This article integrates the history of the experience of rickshaw coolies into the larger history of Singapore in the period from 1880 to 1940. These were decisive years. They witnessed the extraordinary economic development of the vast potential for tin, rubber, oil palm, and tobacco in the Malay peninsula and on the east coast of Sumatra under colonial rule, and the evolution of Singapore as a “coolie town”, with a colonial administrative heart and an entrepôt port, with the birth of the rickshaw and a stream of emigrants from China who poured in faster and faster to pull it. This floodtide ofsingkeh singkeh (newcomers from China) came to Singapore with the hope of forming a foundation for a new and prosperous life. Expanding Singapore, especially at this stage of its growth from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was often considered by the migrants as a place of hope and betterment. There were in Singapore tens of thousands of Cantonese, Hengwah, Hockchia, and Foochow sojourners who hoped to find a pipeline to prosperity since the second half of the nineteenth century, when dire poverty and overpopulation plagued Southeast China.

The idea that Malay peasants have a close attachment to their land is a common place in both historical and contemporary writings about Malaya, and since the 1890s land legislation has been oriented toward bringing into being and preserving a landowning peasantry. The files of the colonial administration, however, contain numerous complaints about peasants disposing of their holdings. Officials and later commentators have tended to view such behaviour as contrary to the natural inclinations of peasants and symptomatic of underlying social or political problems, but when a pattern has been reported consistently for over one hundred years the question must be asked whether it really is, as conventional wisdom would have it, anomalous.

Mat Salleh was no nationalist rebel. No nation existed in the Sabah of the 1890s; as a somewhat jocular contemporary pointed out in the Pall Mall Gazette: the British North Borneo Company was attempting to establish a state. Opposition existed, but hardly rebellion. The opposition indicated the insufficiency of the Company's efforts rather than their efficiency. There was scope for political adventure. Such there had been in the days of the sultanates; such there was still before they were finally replaced. Mat Salleh's was an adventure. But, as he found, the scope was limited: the old world was passing. His challenge in fact forced the Company to become more efficient and bring the scope for adventure to an end.

Studies about Philippine colonial class structure are singularly scant. With the exception of Scott's work on the sixteenth century, no effort has yet been made to shed light upon the problem of how Philippine society had been stratified during the long span of the Spanish and American regimes. This paper tries to describe and analyze the manner in which a segment of nineteenth-century Philippine society was structured, and offers a conceptualization of what constituted a provincial “social class” at the time by looking at the role of the inquilino (leaseholders of agricultural land) in Caviteño society. Specifically, it (a) rejects the idea that native Filipino society was composed of only two social strata: a tiny upper stratum and a mass of uniformly poor population; (b) and implies that the native class structure was far from having been static during the Spanish regime. Due to limitations in the sources, no attempt has been made to trace in an evolutionary manner the development of the inquilinos as a social class. The study deals mainly with the Dominican hacienda town of Naic, although less detailed information on other municipalities like Imus, Bacoor, Kawit, Santa Cruz de Malabon, and San Francisco de Malabon suggest the existence of similar conditions that could have fostered the development of an intermediate social class composed largely of inquilinos.

The declaration of martial law in the Philippines by President Ferdinand Marcos on 21 September 1972 marked the overthrow of the open and competitive Filipino political system that had operated on the principle of institutional checks and balances adapted from the American model of liberal democracy. The Marcos power seizure represented a breakthrough by a coalition of the central Executive and new social forces that had emerged from the Philippines' transition to modernity against the constitutional restraints on presidential power. The new coalition, in which the military, the technocracy, and foreign economic interests were important components, succeeded in destroying the old balance of power, which had rested on the adversary relationship between the Chief Executive and Congress. The disbanding of Congress by emergency fiat reflected the decisive flew of power towards the Executive; for twenty-six years since independence, the legislature had acted as the main institutional check on the presidency.

On the last day of May 1872, “three respectably, but not ostentatiously dressed Chinamen” arrived at the Charing Cross Hotel, London. They brought with them three letters and four heavy boxes for presentation to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. While they waited for a reply to their letters and for an opportunity to present the boxes, they toured London, visiting the Mint, Woolwich Arsenal, Newgate Prison, the Enfield Ordnance Factory, the Powder Mills at Waltham Abbey, the Post Office and the Bank of England. At the end of July they were informed that Her Majesty's Government could not accept the proposals outlined in their letters and that Her Majesty could not receive the boxes. On 21 September 1872, the three Chinese departed, leaving behind the four sealed boxes. Thus appeared to end one of the more bizarre episodes in nineteenth-century Anglo-Chinese relations.

“If you want to write a real Burmese story”, U Nu once told an audience of Burmese writers, you “must know the real Burmese background”. It is advice that applies to foreign as well as indigenous writers and, in most cases, non-Burmese writers have followed it. The recommendation is important because fiction provides a popular entryway for the “average” reader to reach beyond his normal range of knowledge and imagination; it is more likely that he will have read a novel or short story rather than a history or a scholarly work and it is from this source that he will have formed his ideas and adopted his stereotypes. Thus, it is necessary that the available literature is good, that it is accurate in its descriptions of the locale and the behaviour of the people, that it catches the nuance of local speech and expression, that it reflects the psychology of the subjects when it discusses them rather than imputing alien speech, values, and attitudes.