Urbanization and bureaucratization are usually connected with a high rate of social mobility in western industrialized societies. In Thailand, however, mobility has declined at least between certain strata of Thai society following the consolidation of a bureaucratic elite in the expanding urban centre of Bangkok. The growing size, the monopolization of certain status symbols, the development of a distinct subculture and the concentration of economic and political power are indications that the bureaucratic elite is developing into a social class. It is therefore concluded that urbanization and bureaucratization in formerly loosely structured societies may lead to the formation of a class system and to a temporary decline of social mobility.

There was a stone fort at Malacca from 1512 to 1807. Only twice during the three centuries of its existence did this fort change hands, and it was taken by storm only once. Yet it was many times besieged, and nations which did not possess it regarded it with disfavour as a threat to the security of their communications and a hindrance, if not a barrier, to the freedom of their trade. In relation to the Malay Peninsula the fort at Malacca was of small account, for it was never used as a base for the furthering of territorial ambitions in the interior. Its importance lay rather in its. position on the flank of the main sea route between India and China. Beneath its guns fleets could be assembled and lie at anchor in security, and these fleets could be, and were, employed to attack the shipping of rival powers passing through Malacca Straits.

It is a commonplace that political development must be prepared for and planned for. Without adequate preparation and planning there will be chaos, perhaps approaching Congo-like proportions. The dangers are all the greater in multi-racial societies, such as Sarawak and North Borneo. A warning against the premature introduction of political parties in Sarawak was given by the Governor in 1959 only a few weeks before the Sarawak United Peoples' Party was founded. “It is … essential that party politics should not cause further divisions in our community but should have a unifying and binding effect. If a party tends to be dominated by one race or class … it may have a disintegrating effect on our community …… I frankly doubt if political parties at the present stage of development will spell faster progress in this small country …” These misgivings were echoed from North Borneo, by its Governor, some six months later. “People of like taste or like purpose are all too probably of like race, and nothing could promise greater disaster for this country than its division on communal lines.” The Governor knew of no multiracial society in the world “where as yet there has been evolved a satisfactory, stable or easy working form of fully representative Government”. Nearly four years later the next Governor of North Borneo warned of the danger of “mounting the tiger of political parties prematurely”. The formation of parties at this stage “carried the greatest danger of communal strife”.

During the 130 years since Chinese settlers first began coming to Sarawak, the pattern of leadership and power within the Chinese community has changed in a number of important respects. The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of the changes manifested within the Chinese elite, and to analyze the ways in which the criteria for the selection of leaders and the exercise of power have changed from the establishment of Chinese settlement in the 1830's to the contemporary situation as part of the Malaysian Federation. The emphasis is on leadership and power within the Chinese community itself. At the same time the history of the Chinese elite is treated as a problem in local history.

Malaysia consists of Peninsular Malaysia and the two East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. Development planning in Peninsular Malaysia began as early as 1950, while the first plan for the whole of the Malaysian federation founded in 1963 was published in 1966. Have the two East Malaysian states been integrated properly into the various Malaysian plans? Or have they, with their somewhat different economic, political and social backgrounds, been treated as a nuisance element and appeared in the plans only as an afterthought? In any case, is the planning experience of Peninsular Malaysia relevant for solving the problems of the much less developed East Malaysian states?

In the final three decades of the nineteenth century, the world price of silver fell dramatically. On the London silver market, the price dropped almost without check, from an average of 60d. per ounce in 1870 to 28d. per ounce in 1900. For those countries on the silver standard (and at the beginning of the period this included all the states of Southeast Asia), the result was a substantial, continuous depreciation of their currencies against gold-based currencies, most notably sterling. In turn this threatened to disturb severely the foreign trade and capital inflows of those states at a time when they were becoming more closely integrated into the international economy. For example, frequent changes in the exchange rate introduced an element of speculation into trade with gold-standard countries, with the result that merchants' calculations of profit margins were frequently thrown into confusion by sudden fluctuations in the exchange. Moreover, with the exchange value of their currency falling, these states found themselves paying increasingly more in terms of the local currency to secure the same sterling value of imports. This was a particularly important consideration for those countries dependent upon imports of capital goods, for example, mining machinery or railway equipment, as these were obtained almost solely from the gold-standard states of western Europe.

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

The history of the Malay world in the eighteenth century is characterised by a constantly shifting balance of power, extreme flexibility in the political patterns, and an ongoing search for strong friends and advantageous allies. Malay and European sources relating to the period contain an often overwhelming amount of information concerning seemingly endless conspiracies, broken treaties, negotiations, and re-alignments. Yet from this maze of detail distinct themes emerge, one of which concerns the activities of various Malay anak raja (sons of kings and pirates) and anak baik (sons of nobles). Existing material allows for the compilation of a number of interesting biographies. We can, for instance, follow the career of Perak's Raja 'Alim, who might have successfully unseated his cousin and become ruler himself had it not been for Dutch intervention. The wandering life led by a Siak prince, Raja Ismail, and his unceasing efforts to rally support for a triumphant return to his homeland are similarly described in both Malay chronicles and the missives of Dutch governors. Such accounts make for absorbing reading and undoubtedly have their own intrinsic historical value. On the other hand, it is perhaps more fruitful to regard anak raja like Raja 'Alim and Raja Ismail not so much as individuals as representatives of a distinct social category within what has been called the “ruling class.” If viewed in this light, the activities of many anak raja mentioned in the records take on a new dimension, and comments concerning their role in Malay history assume a wider application.

While student movements have only recently become internationally prominent, they have been active political and social forces in many nations for a fairly long period of time. The European nationalist movements of the 19th century had strong student support, and European revolutionary movements, including the German revolutions of 1848 and the Russian revolutionary movements, saw students in instrumental roles. In the developing areas as well students have played an important and sometimes crucial political role. Asian students have a particularly long and active history of political involvement. India, China, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other nations have all seen nationalist upsurges in the 19th and 20th centuries in which university students and Western-oriented intellectuals have been active. Many Asian nations, after achieving independence, have seen student and youth movements in opposition or as politically volatile elements in their societies. In a few nations, such as Turkey, South Korea, South Vietnam, and indirectly Indonesia, Pakistan, and Japan, students have caused governments to fall or political crises to take place.

Modern spoken theatre emerged in Vietnam in the context of the intellectual and social upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s. Plays in this period focused on the status of women, the effects of Westernization and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism. In Nam Xu′o′ng's 1930 play Ông Tây An-nam, women became conduits through which men expressed their Westernized or nationalist identities.

Indonesia's state-owned mosques are important sites for observing changes in religious life that have taken place since the demise of the Suharto regime. During the New Order period, ideological and political factors restricted access to mosques owned and managed by provincial and regency governments. In contemporary West Java, access to such mosques has been broadened, and they now display a diversity of religious programs and practices. Drawing on recent fieldwork, this article makes a case study of the intercession ritual known as manakiban which has recently emerged in government-owned mosques of West Java. It identifies two dominant factors behind the new inclusiveness: a desire for visibility and public legitimacy on the part of some members of the Sufi order that promotes the ritual, and secondly, a broadening of access to state-owned mosques as a result of more inclusive participation in the electoral process. The article contributes to knowledge of the politicisation of religion in contemporary Indonesia, and suggests new possibilities for understanding the meanings of public Islamic infrastructure.

This article traces the etymology of the term ‘revolution’ as it developed in Việt Nam between the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It argues that the term was slow to catch on, and that activists who used it did so in often contradictory ways. The term's historical development complicated efforts to fix its meaning, and it was not until the later part of the 1920s that it came to be consolidated, in part through Hồ Chí Minh's publication of a short book entitled Đường Kách Mệnh (The road to revolution).

I argue that women's literacy was more common than is usually supposed and that women engaged extensively with written literature, both as readers and writers. I also discuss the role of traditional Islamic education in transmitting literacy among girls. The article is based on the examination of a group of narrative poems written by women at the court of Penyengat.

The importance of the Portuguese sources for our knowledge of Malayan history has long been recognized. Fortunately, most of them are now available in translation, and thus accessible to historians who have difficulty in reading 16th or 17th century Portuguese.

In the first place we should mention the English translations issued by the Hakluyt Society. These are:

This article attempts to fill two gaps in two sets of inter-related historiographies, that of the diplomatic history of Singapore and that of the Vietnam war. For a number of reasons, not much had been published about the foreign policy of Singapore from the historical perspective. The Southeast Asian dimension of the Vietnam war is also starkly missing from the voluminous literature on the war. This article thus tries to describe and explain Singapore's attitude towards the war as it evolved over the ten years — from 1965, when the war really began and which coincided with the year that Singapore became independent, to 1975, a period which overlaps with the first ten years of Singapore's independence. Hopefully, this study will provide an understanding of one aspect of Singapore's foreign policy in its first 10 years as well as offer one Southeast Asian perspective on the Vietnam war.

Scholars of Southeast Asia have for several decades moved away from theories of ‘Indianisation’, in favour of theories of ‘localisation’. So far, however, there has been little attempt to apply the methodological shift from Indianisation to localisation to an important living relic of the prime agents of older Indianisation theories: the royal court Brahmans of Thailand. In this article, I examine the history of this still-functioning Southeast Asian Brahmanical institution, with respect both to evidence of its ties to India and to the ways it has been ‘localised’. I argue that it is best understood as a local articulation of kingship, negotiating a necessary tension between the foreign and the familiar in royal ritual.

In July 1922 a small private school called Nationale Onderwijs Instituut Taman Siswa was born quietly at a traditional town Yogyakarta in Central Java. Taman Siswa means literally “Garden for Pupils”. Nobody expected then that this pupils' garden would become a tough ground of resistance to the Dutch colonial Government later in the 1930's. The political climate in Indonesia around 1922 was showing a remarkable uprising of nationalism centering around the labor union movement guided by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party) and Sarekat Islam (Islam Union).

Visual arts maintain a colourful presence at Buddhist funerals in Northern Thailand. These arts are not made for mere decoration but serve an active and essential role in the ceremonies that take place after death. They echo funerary themes of the impermanent nature of life and the importance of a life filled with merit. This article examines cremation structures and funeral banners of Northern Thailand and argues that these arts not only hold significance for the living and the dead, but that in giving form to abstract concepts they have the power to guide observers in their beliefs regarding the dynamics of life and death.

Despite popular representations of Tunku Abdul Rahman as an avuncular political personality, he was also an astute policy practitioner. This was evident in how he, in pursuit of Malayan interests, calibrated Malaya's foreign policy posture towards Jakarta in a manner that not only displayed little appreciation of Indonesian sensitivities, but also undermined its political interest and status as the major power in Southeast Asia, thus contributing to bilateral tension.