Since 1989 ‘rites of cursing’, derived from Northern Thai folk-religious practices, have become common in public protests and demonstrations in Thailand. This essay argues that the employment of these practices and associated beliefs as aspects of civil society and contemporary nation-state making in the Thai context can only be understood in terms of the internal logic of sorcery and embedded conceptions of morality.

I make the following observations from the vantage point of a philologist and anthropologist. I presuppose Michael Aung-Thwin's paper, “Hierarchy and Order in Pre-Colonial Burma”, as background, and I do not propose to recapitulate his treatment of the facts.

Writing in June 1960 Donald Stephens, editor of the North Borneo News and Sabah Times, remarked that “… the Penampang Kadazans have seldom found much favour in official circles because of the bit of education they possess and because of the courage they have in fighting for their rights.” Certainly the observations of British North Borneo Chartered Company officials and others in the past often included disparaging comparisons between the then-called “Dusun” people of the Penampang, Papar and Membakut areas south of Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu), and the more tractable people of Tuaran to the north. Owen Rutter, for instance, delivered himself in 1922 of the opinion that “The Dusuns of Tuaran … are … the pleasantest of the lowland Dusuns, just as the people of Papar and Membakut are the most objectionable.” He went on to describe an incident occurring in 1910 in which the people of Papar led a protest movement against the sale of land by the Chartered Company to rubber companies. They contended that such compensation as they had received for fruit trees and ancestral graves was inadequate, and that the land itself was their heritage for which they should also be paid. “At one time”, wrote Rutter, “the agitation movement threatened to spread to Tuaran, but the good people of the district did not appreciate squandering on legal charges the comfortable sum they had extracted from the Tuaran Rubber Estate for their fruit trees, and the Papar envoys went home practically empty-handed.” K. G. Tregonning, alluding to the same incident, merely says “At Papar, a notorious trouble-maker, strongly influenced by the long-established Roman Catholic mission there, found for the Christian Dusuns imaginary faults in the change from traditional tenure.”

Tai Lue and Lua people are struggling to maintain access to resources in a northern Thai national park. Contrasting outcomes for Tai Lue and Lua relations with the park can largely be explained by political, economic and discursive structures and the interests, attitudes and actions they promote. In particular, the racialisation of resource use constrains the ability of minority upland groups like the Lua to secure recognition and legitimacy for their resource use practices.

Inter-household relations in lowland Lao villages are often characterized by cooperation and mutual support. This study describes norms governing agricultural labour exchange, assistance at household ceremonies, and village-wide projects. Successful cooperation expresses and reinforces values of village mutuality and solidarity which are important principles of Lao social organization and identification.

Malaya's creditable economic performance prior to the Second World War was very much the product of growth without planning. It would be a mistake, to be sure, to attribute early Malayan economic growth solely to the initiative and enterprise of private individuals and firms acting independently of government. Certainly the British colonial administration, indirectly through fiscal measures and directly through the activities of an increasingly important public sector, had a significant role to play in determining the direction, and incidentally the magnitude, of pre-war economic expansion. Colonial government policy nevertheless remained compartmentalized and its objectives were defined narrowly. There was no idea of maximizing the development of Malaya's economy as a whole. Indeed, the Malayan economy during the decades before the War even lacked fundamental functional integration, for in the words of a World Bank mission, “… Malaya in many respects was rather a geographic region where capital and labor belonging to other economies found it convenient to carry on certain specialized operations, within the British monetary as well as political framework”. Whatever economic growth that did occur involved unplanned, and largely uneven, development.

When Dr. Lim Boon Keng, an eminent Western-educated Chinese and one of the comparatively few Chinese Christians in Singapore, was converted to Confucianism in 1899, the grip of Confucianism on overseas Chinese intellectuals had shown its strength. In the intellectual history of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, the spread of Confucianism and nationalism were the chief causes of ferment and change in the period 1899–1911. Between them these new ideas did much to transform the overseas Chinese communities and make them more adaptable to the modern world. The Confucian revival movement was the first among the stimulants of change. To understand its influence on the development of the overseas Chinese communities, it is necessary to trace its origins back to China.

For more than a century scholars of central and western mainland Southeast Asia have sought to characterise the status of dhammasattha — the predominant genre of written law from the region before colonialism — and define its authority vis-à-vis Pali Buddhism. For some, dhammasattha texts represent a predominantly ‘secular’ or ‘customary’ tradition, while for others they are seen as largely commensurate with, if not directly derived from, the religio-political ideas of a cosmopolitan and purportedly canonical ‘Theravāda’. However, scholarship has yet to investigate the way that regional authors during the late premodern period themselves understood the character and legitimacy of written law. The present article examines seventeenth through nineteenth-century Burmese narratives concerning the genealogy and status of dhammasattha to advance a pluralist conception of the relationship between law and religion in Southeast Asian history. This analysis addresses a historical context where ideas concerning Buddhist textual authority were in the process of development, and where there were multiple and competing discourses of legal ideology in play. For elite monastic critics closely connected with royalty, dhammasattha stood in problematic relation to authoritative taxonomies of scripture, and its jurisprudence was seen to contradict authorised accounts of the origin and nature of Buddhist law; the genre thus required reform to be brought into alignment with what were construed as orthodox legal imaginaries. The principal hermeneutic move these monastic commentators performed to achieve this involved redescribing dhammasattha in light of such accounts as a variety of Buddhist royal legislation and written law as the prerogative of the Buddhist state.

The period from 1963 to 1966, which spans Indonesia's “confrontation” against Majaysia, marks an important benchmark in the history of Malaysian-American relations as it represents the first direct involvement of the United States into the political affairs of Malaysia. Before confrontation, the United States had maintained a low profile in the country and had confined the relationship to mainly economic issues. Politically, the United States had, for the most part, hovered in the background behind the British who had continued their close ties with Malaysia even after the granting of independence in 1957. America's deeper involvement with Malaysia because of confrontation, signified, therefore, a distinct departure from its earlier policy.

The province of Maluku, otherwise known as the Moluccas, is divided into three main regions: the predominantly Muslim north, the mainly Christian central area, and the predominantly Christian southeast (see Map 1). The central region contains the “mother island” (nasa ina) of Seram which Maluku people believe to be the original source of Maluku culture. In some relatively isolated parts of this large island the original inhabitants such as the Nuaulu and the Huaulu ethnic groups (known in colonial times as the Alifuru people) still practise their ancestral rituals including music and dance.

‘Mas malupit ang mga Koreano kaysa mga Hapon’ is a rumour about Koreans in Second World War Philippines that has persisted to this day. A comparative, quantitative statement, it is roughly translated as ‘The Koreans committed more atrocities than the Japanese in Second World War Philippines’. This is a half-true memory: true, there were Koreans in the Philippines; false, they could not have committed more atrocities than the Japanese because there were very few of them, as archival evidence discussed in this article proves. If only the Koreans and their role in the war were properly discussed in Philippine textbooks, this rumour would not have persisted to this day.

During the turbulent years between the 1930s and the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, Chinese businessmen in Yogyakarta confronted three major issues: competition against the emerging Indonesian entrepreneurs and Japanese business expatriates; patriotism towards their ancestral land China in fighting against Japanese aggression; and collaboration with the new regime run by their former enemy, the Japanese. During this period newly arrived ‘totok’ Chinese achieved pre-eminence over the well-established ‘peranakan’ community.

In the spring of 1957 a large stone tablet was found in a dilapidated temple in Canton. It was half buried in earth. The stone is still in good condition and the inscription on it is well preserved. On the head of the tablet there are 6 big characters reading “Chung Siu Tien. Ching Kuan Chi (Record of reconstruction of the Tien Ching Temple).

Since the 2008 rice crisis, Malaysia's rice policies have been caught between government efforts to raise production and its support of the country's monopoly rice importer (Bernas). This article argues that when the politics behind the country's policies are revealed, the paradox is more apparent than real. The three principal policy components — gratifying Barisan Nasional's coalition partners in East Malaysia by expanding the acreage devoted to rice; buttressing the rural Malay economy by providing subsidies through a yield-enhancing programme; and relying on big business for financial support (Bernas's new owner is one of Malaysia's richest businessmen) — aim to serve the same end: to perpetuate UMNO's political power amid increasing electoral competition.

Between 1874 and 1888, British colonial rule was imposed on the Malay states of Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang later collectively called the Federated Malay States (FMS). Based on the various Anglo-Malay treaties, which maintained the fiction that the British Resident was an adviser to the Malay ruler, the British established a form of administration generally known as a system of indirect rule. In this new order, the Malay rulers retained their constitutional and ceremonial role, while the exercise of executive power was held firmly in British hands. In the rush for establishing a modern administration and accelerating economic development late in the nineteenth century, hardly any attention was paid to training Malays to share executive power with British officials at the higher level of government or to compete effectively with Indians, Eurasians, and Chinese for subordinate appointments. This sin of omission began to stir the British conscience at the turn of the century and, for the next four decades, the British pursued a policy of actively promoting Malay employment in the government. This paper discusses the central component of this policy, namely, the training, recruitment, and development of Malay administrators in the FMS.

This article uses recently declassified archival documents from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) concerning the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948. This evidence contradicts speculation that ‘orders from Moscow’ were passed to Southeast Asian communists at this time, helping to spark the rebellions in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma and the Philippines later that year. Secret working papers now available to researchers show no signs that the Soviet leadership planned to call upon Asian communists to rise up against their national bourgeois governments at this point in time. This article outlines the real story behind Soviet involvement in events leading up to the Calcutta Youth Conference, showing both a desire to increase information and links, and yet also a degree of caution over the prospects of local parties.

In recent discussions of trade and industrialization strategies in Asia, much attention has focused on the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of Northeast Asia and ASEAN's rapid industrial growth, but the experience of some other, more inward-looking countries has been largely ignored. The NICs and most of the ASEAN countries have completed a phase of import-substituting industrialization and have subsequently embarked on a vigorous export-oriented drive, especially in the field of labour-intensive manufactures. Their record, however, is in sharp contrast to that of some other countries in the region, where the manufacturing sector is still in a relatively early stage of development.

The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was a compilation of documents translated from the Spanish and edited by Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson. The former was the brains behind the project. The editors received assistance from a reviewer, one James A. LeRoy, who introduced himself as an expert in Philippine matters. The personal correspondence amongst the three persons showed how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 was constructed. Blair fully trusted LeRoy's knowledge and consulted him with doubts about translation. In turn, LeRoy advised Robertson to select documents for publication and warned him about unreliable Spanish, Filipino and English scholars. The correspondence helps to explain how The Philippine Islands 1493–1898 developed into a political tool in the service of the United States in order to explain the problems the Americans confronted in their new colony – a Spanish inheritance and the difficulties of training uneducated Filipinos for self-government.

This study grapples with two key puzzles: first, what happens when companies established as ethnic-based enterprises, including by migrants, are passed on to the next generation? Second, do these migrant businesses remain as ethnic enterprises after generational transitions? The empirical focus of this study is Malaysia, a country with one of the largest ethnic Indian populations outside India. To provide insights into these questions, this article pays particular attention to how an ethnic enterprise functions, in terms of types of goods and services produced and its targeted market, after the emergence of a new generation of owners with more class resources. The evidence from this study will provide insights into the validity of the concept of ethnic enterprise following a generational transition.

J. de V. Allen's recently published monograph on the Malayan Union will have served its purpose if it redirects the attention of historians to ‘an event whose importance was only possibly exceeded by the things which seem to crowd it out of the historical books — the Japanese occupation of 1943–1945, the emergency which began in 1948, and the declaration of independence from Britain in 1957’.1 In his often fascinating elaboration of what is essentially the accepted, almost traditional, account of the Malayan Union's demise, Allen argues that the scheme (which provided for the amalgamation of the pre-war Federated and Unfederated Malay States and the crown colonies of Periang and Malacca into a unitary colony which would provide the basis for eventual independence by granting citizenship to the great majority of the existing population) represented a recognition by British planners of the advantages of administrative centralisation, of the permanence of settlement of many Chinese and Indian inhabitants and of the loyal support of the Chinese during the Japanese occupation. The scheme failed because it was deliberately foisted upon the Malay Sultans (who were required to cede their sovereignty) in great haste, because it took inadequate consideration of Malay attitudes and political forms, thus arousing united Malay and ex-Malayan Civil Servant opposition, and because it aroused no interest among the Chinese and Indians. Therefore the Malayan Union was replaced by the Federation of Malaya, which safeguarded the traditional leadership role of the Sultans, which allayed Malay fears of ‘alien’ domination and which yet offered ‘generous’ citizenship rights to the non-Malays. In this manner, so the account goes, a gross error of judgement was rectified and the groundwork laid for progress towards independence.