Over the 400 years of the Lê dynasty (1428–1788), the village in northern Vietnam progressively evolved as an administrative institution. The article traces this process, and analyses the changing relationship between villages and the central government, contrasting the early decades of the dynasty when the court exercised strong control over the village with later centuries when the trend was towards autonomy.

Relations between Australia and Indonesia became strained within months of Indonesia's attainment of independence, deteriorating as conflict developed first on the question of West Irian and then as a result of Indonesia's hostility towards Malaysia. For many years, it seemed ironical that Australia should have played a major part in the emergence of a neighbour whose external policies and internal trends endangered rather than safeguarded Australian interests. But there is more involved here than historical irony in the context of Australian-Indonesian relations. Sufficient time has now elapsed for Australian policy on the Indonesian independence question to be seen in the wider context of the whole postwar phenomenon of decolonisation. For it is not merely of interest that Australia should have assisted neighbouring Asian rebels against a European colonial Power (remembering that Australia herself was, and is, a European colonial Power) and should then have been embarrassed by the activities of the rebels coming to office. It is of greater interest that, of the immense number of colonial issues anxiously engaging the attention of international society in the 1940s and 1950s, the years which saw the virtual demise of western colonialism, this was the one issue on which Australia took up the rebel cause. Throughout this period and irrespective of the complexion of the parties in power in Canberra, Australia persistently jeopardised her regional objective of friendly relations with anti-colonial Asia by opposing strongly and, at times, bitterly the anti-colonial cause in the United Nations. If nothing else, the United Nations has provided a forum in which each year Australia and other members have been forced to declare themselves on colonial questions. And, until the 1960s when Australia switched policy, Australia fought against all the anti-colonial Powers' largely successful attempts to have developed a system of international control over colonies under the authority of Chapter XI (“Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories”) of the United Nations charter, to tighten the trusteeship system of supervision erected under Chapters XII and XIII of the charter, and to involve the United Nations in particular disputes so as to meet alleged threats to peace — all of them being attempts, however indirectly, to hasten the attainment of independence by dependent territories. Thus, Australia supported South Africa on South-West Africa, the Netherlands on West New Guinea, the British on Southern Rhodesia and Oman, the Portuguese on their African territories, the French on Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. But Australia opposed the Netherlands on the Indonesian question.

Archaeological data over the past two decades have contributed to our understanding of the transition into the historic period in Southeast Asia and rebutted outdated models of externally stimulated complex polity formation. This article investigates the transition into the Pre-Angkorian period 300–500 CE based on a model constructed using archaeological data from Thala Borivat, Cambodia. Data from Thala Borivat suggest a pattern of continuity where smaller proto-historic settlements may have become incorporated c.300–500 CE into larger ones which became major Pre-Angkorian centres. This phenomenon coincided with evidence of increasing inter- and intra-regional interaction following the proto-historic period. This article argues that the model can be used to reinterpret the pattern observed in major Pre-Angkorian centres in the Mekong Delta and northeast Thailand. This pattern is complemented by the spatial correlation between the chronometrically-anchored ceramic traditions in proto-historic and early historic period Cambodia that suggests the continuity of local communities. Spatial correlation between prehistoric sites and inscriptions recording Pre-Angkorian elites, particularly the poñ, mratāñ, and kings provides similar patterns of continuity between the elites of the late proto-historic to the Pre-Angkorian periods.

Until the fifteenth century, Vietnam was essentially a Buddhist country. The piety of the dynasties constituted their source of legitimacy, and Buddhism provided a means for royal authority to penetrate and incorporate the local political structure. In the face of the development of social unrest, however, Confucian literati started to voice their concern for the maintenance of order and eventually emerged in the fifteenth century as spokesmen for royal authority, definers of public morality and guardians of the court. As a result, institutional Buddhism lost the court patronage it had previously enjoyed, and henceforth its political influence declined steadily.

Based on surviving local records, this essay argues that after 1943 Japanese policy towards Islam underwent far-reaching changes when the faith, religious elites and religious edifices were incorporated into the Japanese propaganda machinery for the purpose of winning a war in which neither Islam nor Malay-Muslims had any vested interest.

British Malaya before the Japanese occupation was heavily dependent on imported rice, producing on average only 35 per cent of its requirements between 1920 and 1940. During the 1930s, efforts were made to expand rice cultivation, but progress was slow and did not even keep pace with population growth: imports increased at the same rate as domestic production.

As war approached, the government of Malaya built up a stockpile of rice and had about one year's supply in reserve when the occupation began. However, a considerable proportion of this grain was appropriated for military use and the civilian population soon faced food shortages.

It has become a commonplace of Malayan historiography that the period following the end of the Pacific War witnessed the establishment of a pattern of political life which has persisted in its main features into the present decade. Existing accounts have focused around the restructuring of the British presence in Malaya under a military administration and the introduction of, and opposition to, the Malayan Union scheme in 1946 and the Federal structure which succeeded it in April 1948. These years saw the emergence of an ethnically based nationalist movement and the defeat of a radical challenge to its predominance. The communal and insurrectionary violence which was a feature of the period has been represented as a constraint to subsequent political action — as a limit to what the structure of Malaya's pluralism could tolerate — and the constitutional struggles as a lost opportunity to effect its transformation. Whilst it is hard to exaggerate the importance of these events in shaping the landscape of Malaysian politics, there is a sense in which the sophistication of these political and constitutional preoccupations suggests uneven development within the historical writing as a whole. The social context which stimulated change, and the breadth of the local response which dignified it, has been marginalized in many accounts. There has been a tendency to conceive the state system and the colonial presence in Malaya within the bounds of a paradigm governed by the constitutional settlement, and the various phases of insurrection and political change as primarily the products of the subversive or nationalist imagination.

Kalah was the earliest recorded settlement of Muslims in this part of the world, and from Arab and Persian descriptions of it from the middle of the ninth to that of the fourteenth century, it was undoubtedly an important port in South East Asia.

But where was it actually located? The problem has baffled some of the best minds of the east and the west. It has been debated since 1718. During this long period eminent historians, geographers, Arabicists, Indologists and Sinologists have made an effort at solving the riddle, but at best they have succeeded only partially. Earlier attempts at identification were very much wide of the mark. Abbe Renaudot (1718) who initiated the debate identified it with Malabar, while Gildemeister (1838) located it in Coromandel, and Reinaud (1845) equated it with Galle in Ceylon. Alfred Maury (1846) was the first to realise that the search for it must be made in the Malaysian region and he suggested Kedah. Walckenear (1852) made this equation famous by accepting it in his commentary on the story of Sindbad the sailor. P. A. van der Lith (1883–6) gave massive support to it in his elaborate and erudite discussion on the subject in his annotation and edition of Buzurg bin Shahriyār's Book of the Marvels of the Indies. It seemed that van der Lith had clinched the issue by getting the philological support from no less an eminent authority on the subject than M. Kern, who stated that the Malay d was pronounced very like an Arab 1. And then followed a galaxy of great Arabicists, like de Goeje (1889) and G. Le Strange (1905) all of whom accepted this equation. Pelliot (1901) and other Sinologists, and Coedes (1918) and other Indologists found it handy in their own search of Malaysian place-names.

In recent years a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical activity in social and historical demography has been directed towards assessment of the relationship between modernization and household size and structure. Largely stimulated by Levy's postulation of discrepancies between idea and actual household configurations, Burch's pioneering cross-national evaluation of the Levy thesis, and the monumental historical demographic research of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, studies have been conducted both historically in currently developed societies, as well as in contemporary developing societies. Focused on the co-residential domestic group, these social demographic investigations have questioned long-standing assumptions and conventional wisdom in family sociology with respect to such issues as the universality of extended family co-residential arrangements in pre-industrial societies, the implicit smooth evolutionary trend from extended to nuclear household structures, and the relative contribution of variations in the size of nuclear and extended (as well as non-relative) membership components to variations in overall household size.

This paper comprises an enquiry into the unrest in the Belait and Tutong districts of Brunei at the turn of the twentieth century. After outlining the course of the disturbances, I shall examine their causes, explain why the recrudescence of violence (after a period of calm) early in 1901 led to a departure in British policy towards the Sultanate, and finally, show how the factors which had given rise to the original disaffection were removed, and lasting peace restored, under a reformed administration introduced at the beginning of 1906. First, however, some background information is necessary.

Phạm Sū Mạnh's name first appears in the annals during the 1340s, and by 1358 he is described as a hanh-khǐên. Several of his surviving poems were written when he was travelling on duty in northwestern Vietnam, perhaps in the 1360s. In 1364 and 1365, military precautions were taken on the northern border to safeguard Vietnam from consequences of the civil warin southern China on the eve of the Ming dynasty's accession in 1368.

The publication of Dr. C. D. Cowan's Nineteenth Century Malaya in 1961 was a significant landmark in the historiography of British intervention in Malaya. His view of the reasons for intervention has shown signs of becoming the newly orthodox view of a well-known crux in Malayan historical interpretation, being given prominence in a number of recent Malayan history books. After studying the London records, he came to the conclusion that “the decision to take some action in Malaya, and if necessary to intervene in the affairs of the states, was provoked not by conditions in the Peninsula, nor by any consideration of British economic interests there, but by fear of foreign intervention.” This conclusion has since been supported by another student of the Colonial Office side of things, Dr. W. D. MacIntyre, and seems to relegate previous interpretations to the limbo of historiographical curiosities.

Most of the stories we know about the Vietnamese goddess Liêu Hanh derive from Doàn thi Diêm's story Vân Cát Thân Nũ Truyên. This article analyses the story, arguing that in fact it is a piece of fiction which reflects the author's views, experiences and aspirations for greater freedom for women.

The impact of the conquering Japanese upon the Indian communities of Southeast Asia and upon the Indian soldiers captured there led, within a few months, to the formation of an Indian National Army intended to fight for the Independence of India alongside the Japanese, and to the establishment of an Indian Independence League embracing the civilian population of the whole area. The Japanese impact was harsh; the requirement from the conquered populations was total quiescence; military operations must not be hampered, Japanese needs for supplies and labour must be met without hesitation. Where this could be secured through an existing colonial administration as in Indochina, by enforcing the collaboration of a national government as in Thailand, or by playing on latent nationalism as in Burma, so much the better. Otherwise the method was terror: massacre, random execution, torture. It is the method of invading armies; it was the German method, the Russian method, the method of Genghiz Khan. That it wasemployed by the Japanese in the countries of Southeast Asia is basic to the history of the period.

Historians have examined the Japanese peace settlement of 1951 in a variety of ways. A few have treated it as an episode in the ongoing evolution of the structure of international relations in the Pacific and East Asia. Most have focused on the interaction between the principal victor, the United States, and vanquished Japan, weighing the negotiating successes and failures of each and assessing the impact of the settlement on subsequent Japanese-American relations. Recently still other historians have exploited newly available archival materials to analyze the role middle-range powers such as Australia and Britain played in shaping the 1951 peace treaty. While this research has revealed a great deal about the San Francisco peace settlement, it has left unexplored the part small powers played in a major restructuring of the Pacific/East Asian international order.

Over the past several decades a considerable body of scholarly literature has accumulated concerning the evolution of Thai social and political patterns, behaviour, and values, and our study of Thai society now is much more solidly-based than it was only a generation ago. One might legitimately begin to wonder, however, whether we might not “have it all wrong”. The question is not entirely flippant. Much of what has been written on such subjects has little solid historical depth. Historians' study of Thailand prior to the nineteenth century remains relatively superficial, based on very scanty sources; and to the extent that social scientists and others have depended on the historians, none would argue that they have been completely well-served. Even more seriously, however, one can argue that there has been a good deal of reading contemporary and recent situations back into the past; and even historians' analyses of pre-Chakri social and political history have been all too readily the prisoner of a narrow, linear view of Thai history as the political succession of kingdoms from Sukhothai to Ayudhya to Bangkok.

The demise of elective local government in the State of Penang, Malaysia, is worth examining for several reasons. George Town, the state capital, was the first British settlement in the Far East; traces of elective local government appeared in the city early in the nineteenth century and the subsequent development of local government in the city followed British theory and practice to such a degree that at the time of Malayan Independence in 1957 the George Town City Council was a remarkable replica of a British town council. To study the George Town Council after Independence is thus to study a transplanted western institution which failed to survive within an Asian political system. Of more significance, however, is the light which a study of elective local government in Penang casts upon the fundamental transformations now underway in local government throughout Malaysia. Penang was the only state in the Federation to attain fully developed elective local government. Penang was one of the two states (the other was Malacca) in which all state territory and all state citizens were within the jurisdiction of local authorities. Penang however, was the only state in which every local authority consisted entirely of elected members and the only state in which every local authority was financially autonomous of the state government. Yet in 1966 the George Town Council was suspended and in 1971 the remaining local authorities were suspended as well. Penang became the first state in the federation to have no elective local government at all. It now seems likely that the other Malaysian states will follow Penang's lead (indeed, Malacca did so in early 1972), since it is now clear that the sanguine view of elective local government originally held by state and central officials has given way to one of pessimism and distrust. In July 1971 the Minister of Local Government indicated in Parliament that the central government believed that elective local government should be abolished. For these reasons, and for others which will become apparent in this paper, a study of the decline of elective local government in Penang provides an opportunity not only to test the hypotheses which have already been advanced to explain the demise of elective local government in the State itself, but also to test wider hypotheses advanced to explain the actions of national and state government towards elective local government throughout Malaysia.