Bringing to light the first known Urdu primary source on Islam in colonial Burma, this essay examines the polemical encounter with Buddhism in the years surrounding the Third Anglo–Burmese War. Using the model of religious economy, the Urdu Sayr-e Barhma is contextualised amid the religious pluralisation and competition that accompanied colonisation as a multitude of religious ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘firms’ rapidly entered the colony. Among them was the Indian Muslim author of Sayr-e Barhma, which provided a detailed account of the history, language and theology of Burman Buddhists and included an account of a public debate which, it claimed, culminated in the conversion of the Thathanabaing (Primate). Against the long-standing historiographical emphasis on the economic roots of anti-Indian sentiments in colonial Burma, this essay points to the religious dimensions of these enduring antagonisms.

The 1930s Depression caused an enormous growth in urban poverty in colonial Java. Informal neighbourhood networks could no longer cope with the unemployed, the homeless and the destitute. Politically conscious Indonesians were convinced that the colonial state was concerned only with poverty among Europeans. They responded by creating new charities focused on the Indonesian lower classes. Many provided middle-class women with opportunities for leadership denied them in the political and labour movements. However, those who managed the charities had no concept of empowering the poor. In dispensing support they made a clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Nevertheless their charitable work enabled thousands of Indonesians to survive the Depression years.

For decades after their introduction in 1854, state-defined categories of subjects and citizens in the East Indies remained largely uncontested. But a furore erupted when Indo-Europeans — legally Europeans and citizens of the Netherlands — demanded rights to own land, rights exclusively apportioned to the autochthonous population. This article recounts a contentious campaign in the 1930s by the Indo-European Association to gain rights to own land, and the vehement rejection by Indonesians expressed in various civic outlets. I argue that by challenging state categories of entitlement, race, and belonging, the debates on rights to own land defined more sharply notions of citizenship among the Indies population. Drawing on ‘acts of citizenship’, I situate the discourse of rights at the centre of the debate on colonial citizenship. In so doing, I offer an insight into the genealogy of exclusion that has haunted the idea of citizenship in postcolonial Indonesia.

After the restoration of the Lê dynasty, the Red River delta region was flooded with military men who set up and controlled irregular departments from the end of the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. The imperial administration became a shell during the Lê-Trịnh period, with the Trịnh Lords as de facto rulers who constructed their own parallel government on the basis of these local departments. This analysis of contemporary inscriptions indicates that the Trịnh Lords subsequently expanded their administration and secured their rule by absorbing large numbers of Red River delta literati, while retaining many eunuchs in influential financial and military roles. Overall, the Trịnh bureaucracy, comprising of the Lục Phiên and Lục Cung, was a kind of financial organisation combined with a military district system because it harnessed the existing military organisation.

This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society.

In the wake of the bloody coup of 1 October 1965, three young Indonesia scholars, Ruth McVey, Fred Bunnell, and Ben Anderson, all working with George Kahin at Cornell University, set out to explain how things had gone so wrong. They began their analysis with a careful examination of the patterns of promotion and transfer in the Indonesian military, which seemed to indicate that tensions between Javanese and other officers played a major part in the coup. Keen to make this information available to other scholars, they quickly wrote up a draft version of their findings and tentative conclusions, and circulated it to a few friends and colleagues. This fateful decision, ironically, would reshape our understanding of Siam. Subsequently banned from entering Indonesia, McVey and Anderson would produce influential work on Siam, while mentoring younger scholars through thesis supervision and edited volumes. This collection, Exploration and irony in studies of Siam over forty years, is comprised of nine of Anderson's articles each outlined below, with an introduction by Tamara Loos, a successor of Anderson as director of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program. Loos' introduction places the articles in historical perspective, and in the context of Anderson's own personal history, including his networks of colleagues and students, and his other work. The essays provide an opportunity to reflect on Anderson's contribution to Siam Studies, as they illuminate the influence he had in opening up new directions for research, and new ways of conceptualising Thai politics.