Teaching Political Science in Southeast Asia can be an easy academic exercise. Structure the courses after those of a department in an established university in Europe or America, use the textbooks produced by the major publishing companies, list the references carefully worked out by their counterparts in some western universities, organize the facts and points in the texts, present them in class, give one or two examinations to find out how much the students know, mark them strictly or leniently, hand in the grades to the Registrar's office and the academic year is over. With few exceptions, everything seems to be ready-made for the teacher and the student.

The focus of the article is on the policy perspectives of the colonial state in Malaya vis-à-vis business, Western and Chinese. It touches on the policy outlook of the periods preceding the inter-war years before exploring various related topics (the question of industrial development, tariff policy, private sector initiatives) with a view to ascertaining the relationship between state and business.

The VOC's Burma trade was based on Indian textiles, particularly the cheaper, coarser varieties which would have been surprisingly affordable to the common man or woman. Burmese profits helped fill the coffers of the Company's factories in Coromandel and Bengal. In the end, however, the VOC's establishment in Burma became the victim of a general change in Dutch fortunes.

Focusing on land, forests and coastal resources of Southeast Asia, this collection of articles explores an emerging interest in exploring local development and change in national, regional (Asia Pacific) and global terms. Specifically, the authors are interested in steering clear of viewing ‘global’ forces (of market production and environmentalism) as the privileged sites of action with the ‘local’ relegated to a ‘mediating’ role vis–à–vis these larger influences. On the contrary, the articles suggest that local groups actively engage in reshaping discourses and practices of the global (Majid Cooke, Tomforde). Local groups grow crops, often changing from subsistence to cash-producing ones or from one cash crop to another for a complexity of reasons – often not of their own choosing – which reflect local, regional, national and global power differentials (Majid Cooke, McKay, Sato).

This article examines the history and functions of the Brunei State Council (1907—1959). Although a "rubber stamp" to the British Resident's decisions until 1950, thereafter the Council, dominated by the nominees of a new and strong Sultan, Omar Ali Saifuddin III, became an Achilles heel to the British officialdom that yielded maximum power to the traditional elements under the Constitution promulgated in 1959.

No Harvest but a Thorn opens with a sentence whose emphatic brevity outlines the macrocosm governing the interlocking spiritual, emotional, and physical environment inhabited by Lahuma and his family. That

Life and death, dearth and plenty, are in the hands of God. In the hands of Allah the Almighty. (p. 1)

is simultaneously religious doctrine and empirical attitude, declaration of faith and supplication. Moreover, the quartet of primeval forces, announced with stark simplicity of tone, creates a powerful, complementing sense of time as a cycle felt through significant events. Thus marshalled, the four key words emphasize further both their antithetical and complementing relationships (life-plenty, death-dearth) and the degree to which events, and the processes they embody, control the rhythms of life in Banggul Derdap. Allah presides over cause and effect. As the pair of sentences occurs four times in the first eight, relatively short paragraphs of Chapter 1, the realities of these basic equations are installed as constants in the readers' awareness. A vital point regarding what constitutes an essential part of Lahuma's existence is being urged vigorously for their benefit. Their world view, limited though it proves, derives from and remains utterly dependent on these dominant elements in the macrocosm. Village life, which takes hard, unremitting labour for granted, is prone to sudden, tragic turns — a fact that alters the scale we are inclined to adopt when assessing the tenor and the general quality of life.

This paper examines the trade in ceramics from northern Vietnam into island Southeast Asia in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. It focuses on two issues: the question of typology of Vietnamese ceramics and the feasibility of these wares entering the southern Philippines during the years 1663–82. The compilation of an accurate typology has been inhibited by exceedingly brief descriptions in trade records, and the difficulty has been further compounded by the fact that although the Dutch East India Company (VOC) records show Vietnamese ceramics were imported into Batavia and dispersed to regional godowns, no material has yet been reported from either archaeological excavations or accidental finds in island Southeast Asia that can with certainty be ascribed to this era. Furthermore, items proposed in the ceramic literature as wares exported to Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century are, in the face of new evidence, no longer convincing. The typology put forward in this paper is based on VOC trade records and the contemporary literature. It broadly matches material from archaeological sites in Vietnam and in Japan that are from co-eval contexts. Previously untapped archaeological findings from Vietnam contribute a new dimension to this issue.

In Indonesia the industry producing the most popular commercial TV programmes, known as sinetron, is largely dominated by Indonesians of Indian (Sindhi) origin. This article examines social relations within the sinetron production houses and argues that between the 1990s and the early 2010s the distribution of symbolic and material capital depended on ethnicity, as it was imagined and constituted by two rather different cultural frameworks and historical experiences. One is based on the occupational distinction, rooted in the South Asian caste system, while the other can be traced back to ethnic classifications in colonial Indonesia.

This article focuses on racialisation as a signifying practice and cultural process that attributes difference in Malaysia. It attempts to think with and against the concept of racialisation with an aim to add to a clearer understanding of the cultural politics of ‘race’. It focuses on the hierarchies of power and marginalisation, visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion that are built into dominant discourses and modes of knowledge production about race, citizenship, and culture in Malaysia. This article aims to show how the political mobilisation of race as a remnant of colonial governmentality disciplines social processes through the notion of multiculturalism. For this reason, it sets up state-endorsed ‘multiracialism’ and a people-driven ‘multiculturalism’ as oppositional ways of thinking about race. It concludes by briefly identifying some key drivers for cultural transformation and speculating if these people-centred processes can offer a more imaginative racial horizon.

This article examines the relationship between an important local spirit cult and the construction of Isan political identity in Chaiyaphum province, northeast Thailand. Isan subjectivity has largely been studied through social or political-economic lenses. This study looks, however, at the spiritual experiences and ritual performances that crucially manufacture a local version of personhood. The spectacular annual performance of social memory and historical commemoration of Phaya Lae is constitutive of political identity for the people of Chaiyaphum province. I argue that the rituals surrounding the Phaya Lae cult enable the people of Chaiyaphum to perceive their subjectivity as Thais via the integration of the deity into the historical imagination of the state. I argue further that such local performances of spirit cults sustain Thailand as a ‘ritual state’ in which power and prestige are maintained by ritual enactments both in everyday life and ceremonial events. Through mediumship, the periphery draws charisma from the central Thai state and in turn ritually sustains the potency of the centre.

Sociocultural boundaries come in many forms, and crucially, are responsive to power and constantly in flux. This article focuses on the production of space and unmarked sociocultural boundaries linked to spirit mediums in a historically contested area of northeastern Thailand who are possessed by the spirits of Phaya Narin Songkhram — a key ‘Lao’ military leader of Chao Anou's famous Vientiane revolt against Siam between 1826–28 — and those of his subordinates. Spirit mediums linked to ethnic ‘Thai’ leaders are also found to the south of this area. Through channeling and performing these historical persons, spirit mediums keep alive and reproduce group memories with space-making implications. This article also shows how the mediums' positioning has shifted over time and varies in relation to contemporary power relations, altering the sociocultural boundaries between ethnic Lao and Thai.