplomatic) history, a number of important themes need reinterpretation or reevaluation. Indeed, many modern historians continue to accept as valid traditional assessments of some nineteenth-century events. This is sometimes the case even when the original sources are compromised by a Western ethnocentric and colonialist bias, since European representatives of the imperialist imperative largely produced the documentary sources for the period. The colonial episode now seems a far less benevolent exercise than it did to an earlier generation of historians; yet, outmoded perspectives sometimes remain with us. Such a failure of reinterpretation characterizes the recent writings on one of the better-known episodes in Bornean history, the so-called “Chinese Rebellion” of 1857 in Sarawak. The time has come for a revisionist appraisal.

As the founders of a revolutionary movement with an international ideology, the small group of men who led the Burmese communist parties for their first thirty years were concerned as to whether their ideological views and political tactics were consonant with those of foreign communist parties. While looking to Marx, Lenin, and their European interpreters as the original fount of ideological coherence, Asian parties nearer to Burma provided the most immediate and programmatic sources of interpretation. Since the 1950s the example of the Chinese Communist Party has been the leading inspiration for most Burmese communists. However, in the first decade of communist activity in Burma, the Indian Communist Party provided the closest and most congenial guidance.

There was a tremendous acceleration in newspaper publishing between 1930 and 1941 despite the Great Depression. The Malay press began to evolve into a site for discussing and debating the circumstances of Malay life in the 1930s. Rather than news, opinions, commentaries, leading articles and editorials made up the bulk of column space in Malay newspapers and magazines of the 1930s. It was a ‘viewspaper’ rather than a newspaper. New forms of public-opinion making like the editorial, increased participation in the media through letters to the editor and contributors' articles, public readings of newspapers, and the extension of newspapers into classrooms meant that a broader cross-section of Malays were able to access debates and discussions on issues of the day and raises new questions about public life in Malaya among Malays.

Before 1997 a number of social, political and academic movements combined to present a more negative image of luuk tung (Thai country music) than was warranted and as a result, the genre was understudied. This article identifies the forces that influenced the development of luuk tung's status in Thai society and demonstrates how the rising status of luuk tung since 1997 has influenced recent academic writing by Thai authors. This survey of the voices that speak on luuk tung is grounded by an analysis of the lyrics and melodies of Sorapet Pinyoo, a well-known luuk tung artist.

The mid-first millennium CE represents a crucial period in the emergence of early polities in Southeast Asia. However, disagreement remains between archaeologists and art historians as to the precise dating of this shift from prehistory to history. This article focuses on the Dvāravatī period and re-evaluates evidence in Thai and Western language publications. A growing number of sites excavated over the past two decades in particular show occupation from c. the fourth to fifth century onwards while others provide a continual sequence stretching back well into the Iron Age. I argue that evidence from these sites makes a strong case for postulating a proto-Dvāravatī period spanning c. the fourth to fifth centuries. In doing so this article proposes this period as the timeframe within which the nascent traits and characteristics of what becomes Dvāravatī in the seventh to ninth centuries are present and gradually developing.

This article re-examines the history and historiography of the Saya San Rebellion (1930–32), Burma's most famous peasant uprising and one of Southeast Asia's most frequently examined anti-colonial movements. By retracing the documents most intimately connected to the rebellion's official narrative, this study reconstructs the legal and administrative context within which this particular history was made.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

Over the years much has been written about the so-called attempted Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965. Many of the horrors depicted have concerned Balinese or abangan, nominal Muslims in Central and East Java, but little if anything has been written about the Catholic and Protestant inhabitants of those regions outside Java during the period 1965 and following, and how they coped with Communist activity in their districts. Hitherto there has been little said concerning the Christians' attitude towards the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI) — the Indonesian Communist Party — and few reasons given for some Christians becoming members of this political party. This paper is written to shed a little light on these questions and to analyse the reasons why in more than a few districts of the eastern islands the Communist Party was by no means seen by some Christians as the archetypal enemy of Christianity. This article does not, on the other hand seek to discuss the attempted coup in detail, nor specially reasons for its occurrence or its ultimate failure. Rather it intends to describe how Communism also reacted in the face of Christianity in the islands of Bali, Flores, Sumba and Timor, and how in a few cases, each flavoured, coloured and influenced the other.

This article investigates new religious movements that have emerged in post-Renovation Vietnam. The formation and development of movements that worship Hồ Chí Minh will be examined through the Way of the Jade Buddha. My analysis of this indigenous movement will discuss its controversial attempts to establish communication with the spirit of Hồ Chí Minh. It is argued that the movement is a channel through which people can empower themselves, seek legitimacy, and promote nationalistic aspirations. The emergence of such movements demonstrates the ongoing millenarian dream of social transformation in the face of the challenges of international integration and the tensions caused by maritime conflicts with China.

In southeastern China where most villages consisted of people with the same surname, lineage and clan became the foundation of the local community. As the village people moved to the cities of China or overseas, they organized clan associations to gather distant agnates and set up ancestral altars to strengthen kinship ties among clansmen. Clanship emerged in a new form to cope with changes encountered in different milieus and continued to serve its functions. The transformation, however, has never really changed the clan to a club as its membership has remained restricted even if the membership has remained restricted even if the. The clan associations retain enough kinship elements to function like a traditional clan.

Women's involvement in the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) since its establishment in 1930 until they laid down their arms in 1989 contributed much to the strength of the party. Women in the MCP have been presented largely as nurses, cooks, seamstresses, couriers, and wireless/radio operators, but they went through hardship and danger and fought the same battles as the male guerrillas. A few even climbed to the top party posts through hard work, intelligence and personal sacrifice. This paper recovers the role of women in the Malayan communist movement during the Second World War, the Emergency and after by tracing the careers and lives of party heroines / female role models as well as some ordinary cadres. Major questions include the motivations of women who joined the MCP and the challenges they faced in their roles as propagandists, comrades, guerrilla fighters and in the communist villages. This investigation provides more insight into how the revolutionary struggle transformed these Malayan women.

After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, Philippine policymakers became the first in Asia to recognise indigeneity and Indigenous rights. By law, Indigenous groups throughout the archipelago now have priority rights to their ‘ancestral domains’, but in return they are expected to maintain an ‘ecological balance’ and cooperate with environmental regulations. As in many other parts of the world, the conditionalities of recognition mean that invocations of Indigenous rights often serve to initiate ever-deeper entanglements with governmental power. At the same time, however, Indigenous Peoples and their advocates do not approach the dilemmas of recognition as hapless bystanders; rather, they negotiate them in strategic and often unexpected ways. This article considers how members of Indigenous Palawan communities in the southwestern Philippines have used dominant policy assumptions to intervene in dispossessory processes. Specifically, I examine instances in which they have: (1) codified a ‘tradition’ of inheritance to influence legislative outcomes; (2) performed the policy narrative of ‘ecological balance’ to shape the outcome of conservation interventions; and (3) filed a civil case tacitly challenging official expectations that they govern themselves as homogenous collectivities. These examples, I argue, offer broader insights into the paradoxical and at times unexpected consequences of legislating Indigenous rights.

Probably the biggest single effect that the Emergency in Malaya has visibly accomplished has been the resettlement or regrouping of nearly 650,000 “squatters” into more than 550 “new villages.” It is the purpose of this paper to examine the conditions that necessitate the resettlement and regrouping of these “squatters”, the positive law measures utilized, and the direct and indirect results that were accomplished.