British planning for post-war Burma had been set back by the Cabinet's decision in April 1943 not to adopt the proposals put forward by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. Designed also to meet the need for wartime propaganda, the proposals had envisaged a programme of reconstruction aided by the British, carried forward during a period of direct rule, to be followed by advance towards self-government. There were doubts about the amount of aid Britain could promise. There were also doubts as to the wisdom of the concept of direct rule, though in fact the Cabinet accepted the principle without setting a limit to the period. Above all, the Prime Minister opposed further policy declarations on Burma. The war, Churchill believed, was not the time for them. Amery and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, thought that he really believed that no time would be right for them. They were not without hope that he would “come round”. Meanwhile, it was decided that the Burma Government, in exile in Simla, would remain in existence. “I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would [be] a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma.…”

Much of the history of the people of the Straits of Malacca in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is still unknown and perhaps unknowable, given the lack of source material. However, some aspects of political history are becoming clearer. It has become apparent that this period witnessed a fundamental change in the political structure of the area; able in the past to support empires and cultures of no small renown, the Malay world by the nineteenth century had disintegrated into a mass of petty states, leaderless and disorientated, a power vacuum that the British Empire was eventually forced to fill. Symptoms of this change first became discernable in the early eighteenth century, during the reign of the last Malay Raja Muda of the Johor Empire (1708–18). Johor was then still a powerful force in the Malay world, ruling a widespread area from Siak in Sumatra, through the coastal areas of the Malay peninsula (roughly, in modern terms, from Selangor south, then north again as far as Trengganu), plus the islands of the Riau–Lingga archipelago and Siantan. The sea was still a connecting, rather than a dividing force in Malay politics. In 1708 the administration of this empire fell to Tun Mahmud, who was to be the last Malay to hold the office of Raja Muda in Johor. He was by all accounts a remarkable ruler, under whose guidance Johor attained, for a while, great power and prestige.

One of the constant problems for historians of Southeast Asia is to assimilate its system of adding extra days and extra years to the lunar calendar to make it keep pace with the solar calendar. It is well known that the addition of an extra month should take place 7 times in every 19 years (adhikames), and that the addition of an extra day should occur 11 times in every 57 years (adhikawan). It is also known that the extra month is called second Ashadha and that in Thailand and Cambodia the extra day is given to the previous month, Jyestha.

The difficulties inherent in the systematic and comprehensive acquisition of materials published in the Philippines are matched by their variety and value. The current volume of Philippine titles probably remains unduplicated elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1951, for example, “Manila was producing more serial publications than any other center in Southeast Asia.” English remains the predominant language of most scholarly publications. The usefulness of these materials, therefore, is increased for institutions who lack research needs for Philippine language resources but desire a solid student and teaching collection.

Following the initialing of the Treaty of Hue in 1884 ceding Tonkin and Annam to France as “protectorates”, the Vietnamese Emperor Ham Nghi led a nationalist imperial party against consummation of the colonialists gains. This Nguyen imperial party, a regional guerrilla and terrorist faction based only in the north central section of the nation and operating from highland fiefs, relied upon violence, the personality of its leader, the mystic of his cause and the mystic of nationalism. This combative “party,” while hardly a party in the strictest sense of the term and perhaps not even a movement in the strictest sense of that term, was defeated with the capture of its leader in 1888. Yet this party has continued to serve in miniature as the model for subsequent political party activities in Vietnam. Nearly all of the numerous Vietnamese parties have more or less emulated the patterns of behavior of the first anti-colonial party and few in South Vietnam have gone much beyond modifying the tactics of that vanguard group.

On July 23, 1962, the International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian Question in Geneva came to a close with the formal signature of a Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos and a Protocol to the Declaration. The Conference had been in session for over a year; fourteen governments participated, and all of them became parties to the agreements reached.

This paper examines three aspects of the Opium trade in Szechwan from 1881, when for the first time there is evidence that China consumed as much native as foreign opium and that Szechwan was both the largest producer and consumer, until 1911, when the cultivation of the poppy was completely suppressed in the province as a result of the vigorous imperial campaign against the trade. It will consider first, the demand for opium who smoked it and why; second, the production of opium, how it fitted into and contributed toward the economy of the province; finally, the character of the suppression campaign of 1906–1911 as it affected Szechwan will be considered. The conclusions of the paper may be summarised as follows. (1) While the expansion of the opium habit in Szechwan, as in the rest of China, had no one cause, in Szechwan it has for its background a prospering society whose values and accepted goals had not kept pace with its economic expansion, a society which provided increasing wealth and leisure on the one hand, but only limited opportunities for socially approved spending on the other. (2) The rapid expansion of opium production in late nineteenth century Szechwan was part of the development of a market economy both within the province and in its relations with the rest of China. (3) The opium suppression campaign, because it undermined a developing economy, was much less popular in Western China than it was in the east, and contributed to the widespread unrest in those parts, which in turn led to the revolution of 1911.

With the end of the East India Company's monopoly of trade to China in 1834, relations with the Celestial Empire came under the direction of the Foreign Secretary in London, who appointed a Superintendent of Trade, subsequently British Plenipotentiary and also, under the Colonial Office, Governor of Hong Kong. In Southeast Asia, no similar arrangements were made. The three Straits Settlements remained under the Company's administration, with a Governor controlled by the Supreme Government in India, between 1834 and 1851 via the subordinate Bengal Government. The “foreign relations” of the Settlements in regard to indigenous states tended to be handled by the Company's or by naval officers. Relations with the Dutch were handled in London and The Hague by the Foreign Office and its envoys. At various times the appointment was urged of a Superintendent or Plenipotentiary or Commissioner to conduct British diplomacy in South-east Asia, but none ever eventuated. This may seem an unimportant point. But it calls attention to certain basic traditions in British policy in Southeast Asia, as distinct from China, and the fact that the appointment was not made despite pressure for it calls attention to a challenge to these traditions in the little studied mid-century period, a challenge, however, never pressed hard and ultimately only partly successful.

The so-called Afdeeling B or Section B of the Sarekat Islam, discovered in the Sundanese ethnic area of the Preanger Regencies, West Java, in 1919, presents a valuable case study in the uses of local history because of its relationship to the Sarekat Islam, the first mass based nationalist type movement in Indonesia, which began in 1912. The discovery of the Afdeeling B also acted as a catalyst for opinions which had been maturing in all strata of the colonial society, both Indonesian and Dutch, and an examination of the reaction to it gives a clear picture of the diversity of that society.

At the end of World War II, American Office of Strategic Service (OSS) officers in Bangkok were dismayed to discover that, contrary to their expectations, the Thai showed little animosity toward the Japanese. The OSS unit reported in August 1945 that ‘there has been very little in the way of hostile reaction’. Japanese accounts confirm this, with a Foreign Ministry study, for example, concluding: ‘The general attitude of Thai officials and citizens toward Japan just after the war's end was relatively sympathetic….’

This article documents a significant and previously unknown episode in the history of Philippine labor, the explosive Manila Port Strike of the arrastre service workers—stevedores and longshoremen—in 1963. The strike was among the largest, costliest and most politically charged labor struggles in the nation's history and yet not only has no account of it been written, it has found no mention in over a half-century of historiography. Using confidential US State Department memoranda, contemporary newspaper accounts, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) publications, and material published by the Lapiang Manggagawa (LM), I reconstruct the history of the strike. This article examines how an event of this magnitude, while still part of living memory, could disappear from the historical record. The case of the 1963 Port Strike highlights the need to recover the histories of the oppressed by reading not only the official archives, but also the narratives of the workers’ own organisations, against the grain.

It is a biological fact that the health of mother and child are interdependent. The care, attention and affection given by the mother to her young offspring are of major significance in the psychobiological development of the infant and indeed, in subsequent personality development. Suggestions have been made that special attention to a pregnant woman brings double health benefits: to her as an adult member of society, and to the outcome of her pregnancy. Although childbearing is a natural process, women all over the world do not possess full faith in the ability and self-sufficiency of the human body to deliver safely a healthy baby. Pregnancy has been described as a unique and ambiguous state for women: it is not a usual condition nor a medically pathological state, so it is especially problematic. Several influences are known to affect women's pregnancy outcome. Factors relating to the mother—such as age, parity (or the number of births she has had), her age at marriage, socio-economic status such as education, occupation and income, and past obstetric history, are likely to be interdependent in their influence on pregnancy outcome. However, complications of pregnancy and delivery brought about by the interdependence of these factors can be prevented by careful antenatal care. Presumably, this type of care is closely related with modern medical science, thus only available in clinics. Consequently, the prevention of the many complications of pregnancy rests more with seeking careful antenatal care from the clinic than with any other factors.