Modern Vietnamese history is generally considered to begin with the seventeenth century. The final destruction of the Cham kingdom and the concurrent territorial expansion presided over by the Nguyễn lords of Hue increased the visibility of the Vietnamese people along the South China Sea and attracted the attention of refugees, merchants, and missionaries from China, Japan, and Europe. These foreign contacts were symptomatic of basic changes occurring in Vietnam; they were not the cause. From the decline of the Lê dynasty early in the sixteenth century, political life was dominated by militarized family alliances. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the two most successful families in the competition for power were locked in a grim testing of wills. Mutually aggressive policies remained inconclusive after half a century of warfare, however, and were eventually abandoned by both parties. This resulted from the rise of new interests tied to the internal social, political, and economic conditions of Vietnam. The rise of these new interests was the most significant development in the seventeenth century.

Unity within the Malay-Indonesian region evolved as an economic force from within and was not artificially superimposed by any political authority. The region was inextricably linked as a ‘geo-economic’ unit which was of paramount importance to international trade. Although it was trade which laid the area open to external intrusions which ultimately forced the region into a single matrix, colonial authority was imposed largely upon a pre-existing inter-regional economic infrastructure.

The paradox can be expressed simply: the population of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia apparently grew much more rapidly than precedent or demographic theory would have led us to expect. In the two areas for which we have the most and best data — Dutch Java and the Spanish Philippines — almost all the statistical evidence points to rates of natural increase reaching 1 per cent a year by the early nineteenth century and rising well above that level for most of the rest of the century. Though the evidence is much less clear for other countries in the region, it is generally compatible with a hypothesis of comparably rapid growth. In Siam, for example, the trend line passing through most nineteenth-century estimates reaches 1.3 per cent by the 1860s, 3 per cent by the 1890s.

This study aims to reconstruct a neglected chapter in the history of the Singapore Chinese. The opium farm, which was the monopoly for the manufacture and sale of chandu, or smokeable opium, was one of the primary Chinese-dominated economic institutions of nineteenth-century Singapore. A study of the farm provides the historian with an institutional focus which can increase our understanding of the history of the Chinese community in Singapore during its formative years.

In 1809, representatives of Chiang Mai and the Kayah State of Kantarawaddy marked their mutual boundary by releasing a buffalo on the summit of a range of mountains and erecting markers on the line it followed. As this episode suggests, these Kayahs and Thais (and also Burmans) translated the world into cognitive maps quite different from those of the British colonialists who would later rule in Burma. The anthropologist, Edmund Leach, noted this difference in his “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, observing that European concepts of frontier, state, and nation are not always applicable to Burma where the frontier is not an absolute division but “a border zone through which cultures interpenetrate in a dynamic manner”. This paper examines the interaction between the Kayah-Thai-Burman and the British conceptions of frontier in the working out of demarcated borders between the Kayah states and Thailand during the nineteenth century.

This paper comprises an enquiry into the unrest in the Belait and Tutong districts of Brunei at the turn of the twentieth century. After outlining the course of the disturbances, I shall examine their causes, explain why the recrudescence of violence (after a period of calm) early in 1901 led to a departure in British policy towards the Sultanate, and finally, show how the factors which had given rise to the original disaffection were removed, and lasting peace restored, under a reformed administration introduced at the beginning of 1906. First, however, some background information is necessary.

The philosophical basis of the Indonesian state, first framed in 1945, is the Panca Sila or Five Principles. Since 1985 all political and social organizations including religious ones have had to subscribe to the Panca Sila as their sole philosophical principle (Azas Tunggal). The first of the Five Principles is belief in Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, normally, though not entirely satisfactorily, translated as the One Supreme God. The founders of the state had accepted this principle rather than a more specific statement of belief in the God of Islam, the religion of the majority of the people. Its formulation was clearly a compromise, aimed at stressing the importance of religion in the state, but avoiding declaring Islam as the state religion. As it stood, the principle was generally acceptable to followers of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, and all religions which did acknowledge the existence of God, in one form or another.

Rapid urban growth, in spite of some limited success in controlling population expansion, will likely continue over the next two decades in much of the developing world. Growing evidence suggests that this surge of urbanization poses significant problems for urban development and management as well as for national economic progress in general. Despite relatively strong economies and development programmes this trend is quite conspicuous in Southeast Asia where policy concerns about resource allocation, informal sector development, fiscal capacity and urban services delivery have emerged.