Visitors to the city of Bangkok are often struck by the sight of exposed, dangling, and dangerous electrical wires and a multitude of inconveniently placed utility posts that impede pedestrian circulation. This article argues that the city's seemingly dysfunctional electric power infrastructure is not a failure of modernisation but the outcome, or ‘style’, of a socio-technological system built by and operated for a narrow set of interests. To demonstrate this, the article presents a history of the electric power system that shows how its initial development in the early twentieth century produced new forms of privilege and disenfranchisement that are now the basis of social division in the city. By approaching the study of Bangkok's electric power system in terms of equity, the article offers a framework for evaluating how infrastructure shapes cultural practice, social relations, and political authority.

This article shows that the descriptions of Southeast Asian geography contained in Ming and Qing Chinese sources that used observations collected from contemporary mariners reflect the structure of the maritime trading networks in the region. It examines several Chinese textual studies of Southeast Asia, navigational rutters, and maps, and uses geographic information system mapping to visualise and compare the extent of the authors’ and cartographers’ knowledge of the region. The article then takes the findings and situates them in the context of early modern Southeast Asian economic history to explain how the Chinese networks were transformed.

One of the most visible and enduring vestiges of colonialism is its buildings. In this article I address the question of how current approving references to the colonial buildings in Indonesia should be explained, looking at one particular city, Surabaya. The cheerful, innovative adoption of colonial themes defies an analysis in terms of ‘imperial debris’. I propose to borrow the term ‘bricolage’ from Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe this process in which people make new associations between selected colonial buildings and their own present lives. Bricolage is the selective conceptual appropriation of the colonial buildings for whatever objective the user finds convenient: objects to boost city marketing, a company advertisement, stops on a heritage tour, amusing backdrops for pictures and selfies, a counterpoint to a consumerist lifestyle in shopping malls. For colonial building enthusiasts, the love of colonial design and old urban quarters is more than a matter of the aesthetics of urban spaces, but also, indirectly, a critique of the transformation of modern cities by short-sighted real-estate developers and city administrators, who demolish irreplaceable buildings in acts of ‘architectural suicide’.

In the 1970s, communities of the Kalinga sub-ethnic group in the Cordillera Mountains in northern Philippines successfully halted the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams along their main waterway, the Chico River, which would have caused their displacement. Based on interviews and archival research, the article examines the role played by a Kalinga political institution known as the bodong or peace pact in the Kalingas’ mobilisation against the dam project, using an analytical framework drawn from Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics.

This study focuses on state–state relations for business, a phenomenon shaped by how local power elites (LPEs), in this case, in Malaysia, collaborate with transnational corporate elites (TCEs), in this case, from China, to implement infrastructure projects linked to the latter's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These LPE-TCE links, which have led to the creation of novel forms of state–business relations (SBRs), offer interesting theoretical insights for SBR-related studies. This article builds on the conventional wisdom of homogenised SBRs as usually driven by bureaucrats by indicating that, in practice, state–business ties are extremely heterogeneous, with the capture of key institutions by influential LPEs. A conceptual framework explains theoretically how state–state relations, forged by two countries, both led by dominant parties that control their respective enterprises, have contributed to unique SBRs created to undertake BRI projects, driven by LPE-TCE links. Case studies of three BRI projects in Malaysia provide insights into how disparate forms of SBR-based institutional architecture function, not only at the federal level, but also in different states, involving enterprises from China. Diverse types of power relationships have emerged in these joint ventures, encompassing different LPEs, contributing to the creation of dissimilar SBRs. These LPEs have turned effective SBRs, fashioned to implement BRI projects, into economic endeavours that feature rent-seeking behaviour.

This article examines the first decade of Pasar Gambir as an annual week-long festival held in the Dutch East Indies in conjunction with Queen Wilhelmina's birthday. As a study of colonial spectacles, it seeks to address the dearth of scholarly literature that analyses how the Western exhibitionary complex functioned in a colonised environment. In producing Pasar Gambir, the Dutch colonisers did not adopt this exhibitionary complex in its entirety. As such, Pasar Gambir assumed the hybridised form of a jaarmarkt-tentoonstelling (fair-cum-exhibition) imbued with market-like characteristics. This reality distinguished Pasar Gambir from its metropolitan equivalents by involving the colonised not only as objectified exhibits on display, but also as active consumers and participants of the spectacle. Ultimately, this article argues that the hybridity of Pasar Gambir undercut Dutch efforts to use it as a vehicle that illustrated and vindicated their claims of benevolence and racial supremacy. Through the Malay language press’ appropriation of the spectacle to underscore the moral superiority of the colonised and the Indies Chinese’ successful boycott of Pasar Gambir in 1925, colonised communities contested the empire-building messages that the Dutch sought to convey through Pasar Gambir and inscribed their own nationalist readings and interpretations of the annual jaarmarkt-tentoonstelling instead.

The Indonesian Muslim community includes segments dedicated to contrasting pious projects and doctrinal positions, yet the nation's Ministry of Religion (MORA) manages aspects of Islamic life while purporting to more or less transcend such contrasts. This tension recently emerged in Indonesian public life when a state Islamic university defended the autonomy of its research practices against a challenge by scholars from outside the university who claimed that the doctoral project of Jalaluddin Rakhmat (1949–2021) offended doctrinal positions of the Sunni majority and gave priority to Shiite historiography and doctrine. This dispute shows how questions concerning academic method become disputes about public interest, and further, its resolution attests to the emergence of free inquiry as an Islamic value in the environment of MORA's universities. Academics cited the example of earlier generations of scholars as supporting precedent for an Islamic principle of free inquiry.

Between 1786 and the 1860s, Penang Island was transformed from a lush tropical island into a British colony covered in ordered plantations. As a consequence of Britain's temporary possession of the fabled Spice Islands, nutmeg emerged as the most important crop, but after decades of experimentation and uncertainty, its cultivation ultimately failed. Although the struggle for nutmeg to become commercially viable was heavily dependent on global price fluctuations and official support, this article focuses on local factors such as shortages of labour, the specific skills of the island's various ethnic groups and reliance on indigenous agricultural techniques. The story of nutmeg cultivation in Penang can then be situated within a wider historiography concerned with the transmission of botanical knowledge and plant transfer, as well as the ecological impact of colonial agriculture.

This article examines the history of the Indonesian penal island of Nusakambangan between 1905 and 1942, based on quantitative and qualitative archival research. It compares labour conditions of inmates in Nusakambangan to those of workers in private plantations to intervene in a decades-long scholarly debate over the colonial state's role in managing labour conditions in the late colonial period. In a second part, this article describes everyday life on the island from an inmates’ perspective. While several imposed rounds of classification determined the inmates’ prospects of survival, corruption crucially created space for negotiation between inmates and guards, making the ‘ill-disciplined prison’ function.

This article argues that in the last few years the Vietnamese state and the Vietnamese Communist Party have upgraded the commemoration of a Sino-Vietnamese War (1979–89) that had fallen into oblivion after the normalisation of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991. The first part of the article analyses the way in which Vietnam officially commemorated the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the war against China in 2019. Vietnamese authorities such as the Department of Propaganda and Edcuation stepped up the commemoration of the war, but in comparison with that of the war against the Pol Pot regime it was much more subdued and low-key. The second part of the article shows that the veterans of the Vị Xuyên battle in Hà Giang province where fierce battles had taken place between 1984 and 1989 have actively shaped the commemoration of the war by organising commemorative activities on the old battlefield and reaching out to state media and social media. This highlights the significance of ‘agents of remembrance’ in Vietnam who, along with the official Vietnamese ‘memory machine’, also make important contributions to the commemoration of the past.

Scholars have yet to fully recognise the central role environment played in inspiring, and stymying, the Ming dynasty invasion and colonisation of Đại Việt (1407–27) and subsequent Vietnamese resistance movement. During the initial campaign, the Yongle emperor and his generals identified miasma, the illness-inducing hot and misty climate of the Sino-Vietnamese uplands (‘the Dong World’), as their primary obstacle and obsessed over strategies to avoid it. For Lê Lợi, the Vietnamese dynastic founder who expelled the Ming troops from Đại Việt, resistance to Ming environmental exploitation of Vietnamese resources was a rallying cry. The ecology and flora and fauna of Đại Việt helped inform an articulation of Vietnamese difference and independence. Despite the anticolonial rhetoric of the early Lê, the dynasty was soon engaging in a project of imperial expansion not dissimilar from that of the Ming. The Vietnamese state that emerged following Ming colonisation was in turn limited by the miasmic uplands.

The Denounce the Communists Campaign (1955–c.1960) was a key moment in the conflict between the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, South Vietnam) and the Vietnamese communist movement and would eventually escalate to become the Vietnam War. The RVN launched the campaign to turn public opinion against communism and destroy the underground communist network. Building on previous scholarship, this article examines the propaganda associated with the initiative. During the campaign, state propagandists and allied intellectuals developed a historical narrative about the Anti-French Resistance (1945–54) that vilified the communists. Although highly partisan, the narrative illuminates the longer history of violence between communists and anti-communists in Vietnam.

Two years after the Anglo-Burmese War, with the British colonial takeover of Burma complete and yet still subject to outbreaks of rebellions, a small group of Karen Baptist intellectuals in Rangoon who formed the Karen National Association (KNA), attempted to assert a political claim to Karen nationhood. This article focuses on two letters, in English and Sgaw Karen, presented by Karen delegates on the occasion of the ceremony to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 in Rangoon, to investigate the colonial politics of loyalty and national claim. It argues that the letters were written for two different audiences, and by doing so the Karen Baptists were asserting dual claims; one directed at the British colonial authorities and the other, the wider population of Karen in Burma, with their multiple Karennic languages and religious and other affiliations. Both appeals failed to get the desired responses, however. This article then discusses the contradiction that this assertion of Karen nationhood alienated the Baptist leaders from their own diverse community.

This article explores increasing medical control over sexuality and the female body in rural Malaysia by examining the formation of the global discourse of ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM) through local discourses on sunat (circumcision). Regarding FGM as a Foucauldian discourse, the article analyses interviews with traditional practitioners and villagers’ statements. The expansion of modern medical systems, along with the medical gaze, has brought notions of sexuality in rural areas of Malaysia as revealed from local discourses on sunat that mention it as a means of controlling female sexuality. By examining the cultural gaps between global discourse and categories of FGM and the local practice of sunat, the article concludes that the incorporation of local practices in the global is ongoing rather than complete.

Between 1967 and 1969, thousands of Hmong in northern Thailand became aligned with the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and resided in mountainous strongholds near the border with Laos in Chiang Rai, Phayao, Nan, Phetchabun, and Phitsanulok provinces, and in Tak province near the border with Burma. They stayed in these strongholds until the early 1980s, when the CPT fell apart. During the CPT period, some important transformations in Hmong gender relations occurred, especially relative to the traditional strongly male-dominated society. We describe the most important changes, as reported by Hmong women. The legacy of the CPT period remains today. However, there has been some reversion to pre-CPT patriarchal practices. Some Hmong women feel nostalgic about the rights they enjoyed during the CPT period, although the leadership of the CPT was male dominated, and despite the fact that some progress has been made, for example, in convincing clan leaders to allow divorced women to return to their birth clans. This study applies a feminist geography and social memory theoretical framework to examine Hmong women's life stories about their time with the CPT.

Past scholarship has described the Cham Bani religious community as a heterodox and syncretic version of Islam. We argue for a more nuanced interpretation: assertions of orthopraxy and heteropraxy shape contemporary debates in Cham communities in Vietnam. Based on a robust selection of source material—including the positions of government officials, high-ranking clerics, community members, and local activists, along with historicised anthropological accounts, Cham manuscripts, and government documents—our multidisciplinary approach, combining in-depth interviews and historical analysis, suggests religious classifications cannot be viewed as static in Cham communities, especially in the case of the ‘Cham Bani’, currently best thought of as a Cham particularist religious community.

Little is known about Cambodia's highland minorities during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese communists were infiltrating their homelands on the ground and American bombers attacking them from the sky. When inhabitants of the northeastern regions are mentioned in histories about the Khmer Rouge's coming to power, it is mainly as bodyguards of Pol Pot, who represented them as remnants of an uncorrupted ‘primitive democracy’. However, stories heard in the highlands raise different narratives, notably those of Bunong men and their families who left Mondulkiri province for Phnom Penh, where they enlisted in the weak pro-American Khmer Republic's army. These stories, told by the few who survived the mission and by the many who lost relatives to it, complicate the history of this convoluted period by bringing to light the Bunongs’ previously unmentioned involvement within the Forces Armées Nationales Khmères. Neither visceral rebels, nor unconditional allies, these Cambodian highlanders were and still are complex actors, whose engagements constitute a much-needed disturbance of dominant (historical) records.