This article examines various aspects of the formulation of the Dutch East India Company's treaty and alliance system, based on published and unpublished papers written by, or in the possession of, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). In particular the study draws on his commentary on the Sultan of Johor in De Jure Praedae, and his submissions to the Indies Conferences of 1613 and 1615.

This paper examines the trade in ceramics from northern Vietnam into island Southeast Asia in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. It focuses on two issues: the question of typology of Vietnamese ceramics and the feasibility of these wares entering the southern Philippines during the years 1663–82. The compilation of an accurate typology has been inhibited by exceedingly brief descriptions in trade records, and the difficulty has been further compounded by the fact that although the Dutch East India Company (VOC) records show Vietnamese ceramics were imported into Batavia and dispersed to regional godowns, no material has yet been reported from either archaeological excavations or accidental finds in island Southeast Asia that can with certainty be ascribed to this era. Furthermore, items proposed in the ceramic literature as wares exported to Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century are, in the face of new evidence, no longer convincing. The typology put forward in this paper is based on VOC trade records and the contemporary literature. It broadly matches material from archaeological sites in Vietnam and in Japan that are from co-eval contexts. Previously untapped archaeological findings from Vietnam contribute a new dimension to this issue.

The Fisheries Act of 1875 altered the leasing arrangements for Burma's most valuable inland fisheries, the inn. It withdrew leases from the “innthugyis” who had traditionally handled these fisheries, and instituted a system of five-year auction leases. Expectations that local fishermen would secure these leases were never realised, and the fishing industry came to be dominated by capitalist interests, which made extortionate profits by subletting the fisheries.

The demographic history of Southeast Asia remains largely uncharted. This is particularly true of mainland Southeast Asia prior to the commencement of the era of high imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, in recent years scholars have begun to explore certain aspects of the mainland's demographic history during the precolonial and early colonial periods. Nonetheless, we still lack basic information on fertility, mortality, and migration — the three fundamental categories in demographic analysis — for most populations on most parts of the mainland prior to 1850.

Peasant uprisings in Java under colonial rule are usually seen as precursors of the nationalist struggle for freedom. This view needs a radical revision in light of numerous small incidents of rural protest that did not have any political agenda as such. Instead, conflicts of interests among villagers over agricultural resources appear to have led to mutual recrimination and to denunciation of some individuals as rebels against colonial state. The colonial bureaucracy caught up in such incidents found it difficult to disentangle the truth from fabricated information and sought an easy way out by depicting villagers as rebels.

Clifford Geertz, in his discussion of the social history of an East Central Javanese town, described how rural migrants attempted to make sense of modern elections and political factions by applying old systems of meanings. As people adjusted to the evolving social conditions of new urban contexts, new knowledge supposedly emerged to order social relations. Yet he observed that in the 1950s this rarely was the case; usually a sense of vagueness and incoherence persisted. Similarly, Geertz's analysis of a Javanese funeral concluded that the ritual “failed” and consequently tensions persisted and intensified as a result of societal and cultural discontinuity; the social and the cultural were moving in opposite directions. Old cultural notions did not tend to give way to new notions more adept at effecting social solidarity. The contest over whose voice, whose sense of self and image of post-colonial Indonesia would prevail eventually culminated in the bloodbath of 1965–66, which marked the abrupt end of the Old Order and the birth of the Suhartoled New Order regime.

Globalization, the worldwide web of economic and cultural communications with its unifying and integrative tendencies, has done more than deeply affect the political economy (liberal markets) and the cultural patterns (mass consumption) of our time. It has also internationalized the debate on moral principles and ethical practices concerning human behaviour. Already the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first statement on the issue by the United Nations, has claimed universal validity as a “common standard of achievement”.

The actor-dancers of the Kelantanese Thai Nuuraa theatre are often seen by Kelantanese as practitioners of love magic. Theoretically, the Nuuraa can be viewed as an ongoing process of mediation between cultural symbols. A Nuuraa performer inhabits an ambiguous and power-filled socio-ritualistic universe associated with unbridled magical know-how.

This article develops an argument about the business culture and managerial organization of the colonial Indonesian sugar industry. It argues that developments in both spheres during the third quarter of the nineteenth century — largely ignored in the relevant research literature — played an appreciable role in assuring the industry's survival in the crisis conditions of the 1880s, when the world price of sugar fell dramatically. An important explanation of such changes, it will be suggested, is to be found in the technological progress which took place in some sectors of the industry from the 1840s onward. This development, delineated here in terms of a “colonization” of the sugar factory or fabriek, began to set the industry apart from the dominant colonial socio-cultural environment in which it was situated, and to prefigure an ethos more commonly associated with the final decades of Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. A nascent business culture was paralleled, moreover, by changes to the ways in which both the fabriek itself and the industry in general were run — changes which pointed to the early growth of a specifically managerial type of enterprise within an industry where such developments have usually been allocated to the closing decades rather than the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Taken together, as will be argued, the two developments — however embryonic — formed one of the foundations which enabled the colonial sugar industry to survive a perìod of severe crisis in the mid-1880s and resume a vigorous expansion by the century's end.

The reign of King Chulalongkorn, conventionally regarded as the turning point in Thailand's political development, is also understood as offering a paradigm for social history. In particular it set down standards for appreciating courtly female behaviour which entailed political submission and passivity — attitudes championed by conservative elements during the 1970s. This article argues that palace women in fact did have their own understanding of the changing world and made efforts to better their lives by moving beyond what was prescribed for them.

To compare the twentieth-century Thai writer Angkarn Kalayanaphong and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche may seem absurd. Yet both reveal a particular concern with time, responding to the unprecedented acceleration of their respective cultures. Their numerous points of similarity and divergence raise broader questions concerning global capitalism's domination of time, and efforts to resist that domination.

This article addresses the historiography of the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). It does so by challenging two archetypal works on the conflict: those of Anthony Short and Richard Stubbs. These argue the Emergency was locked in stalemate as late as 1951. By then, a “population control” approach had been implemented — the so-called Briggs Plan for resettling 500,000 Chinese squatters. The predominantly Chinese nature of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) had also ensured that most Malays — who constituted nearly half the 1950 population of five million — opposed the revolt. The several thousand strong Communist-led guerrillas thus laboured under severe limitations.

Vietnamese resistance to French rule dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, but the first decade of the twentieth century heralded a new chapter in the long history of anti-colonialism in Vietnam. It began with the fervent reformist efforts of a group of nationalist scholars trained and brought up in traditional ways, whose Movement for Modernisation (Phong Trao Duy Tan) was greatly influenced by the rise of Japan in the eastern hemisphere, especially following Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905). Japan became a source of inspiration and began to be perceived as a model, a stimulant and even as a possible saviour of Vietnam.

During May 1936 and March 1937 there were attempts by different political factions in Cochin China to form an Indochinese Congress. The congress was planned as a people's assembly in which the Vietnamese could negotiate colonial reforms with French authorities. Such attempts revealed competition among different political factions and also reflected a genuine French effort to introduce reforms and liberalize the Indochinese colony. The congress movement was eventually suppressed by French authorities, but it provided the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) with access to the masses and helped the Party expand its political activities into the Mekong Delta during the latter half of the 1930s.