In 1881, the southern Philippine archipelago of Sulu was plunged into an extended contest for the succession to its sultanate. With only a tentative peace established by 1894, tensions remained volatile between the districts of Patikul, Parang, Luuk, and Maimbung on the main island of Jolo. These tensions straddled coincided with the transition of the colonial regimes from the Spanish to the US regime in 1899. Therefore, the events of the early years of American rule, most often understood in the context of the American arrival and Spanish departure, were in fact intertwined with the prevailing conflict and rivalry between local candidates vying for the sultanate

This paper discusses the year 1905 as an educational watershed in colonial Vietnam. It focuses on the development of student mobility that transcended colonial and imperial boundaries and gave new momentum to educational training on a transnational scale. In the mid-1900s, the anti-colonial mandarin Phan Bội Châu launched a new nationalist movement called Đông Du, meaning ‘Going East.’ It centred on sending young men to Japan via Hong Kong to train them as effective anti-French activists. These students came from Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina and enrolled in a variety of curricula. Although this initiative collapsed in the late 1900s, it remained a watershed. Regional mobility did not disappear afterwards but mostly redirected itself towards China. This paper brings a great diversity of material face-to-face, including governmental archives and biographies, and challenges the colonial-based vision of Vietnamese education by highlighting its regional dimension, from the early twentieth century to the outset of the Second World War.

In 1913, a new generation of Indonesians asserted their agency by publicly demanding equality in colonial society. Through four case studies—the prohibition of traditional forms of deference, the sudden popularity of Western dress, the adoption of new legal assimilation guidelines for Indonesians, and the discussion of employee rights at a railway company—we argue that this new assertiveness reflected a broad change in mentality that we consider a turning point in Indonesian history. By focusing on Indonesian agency, we challenge the Eurocentric periodization of the Indonesian past that emphasized WWI as a trigger of change.

In 2013, a group of British aviation archaeologists began excavating in Myanmar in search of some 140 mint-condition crated Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfire Mk XIV aircraft. According to their story, at the end of the Second World War, Allied forces in Burma were left with these unassembled aircraft. Without the funds to send them home, but unwilling to let the planes fall into enemy hands, they buried the crated planes in Mingaladon, Meiktila and Myitkyina. Like legends of pirate treasure, the story of these buried Spitfires carries with it fantastic aura and intrigue. For aviation fans, the pirate's gold is an iconic aircraft, meaningful in patriotic narratives for its role in the Battle of Britain. This paper will discuss this story as a form of military history folklore which is stoked by the orientalist perception that Burma/Myanmar's decades of military regimes and purported isolation indirectly ‘“preserved” the crated aircraft in time. As this paper will demonstrate, Burmese and others in Southeast Asia have their own legends of buried war materiel and treasure. This point, though largely lost on British aviation enthusiasts in their quest for their Spitfire ‘holy grail’, nevertheless crucially enabled their quest to manifest itself.

In Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Indonesia, being Malay usually means being a practitioner of Islam and a speaker of standard Bahasa. However, such understandings no longer comprehend other members of the so-called brown-skinned race who were once united with the Malay aggrupation: numerous Filipinos (and East Timorese), who inhabit the same broad geopolitical region. Challenging the recent narrowly defined conceptions of who is, or was Malay, this study recalls an inclusive borderless understanding acquired in antiquity by the Filipino nation, whose peoples were considered by Spanish and American colonisers and educated by their government to consider themselves as part of a pre-modern “Malay” world. Geohistorical evidence shows how such auto-consciousness evolved and preceded the entry of the term into the nearby British colonisers’ lexicon, before its social-reconstruction for the perpetuation of post-colonial polities as well. The author interweaves his textual survey with the problematisation of the location of ethnicity, and points out the seemingly neglected corpus of Iberian works that demonstrate how the knowledge of Malayness could only have been approached by Europeans from a geographic periphery, of which the Philippine archipelago was very much a part, especially the Mindanao area. The author builds on and constructively critiques work by one scholar who had initiated the claims of the Filipino to Malayness. It is shown how sociocultural and geopolitical priorities can help or hinder the relaxation of definitions of who is Malay and where Malays are properly situated, if only because these counter perceptual rigidities, and allow the creation of hybrid third spaces that admit new possibilities of coexistence.

Drawing on new archival evidence, this paper focuses on the origins of Vietnam's foreign economic policy of 1986, better known as doi moi (renovation). The existing scholarship contends that doi moi ideas emerged amid Vietnam's socio-economic crisis during the late 1970s through a bottom-up process of market-oriented activities by local authorities. I argue, however, that these scholars overlooked the early ideas of economically engaging the West to obtain advanced technology to raise the Vietnamese products’ quality, and therefore, their competitiveness in the socialist bloc. Following the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, Vietnamese diplomats-turned reformists studied the role of western technology and capital investment in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Politburo entrusted Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Co Thach, a senior advisor to Hanoi's chief negotiator Le Duc Tho in Paris, to conduct a series of clandestine studies on the role of western technology in economic relations between East and West. Thach's learning about the West's technological revolution led them to the shocking conclusion that the Soviet bloc was at least a decade behind the West in technological development. The fear of Vietnam being trapped in economic backwardness propelled these reformers to advocate bold ideas of economically engaging the West in the post-Vietnam War era to extract advanced technology to support post-war economic development and modernisation. However, it took an economic crisis (1977–78), followed by another costly two-front war against Cambodia and China between 1979 and 1985, for reformist Nguyen Co Thach's ideas to prevail over the conservative faction's military-first policy.