In his influential edited volume Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid suggests that long-term slave-based systems of production were absent from agriculture in Southeast Asia, and had an ambiguous presence at best in other areas of economic activity. The argument he presents suggests that indigenous slavery in the region merged into a ‘kind of serfdom or household membership’, a situation that continued after the arrival of Europeans whose slave-holding practices were profoundly shaped by the local traditions they encountered: ‘slavery in the European colonies owed more to the Southeast Asian environment than to European legal ideas’. Reid's analysis is insightful and his conclusions persuasive. But he also notes a single exception to this general picture: ‘the Dutch perkenier system for producing nutmeg in Banda with hundreds of slave labourers on large estates’. The nutmeg estates of the Banda Islands, in eastern Indonesia, provide a rare unequivocal example of a slave mode of production in Southeast Asia, and its sole instance in an agricultural context. The islands have a similar status within established accounts of slavery in Asia more generally. While some degree of geographic and historical variation is usually acknowledged, European slavery practices in Asia are regarded as distinct from colonial slavery in the New World, where European systems were imported wholesale. Against this conclusion, the perkenier system in the Banda Islands has been described as a form of exploitation ‘unheard of in Asia’, one that represented a ‘Caribbean cuckoo in an Asian nest’. In other words, Dutch nutmeg cultivation in the Bandas constituted a New World style system of slavery operating in an Asian context.

There was a tremendous acceleration in newspaper publishing between 1930 and 1941 despite the Great Depression. The Malay press began to evolve into a site for discussing and debating the circumstances of Malay life in the 1930s. Rather than news, opinions, commentaries, leading articles and editorials made up the bulk of column space in Malay newspapers and magazines of the 1930s. It was a ‘viewspaper’ rather than a newspaper. New forms of public-opinion making like the editorial, increased participation in the media through letters to the editor and contributors' articles, public readings of newspapers, and the extension of newspapers into classrooms meant that a broader cross-section of Malays were able to access debates and discussions on issues of the day and raises new questions about public life in Malaya among Malays.

The administrative boundary between Laos and Cambodia is amongst the least studied international borders in Southeast Asia. Since Laos and Cambodia became independent in 1953–54, relatively minor but sustained tensions have characterised border relations. An important reason for disagreements is irredentist feelings. Some ethnic Lao in both Laos and Cambodia believe that part of northeastern Cambodia should be added to Laos, while some ethnic Khmer in Cambodia insist that their border should be extended to include part of southern Laos. Different emphases and framings of history have contributed to irredentism and the development of identities in relation to the border.

Despite their profound differences all of Cambodia's post-independence regimes have exhibited a unique obsession with protecting the country's borders from the depredations of neighbouring states. Some of this is fall-out from the colonial inheritance but this paper argues that older indigenous categories related to Theravada Buddhism have also played a significant role in the aetiology of modern Khmer territorialism. By showing how the traditional maṇḍala arrangement of space was being eroded at around the same time as the old monastic conception of a ritual boundary was purified, rationalised and extended under the influence of Buddhism modernism the author seeks to provide a Southeast Asian illustration of Carl Schmitt's insight that certain important elements of the modern state are, in fact, secularised religious concepts.

The Great Depression (1929–35) seriously affected the world economy but it was also a catalyst of the development of political awareness among the Malays. In conjunction with the growth of political awareness there was the rise of consumerism, which also was accelerated by the Great Depression. People were taught to appreciate a new way of life centring around luxury goods that became cheaper and reportedly within the reach of everyone, if one only tried. The machines of this heightened consumerism were commercials that were disseminated through the rapidly expanding mass media, mainly financed by these advertisements. The huge boom in entertainment businesses and publishing houses defied the logic that the downturn would have a negative impact on the entertainment and popular culture industries. Rather the contrary occurred. The number of magazines, journals and newspapers published in this period increased dramatically, and theatre and dance companies met with great success in their performances in the towns and on tours throughout the region.

This study of Timor and the surrounding islands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries provides evidence that, after the demise of the Portuguese Estado da India, an ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ empire persisted but in uniquely localised ways. It describes the emergence of the ‘black Portuguese’ community known in Timor and the Solor archipelago as the Topasses. Their singular identity was based on the melding of indigenous and Portuguese blood and cultural forms. Their ability to access the sources of spiritual authority in both the Catholic and the Timorese domains assured their survival and that of the Portuguese in Timor until well into the twentieth century.

This paper deals with the consequences of the increasing commercialisation of the rice industry in west Indramayu from the mid-1880s to the late 1930s. Instead of prosperity as a result of growing rice for sale in a free market, local peasants found their survival being threatened by traders who had them bound to a vicious cycle of debts and who acquired much of the rice they produced. The rice growers in west Indramayu were impoverished far more than the peasants growing cash crops such as sugar elsewhere in Java.

Prior to World War Two many of the Malay-language films released in Singapore and Malaya were made in Java and the Philippines. Beginning in 1940 the Shaw Brothers began producing Malay films in Singapore for distribution to their theatre network throughout Malaya. The first Malay film magazine, Film Melayu, which began publishing in May 1941, documented the production and release of a number of these pre-war films in Singapore, providing one of the few avenues for a better understanding of the origins of Malay cinema. More importantly, this periodical was firmly ensconced within the Malay publishing community and thus reflects debates over issues ranging from the proper script to use in publishing to technology and its relationship to the nation (or community, bangsa).

Cambodia has been governed by the same, relatively fixed, elite since the Vietnamese removal of the Khmer Rouge from power in early 1979. This article provides an analysis of the dynamic interplay of external and internal factors that have contributed to the perpetuation of this elite's rule in the context of a nominal political and economic transition that might have been expected to undermine the bases of their power. It is argued that the patrimonialism of the Cambodian state and the provision of material aid and political legitimacy by external actors have been central to the endurance of this ruling elite.

This paper is ethnographically concerned with two different orang asli communities: the Meniq living in Southern Thailand and the Orang Sakai in Riau, Indonesia. The focus is on the different discursive rhetorics of development in the two nation-states. These rhetorics have been absorbed by the two indigenous groups to form part of their own modern cultural discourses within their respective countries. These rhetorics of development define the indigenous groups as somewhat lacking in culture and provide them with new understandings of themselves that devalue their customary way of life. The post-development indigenous identity work (such as the development of an ethno-cultural identity) will therefore usually be constructed through these negated developmental foundations.

Much research has sought to understand why mixed communities in Indonesia have been torn apart by violent conflict. By contrast, little is known about how people live together successfully in the mixed, low-conflict communities that exist in abundance throughout the Indonesian archipelago. This paper explores the inter-communal relations in the multiethnic, Christian-Muslim coastal village of Oelua in Roti, Nusa Tenggara Timur province. Mechanisms of agreement across ethnic, religious and livelihood differences have shaped and reproduced a low-conflict community — including transfers of land, labour, technology and surplus; use of customary law and conflict management; and social mixing and interpersonal relations. The findings suggest that there are lessons to be learned from communities like Oelua about how to foster social and economic inclusion, which could inform national and regional political agendas concerned with governing difference in a post-New Order Indonesia.

Abdul Rahim Kajai (1894–1943), his life and his work, are discussed against the background of socio-cultural developments on the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s. A journalist, writer and author, Kajai played an important role in the emergence of notions of ‘Malayness’ which made Malays feel different from and hostile to the growing numbers of ‘others’ in the colony. In particular, his stories, splendid exercises in fragmentariness, suggest a strong nostalgia for the pastoral way of life, at variance with Kajai's own life in urban areas.

This paper is an effort to examine the dynamics of a major famine in the private domains of Indramayu and Kandanghaur in 1883–84, which was reportedly a result of drought, but a closer look at the evidence, including a unique survey of peasant families engulfed in the famine, reveals a rather complex situation. The local peasantry confined to a narrow subsistence economy found its food supply being seriously undermined by the landlords' efforts to extract more and more rice for sale at a time when Java was being closely drawn into the world market.

This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Straits Chinese political identity as one of conservative loyalty to the Empire, I show that the Straits Chinese developed multiple and hybrid political identities that were postcolonial in character, which would later influence the politics of decolonisation and nation-building after the war.

Working from recently declassified Australian and British government files, this paper examines the archival evidence on policy thinking in London and Canberra towards the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) during the period 1970–75. The article argues that one of the main reasons for the Heath government's decision to deploy a token military force in Southeast Asia as part of a multilateral defence arrangement with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore was the desire to uphold these Commonwealth connections. By contrast, Canberra was beginning to question the value of such arrangements in a rapidly changing Southeast Asian strategic environment.

This paper uses the example of songket to explore translocal Malay cultural processes in Sambas, West Kalimantan. I argue these intra-Malay cultural exchanges reframe selected Sambas Malay cultural forms as Malay ‘cultural heritage’, making it difficult to view cultural practices in purely localised terms. Consequently, many cultural forms lose their localised normative values and become aspects of a wider cultural heritage to be preserved, performed and consumed. The paper begins with a discussion of the historical, political and social grounds that forge a sense of translocalism amongst many Sambas Malays. Building on this, the more specific interest in participating in intra-regional Malay cultural exchanges is explained with reference to commodification, internationalisation and institutionalisation.

Historical studies of Burma–China relations have emphasised warfare, seen from the perspective of Chinese sources. One commonly studied event is the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Bagan. Burmese sources describe the flight of King Narathihapate (1257–87) from the Mongols, thus earning the Burmese epithet ‘Taruppye’. ‘Tarup’ now refers to the Chinese, but the identities of the people and region to which the term applies have not been constant. This paper discusses the question of the identity of ‘Tarup’ in the Burmese chronicles.

This paper is a reflection on a number of theatre performances held in Singapore, each of which probed problematic or traumatic historical events occurring either in Singapore itself or in other parts of Southeast Asia. These avant-garde performances were inspired by or built around actual testimonies of individuals in ways which, for this author, suggest a striking fluidity in the boundaries between testimony and performance, one that raises difficult questions about performance ethics and the processes by which collective memories are shaped. The plays also made use of visual media: one had been recorded on video while others incorporated photographic and video materials into the actual performance. At the time I witnessed these plays, I had already become interested in the way that, over the course of the twentieth century, documentary films had come to play an increasingly important role in the recording of testimony concerning traumatic events. Testimony on film, I have argued, functions simultaneously as evidential trace, and as performative event. Films of testimony develop their own trajectories as they enter into the realms of public remembering. They preserve and extend the record of personal experiences, thereby adding them to the pool of collective memory about an event. Theatrical performances, too, develop their own trajectories through repetition, as Marvin Carlson's statement (cited above) suggests. But what exactly might be different when testimony is performed as drama before a live audience? What are the purposes of such performances, and what might be their possible effects upon both participants and audiences? Is the trace left by a live theatre performance inevitably more ephemeral than those captured on film, or might it be in some respects even more powerful? These are some of the questions I raise – without necessarily being able to present definitive answers – in what follows. I conclude by arguing that in the Singapore context, because censorship laws place very specific constraints on the making of documentary films with openly political content, in recent years theatre has been able to offer a slightly greater space than film as a medium for critical reflection. How theatre directors and actors have tried to use this space is a subject correspondingly deserving of our close attention.

I argue that women's literacy was more common than is usually supposed and that women engaged extensively with written literature, both as readers and writers. I also discuss the role of traditional Islamic education in transmitting literacy among girls. The article is based on the examination of a group of narrative poems written by women at the court of Penyengat.