During World War II, Britain and the United States differed over the postwar status of Indochina. Although the United States made several strong statements about restoring the prewar possessions of the French Empire, the Americans, especially President Franklin D. Roosevelt, increasingly came to favour an international trusteeship guiding postwar Indochina to eventual independence. The British were not at first prepared to guarantee the complete restoration of the French Empire. With surprising slowness, the British did gradually sponsor the prompt return of French colonial authority in Indochina. British postwar planning had shown how dangerous a hostile or unfriendly France and French Empire could be to the security of the British Isles and British Empire. The British determination to reestablish the French connection coincided with a refusal by Roosevelt to enter any discussions about the postwar status of Indochina. The presidential silence only served to promote Anglo-French colonial interests. After Roosevelt's death, President Harry S. Truman did not challenge the return of French control in Indochina. Ironically, despite the earnest — but seldom expressed — American intentions to underwrite indigenous dreams of independence, the people of Indochina subsequently associated the United States with Western suppression of those dreams.

Considering the importance of the early dates for bronze working technology in Southeast Asia that several of us have been presenting in preliminary reports over the last fifteen years, it is somewhat surprising that there have not been more critical articles published concerning our evidence and interpretation thereof. The primary reason for this is no doubt because final reports of the pertinent sites presenting the relevant data in context have not yet appeared. The great majority of the interested archaeologists are simply awaiting the final site reports before they decide whether our interpretation is reasonable. We are sorry for the great delay in completing the final reports. Speaking of Non Nok Tha, the first site from which excavated data produced early dates for bronze working, the descriptive portion of the research has been completed, the analysis of the data has almost been completed (primarily by Donn Bayard), and it is hoped that the first volume of a two volume final report can be submitted to the press by the end of 1982. The second volume will be totally a data volume, probably published in microfiche.

The development of the Indonesian national language has been exemplary. Unlike the creation of a national language in other developing countries, as in Malaysia, the Philippines, and India, the choice has not become a political issue. In Indonesia, no sector of society has sought to promote other local or foreign languages as the national language. In 1962, Takdir Alisjahbana outlined the initial development of Indonesian from Malay, the trade language of the archipelago from the first century AD. and the language of the Sriwijaya Empire (A.D. 700–1200) through the period of rising nationalism to independence. A few of the important steps in this process were: the declaration of Indonesian as the national language by the National Youth Congress in 1928; the flourishing of a national and a Chinese press from the 1920s onward, both of which used the Malay language; the promotion of literary works by the monthly journal, Pudjangga Baru, from 1933 onward; and the standardizing effect of the Indonesian Language Commission established in 1942. These events successfully established the first stage or emergence of the national language.

During the period of American colonial rule in the Philippines prior to the Pacific War, the attitude of most thoughtful Filipinos toward Japan seemed to waver as though tantalized between fear and fascination. For while there was often a genuine concern, principally as a result of Japanese-American tensions, that a predatory Japan was literally counting the moments to an invasion and conquest of the Islands, there was also the tremendous admiration of one Asian people for another and an almost awe-struck eagerness to emulate the startling successes of Japan in achieving modern nationhood in its fullest sense. To this generalization Manuel Luis Quezon (1878–1944) was no exception.

Our chief sources of information about Vietnam until the middle of the tenth century are the dynastic histories and related writings of China. This is because, from the beginning of recorded history in Vietnam until then, Vietnam was, for the most part, under the authority of Chinese governors or people who posed as Chinese-style governors. By the end of the tenth century, an independent Vietnamese monarchy was established, and historical information was being independently preserved by the Vietnamese; this information was eventually incorporated into the Vietnamese historiographical tradition as it developed in later centuries. Consequently, the historian of tenth-century Vietnam finds two streams of information, one coming from a wellestablished viewpoint from which Vietnam was a remote frontier district at the edge of the horizon, the other coming from the Vietnamese themselves as they worked toward a standpoint from which to remember their past.

British planning for post-war Burma had been set back by the Cabinet's decision in April 1943 not to adopt the proposals put forward by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. Designed also to meet the need for wartime propaganda, the proposals had envisaged a programme of reconstruction aided by the British, carried forward during a period of direct rule, to be followed by advance towards self-government. There were doubts about the amount of aid Britain could promise. There were also doubts as to the wisdom of the concept of direct rule, though in fact the Cabinet accepted the principle without setting a limit to the period. Above all, the Prime Minister opposed further policy declarations on Burma. The war, Churchill believed, was not the time for them. Amery and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, thought that he really believed that no time would be right for them. They were not without hope that he would “come round”. Meanwhile, it was decided that the Burma Government, in exile in Simla, would remain in existence. “I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would [be] a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma.…”

John Fairbank wrote of China that “the missionary movement … was a profound stimulus to China's modernization”, and he cited missionary medical, educational, and humanitarian work, including extensive rural contacts, as the basis for his conclusion. And George Antonius in his classic study of Arab nationalism noted that in the Arab revival of the last century, the American Presbyterian Mission in Syria played an important role in the rebirth of Arab literature and education. The Presbyterian missionaries were one important source of the emergence of the Arabs into the modern world. A reading of Thai history suggests that the missionaries in Siam might well have had a similarly important impact. However, the role of the missionaries after the decades of the 1830s to the 1850s has been little studied and is hardly understood. This has been especially true because the historical study of Thai modernization has focused primarily on national policies and strategies where the missionaries had less influence after the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68).

Within the plural society of Malaysia, Indians reflect a pluralism every bit as complex and resulting in problems that are a smaller version of those faced by the nation. Indian society is segmented on a variety of grounds, each segment operating with its own autonomy and yet entering into a competitive coexistence with others to impose its interests as the dominant ones of “the Indian community” of Malaysia. These inner strains and stresses among groups struggling to assert community leadership have a long history and proceed from a background of economic, social, and cultural factors that have characterized Indian migration and settlement in peninsular Malaya. It is the aim of this paper to look at these segments of Indian society, the kinds of leadership they produced, the interactions of that leadership among each other for a period of about fifteen years after 1945. An attempt is made to isolate a number of the major groups and segments of society, to categorize the types of leaders emerging among them, to note the links between these leadership types and thus provide a profile of the society's leaders in this period.

Like most developing countries, the Philippines before the imposition of martial law towards the end of 1972 was characterized by the fact that the majority of her population, living in the small towns and the countryside, were actually peripheral to the national polity. The political process was largely concerned with the intra-elite conflicts and manoeuvrings. As the government did not derive the bulk of its revenue from the income and resources of the mass of the citizenry, the political system functioned mainly as a giant system of patronage.