Studies on the international history of fourteenth-century Singapore have been hitherto limited to external trade conducted by local inhabitants, and material consumption patterns that this trade enabled them to develop. Broader regional cultural influences have been postulated though not clearly demonstrated, given scant textual records and limited material culture remains. This article seeks to examine the external influences, adaptation and assimilation in the production and consumption of fourteenth-century Singapore. In particular, it looks at three aspects of Singapore's pre-colonial existence — modes of economic production, patterns of consumption of international products, and the articulation of high culture vis-à-vis external entities. By examining available archaeological, epigraphic, art historical and cartographic data from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, this article postulates how distinct consumption patterns may have developed among different riverside populations living north of the Singapore River. This study also questions the common view that Singapore developed as a cosmopolitan port-city only after the advent of British colonialism, demonstrating that its diversity and openness was likely a feature centuries before.

This article sets out to demonstrate the Southeast Asian nature of Nanzhao as a Sinitic state similar to Dai Viet. Previous studies have focused on Nanzhao's relations with Tang China, and emphasised the heavy Tang influence on its political organisation. Examining Nanzhao's expansion of governance into the Upper Ayeyarwady and Upper Mekong river regions during the eighth and ninth centuries, I argue that it was a kingdom characterised by a combination of Sinitic-style bureaucracy with indigenous Southeast Asian allegiance ties. I demonstrate how Nanzhao utilised these features to broaden its entire power base by administering conquered peoples and maintaining trade routes in the Upper Ayeyarwady and the Upper Mekong from a network of walled-cities. Though Confucianism exerted limited influence at the local level, the elite invoked Confucian civilising ideology to morally justify their governance of conquered peoples. The authority of the king extended beyond the core area, and his bureaucracy was powerful enough to loosely administer regional areas and to shift subdued peoples to populate strategic points within the kingdom, while governing Mon-Khmer polities at the southern periphery indirectly through their own leaders.

The opening of the nithan khun bulom genre of texts is usually regarded as a mythic account of Lao history. But the process by which Lao historians themselves began to perceive this was an important nationalist project of the elite during the Royal Lao Government (RLG) period. As early as the 1920s, Lao authors began rewriting the old folktales into a new, modern, scientific account of the past, the ‘birth of the Lao race’. By studying elite writings in the RLG period I show that Lao nationalism was more modernist and autonomous than previously recognised.

Among the numerous Malay writers of our time Shahnon Ahmad stands as one of the most famous. Several points can be mentioned in that respect. First, he has published fourteen novels in twenty-five years apart from dozens of short stories. One of his novels, Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (translated into English under the title “No harvest but a thorn”) is a household name in Malaysia as it has been for years a textbook for secondary school children. He has been awarded numerous literary distinctions such as Hadiah Sastera for his novel Srengenge (the sun) in 1973, Hadiah Pejuang Sastera (Prize for Literary Fighters) in 1976 and, finally in 1982, he was awarded the most prestigious literary award in Malaysia, i.e. Anugerah Sasterawan Negara which is the Writer Laureate Award and he was among the very first Malaysians to receive it. His most famous novel, Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan has been translated into several languages such as English, French, Dutch, Russian, Japanese and Danish. Dozens of articles have been written about him not only by Malaysian critics but also by foreigners. Finally several theses have been written on Shahnon Ahmad. So it appears that this writer is probably the most talked about author in Malaysia at present.

This article examines the phenomenon of Cambodian intellectual curiosity about China through the social experiences of Phouk Chhay, a prominent leftist activist-critic and Pol Pot's one-time secretary. Amid Phnom Penh's urban radical culture, Phouk transformed from rural student to Communist guerrilla. He associated with Communists, formed pro-China student associations, and through his networks, went on trips that left lasting impressions. This study draws from issues of the Cambodian-Chinese newspaper Mianhua ribao (Sino-Khmer Daily) and several forced confessions to tell a story of becoming that examines community and network in charting the course of ‘China-curiosity’ as intertwined with Phouk's life trajectory.

This article deals with the Namsang project in Burma, run in the late 1950s and early 1960s to engage demobilised soldiers in establishing a series of cooperative villages modelled on Israeli settlements with Israeli technical and other assistance. The article explores the Burmese modernisation project in the context of the unification of the country and the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. In its examination of the Namsang project, this article offers a microscopic view of the translation of planning practices to other contexts in general, but also asks some more specific questions, such as how Burmese and Israeli national identity, memory, and history defined the project agenda, what the planners’ ambitions were, and why the project failed.

This paper analyses the symbolic aspects of the tiger as perceived by the Madurese, both on Madura and in East Java. It focuses on people's relationship with the environment and the supernatural world as well as the way the tiger as symbol has adapted to both the progress of Islam and to the modern world in general.

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.

In this article, I argue that Malaysia joined the South China Sea dispute during the 1970s as a reaction to the World Oil Crisis instead of asserting historical claims as in the cases of Vietnam and China. Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction to include several highly disputed maritime features at the height of the oil crisis. The crisis was initiated by an oil embargo imposed by the Arab states, which imposed domestic inflationary pressures on Malaysia's economy. These two factors, external and domestic, resulted in Malaysia's bolstering of its offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation culminating in the expansion of its maritime jurisdiction. In particular, Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction in 1976 and 1979, which coincidentally corresponded with the aftermath of major oil price hikes that occurred in October 1975 and December 1978. Compared to China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, all of whom issued their maritime claims on the South China Sea based on historical or new discoveries, Malaysia's expansion was a mere reaction towards the oil crisis rather than a deliberate move.

Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his notion of ethically constitutive stories that are central to individual subject formation. The role of the colonial past in such stories of Singapore is contradictory, in that the relationship between colonialism and the nation-state is seen simultaneously in terms of rupture and continuity, and this conceals a further contradiction in terms of the relationship between individual and the collective. In exploring these contradictions, and in tracing reparative possibilities for new stories of peoplehood, I will, in conclusion, turn to recent literary narratives, and in particular recent historical speculative fiction that revisions the colonial past.

By the 1890s the Dutch had noticed the escalation of opium addiction in colonial Indonesia. They believed that opium consumption had brought about health problems and other negative socioeconomic effects. Yet, the profitability of opium took precedence over its negative social effects in the Dutch East Indies government's policy, which until the end of the 1920s made almost no substantial efforts to address addiction. It was nongovernmental organisations which took the initiative to install medical facilities for addicts and launch diverse anti-opium campaigns. These organisations marked the rise of modern philanthropic activism in the field of public health as part of the flourishing sociopolitical movements of that time. They also represent the nascent civil society in late colonial Indonesia.

This essay proposes a revisionist interpretation of the debates between Buddhists and Protestants in nineteenth-century Siam. It argues that the Buddhist–Protestant debates were different in nature from the earlier Buddhist–Catholic clashes, which were interwoven with colonial ambitions and occasionally erupted in acts of persecution against the Catholics. The debates among Protestant missionaries and the Siamese royalist elite, monks and lay literati comprised an intellectual exchange mediated by the printing press. Centred around the encapsulation and bifurcation of religiosity and modernity, the debates helped the literati readjust their epistemological position during Siam's early modern era, creating a discursive space for the emergence of a form of scientific Buddhism. The latter affirms that Buddhism not only accords with aspects of modern science but was precocious in its understanding of features such as the analysis of mental states prior to modern scientific methods. The ‘scientificity’ of Buddhism as articulated by Siamese literati had long-lasting effects on Thai intellectual life well into the twentieth century.

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.

In this article an attempt is made to trace back as far as possible a history of Bang Chan, a rice-growing village in the central plains of Thailand. Documents existed which might have offered some clues, but help could not be expected from court records, land registration deeds or the census. All that existed lay in bundles in the District Office store rooms, a bit mouldy and perhaps chewed by silverfish. It would take a year at least to dig out the relevant papers, and then since family names do not appear until about 1915 and place names changed frequently, one would never know whether the case of Chan vs. Chya referred to incidents in Bang Chan or some other part of the district.