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.

The identity of “Southeast Asia” has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of “early modern”, a term which seems set to displace “precolonial” in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared “periods” that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of “early modern” in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a “modern Europe” against a “yet to be modernized non-Europe”. But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as “classical” and “colonial/modern”. The term “early modern” itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

Shrimp farming in Southeast Asia is often touted as a globalisation success story. The region emerged as a key area for farmed shrimp production in the 1990s, and it remains a leading producer of shrimp for export to international markets to this day. This achievement has not, however, been without cost. Small-scale shrimp farmers in Southeast Asia have suffered persistent social, economic and environmental dislocations stemming from price pressures imposed by globalisation and neoliberal economic policies in the seafood sector. Community supported fisheries (CSF) represent an alternative marketing model which could potentially support small-scale producers in Southeast Asia whose viability is threatened by the intensification of shrimp production by large corporate interests. This article investigates opportunities for CSF in the region, encourages research that builds social capital in aquaculture communities, and identifies opportunities to link small-scale shrimp farming operations with local markets that seek high quality seafood produced in an environmentally sustainable and socially responsible manner.

Responding to the new forces unleashed by the Second World War, Whitehall planners devised a new scheme that envisaged the creation of Malayan Union Citizenship. In a fundamental break from past practice, the new scheme sought to confer citizenship privileges on Malaya's non-Malay population. In the aftermath of the War the implementation of the new policy embroiled the Colonial Office in a major constitutional controversy that threatened not only Britain's traditional relationship with the indigenous Malay community but also the bases of British rule in Malaya.

With the transformation from the Malay kerajaan rule based on economic extraction and the capability to take life to British colonial rule, Malays aspiring to govern others were now subject to a set of mundane disciplinary techniques seeking to promote a bureaucratic ethos that precipitated around academic merits, team spirit and above all the strange distinction between public and private spheres of action.

“[Your committee] are not aware that anything material has been omitted that could have conduced to the welfare of the Association, or the trade of India and China generally…They have not failed to maintain their communications with the different Presidencies in India and the Chambers of Commerce at Canton and Singapore.”

This essay considers the importance of looking at writings for children for historical analysis, particularly in times of war, focusing on magazines published for youth in South Vietnam in the early 1970s. Two magazines, Thiếu Nhi and Thằng Bờm, in particular, are studied in terms of their editorial aims and contents, as well as their young readers' submissions in response to contemporary sociocultural issues raised in these magazines. The lively discussions in these magazines were made possible by the relative freedom of expression in South Vietnam, compared to North Vietnam, which was an important reason for the civil war being fought. Yet this freedom also challenged the fabric of Vietnamese society. The strongest concern of these magazines' initiators, editors and writers was that its readers not lose their sense of being Vietnamese in the face of the great wartime flood of American popular culture that captivated many youth. Anxiety that the younger generation would be Americanised and lose their identity struck at the core of what the war was being fought about: i.e. different versions of being Vietnamese in the modern world. This threat of Americanisation to fundamental Vietnamese values was perceived by some intellectuals in the South as more serious than the threat of communism, because at least the communists were Vietnamese.

This article examines one Cambodian village's efforts to resettle a war-altered landscape and reconstruct a sense of belonging in the aftermath of war. The resettlement of Reaksmei Songha village entailed physically settling over the sediments and traces of a fractured and violent past, as settlers cleared a landscape of foliage and the explosive remnants of war. Settlers living side by side had often fought on different sides of the war, yet divisive former allegiances were rarely discussed. Instead, a post-war sense of communal belonging was constructed through references to accounts of the resettlement period, focusing upon common elements of struggle and hardship.

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

Tun Abdul Razak, the prime minister of Malaysia, has recently announced that his Government cannot consider the claim to the Limbang River made by the Sultan of Brunei. This dispute has its origins in the 1880's when North Borneo and Sarawak were intriguing against each other to gain possession of the remains of the once powerful Sultanate. Since that time the problem of the Limbang has smouldered continually, every now and then breaking into a fitful glow. The problem is a complex one and has not hitherto received detailed scholarly analysis.

Will peace in Vietnam and neutralised Indochina bring stability to Southeast Asia? Or will most of the area fall under a China-North Vietnam condominium? Can the Nixon doctrine, with the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the background, assure the security of a regional association? Or will the Japanese — the flag following trade — gather Southeast Asia into a new co-prosperity sphere?

The 19th century is chosen as a period for a static section study of the population of Kedah for a number of reasons. The most important is perhaps the feasibility of the study at all, for as with the other states of Malaysia, no statistically based discussion on population or landuse can be undertaken for periods earlier than the 19th century. Secondly, the population of the State during that century provides us with a picture of what the situation was like, and what it might have continued to be, with regards to numbers, composition and distributions, prior to the drastic demographic and economic upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The existence within the State's population of certain elements and situations peculiar to the century alone provide other points of interest. Examples were the presence of a large Thai element and of the Jawi Pekan community, both of which became conspicuously absent after the census of 1911.

From at least the early sixteenth century, when Tomé Pires acclaimed the marvels of Malacca, Westerners have evinced an interest in the cities of Southeast Asia, though for different reasons and from varying perspectives. Travellers like Cesare Fredrici, Ralph Fitch, and Gasparo Balbi were generally impressed with what they saw and compared it favourably in many respects with Europe of the 1580s. In the course of the two hundred years, however, this appreciation altered markedly. Western authors after the late eighteenth century took a less sanguine view and tended to describe towns and cities rather disparagingly as little more than collections of villages. During the late 1920s, the panorama made possible by the advent of air travel in Southeast Asia distinguished clearly between rural and urban areas, but showed the latter as thoroughly Europeanized enclaves. In the popular aerial photographs of the day, these cities appeared slick in their new tropical-colonial architectural style and uncomplicated by large or even particularly visible non-European populations.

Dato Sir (now Tun) Cheng-lock Tan is best known today for his. leadership of the Malayan Chinese after the Second World War, in connection with the Federation of Malaya constitutional proposals, the Emergency, and the attainment of independence by Malaya. Even before the War, however, Dato Tan had established himself as a distinguished public figure and, in a sense, as a political leader.

This is the first part of a study made in my seminar on the relations between the German ports Hamburg and Bremen and the trading centres in the area of the Indian Ocean. The study covers the whole period from the end of the eighteenth century until the beginning of the First World War. For reasons of time and space this paper is limited to the first part of the study which deals with the period up to 1870.

In the on-going debate over the consequences of national policies of political and economic integration in pluralistic nations such as the Philippines, two facts have become increasingly obvious. We need to know more about the effects of the patterns of political incorporation and more about the type of economic strategies pursued by individuals to judge the effects of integration on peripheral populations. Our former views of the monolithic nature of external influences have been modified; new research has made it apparent that local populations have certain resources at their disposal which can influence the direction of political and economic change. One such resource is the manipulation of the discrepancy between state law and customary law, a strategy which often includes the use and/or invention of custom. This paper uses diachronic data from one upland community in the northern Philippines to illustrate how individuals have manoeuvred within and utilized the conflicts between the provisions of customary law and national legal codes in order to pursue certain economic strategies. The creative process of inventing custom is demonstrated, since the patterns of communal ownership which have been set against Philippine state property law in this region, and which have been used to support claims for regional autonomy, are shown to be a relatively new jural construct. The paper suggests that there are no clear winners in these strategies, elite prerogatives have been eroded in favour of poorer families and the community as a whole has suffered from increased factionalism. This in turn suggests that should regional autonomy be granted in this region, conflict will not necessarily be reduced by a return to customary practice.

Thailand is primarily a peasant society. In 1974, about 65 per cent of the labour force earned their livelihood from agriculture, although 87 per cent of the population lived in rural areas. Because land has been relatively abundant until recent years, most farmers are landowners, with noted exceptions of tenant farming in areas contiguous to Bangkok. Their simple occupational skills have been transmitted from one generation to another within the village and family, supplemented only by up to four years of compulsory elementary education, acquired intermittently and sporadically between the ages of seven and fourteen. The basic necessities of life historically have been easily satisfied in a hospitable, tropical climate.