Over the course of the twentieth century, Southeast Asia's population will have grown from 80 to 530 million. Much of this extraordinary growth is due to the very rapid decline in mortality over the second half of the century, but the socioeconomic and political attributes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southeast Asian societies also contributed to rapid population growth, especially in the settlement of frontier rice-growing regions. Although fertility transitions are underway in almost every country in the region, the population of the region will probably double in size before growth ceases sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century.

This article examines knowledge production about malaria in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. During the 1920s and 1930s, medical doctors cooperated with plantation managers in order to develop industrial hygiene techniques consisting of environmental modification and quinine use. By the 1930s, changing motivations, in particular racial hygiene and patriotism, drove malaria control efforts. The wartime pressures to control malaria between the 1940s and 1975 further encouraged patriotic hygiene. This history of malaria science in Vietnam highlights the tension between change and continuity and shows the importance of place in the conjunction of scientific knowledge production and nation-building projects.

“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and economically detrimental, yet official recognition was extended to an activity that could not be eradicated and from which the colonial state derived considerable financial benefit. The definition of criminality in respect to gambling, therefore, became dependent on the inability of the state to enforce its own regulations and the exigencies of financial demands. This article will examine the popularity of cockfighting and other forms of gambling in the Philippines, the extent of official ambivalence towards these sports, and the motives behind colonial policy. In the process, Gusfield's concept of the “moral passage”, whereby once tolerated behaviour is redefined as deviant and treated as criminal, will be shown to have application in reverse. Gambling was progressively legalized during the late 18th and 19th centuries as the state profited from such activities.

Challenging conventional wisdom, this article argues that Indonesia — long home to both large-scale transmigration programmes and a range of conflicts — has not witnessed transmigrant conflicts. The vast majority of Indonesian transmigrants were resettled in parts of Sumatra which have remained peaceful. In some conflicts, the role of transmigration has been exaggerated. In others, interethnic violence has involved spontaneous migrants rather than state-led transmigrants. We conclude with a discussion of two potential outliers, where violence has been directed towards transmigrants, but only those from disaster-affected regions who arrived en masse. This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the distinctions between different forms of internal migration, some of which have the potential to spark future violence in recipient areas and communities.

The administrative boundary between Laos and Cambodia is amongst the least studied international borders in Southeast Asia. Since Laos and Cambodia became independent in 1953–54, relatively minor but sustained tensions have characterised border relations. An important reason for disagreements is irredentist feelings. Some ethnic Lao in both Laos and Cambodia believe that part of northeastern Cambodia should be added to Laos, while some ethnic Khmer in Cambodia insist that their border should be extended to include part of southern Laos. Different emphases and framings of history have contributed to irredentism and the development of identities in relation to the border.

Colonial engineers and administrators often referred to the pre-colonial Mekong Delta landscape as a vast solitude yet to be reorganised through their hydraulic technology. However, the environmental history of the Delta's waterways is more complex, suggesting that colonial projects were to some extent embedded within an existing infrastructure. This problematises the rhetorical concept of Progress within a colonial context and its value as a metaphor to understand human changes to the landscape.

Once the premier port in colonial Southeast Asia and one of the foremost in the British Empire, Singapore now ranks as the world's fourth busiest port, tonnagewise, with the second highest per capita G.D.P. in Asia. Its post-war achievements rest on solid historical advantages. A broad historical survey of its commercial growth before World War II is therefore not amiss: the more so, as there has been no such panoramic presentation before. With no natural resources, Singapore's economic growth was almost synonymous with its foreign trade. In most historical works, especially those written before World War II, Singapore has been treated as an integral part of the Straits Settlements or British Malaya, for, until its emergence as a separate nation in August 1965, Singapore as the focal point of reference for researches was not part of the historical consciousness.

On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’.

One of the most widely held views about Indonesia, and especially Java, in the nineteenth century was that such economic growth as occurred did not benefit the mass of the indigenous population, whose living standards almost certainly declined. Many scholars have drawn attention to the evidence that per capita rice production fell after 1880 as proof that living standards were definitely falling in the last two decades of the century, while others have not hesitated to draw the bolder conclusion that living standards declined almost continually after 1800:

One theme stands out most prominently in Javanese society during this time: the theme of involution and reaction…. Despite the promises of the changing colonial policies to further the individual welfare of the Javanese, conspicuously little was done in this regard. Instead the Javanese farmer became gradually more impoverished throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, with a particularly severe drop in living standards in the second half of the liberal period (1885–1900).

In the 1920s and 1930s, Republican Chinese thinkers viewed modern sports and traditional martial arts as important ways of invigorating the Chinese nation and race, and institutions in the ROC used both in attempting to extend the nationalist impulse to the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. These alternative physical culture models provide insights into both the diversity of thinking and the shared modernist assumptions that inspired projects directed toward the creation of “Greater Chinese” communities.

The dominant indigenous community of Sabah, East Malaysia, came late to the process of imagining itself as a modern political community. Its difficulties in identifying an acceptable name, boundaries and symbols for itself since entering Malaysia in 1963 provide an interesting case study of identity formation without the benefit of a long written tradition.

Vietnamese cinema has only recently become known outside of the East Bloc countries. The first public showing of a Vietnamese feature film in the United States was that of When the Tenth Month Comes at the 1985 Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. At the 1987 Festival, a consortium of American film institutions was formed with Nguyen Thu, General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department, to organize the Vietnam Film Project — the first attempt to introduce an entire new film industry to America. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief description of Vietnamese cinema along with an appreciation of its major characteristics and themes. I base my views on my two visits to the Vietnam Cinema Department in Hanoi — for one week in 1987 and two in 1988 — on behalf of the Hawai'i International Film Festival. During those visits, I was able to view a large number of documentaries and feature films and to discuss Vietnamese cinema with a number of department staff members. I was able to obtain more interviews during the visits of Vietnamese to the Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. This article cannot claim to be an adequate introduction to the history of Vietnamese cinema, a task I hope will be undertaken with the aid of my informants and the sources I list as completely as possible.

In southern Thailand, monasteries once served as focal points for different communal identities to negotiate shared space and, with it, shared identities. However, since martial law was declared in 2004, Muslims in southern Thailand do not frequent monasteries. Instead, soldiers and police occupy monastery buildings and protect the perimeters from attacks. In addition, there are now military monks, soldiers who are simultaneously ordained monks, who work to protect the monasteries. This article argues that the Thai State's militarisation of monasteries and the role of Buddhist monks fuel a religious dimension to the ongoing civil war in southern Thailand.

The spilling of blood in modern political protest is an exceptional event. This article discusses the deployment of blood as a means of struggle by the members of an extra-parliamentary movement, known as the ‘red shirts’, in March 2010, in the course of their prolonged attempt to topple the government of the Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Two contesting discourses of blood are discussed: the symbolic discourse of blood as a self-sacrificial act deployed by the protesters to curse their enemies, and the medical counter-discourse deployed by the authorities, in an effort to neutralise the protesters' act. Several issues raised by the blood-spilling act are examined: its perceived appropriateness, its ritual roots and its disputed effectiveness as a curse. In conclusion, it is suggested that the blood ritual constitutes a reflective move to counter the prevailing ‘regime of images’ in Thai society.

Historians of Southeast Asia have been inspired by Fernand Braudel's classic The Mediterranean because of its focus on the sea and multidisciplinary approach, and because it seems to solve two recalcitrant historiographical problems: the definition of time and space, and the reconciliation of local identities and external influence. But while Braudel's prose and intellectual ambition are justly seen as inspiring, conceptual confusion and analytic evasion limit his contribution.

The article suggests that the development of Chinese capitalism in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia was intimately connected to the participation of Chinese merchants in the financing and operation of opium revenue farming concessions. It examines the development and structure of the opium farming system as it operated in the region.

How did Indian influence spread in Southeast Asia during the opening centuries of our era? The following quotations give some idea of the extent to which authorities are agreed:

It seems almost to be a universal law, that when an inferior civilization comes into contact with a superior one, it gradually tends to be merged into the latter, the rate and extent of this process being determined solely by the capacity of the one to assimilate, and of the other to absorb. When the Hindus first settled in Suvarnabhumi and came into close association with her peoples, this process immediately set in, and produced the inevitable result.

Throughout Thai history there have been religious ascetics credited with the ability of precognition (mii yaan) as a result of accumulated virtues and meditation abilities. One such religious figure, perhaps the most widely acknowledged “saint” in modern times, was Phra Ajaan Man Phuurithatto (1870–1949). Of particular interest to this paper is the recorded prediction made by this ascetic monk shortly before his death, documented by a former disciple Phra Aajaan Wiriyang, that there would be a proliferation of self-proclaimed meditation masters and pupils and fragmentation into urban-based “cults” or religious movements (yaek pen kok pen lao).

When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?

Levels of urbanization in Southeast Asia are low by world standards, even by developing country standards. Figures taken from recent U.N. estimates are presented in Table 1. They take advantage of the 1980 round of censuses and differ substantially from estimates made five years earlier. Even so, inter-country comparability remains problematic, as indicated by the inclusion of an alternative set of estimates for Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia which the writer believes provides data somewhat more comparable with the other countries than the data employed by the U.N.