The 1930s Depression caused an enormous growth in urban poverty in colonial Java. Informal neighbourhood networks could no longer cope with the unemployed, the homeless and the destitute. Politically conscious Indonesians were convinced that the colonial state was concerned only with poverty among Europeans. They responded by creating new charities focused on the Indonesian lower classes. Many provided middle-class women with opportunities for leadership denied them in the political and labour movements. However, those who managed the charities had no concept of empowering the poor. In dispensing support they made a clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Nevertheless their charitable work enabled thousands of Indonesians to survive the Depression years.

This paper provides a critical historical analysis of the Muhammadiyah movement in Singapore. I argue that four processes have been crucial in the emergence and sustenance of the Muhammadiyah within a predominantly non-Muslim society: the symbiotic relationship between the leaders and their followers, the formulation and subsequent reformulation of the ideology of the movement, political opportunities which were judiciously exploited and the availability of a wide array of infrastructures. The Muhammadiyah, as will be shown, provides an informative example of an Islamic movement in Southeast Asia that has transcended the challenges faced by the minority Muslim population by making effective use of the limited resources at its disposal.

Colonial discourse analysis has proven one of the most fruitful and significant areas of research in recent years. This paper considers the orientalist discourse and its context in the case of pre-colonial Malaya. It discusses the concept of “feudalism” as employed by historians of western Europe, by those of precolonial Malaya and, thirdly, by selected post-colonial writers. In discussing the works of Clifford, Maxwell and other nineteenth-century British officials on Malay feudalism, the author argues that the truth value of their analyses should not be dismissed out of hand, for they have much of value to say, that would repay careful study.

The Asian–African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 has been written into twentieth-century history as ‘a moment’ made up of ‘little histories’, as the titles of the two volumes reviewed here suggest. Both belong to the literature on the Bandung Conference published since its fiftieth anniversary, the broad scope of which underscores the intricate and diffuse nature of the Conference. While offering new perspectives, the contributors also add to its ambiguity: Was Bandung a continuation of the struggle against imperialism? An episode of the Cold War? A protest against centuries of racial humiliation? Or a communist plot? It may well have comprised elements of all these.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards there developed in the British colonies a distinctive set of forestry practices that came to be described as Empire forestry. These practices grew out of the same milieu as imperialism, and had their earliest expression in British India. Gregory Barton argues that Empire forestry also heavily influenced the forestry of the United States and that from there it spread to the Philippines. However, this article argues that the variant of Empire forestry developed in the Philippines was not particularly successful as its proponents failed to adequately adapt it to local social and political conditions.

For many years now, the Malaysian government's population policy has included both a growth component and a distribution component. The growth component, adopted in the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–75) and still in force, was the goal of reducing the rate of population growth from 3 per cent to 2 per cent by 1985. The distribution component, first enunciated in a coherent way in the Mid-Term Review of the Second Malaysia Plan, is a strategy for regional development with direct population redistribution consequences. The Third Malaysia Plan (1976–80) elaborated the population situation and goals in greater detail but their broad thrust remained essentially unchanged. The Fourth Plan (1981–85), while maintaining the target of lowered growth rates, emphasized the quality of human resources and was sanguine about the prospects for economic development far outstripping the rate of population growth. Indeed, earlier concern with unemployment had been replaced by worries about the emergence of labour shortages.

This article focuses on the eastern region of the Red River Delta, Vietnam, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. This area was an important centre of economic and population growth in Đại Việt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and nurtured Đại Việt's sophisticated and renowned ceramics industry, hosted leading schools of Vietnamese Buddhism and bred a rising class of scholars and bureaucrats. The region's rapid rise as an economic and political centre was, however, also the key to its undoing. The sudden spike in population density, and the intensive logging carried out for ceramic production, and temple and ship building, overtaxed the area's natural resources. The burden on the local ecology was exacerbated by the Trần dynasty's dyke building project, which shifted the river's course. The ensuing environmental deterioration might have been one major reason for the Vietnamese forsaking the large-scale ceramic production in Chu Đậu, deserting their main port, Vân Đồn, and for the Chinese abandoning a historical maritime invasion route.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Britain converted her paramountcy into effective control in the central and southern states of the Malay Peninsula (except Johore) through the device of British Residents whose advice the several Malay rulers were obliged to accept in “all matters of administration”. But strong local pressure for the extension of this system northwards into the Siamese part of the Peninsula was neutralized by the Foreign Office which sought alternative means of safeguarding British interests there. This paper examines the various arrangements considered when the intrusion of another European power appeared likely, culminating in a secret convention between Britain and Stem signed in April 1897.

On the basis of a new database of stock and commodity prices, along with measures of government revenues, commodity exports and immigration, the article assesses the impact of the opium trade on the economies of colonial Malaya, the Netherlands Indies and China from 1873 to 1911. Stock returns for a few Malayan industries related to international trade are significantly correlated with opium price changes, as are prices for labour-intensive, Chinese-dominated export commodities such as tin and gambier. However, opium price changes explain, at most, only a small fraction of the behaviour of stock and commodity prices. On balance, stock and commodity markets ascribed only secondary importance to ups and downs in the opium trade as measured by the price of the drug.

In two recent review articles, I.W. Mabbett summarizes the prehistoric and historic sources bearing on the question of “Indian influence on the development of Southeast Asian societies”. Asimilar review was undertaken by Paul Wheatley in “Satyantra in Suvarnadvipa” and more recently by Ken Hall. Each of these authors make similar points: that there are essentially three major hypotheses that have been advanced over the years to account for the spread of “Indian influence” (the Brahmana, Ksatriya, and Vaisya respectively, to which we will return); and that evidence on which to decide amongst these hypotheses is lacking. After a “brief outline of the sources on ‘Indianization’ which is practically complete”, I.W. Mabbett concludes that:

It is unlikely that prolongation of the catalogue of possible sources would add much to what has already been gleaned — more Indian trade goods, more inscriptions recording the activity of pious Hindu or Buddhist rulers, more unreliable Chinese second-hand accounts of Indian priests and Indianized “kingdoms”. The purpose in extending the catalogue this far had been twofold. In the first place, it is to make quite clear that the actual process of “Indianization” is nowhere reliably portrayed; what is portrayed by the earliest evidence is the operation of kingdoms already Indianized; and therefore the various theories that have been offered are speculation. One may seem more plausible or attractive than another, but none has been established.

The geo-political and cultural-historical context, more than any other single factor, has shaped the notion of Mranma Pran in pre-colonial times. It is derived from a longstanding reality embodied in the term anya (‘upstream’), representing Upper Burma (hence, the term anyatha, ‘offspring of Upper Burma’). Although Lower Burma also has an equivalent in the term akriy (‘downstream’), it was Upper Burma more than any other region in the country that initially exemplified the term Mranma Pran, the ‘heartland’ of the country's culture and society for over a millennium. The meaning of the term Mranma Pran (or its colonial term, ‘Burma’), therefore, depends on the context in which and by whom it is viewed.

Working from recently declassified Australian and British government files, this paper examines the archival evidence on policy thinking in London and Canberra towards the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) during the period 1970–75. The article argues that one of the main reasons for the Heath government's decision to deploy a token military force in Southeast Asia as part of a multilateral defence arrangement with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore was the desire to uphold these Commonwealth connections. By contrast, Canberra was beginning to question the value of such arrangements in a rapidly changing Southeast Asian strategic environment.

The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was a compilation of documents translated from the Spanish and edited by Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson. The former was the brains behind the project. The editors received assistance from a reviewer, one James A. LeRoy, who introduced himself as an expert in Philippine matters. The personal correspondence amongst the three persons showed how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was constructed. Blair fully trusted LeRoy's knowledge and consulted him with doubts about translation. In turn, LeRoy advised Robertson to select documents for publication and warned him about unreliable Spanish, Filipino and English scholars. The correspondence helps to explain how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 developed into a political tool in the service of the United States in order to explain the problems the Americans confronted in their new colony – a Spanish inheritance and the difficulties of training uneducated Filipinos for self-government.

Singapore became an independent sovereign state on August 9, 1965 It may be alleged that to attempt an analysis of a country's foreign policy only three years after its independence is premature. Yet there are certain basic facts about Singapore which no political leader can ignore, and these become the determinants or roots of Singapore's foreign policy. To that extent, Singapore's foreign policy is predictable because the range for manoeuvre is limited.

Among the most obvious and durable monuments to the colonial age in Asia are the great engineering projects which have permanently transformed the physical and economic geography of the continent. Many of these have an interesting history of their own, both in the political and commercial history of the country building them and on the level of international politics. This is true not only for such successfully completed projects as the Suez Canal or the Trans-Siberian Railway, but also for great schemes which were never realized. In Southeast Asia the long-discussed Kra Canal is the most famous instance of the latter, but it is not unique. Throughout most of the second half of the Nineteenth Century the British Government and especially the British business community dallied with the idea of a rail link between the Bay of Bengal and the interior provinces of China. Those familiar with the building of the Burma Road will understand the enormous engineering problems involved in such a plan. But for most of the Nineteenth Century geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia was extremely vague and the lure of a several thousand mile shortcut to the perennially fascinating markets of China exerted a strong pull on the imagination of a commercial nation. Ultimately, international political complications and sound economic logic killed ven the idea of such a railway. But the light it throws on government — business relations within the British Empire and on imperial rivalries in Southeast Asia makes the story of the first Burma Road, the one that was never built, well worth the telling.

It is the thesis of this paper that the Communist Uprisings of 1926–27 in Indonesia were neither “proto-nationalist” nor a “revolution of hope”, as they have been called by two historians. I shall try to show that there were decidedly nationalist characteristics in the demands which the Communists made, in the objects against which the revolt was directed, and in the makeup of the Communist leadership at both the highest and secondary levels; furthermore, that, despite the era of prosperity which the colony was enjoying, the situation of the peasant was worsening.

The origins of political consciousness and nationalism among the hua-ch'iao or overseas Chinese in Malaya occurred during the period 1895–1911, between the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Revolution. The major defeat suffered by China at the hands of Japan and the subsequent Reform Movement which arose in China awakened the overseas Chinese to the political situation in their homeland. The presence of reformist leader K'ang Yu-wei and revolutionary advocate Sun Yatsen and their colleagues in Malaya served to enhance hua-ch'iao concern for China. By the Revolution of 1911, nationalism among the Malayan Chinese had emerged.

In any attempt to clarify ths problems generated by the writing of history, one is always beset by the difficulty of selecting a point of departure. This is particularly the case with the study of Malaysian history, by which term I mean Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. Close as we now are to a political Malaysia, this term is used here purely in the geographical sense.

In the past two decades, social scientists have paid considerably greater attention to the possible role of native sociocultural frameworks in structuring the organization of economic enterprises. The primary research focusing on the Japanese and Chinese cases relates to the emergence of many highly competitive industries in capitalist East Asia in which relations of production do not necessarily resemble American or Western industrial relations. The following historical analysis of production relations in the pottery industry of Tân Vạn, a major centre of Southern Vietnamese ceramic production, seeks to contribute empirical data for comparative purposes within the East Asian sociocultural sphere.

Southeast Asia is the world centre of mangrove development. Not only is there a greater diversity of species, but the areas covered by mangrove forests are more extensive. This paper is concerned with the utilization of the mangrove forests in Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia (along the west coast), which is bounded by that part of the Indian Ocean called the Andaman Sea. The Burmese mangrove forests are probably very similar to these, but they will not be treated in this paper.