Studies on leadership in Southeast Asia's early modern era have tended to centre necessarily on men, and in particular, on O.W. Wolters' concept of ‘men of prowess’. The concept of female leadership is still little researched. This case study of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh (1641–75) provides some insights into female leadership in the Malay-Muslim island world of Southeast Asia. Contrary to the received view that successful leadership tended to be male (men of prowess), this article demonstrates that female leadership and the justification for the position of the ruler relied less on notions of sacral and charismatic power based on male prowess, but instead shifted to Muslim notions of piety and the just ruler.

Women's involvement in the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) since its establishment in 1930 until they laid down their arms in 1989 contributed much to the strength of the party. Women in the MCP have been presented largely as nurses, cooks, seamstresses, couriers, and wireless/radio operators, but they went through hardship and danger and fought the same battles as the male guerrillas. A few even climbed to the top party posts through hard work, intelligence and personal sacrifice. This paper recovers the role of women in the Malayan communist movement during the Second World War, the Emergency and after by tracing the careers and lives of party heroines / female role models as well as some ordinary cadres. Major questions include the motivations of women who joined the MCP and the challenges they faced in their roles as propagandists, comrades, guerrilla fighters and in the communist villages. This investigation provides more insight into how the revolutionary struggle transformed these Malayan women.

This article offers an examination of the gendering of the Philippines' Muslim South under American military rule (1899–1913) through discourses of violence against women. It explores the exposition and discussion of cases involving abuse, murder, enslavement, and violence in both official and unofficial reports, which revealed a critical discourse of gender construction for both coloniser and colonised in Moro Province.

Christian Filipino legislators in the bicameral US civil administration played a hitherto unacknowledged role in pushing for the colonisation of Mindanao, as part of the Philippines, by proposing a series of Assembly bills (between 1907 to 1913) aimed at establishing migrant farming colonies on Mindanao. This legislative process was fuelled by anger over the unequal power relations between the Filipino-dominated Assembly and the American-dominated Commission, as well as rivalry between resident Christian Filipino leaders versus the American military government, business interests and some Muslim datus in Mindanao itself for control over its land and resources. Focusing on the motives and intentions of the bills' drafters, this study concludes that despite it being a Spanish legacy, the Christian Filipino elite's territorial map — emphasising the integrity of a nation comprising Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao — provided the basis for their claim of Philippine sovereignty over Mindanao.

When the Burmese military junta implemented a repressive economy that nationalised trade and industry during the socialist period (1962–88), a black market economy sprang up and predominated. Despite regime change in 1988 and the subsequent adoption of a market-oriented economy, the underground trade has nevertheless continued and thrived. The Yunnanese Chinese merchants of Burma have played a significant role in the contraband economy over the span of regimes. Based on a non-state-centred perspective, this paper aims to look into the everyday politics of the underground trade conducted by the Yunnanese Chinese moving between Burma, Thailand and Yunnan and analyses the country's politico-economic landscape since 1962.

This paper analyses the textual-mythographical transformation of Viet origin myths from their transcription in the distant past through their exploitation for political purposes in the 1950s by scholarly elites. It attempts to demonstrate that, as early as the fifteenth century, stories about the Hùng Kings were deliberately collected and codified by members of the Việt elite, who sought to exploit their potential as catalysts of identify-formation and unification under the leadership of the imperial state. However, as a result of the confluence of two currents, that of the monarchical state's mythographical construction and that of popular, village-based, animistic worship, the Hùng Kings came to be venerated as ancestral founders of the Việt quốc in temples throughout the Red River Delta and beyond. During the French colonial and early national periods, the codified myths were the object of severe criticism and strident defence by both French and Viet scholars.

The world might have become, for the first time in human history, a majority urban place, but there are clearly important seams of research to mine in the Southeast Asian countryside. These six books amply show why there is a continuing interest in rural areas and agrarian living in the region.