Malaya at the start of the twentieth century, in common with much of the non-European world, had a peasant economy upon which a highly capitalized export economy was being grafted. The main export in the 19th century was tin, but tin took second place to rubber by 1916. There was, as is characteristic of export economies, a great disparity between the resources, particularly capital, available to the indigenous peasant population and those available to the export sector. There were, however, distinctive features to the Malayan situation, the most important being that the capitalist export economy did not draw on the subsistence sector for produce, labour, or food; food was imported, as was the labour used in mining and on estates. The output from rubber and coconut smallholdings, many of which were Malay owned, augmented Malaya's exports, particularly after 1910, but mines and estates operated independently from the indigenous rural population. There was a high level of coincidence between ethnic groupings and occupational specializations, and the economic division between peasant cultivation and the export sector also marked the ethnic division between Malays and non-Malays. Because the colonial administration nominally held power on behalf of the Malay population, the question of the welfare and economic role of the Malays had political implications disproportionate to its economic importance.

Tan Cheng Lock was born in Malacca in 1883. His father Tan Keong Ann, his illustrious grandfather Tan Choon Bock, and his great grandfather were also born there, while his great great grandfather Tan Hay Kwan, who had migrated from Fukien as a youth to Malacca in the latter part of the eighteenth century (circa 1765), had died there in 1801. The Tans by now have been part of Malacca for over two hundred years.

Human nature is inevitably concerned with the past which, for nations no less than for individuals, forms a framework for present attitudes and sometimes a justification for present actions. In the developed countries of the West this framework is easily and frequently obscured, although its presence can be readily demonstrated. For those nations which have, until recently, been controlled by one or other of the European powers, however, the past provides a framework to which national appeal is often made in a particularly explicit way.

In 1968 David E. Bell, vice-president of the Ford Foundation, said: “Fifteen years ago, many thought it was a relatively simple matter to raise farm output in less-developed countries. All that was needed was to make U.S. technology available to the farmers in those countries by establishing extension services or their equivalent. This notion rapidly proved to be a monumental misconception.” The monumental misconception was that peasants in less-developed countries would be eager to maximize food production in order to overcome perennial food shortages, if they had the opportunity to learn the techniques of Western agriculture. This did not happen. Indonesian peasants, after learning of the techniques of the Green Revolution, rejected full participation in it. Why? Many observers in Indonesia and elsewhere have partially explained this rejection but in my opinion they missed the main reason because they failed to recognize that peasant cultures have social values and institutions that act as strong restraints on food production.

Though the Persatuan Melayu Selangor (PMS) was not the first association of its kind in the peninsular states, there are several arguments in favour of selecting it for particular attention. To begin with, it is the only Malay political (or quasi-political) organisation of the 1930s for which anything like detailed records exist — a determinant of considerable, if perhaps chance, importance. That these records do exist may well, indeed, be more than a mere accident of time, reflecting rather the relative sophistication of the PMS in organisation and administrative procedure, its fondness for getting everything down on paper, preferably in multiple copies, and its very active life.1 Apart from this, however, the PMS is particularly interesting in other ways, in terms of its leadership (somewhat more variegate than that of other associations), of its close connection with at least one Malay national newspaper, and of the leading role it played not only in bringing about the two national congresses of state Malay associations before the war, but in providing the chairman for these meetings and helping to determine their agenda. This paper will be concerned primarily with the first year of the PMS, from June 1938 to May 1939 (the period covered by the records), but some attempt will be made to set it in context and to outline its later history.

This paper examines a system of economic relations in Northern Thailand linking Karen and Hmong communities in the western highlands with traders from the lowlands. I shall describe the salient features of this tripartite system as it existed in the late 1960s and argue that it was essentially a product of opium cultivation and commerce. I also argue that it contributed towards a serious level of indebtedness among Karen and that this indebtedness tended, in turn, to widen wealth differences in Karen communities. Finally, I shall consider some of the economic changes that have led to a breakdown in the system i n recent years.

Central Thailand comprises three ecologically distinctive areas, i.e. the mountain area, the floodplain and the delta, as shown in Fig. 1.

These three areas relied on irrigation agriculture making full use of the distributary system of intermountain basins. The mountain area was the main stage for the traditional “Muang” during the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries.

Two nineteenth-century Balinese genres in which the erotic predominates are epic kakawin poetry and tutur (religious manuals) on sexual yoga. The article points to the strong intertextual links between these diverse genres. Through their focus on practical sexual matters and on the pursuit of sexual pleasure as integral to spiritual growth, tutur and kakawin also offer insight into notions of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Bali.

As issues of gender and sexuality become an increasingly important focus in cultural studies, the work of the once popular woman writer of the 1950s and 1960s, Thidaa Bunnaak, draws Thai literature into the debate. This paper investigates the sexually explicit nature of Thidaa's fiction and the multiple meanings that erotic references might hold.

Despite their profound differences all of Cambodia's post-independence regimes have exhibited a unique obsession with protecting the country's borders from the depredations of neighbouring states. Some of this is fall-out from the colonial inheritance but this paper argues that older indigenous categories related to Theravada Buddhism have also played a significant role in the aetiology of modern Khmer territorialism. By showing how the traditional maṇḍala arrangement of space was being eroded at around the same time as the old monastic conception of a ritual boundary was purified, rationalised and extended under the influence of Buddhism modernism the author seeks to provide a Southeast Asian illustration of Carl Schmitt's insight that certain important elements of the modern state are, in fact, secularised religious concepts.

This article develops an argument about the business culture and managerial organization of the colonial Indonesian sugar industry. It argues that developments in both spheres during the third quarter of the nineteenth century — largely ignored in the relevant research literature — played an appreciable role in assuring the industry's survival in the crisis conditions of the 1880s, when the world price of sugar fell dramatically. An important explanation of such changes, it will be suggested, is to be found in the technological progress which took place in some sectors of the industry from the 1840s onward. This development, delineated here in terms of a “colonization” of the sugar factory or fabriek, began to set the industry apart from the dominant colonial socio-cultural environment in which it was situated, and to prefigure an ethos more commonly associated with the final decades of Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. A nascent business culture was paralleled, moreover, by changes to the ways in which both the fabriek itself and the industry in general were run — changes which pointed to the early growth of a specifically managerial type of enterprise within an industry where such developments have usually been allocated to the closing decades rather than the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Taken together, as will be argued, the two developments — however embryonic — formed one of the foundations which enabled the colonial sugar industry to survive a perìod of severe crisis in the mid-1880s and resume a vigorous expansion by the century's end.

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.

With few exceptions, commentators agree that bandits were a major socio-economic phenomenon of the nineteenth-century Philippines. Historians and contemporary observers are united in lamenting the deplorable state to which the countryside was reduced by their depredations. Bandits infested the roads and rivers, ravaged fields and farms, sacked towns, pillaged churches and set light to houses in an orgy of murder, robbery and rapine in which there was “hardly an evil deed that their rash boldness [did] not perform”. Modern historiography has usually been content to interpret such crimes as either being indicative of social tensions within a society or as representing “a basic social activity with its own internal logic and historical development”. Only superficial attention has been paid to the environment within which these crimes were committed, historians merely noting that such and such an offence was committed in an urban or rural setting.

Based on Cambodian and French archival records, which include colonial and local administration reports, tax rosters and judicial sources, this paper explores landownership in Cambodia in the 1930s. It shows that, contrary to common belief, land access was already an issue in the 1930s. The study of tax registers of three communes in the province of Kompong Thom presents a Khmer rural society dominated by peasants with average-sized landholdings, but where landless peasants or those with very small holdings also existed. It also stresses that women were able to become efficient farm operators. In addition, this analysis of the different sources available shows that Khmer rural society in Kompong Thom was a form of gerontocracy dominated by men aged over 40.

The understanding of Angkorian pre-state society has been greatly enhanced by an increase in archaeological investigation in recent years. From excavations conducted at Cambodian Iron Age sites we have evidence that attests to a transformative period characterised by increasing sociopolitical complexity, intensified inter- and trans-regional mercantile activity, differential access to resources, social conflict, technological transfer and developments in site morphology. Among the growing corpus of Iron Age sites excavated, Phum Lovea, on the periphery of Angkor, is uniquely placed to provide insight into increasing sociopolitical complexity in this area. The site is one of the few prehistoric moated settlements known in Cambodia and the only one to date to have been excavated. Excavation of the site has revealed an Iron Age agrarian settlement whose occupants engaged in trade and exchange networks, craft specialisation, metal production, and emergent water management strategies. These attributes can be seen as antecedent to the profound developments that characterise the first millennium CE polity centred on Angkor.

Our recent discovery and excavation of a series of iron smelting furnaces, dated to the eighth and ninth century CE, near upland Rmet villages in northwest Laos, potentially sheds new light on the role of regional upland groups during the immediate pre-Tai period. The oral tradition associated with these furnaces emphasises the role of an ancient population of metallurgists who left the area under pressure from the Rmet. These stories could refer to the actual arrival and departure (immigration and emigration) of a population of metallurgists in that area sometime during the second half of the first millennium CE or they can support the scenario of a dissimilation process. The latter would explain the existence of a Rmet subculture that the locals regard as ‘Chueang Lavae’ villages, a differentiation that Karl G. Izikowitz had labelled ‘Upper Lamet’ in the 1930s. Our finds show that archaeology and ethnology can both contribute to a much-needed reformulation of upland Lao history.

The minority tribal groups in the border zones of Southern Thailand (the ‘Sakai’) are often described as ‘disappearing’ demographically while the inability to ‘know’ them at first hand by successive interested parties (the colonial explorer, the naturalist, the government official) has been attributed to their ability to disappear into the jungle, seemingly without a trace. This paper discusses the way the ‘Sakai’ have faded in and out of ethnology and Thai public consciousness, due in part to their own survival imperatives, and in part to the character of Thai state and society.

Ever since the Separation on 9th August 1965, the principal leaders of Malaysia and Singapore have expressed the view that their separated states would be compelled by the forces of historical, geographical, economic and social ties to reunite some day. When this would be accomplished has not been clearly defined nor has the manner of their reunification been suggested. Tengku Abdul Rahman, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, merely stated that Singapore would be welcomed back sometime in the future, while Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore Prime Minister, admitted that it could be a task for the next generation to seek reunification. However, both were hopeful that at some future date circumstances would be more conducive than they were prior to 1965, for another attempt at merger. It is generally agreed that the Separation was a political separation arising from the incompatibility of the political views of the Alliance-controlled central government and the state government of Singapore in the hands of the People's Action Party (PAP). It has also been implied that the fact of their interdependency in several basic fields even after Separation could well provide a strong basis for some form of reunification.

Although, as a result of a boom in tin prices, Kuala Lumpur grew very rapidly in the last two years of the 1870s, and the headquarters of the British administration of Selangor were moved there from Klang in 1880, it still remained a pioneer mining town. A number of contemporary descriptions exist of the town (admittedly seen through European eyes), as it was in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These all portray a small, but bustling, “raw and rumbustious” settlement, with a very large Chinese element in its population; indeed, one visitor in 1879 termed it a “great Chinese village”. This settlement consisted almost wholly of wooden, attap or mud houses, arranged in the haphazard manner which had resulted from its rapid and unplanned growth. One of the major hazards which the town faced at this time was fire, and it was mainly through the fear of extensive fires that the town began to be replanned and rebuilt during the 1880s.