The Philippine society confronts formidable longer-term economic problems. The exhaustion of the land frontier suitable for production of present crops under existing techniques, which is compounded by degradation of the environment by wasteful harvesting of forestry resources and over-exploitation of inshore fisheries is an obvious problem. A comparable problem arises in the inertia built into the age structure of the Philippine population. In 1970, those under 15 years of age accounted for 45.6 per cent of all Filipinos and estimated population growth in the 1970s was 2.7 per cent, a rate more than double the “zero-growth rate”. If the growth rate should fall to the “zero-growth rate” tomorrow, the Philippine population would continue to grow for the better part of a century and would virtually double as cohorts of Filipinos entering the reproductive age group would continue to increase for many years.

Globalization, the worldwide web of economic and cultural communications with its unifying and integrative tendencies, has done more than deeply affect the political economy (liberal markets) and the cultural patterns (mass consumption) of our time. It has also internationalized the debate on moral principles and ethical practices concerning human behaviour. Already the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first statement on the issue by the United Nations, has claimed universal validity as a “common standard of achievement”.

The Chinese community in the Philippines before the outbreak of the Pacific War was relatively small and homogeneous in comparison with those in other Southeast Asian countries. When the Japanese occupied the Philippine islands, they found a Chinese community of less than one per cent of the total population. This small alien group did not appear to be a serious threat to the Japanese authorities. However, during the three and a half years of Japanese occupation, the Chinese maintained several guerrilla groups, which formed part of the resistance movement in the Philippines.

Studies of Indonesia in the twentieth century have properly concentrated on the history of the nationalist movement, but its external relations have been unduly neglected. It is indeed a commonplace that the Japanese invasion had a decisive impact on the fortunes of the nationalist movement and of its antagonists. But the invasion was the climax of a sequence of developments that brought the security of the Netherlands' tenure of Netherlands India into question. Apart from their intrinsic interest, those developments provide an additional context within which to appraise the nationalist movement and the Dutch reaction to it.

Sir Harry Ord, first Governor of the Straits Settlements after their transfer from the Government of India to the Colonial Office in 1867, found himself continually at odds with the Colonial Office. The irritable exchanges between Singapore and London throw light on Colonial Office perceptions of the procedures appropriate to Crown Colony government in a new imperial age.

Film censorship screens the nation as a ‘way of seeing’ that is both fundamental to the art of governance and vulnerable to the flexibility of contemporary global images. In Thailand, this historically-conditioned regime arose in the geopolitics of the 1930 Film Act, the Motion Pictures and Video Act of 2008, and a coterminous regulation of visuality as a form of cultural governance. I pursue a close reading of two banned films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nontawat Numbenchapol, respectively, to illustrate the aesthetics of film censorship in light of the development of a national cinema, especially to consider the strategies that film-makers use to negotiate the governance of vision.

This study of river names seeks to deepen our understanding of the pre-modern environmental history of northern Vietnam. A performative practice, naming places often reveals the transformation of a physical environment into a cultural one. By analysing the names given to antecedents of the Red River in northern Vietnam, this article argues that each historical name reflected its users’ perception of their relationship with a respective river. Toponyms like Lô, Phú Lương, Nhị, and ‘Great River’, therefore, did not simply represent the present-day Red River — a geographical unit that dates to the French colonial period.

Ahmad Tohari's trilogy of novels conjures up national demons of Indonesia's darkest historical moment. In reading across the grain of anti-communism and pro-moral reform, this article analyses a wealth of gender imagery. Javanese complementarity, although unequal, recognises a kind of dramatic feminine power that need not be threatening as long as men exercise self-restraint. Although modernisation tends to dichotomise persons into ‘castes’ of the sinful and virtuous, alternative modernities drawn from Javanese cultural sensibilities are also conceivable.

Swidden cultivation has long been seen as incompatible with state goals for development, modernisation and environmental protection in Vietnam. This article provides a history of anti-swidden programmes since the French colonial period: how targets were selected, how different justifications were used, how interventions were implemented, and what the impacts were. Shifts occurred over time in targets, tools, and techniques, due to leeway available to local officials and resistance of target populations, but which also prolonged overall anti-swidden campaigns by providing opportunities for continual reinvention. Shifting justifications have allowed for new funding and approaches over time, while remaining rooted in misunderstandings and cultural chauvinism.

The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore in 1877 with the limited objective of preventing abuses in Chinese labour migration, but it evolved multiple functions dedicated to governing Chinese migrants and residents in colonised Malaya. The Protector possessed extensive statutory powers and he was regarded as the official authority on all matters ‘Chinese’. This was an important yet under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. This article narrates the history behind the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s when ‘racialised governmentality’ of the Chinese population was institutionalised in colonised Malaya. The article underscores the significance of imperial and local contexts of the Protectorate's creation, arguing that it was a product of flexible adaptation of empire-wide practices of ‘protecting’ and governing liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, indentured Indian labourers ‘humanely’. It is notable, therefore, that there was a coeval and conjoined discussion of migration control of Chinese as well as Indian labour migrants in Malaya during this period, but this history is hidden from plain sight by popular approaches studying labour migration as components of ethnic diasporas migrating from a single point of origin.

Edward Van Roy's Siamese melting pot: Ethnic minorities in the making of Bangkok is a tour de force and one of the most important books on the history of Bangkok and late-modern Thai history ever to be published. It is clearly written and presented, it provides excellent maps, and brings to light little-known sources and surprising facts about the history of the most iconic neighbourhoods in the city. It exposes the histories of various Muslim, Mon, Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese, European, Indian, and other communities in late Ayutthaya and Bangkok, as well as highlights various ways of seeing Bangkok as a feudal city, a vibrant port-city, or a galactic polity. Van Roy also reveals the complexities of defining ethnicity and class in Bangkok's changing neighbourhoods. In this review article I will look closely at two issues Van Roy exposes that need some theoretical and critical interrogation: the ‘galactic polity/mandala’, and ‘ethnicity’. Then I will provide a short vignette about the Chettiar community in Bangkok and the idea of Hinduism in Bangkok history that both supports and supplements Van Roy's excellent research. I write this not to discount or criticise Van Roy's monumental achievement, but because I believe a book this important to the field deserves serious attention and engagement.

Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives, slaves and concubines is set in the late eighteenth century, Victorious wives in the nineteenth, and Realizing the dream in the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.