The history of the early modern Malay world has been told largely in terms of processes of Islamization, the rise and demise of states, European voyages of discovery, trade with China, India and Europe, and colonial conquest. With a few important exceptions, these studies underestimate, if not ignore, the role of transportation in the historical transformations of Southeast Asia. Just as Clive Ponting's (1992) well-known A green history of the world rewrites the world's history in ecological terms, this article aims to describe the political and economic history of Middle Sumatra in terms of transportation of goods and people. Hence this is a moving history.

The purpose of the following remarks is to trace the way in which, for over a century from the time of the first Opium War to that of the emergence of the study of Chinese religions as a separate specialization in the 1970s, the English-language world sustained a description of religion in China that was at very considerable variance with the facts. The narrative is not designed to be definitive—the choice of materials drawn upon is restricted, and somewhat arbitrary—but I trust that it ranges widely enough to explain just how this faulty analysis not only came into being but also managed to survive for so long. More detailed studies of aspects of the problem are already under way, and will doubtless appear in due course, but an overview at this point may even so be helpful. It may indeed even be helpful in the wake of the appearance of one such extremely detailed and valuable study, Norman Girardot's weighty volume on the towering figure of James Legge (1815–1897). For while it is now possible to read an excellent study of Legge's views in the context of his own times—and no one interested in the topic treated here should ignore Girardot's research—a glance at the even broader context of the overall history of sinology in relation to Chinese religion suggests that Legge's views by and large fall into the more extended pattern outlined here. For rather than explore the outlook of any particular individual, the aim here is to illustrate, and to some preliminary degree explain, the persistence of a particular paradigm in the understanding of Chinese religion.

The development of France's territories in Indo-China between about 1900 and 1940 was based on an ideology of economic growth coupled with social and cultural transformation. These twin aims, what French colonial theory termed the mise en valeur and mission civilisatrice of the overseas empire, can tell us much about the attitude of colonial scientists and administrators to defining, controlling and developing the forest resources of the region. This paper examines colonial attitudes towards forest resources and the peoples who relied on the forest for their livelihoods, and explores the ways in which both economic and cultural preoccupations about the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ use of those resources was reflected in the institutions and policies of the state. Through an examination of the origins and development of forest legislation and, in particular, its effects on indigenous peoples, the paper highlights both the mechanisms used to control indigenous peoples and practices, and the wider context within which such policies were framed.

Future predictions in security studies tend to fall into two broad intellectual traditions, liberal modernist hypotheses, and structural-realist or geopolitical hypotheses. These two major schools of thought essentially agree on the rationality of participants, but disagree about the nature of the environment facing policymakers and thereby framing their decisions. This project considers theoretical, rational, and statistical models associated with these approaches, analyzes the available data for future projection with regard to the Northeast Asian sub-region, and introduces a third rational future based on the social construction of a regional geopolynomic community, with America as a political entrepreneur, her regional allies as a winning coalition, and China and Russia as partners for peace. The focus of this work is on the Northeast Asian subset of the international system, containing the countries of China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, North and South Korea, and considering the undeniable role played by the United States in the region, although at times statistical and theoretical evidence forces representation of a larger constituency.

There have been numerous occasions throughout history where the exploitation of a single commodity has transformed the fortunes of institutions, communities and even nations that have sought to benefit from its control. Middle Eastern oil, rubber from the former Belgian Congo or gold in South America provide a few striking case studies. For the eastern Indonesian island of Timor, the long-term struggle for the control and trade of high quality white sandalwood (Santalum album L) holds this pre-eminent position. The history of Timor, for perhaps the last millennium, has been intimately linked to the shifting fortunes of sandalwood production and trade. Over the centuries, the attraction of sandalwood and the fine scented oil produced from its heartwood, has encouraged an extraordinary array of diverse trading interests that jostled and warred for influence and a share of the lucrative profits from its exploitation and sale across Asia. For indigenous Timorese too, participation in sandalwood politics frequently lay at the heart of endemic struggles for power and wealth. The capacity to exert control over sandalwood production and trade from the interior of the island was a direct measure of political authority and standing among rival Timorese indigenous domains. To control the production and trade in sandalwood was to control the polity, at least to the extent that the situation remained uncontested. The converse also held true; namely that the holders of effective political power within Timorese domains were well placed to monopolise available sandalwood stocks. Thus to a significant degree the fortunes of Timorese society are mirrored in the history of sandalwood politics.

Historians often characterize Japan's foreign policy regarding China during the 1920s as dominated by economic priorities and a commitment to peaceful cooperation within a collaborative system of treaty port imperialism. In that narrative, the Manchurian Incident of 1931 thus stands as a watershed moment in modern East Asian history when Japan returned to a policy of acquiring formal colonial territory. Akira Iriye made this thesis famous with his groundbreaking international history of East Asia during the 1920s. More recently, Peter Duus has reinforced this paradigm in his summary of Japan's informal empire, pondering why it was that ‘just when Japan appeared to be emerging as the paramount foreign economic power in China within the framework of the treaty system, it embarked on a new policy of establishing direct political control over Manchuria’ in the autumn of 1931. Similarly, Mark Peattie has also suggested that ‘in the overheated atmosphere of the 1930s, the Japanese empire once more became expansive,’ clearly emphasizing the notion that a return to previously abandoned patterns of colonial conquest was underway.

Boundaries were smashed and broken as modernity struck its first blows in Asia in the nineteenth century. The British and the French chipped away at the borders of China, and the USA ripped open the seal that enveloped Japan in sakoku. Imperialism, or neo-imperialism, represented a way of overcoming boundaries, of decreasing the salience of other territorial units. However, it was also a way of expanding boundaries, of projecting one's own territory and sustaining the priority of these new (modern) borders over the claims of (allegedly pre-modern) indigenous peoples. Boundaries themselves began to take on a distinctly modern persona–and they were the property of the modern, Western powers.

All countries with significant coastlines and groups of islands inevitably produce seafarers at some time or other in the course of their economic development, and the two countries which are the subject of this paper are no exceptions. Chinese ships and seafarers were famously exploring the Indian Ocean more than a century before the arrival of the Portuguese and once the Spanish Pacific empire was established in the sixteenth century, the ships linking Mexico to Manila were mainly crewed by Filipinos. And it need hardly be said that Chinese and Filipinos have both been employed by foreign ship-owners throughout the twentieth century. What is unquestionably new is the magnitude of Filipino seafarers' employment in the world's merchant ships and the extraordinary growth of China as a nation with a major stake in the shipping industry, both as ship-owner and as a source of seafarers.

My thanks for help in writing this paper go to the Jesuit priests whose letters and diaries I have used; to Fathers Rosario Renaud and Jacques Langlais, the historians of the Quebec Mission in China; to Madame Isabelle Content, archivist of the Jesuit Order in St. Jerome, Quebec; and to my mother, M.M.E. Lainson, who helped me to understand the religious life of Roman Catholics in the 1930s.

Buried in an obscure journal published in Burma is a letter addressed to its readers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication. The editor had asked one of the publication's founders, a well-known former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer turned progres-sive reformer, to pen a few lines. Years later, the writer achieved acclaim as an ardent supporter of Burmese nationalism and independence and one of the founding scholars of Burma and Southeast Asia studies. These were his words of inspiration to an audience that comprised mostly educated Burmese:

Burma did not lose its independence because the rulers of Burma came into conflict with the British Empire, but because they had not sufficient wisdom to preserve their country; they did not know enough of Burma or of the outside world. And it will not again be capable of independence until Burmans know enough of Burma and of the outside world to guide its destinies.

In essence, the Burmese were responsible for their own colonisation because they lacked ‘wisdom’ and only through gaining this elusive knowledge could they be free. This opinion was based on nearly three decades worth of first-hand observation of Burmese society. The author was J. S. Furnivall.

The emergence of criminal secret societies in post-Mao China has closely correlated with the criminal subcultures, massive unemployment, impoverishment, economic inequality, relative deprivation, and political corruption that have arisen from the reform process. Although perceived as the roots of organized crime worldwide, these variables have generated crime incentives—mainly among disadvantaged and marginalized social groups—far stronger in China than in most of Western societies. The factors underlying organized crime in China are not simply the by-products of economic liberalization, but rather related to the structural problems caused by flawed reform policies and China's particular political context. These problems account to a large extent for the double nature of many criminal organizations as both anti-social and anti-state forces. The regime's crackdown on organized crime may hamper efforts for greater socio-political pluralism. But in the long run, it may strengthen the rule of law and lead to the improvement of relevant reform policies.

In the last two decades there has been much scholarly and journalistic attention given to the issue of how Chinese overseas relate themselves to China. This happened against a backdrop of two major developments in Asia. The first has to do with the fact that many ethnic Chinese outside mainland China have been faring well economically and accumulating considerable wealth in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the second half of the twentieth century. The second is the rise of China as an economic superpower attracting foreign capital after it reopened itself and launched economic reform in 1978.

Three or four decades ago it was a consensus among scholars in Chinese history that China before the advent of the Western impact was a stagnant economy under the yoke of a pre-modern regime and that the opening of China to foreign trade exacerbated the predicament of peasants by forcing commercialization on them, while the inflow of Western manufactures destroyed the handicraft industries of China. This perception has since been largely contradicted. According to Hans van de Ven, ‘The greatest achievement of China scholarship in the past decade has been the discovery of the eighteenth century. New vistas have been laid out that make clear how dynamic the period was.’ In response to this dynamism, there emerged two kinds of financial institutions serving the needs of the economy. One was the so-called Shanhsi banks (Wade-Giles mode of spelling is used throughout this paper in order to preserve consistency with Chinese words in quotations), that is, p'iao hao, which deployed nation-wide networks of branches and was engaged in long-distance remittances, and, after the T'aip'ing Revolution, remittances of provincial tributes to Peking came to be handled by them. At the end of the nineteenth century there were 32 of them, having 175 branches in all the major cities of China. Their main function, however, was remittance business and their spare cash was lent to the provincial authorities, to individual officials and to the ch'ien chuang. That is, they did not lend money directly to commerce and industries.

In a letter to Sir Samuel Hoare in September 1932, on the eve of his ‘fast unto the death’ against the principle of separate electorates for untouchables, Gandhi wrote:For me religion is one in essence, but it has many branches and if I, the Hindu branch, fail in my duty to the parent trunk, I am an unworthy follower of that one indivisible, visible religion…. My nationalism and my religion are not exclusive, but inclusive and they must be so consistently with the welfare of all life.

Architecture can be viewed as a reflection of value placed on life. In colonial Hong Kong, a distinctive Gothic-style castle, Euston, was built by tycoon Eu Tong Sen (1877–1941) as his family's grand residence. Eu was a prominent figure in South China and Southeast Asia and remains a local legend decades after his death. Eu's castle, being built in 1928 and demolished in the 1980s, was and still is one of the most recognizable monuments in the region. Although Eu did not leave behind any autobiography or memoirs, the monumental castle can be regarded as a symbolic manifestation of his life story. The design of the castle is of mixed ancestry—it is a reconciliation of traditional Chinese design based on feng shui (Chinese geomancy) with European architectural elements. The fusion of East-West architectural building elements, as symbolized by the Eu castle, was a significant achievement symbolizing general social and cultural changes spanning more than a century.

This article focuses on the working of developmentalism as a disciplinary strategy in Bangladesh. The formation of groups or cooperatives of traditional agriculturists/peasants may be seen as the first attempt in establishing the ‘development gaze’ over the peasants of Bangladesh. An examination of various techniques used in the cooperative formation process reveals that they are clearly interventionist in nature and are based on the modernist approach to development. Development deployed in the rural villages in Bangladesh resembles the deployment that took place in European societies when what Foucault (1991a) refers to as ‘disciplinary power’ was established.

The Third Way started as an Anglo-American ideological and political venture. It was soon followed by major European leaders, among other worldwide government heads of state, who sought to emulate the result of a high command of electoral support and a resolution to the consequences of globalisation. Despite criticism by academics and commentators for having lack of content and substance, the Third Way appeared to be rather successful in recruiting allies, especially among Western democracies. Unlike other nations in East Asia, Taiwan is involved with this arguably prominent political project of the 21st century.

The New Middle Way is not only the political idea that seemingly pushed Chen Shui-bian into office, but also appears to be the ideological foundation of his governance. This paper focuses on the political language of Chen in order to analyse and comprehend the implications of the New Taiwan Middle Way. One way to understand Chen's New Middle Way is to look into the language of the DPP, particularly of Chen. To get behind the rhetoric and decode the factual meanings of the discourse, a wide range of political speeches and texts are examined. By examining the New Taiwan Middle Way, we not only gain a different perspective on Chen's bid for the presidency, but also capture valuable insights into his governing approach.

The paper argues that the effect of the New Taiwan Middle Way before the presidential election was to achieve the political objective of Chen Shui-bian. Though the DPP did not hold the majority of the seats in the Legislative Yuan prior to the December 2001 election, the New Middle Way may have served as symbolic means to an end to resolve the deadlock within the legislature. In these ways, the significance of the New Middle Way for Taiwan is to be concluded.

Korea under the Park regime (1961–1979) is known as a typical example of the East Asian developmental state. Many students of development, both economists and political scientists, have studied it, producing a substantial accumulation of knowledge. However, most writers have, in fact, focused on the policies and politics of the first half of the era. The second half was, politically, a notoriously authoritarian dictatorship, through which the regime strongly pushed its controversial heavy and chemical industrialization program. This program is frequently criticized for being based upon irrational industrial targeting that generated great inefficiency in the economy. The explanation for such irrational policy has been attributed to politics, or the authoritarian nature of the regime, which actually does not explain much.

In Taiwan, the legalised gambling sponsored by the government—the Public Welfare Lottery—was re-introduced on January 2002. Since then, the unprecedented lottery fever has become a social phenomenon that deserves our attention. This research focuses on the ‘public welfare’ effects as the name of the lottery was billed. The study consists of qualitative and quantitative analyses, which has served effectively to assess the advocacy of the ‘social ill’ for the ‘social good’.

By conducting a web survey on the Internet, the empirical study enables us to examine the statistical significance of socio-economic and demographic variables on the behavioural tendency of purchasing the lottery. The results of the logistic regression model reveals that those who are younger, have-nots and with experiences on any previous lottery games are more likely to wager on the Public Welfare Lottery. Other major findings include two distinctive perspectives perceived by those who purchase the lottery and those who do not, i.e. lottery buyers tend to legitimise their action into socially justifiable causes, and those who do not purchase the lottery, by contrast, believe that the lottery has negative impacts on society. The paper concludes by discussing its methodological limitations and opportunities for future research.

The massacre of Muslims in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat in February 2002 demonstrated the challenge of Hindu nationalism to India's democracy and secularism. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organisations. The Gujarat government's intervention did little to stop the carnage. The communalism that was witnessed in 2002 had its roots in the mid-1980s. Since then, militant Hindu nationalism and recurring communal violence arose in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat. This study aims to shed light on the rise and nature of communalism since the mid-1980s.