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.

In colonial sources the designation and condemnation of certain indigenous acts of maritime violence as piracy are presented as self-evident. This confronts modern historiography with many problems of conceptualisation, interpretation and assessment. Discourse analysis may be an effective tool. Comparing divergent representations of piracy by Dutch administrators in colonial Indonesia shows how piracy was constructed in the confrontation of colonial and indigenous states.

This article re-examines the history and historiography of the Saya San Rebellion (1930–32), Burma's most famous peasant uprising and one of Southeast Asia's most frequently examined anti-colonial movements. By retracing the documents most intimately connected to the rebellion's official narrative, this study reconstructs the legal and administrative context within which this particular history was made.

Analysis of the earliest sculpture and epigraphy of Southeast Asia reveals contrasting geographic patterns regarding the worship of Hindu deities. During the seventh century, efforts to consolidate political authority by Khmer rulers led to the deployment of Harihara, a god that embodied multiple conceptions of power and could serve as a ready statement of political and religious unification.

Modernisation theory and political development theory played a key role in the formalisation of the study of Southeast Asia, while the dramatic transitions from colonies to nation-states in the region and the deepening war in Vietnam were also pivotal to the rise and transformation of modernisation theory. This article provides a critical historical overview of the rise and elaboration of theories of political development and nation-building between 1945 and 1975.

After making a comparative study of the Chinese Batavia Kong Koan archives between its earlier and later periods, this article discusses what was an apparently inevitable localisation of immigrants' identities, in the context of immigration, settlement and, in particular, intermarriage.

Although Cold War propaganda is now the subject of close scholarly scrutiny, the main method by which it was communicated – language – has been overlooked. The Malayan Emergency illustrates how the British government grappled with the issue of political terminology within the broader context of anti-communist propaganda. This article will analyse the use of political language; the change from ‘bandit’ to ‘communist terrorist’; and the problems of delineating the Malayan from the international audience.

Ayutthaya rose as a maritime power with involvement down the peninsula and in the China trade. Early Ayutthaya resembled coastal polities of the archipelago more than hinterland states of the mainland. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ayutthaya changed by absorbing people, political structures, and cultural practice from the north.

While it is conventionally argued that global culture homogenises local cultures, very little attention is paid to the strategies that local cultures deploy to survive. This article looks at Chinese opera in Singapore and explores strategies such as apprenticeship schemes, coopting consumerist culture and amateur opera. It argues that the relationship between global and local cultures is one of continuous contestation and refutes the notion that national culture protects or elevates local cultures.

Focusing on land, forests and coastal resources of Southeast Asia, this collection of articles explores an emerging interest in exploring local development and change in national, regional (Asia Pacific) and global terms. Specifically, the authors are interested in steering clear of viewing ‘global’ forces (of market production and environmentalism) as the privileged sites of action with the ‘local’ relegated to a ‘mediating’ role vis–à–vis these larger influences. On the contrary, the articles suggest that local groups actively engage in reshaping discourses and practices of the global (Majid Cooke, Tomforde). Local groups grow crops, often changing from subsistence to cash-producing ones or from one cash crop to another for a complexity of reasons – often not of their own choosing – which reflect local, regional, national and global power differentials (Majid Cooke, McKay, Sato).

While some scholarship has found the roots of the modern Vietnamese idea of ‘nation’ in the distant past, this paper attempts to illuminate ways of thought which were in conflict with Western nationalist ideas. These ways of thought had to be transformed in the early twentieth century in order for the idea of a Vietnamese nation to take hold.

The influence of Christianity in Karen communities of Northern Thailand is increasing. Thai Buddhism is still marginal but growing, reducing the power of traditional beliefs, particularly ancestor worship. Despite conflicts between Christians and non-Christians, differing attitudes among the various Christian denominations towards Karen tradition and intra-ethnic dissociation based on religion, a distinctive Karen ethnic identity persists irrespective of religion, though the association between religious and ethnic identity varies.

As in Europe, the transfer, adaptation and utilisation of foreign military knowledge and techniques have contributed greatly to the development of Southeast Asian states. However, it has not always been easy to write about such military transfers when it comes to Southeast Asia.

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.

This paper compares the trajectories over the last two decades of two export-oriented ‘boom crops’ in Southeast Asia: industrial shrimp aquaculture and industrial plantation forestry. It focuses on differences in the establishment, operation and politics of these sectors to explain why they have experienced very different kinds of ‘booms’.

A comparison of European tobacco plantations and native shifting cultivation in North Borneo between 1881 and 1928 illustrates the discursive and political strategies through which colonial administrators justified intervention into native land matters and articulated their vision of ‘appropriate’ land management. The discourse of rational law, scientific agriculture and commercialisation provided the tools of colonial power that pushed native people and their customary laws into an increasingly peripheral position in relationship to the centralising state.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Chinese gunpowder technology spread to the whole of Southeast Asia via both the overland and maritime routes, long before the arrival of European firearms. The impact of Chinese firearms on northern mainland Southeast Asia in terms of warfare and territorial expansion was profound.

This article examines differences and overlaps in imagined spatial ideas of rural Sarawak which underpin official and community mapping. It looks at the ways in which ‘counter-mapping’ is used by indigenous communities to support their claims to traditional land rights when these are contested by other parties.

In the Philippines, female migration for contract domestic work transforms the local landscape. The changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of new local futures, envisioned on a new global scale.

This first attempt to include women in the pre-1949 history of Chinese immigration to Thailand examines the dialectical relationship between immigration and marital practices through a gender lens. It is argued that labour immigration is not simply an economic endeavour, but rather a complex process of cultural production in which Thai and Chinese regimes compete to produce gendered citizens.