On the eve of its foundation in 1954, the Republic of Vietnam had five motorised fishing boats; 20 years later, that figure had swelled to over sixty thousand. This conversion to fossil fuels, along with associated developments like the intensified exploitation of marine ecologies and the use of new synthetic materials, form part of what has come to be called the ‘Great Acceleration’. This article follows a Japanese fisheries expert who spent six years in Vietnam in the early 1960s to explore the physical and conceptual work this process entailed, its entanglement with projects of war-making and nation-building, and the way it was both a product of and producer of the collapse of local ecologies.

This article assesses the interconnected nature of Southeast Asia around 1900, the transnational entertainment scene in Southeast Asia, and the role of Singapore as a hub for commerce, shipping, and entertainment. The global and regional development of transportation and communications technology and networks facilitated the movement of people, goods, ideas, and amusement forms. The article is based primarily on archival research from colonial newspapers in the region. It surveys and maps more than one hundred itinerant entertainment companies that travelled throughout Southeast Asia around the turn of the century, thereby creating and visualising a circuit of entertainment.

Over recent years some Portuguese politicians and historians have been very concerned to argue, with undoubted sincerity, as Armando Cortesão has argued, that:

‘The Portuguese never had any preconceived notions of race or colour. They always dealt and still do deal with Christian brotherhood towards all peoples, whether they are white, black, khaki or yellow’. and ‘they have always treated indigenes with humanity and, when civilized, as equals amongst equals,’

The expression of this viewpoint has taken a variety of forms, often expressed quite categorically and without any qualification whatsoever, and has been supported by official policy and, academically in particular, by the distinguished Brazilian socio-historian Gilberto Freyre. More recently it has been attacked by Professor Charles Boxer in his Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Clarendon, 1963), where the author has presented a substantial body of entirely reliable historical evidence of actual discrimination against indigenes and mestiços within the Portuguese Empire and Provinces, and has argued that whilst this viewpoint is sincerely held it is substantially incorrect in its extreme and bald form.

On the night of 18 September 1931, there was an explosion on the Manchurian railway near Mukden. This incident triggered another series of anti-Japanese incidents among the Chinese in the Philippines as an expression of their patriotic feeling.

The most recent history of the Philippines makes no reference to guerrilla activities or the resistance movement in Negros, although brief comments are included about the rest of the Bisayas. Yet Negrenses, both indigenous and “adopted,” have been unusually active in recording the history of their island during the war years. Recently two additional books were added to the expanding literature on wartime Negros. Since 1946 seven books have been published (one is a mimeographed monograph) on this broad topic for Negros. Unfortunately, many of these sources have not been utilized in more general accounts of occupied Philippines. Probably there is more material on this historic period for Negros than the rest of the Bisayas, with the exception of Leyte.

Much has been written about the labor system introduced by the Spaniards in Latin America where institutions such as the repartimiento (forced labor) were used to obtain laborers for the public works and the private haciendas and mines. Many of these features existed in the early Philippine colonial period, but were modified to accomodate the local situation and the differing patterns of conquest and colonization. As in Latin America, the Spaniards distributed encomiendas and land grants (mercedes) to the conquistadores, and a system of corvee labor was imposed on the Filipinos for public works (the so-called polos and servicios personales), but for the private haciendas in the Philippines a different method was used than had been the rule in the New World.

The relationship between law and politics is both close and ambiguous. Ideally, the law provides impartial justice, but at the same time it expresses—both actually and symbolically—the will of the state. Consequently, a legal system usually embodies the establishment idea of proper social order, and should provide a legitimate means of enforcing compliance to that idea. It follows then that different societies have different kinds of law: underlying principles, procedure, and the institutional framework vary considerably from place to place.

In 1809, representatives of Chiang Mai and the Kayah State of Kantarawaddy marked their mutual boundary by releasing a buffalo on the summit of a range of mountains and erecting markers on the line it followed. As this episode suggests, these Kayahs and Thais (and also Burmans) translated the world into cognitive maps quite different from those of the British colonialists who would later rule in Burma. The anthropologist, Edmund Leach, noted this difference in his “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, observing that European concepts of frontier, state, and nation are not always applicable to Burma where the frontier is not an absolute division but “a border zone through which cultures interpenetrate in a dynamic manner”. This paper examines the interaction between the Kayah-Thai-Burman and the British conceptions of frontier in the working out of demarcated borders between the Kayah states and Thailand during the nineteenth century.

One of the major problems in the writing of Philippine history stems from inadequate knowledge of historical conditions in the rural Philippines. The problem is further complicated by a tendency to treat society as a monolithic structure susceptible to outside influence and change at a uniform rate. Consequently, it has proved difficult to judge accurately the impact on Philippine society of such phenomena as colonialism, the Revolution of 1896 and national politics in the twentieth century.

The British Military Administration in Malaya: A Political Analysis

On 15 August 1945 a British Military Administration (BMA) was established by Proclamation in Malaya, newly-liberated from wartime Japanese occupation. In its post-operational phase this BMA comprised the effective government, of Malaya and Singapore pending restoration of civilian regime. From today's perspective this military interregnum demarcated an historic break from Malaya's passive colonial past, as the critical 1945–46 period constituted a political watershed for the movement towards Malayan independence. It is not our purpose here to survey BMA policy and politics, for these have been well documented elsewhere, but rather to study functionally the governmental structures of Malaya's post-war British Military Administration.

In the year 1814, Great Britain, recuperating from the effects of the Napoleonic Wars and anxious to protect itself against another outbreak of “Revolutionary Madness”, determined to restore the balance of power in Europe. To this end, it turned its attention towards the problem of rebuilding a strong and united Kingdom of Holland. Because the stability of this new Kingdom depended on the prosperity it could derive from its colonial possessions, Britain restored to it, by the Anglo-Dutch Convention of 1814, all the factories and establishments which Holland had possessed in the Eastern Seas at the commencement of 1803. These were Java and its dependencies, Celebes and the smaller islands situated in the Straits of Macassar, the Moluccas, Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, and various establishments on the island of Sumatra. Great Britain also ceded to the Dutch the island of Banca.

This is the first attempt at a world wide compilation, and although useful, it can not claim to be as yet comprehensive, as information from a number of Universities was not to hand when this issue went to press. Greater efforts will be made in 1962 however, and this feature of the Journal may well become an annual supplement. It is in the interests of scholars all over the world to be aware of current research, and as it is our aim to make this Journal of the utmost utility to the world-wide brotherhood of South-East Asian historians, we hope that the compilation will be given maximum support. Information for inclusion should reach us by August of each year.

John Fairbank wrote of China that “the missionary movement … was a profound stimulus to China's modernization”, and he cited missionary medical, educational, and humanitarian work, including extensive rural contacts, as the basis for his conclusion. And George Antonius in his classic study of Arab nationalism noted that in the Arab revival of the last century, the American Presbyterian Mission in Syria played an important role in the rebirth of Arab literature and education. The Presbyterian missionaries were one important source of the emergence of the Arabs into the modern world. A reading of Thai history suggests that the missionaries in Siam might well have had a similarly important impact. However, the role of the missionaries after the decades of the 1830s to the 1850s has been little studied and is hardly understood. This has been especially true because the historical study of Thai modernization has focused primarily on national policies and strategies where the missionaries had less influence after the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68).

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.

In 1958, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce had to decide whether to remain active in politics, representing not only the commercial interests of the rich but also the views of Chinese society at large, or to function solely as a commercial organisation. The eventual success of the pro-politics faction illustrates the buoyant aspirations of the Chinese merchant elite. The public battle for control over the Chamber shows that Chinese businessmen assessed their options by pragmatically balancing political, economic as well as cultural constraints and opportunities.