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.

The descendants of Bugis mercenary forces that liberated Riau from east Sumatran invaders became an integral part of the local Malay community by the mid-nineteenth century. At that time Raja Ali Haji and Haji Ibrahim, two Malay authors of Bugis descent, wrote various tracts to legitimise their presence in Riau and to facilitate Bugis integration into the Malay community, but may have led to continuing divisions along ethnic lines in later years.

Sir Winston Churchill's doctor has recalled the “stupefying” effect which the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 had upon his patient. Britain's wartime leader, Lord Moran suggests, knew that the surrender was “something more than a reverse. I think he wondered if it were a portent”. The spectre of one of the worst defeats in British military history was to return to haunt Churchill in later years. His torment was, perhaps, not solely portentous but also recollective for in the years 1924–29 Churchill himself, while serving in Stanley Baldwin's second government, had played the major role in delaying the building and defence of the Singapore naval base and in disparaging its associated strategy.

This article seeks to explore the impact of digital technologies upon the material, conceptual and ideological premises of the colonial archive in the digital era. This analysis is pursued though a discussion of creative work produced during an international, multidisciplinary artist workshop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, that used digital material from colonial photographic archives in the Netherlands to critically investigate the ways national, transnational and personal (hi)stories in the former colonies in Southeast Asia have been informed and shaped by their colonial past. The analysis focuses on how the artists’ use of digital media contests and reconfigures the use, truth value and power of the colonial archive as an entity and institution. Case studies include: Thai photographer Dow Wasiksiri, who questions the archive's mnemonic function by substituting early twentieth-century handcrafted association techniques with digital manipulation; Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann, who compresses onto the same picture plane different historical moments and colonial narratives; and Indonesian photographer Agan Harahap, who recomposes archival photographs into unlikely juxtapositions disseminated through social media. By repurposing colonial archival material and circulating their work online such a re-imag(in)ing of Southeast Asia not only challenges the notions of originality, authenticity, ownership and control associated with such archives, but also reclaims colonial-era (hi)stories, making them part of a democratic, expanding, postcolonial archive.