This article traces the development of Gaullist and British policies with respect to Indo-China from the fall of France in 1940 to the end of the Far Eastern war five years later. Directed toward restoring imperial influence in Southeast Asia, these policies were sophisticated and complex, but they bore little fruit owing to the relative strategic insignificance of Indo-China during this period, and the imperatives of Anglo-American relations.

One of the most remarkable features of the past twenty years of scholarship on the Southeast Asian performing arts has been the sparking off of ideas between Southeast Asian-born scholars, whether trained in Southeast Asian universities or overseas, and Western scholars of the Southeast arts who live in North America, Australia, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In colonial Indonesia (until 1945) and Malaysia (until 1957), research agendas of Dutch and British scholars respectively had complied with the social, economic and political priorities of the colonial powers and associated local court-centred artistic interests, though not always consciously. In Thailand, which was the only country in the region not to be colonized by a European power, Thai scholars had been actively researching their own court performing arts in the late colonial era but were nevertheless influenced by the colonial ethos of the region. In the past twenty years or so, the developing dialogue and contradictions between Southeast Asian and foreign scholars, each with their own partly distinctive assumptions and methodologies based on the priorities of their respective traditions and governments, have resulted in a healthy divergence, convergence, and cross-fertilization of ideas.

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

Colonial race relations are regularly portrayed in light of the attempts to divide and rule colonialised Asian communities. While this article does not challenge this view, it attempts to uncover a hitherto hidden level of interaction and even intermarriage at the grassroots level in colonial Malaya and Singapore. With the exception of the various Peranakan communities that predated British rule, little to no evidence exists to show that interaction and especially intermarriage existed within early first- and second-generation migrant communities during the British colonial period. The findings show how colonial attempts to encourage a heightened sense of race and its frailties may have fallen short among some sections of the Asian community.

This paper explores receptivity to agrarian change in a Malay rice farming village in Negri Sembilan in 1958–59. Villagers, who earlier were extremely resistant to agricultural change, were at that time experiencing an acceleration and convergence of several trends, among them population growth, governmental attempts to introduce new techniques in food production and increasing reliance on cash crops to buy food. A gradual acceptance of agricultural change was beginning to occur but acceptance was highly selective and the basis of selectivity was not immediately apparent. This paper attempts to specify factors responsible for the selective use of new techniques as well as those crucial to overall change.

The Federation of Malaya, formed on 1 February 1948, may be considered a major achievement in state-building in the Third World. Despite great stresses and strains, it was to survive intact until 1963 when it became the dominant part of a larger political entity. Its integrity as a politically unified system was threatened in those fifteen years by numerous secession attempts emanating from Johore (in the period 1955–1956), from Kelantan (in 1955) and from Penang (in the period 1948–1951 and 1953–1957). This article will deal with the most important of these, the Penang secession movement of 1948 to 1951.

One feature of the Malaysia Agreement of July 1963 was the provisions designed to restrict the political role of Singapore in the new Federation. To this end, in return for a fair measure of local autonomy, Singapore was to accept a reduced representation in the Federal legislature together with a minor disability through a dual Malaysian citizenship. While the government of Malaya, which was to assume the federal powers, was anxious to include Singapore in Malaysia so as to contain a subversive threat, it was concerned also to place limitations on a threat of a different order which seemed to be posed by the governing party in Singapore. The government in Singapore, which represented a predominantly Chinese electorate, was composed of men whose vision of a socialist society was not confined by the territorial bounds of the island-state. Indeed they had been long on record as to their ultimate objective. The government in Malaya — founded on a loose communal coalition which reflected Malay political dominance — was conservative in complexion and made little secret of its protection of traditional interests and of its advocacy of private enterprise. It could not but look with disfavour on the Administration in Singapore, while attitudes towards its Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, verged on the pathological.

The formation of the Kuomintang in 1912 was the culmination of a period of reform and revolution. The reformist movement in China began with the rise of men like K'ang Yu-wei, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Chang Chih-tung, who saw in the foreign penetration a threat to China's territorial integrity. These reformists prevailed upon the Emperor Kuairg Hsu, to adopt modern measures with a view to strengthening China. In 1898 a series of edicts were speedily passed for the reformation of China. These edicts, commonly known as the “Hundred Days Reform”, came to. nought when the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi carried out a coup d'etat and China returned to her former ways.

More than a decade ago, when Singapore was still part of Malaysia, the author wrote, at the invitation of the Journal of Economic History, a bibliographic essay on the economic history of that country. It turned out to be an exploration into the possibility of writing a general economic history of Malaysia. It concluded that the nineteenth century was better studied than the twentieth, and that certain states, periods, and sectors of the economy received greater attention than others. The conclusion then was that a general economic history of Malaysia was not feasible.

The impact of the West's commercial intrusion in China towards the end of the eighteenth century had significant bearing on the growth of the slave trade in Southeast Asia. It led to the crystallization of a permanent slave traffic around organized markets and depots in the Sulu Archipelago. Jolo Island, as the centre of a redistributive network encompassing the Sulu zone, became the most important slave centre by 1800. This had not always been the case. Most accounts of the Sulu Sultanate written before 1780 indicate that the internal demand for slaves at Jolo was on a much smaller scale than it was destined to become in the nineteenth century. These early writers reported that it was often more profitable for the Taosug, the dominant ethnic group in the Sulu Archipelago, to deliver slaves to the Magindanao and Bugis merchants of Cotabato (Mindanao) and Pasir (Borneo) for trans-shipment to Makassar and Batavia, than employ them in their own settlements.

While it can be accepted that the politics of the hua-ch”iao or overseas Chinese in Malaya during the pre-war period generally reflected the politics of China (overseas Chinese responses to such events as the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, the May Fourth Incident of 1919, the Tsinan Affair of 1928 and the Mukden Incident of 1931 strongly substantiate this), this quality of hua-ch”iao politics can give rise to misleading assumptions regarding other events. The Kuomintang (Nationalist)–Communist united front during the Sino-Japanese War is a case in point.

The difficulties when making an investigation into the origin of Jaranese mosques are numerous. Owing to the limited durability of the material from which they are made – in the majority of cases of wood – the remains of old mosques are rare. There are no pictures from the 16th century; from the 17th century we have only a couple; from the 18th century hardly any. In the 19th century we find more of them.

Australia's defence commitment in Malaysia-Singapore is of long standing. In the 1920's and 1930's non-Labour governments in particular had seen the Singapore base as the linchpin of Australian security. Despite Singapore's failure to play this role during World War II, the Malaysian area continued to play an important role in Australian defence thinking in the post-1945 period. Australia began participating in the ANZAM arrangement in 1949, and subsequently committed forces in the campaign against the Malayan Communists. As early as May 1950 the Menzies Government decided to send a squadron of Dakota aircraft to Malaya. In April 1955 this commitment was considerably enlarged to include an infantry battalion, a fighter wing of two squadrons and a bomber wing of one squadron, as well as a permanent naval force of either two destroyers or two frigates. This commitment has provided the basis of the Australian military presence in the area ever since Australia “associated” herself with the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement in 1959, and the extension of this agreement to Malaysia in 1963. Australia adopted a cautious policy during the period of confrontation and, for fear of antagonising Indonesia unduly, did not finally make combat forces available for service in East Malaysia until February 1965. This article is concerned primarily with developments which have affected the Australian defence presence in Malaysia-Singapore since the Wilson Government took office in the United Kingdom in October 1964. It examines the Australian reaction to the march of events in Britaín which culminated in the decision to withdraw British forces from Malaysia-Singapore by the end of 1971, and the attempt by Australia to redefine her role in the light of the new situation.

It is curious and probably quite significant that the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia has proven to be so elusive a quarry for several generations of academicians. Hundreds of thoughtful and scholarly books and articles have addressed this issue or some portion of it in one way or another, and yet our work remains on the whole strangely cautious. A sense of uneasiness hovers over our discussions. We reveal some discontent with both the textual and the conceptual underpinnings of our endeavors. To a greater or lesser extent we all appear to share David Wyatt's misgivings that we may “have it all wrong”. One might well ask why this should be so after all these years of effort.

Southeast Asia in United States policy fell from a region of high priority during the Vietnam war to become, after the fall of Indochina, an area of relatively minor interest. For the United States, Southeast Asia evoked memories of misperception, intensified over-commitment, and simplistic assumptions that characterized the American effort to defeat local Vietnamese national communism. Since the formulation of the Nixon doctrine of disengagement in 1969, United States policy towards Southeast Asia has been undergoing a process of long-term readjustment in recognition of the exaggerated significance that the region had assumed in American thinking. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 was a major stimulus to this readjustment as it gave the Americans compelling reasons to anticipate a reassertion of Soviet influence in the region. Successive American administrations attempted to place the region in a wider global context to avoid the dangers of extreme reaction to local national communism while developing the flexibility to coordinate a response to the Soviet Union at a global level. The main concern of American policy was to remove the basis for direct United States involvement in the region in a way that would satisfy post-Vietnam war public and congressional opinion and the demands of strategic planners for greater freedom of manoeuvre against the Soviet Union.

This article examines the emergence of twentieth-century technological development policies in the Netherlands East Indies from broader welfare policies formulated in the nineteenth century. Identity became particularly important in policymaking as officials disputed whether differences between Javanese and European culture could explain why the Javanese did not flourish under colonial rule, and whether encouraging Javanese to become more like Europeans would solve ‘Native’ welfare problems. Technical experts, whose development projects would increasingly define what a ‘developed’ Native would be, became crucially important players in debates about ‘Europeanizing’ the indigenous people.

With the end of effective resistance to British rule after the Third Anglo-Burmese War, Burma experienced significant economic growth, which led to larger numbers of foreign travellers going there. This article traces the publications of three travel writers – Mrs Ernst (Alice) Hart, R. Talbot Kelley and V. C. Scott O'Connor – by investigating the ways in which they relied on the concept of ‘picturesque’ to understand Burmese landscapes.

This article examines the development in the trade of lakawood as an example of the passage of a commodity from its initial introduction to being highly prized by its recipient market from the Song to early Ming period, and attempts to understand the interactive dynamics of the maritime trade between China and the Malay world at a micro level during the classical period of the Malay world's history.

After making a comparative study of the Chinese Batavia Kong Koan archives between its earlier and later periods, this article discusses what was an apparently inevitable localisation of immigrants' identities, in the context of immigration, settlement and, in particular, intermarriage.