In January of 1827 Chao Anu, the ruler of the Lao state of Vientiane, led his armies in a rapid and unopposed march across the Khorat Plateau of Northeast Siam in a sudden attack on his suzerain, the third king of Thailand's Chakri Dynasty. Reacting to Anu's presence only in late February when the Lao vanguard reached Saraburi, three days' march from Bangkok, the Thai soon mounted acounter attack which scattered and expelled the Lao forces. The sack and complete destruction of Vientiane followed, together with a massive resettlement of Lao people on what is now the Thai side of the Mekong, and in the next few years the Thai brought all the former Vientiane territories under direct administration.

It is now almost sixteen years since R.G, Menzies, then leader of a resurgent parliamentary opposition, informed his colleagues that it would be “the very ecstasy of suicide” for Australians to assist in the elimination of European colonialism from Asia. For better or worse, the right honourable gentleman was unable to stem the tide of Asian nationalism, and with the political facts of life so patently irreversible, most imperial-minded Australians seem to have conditioned themselves, however reluctantly, to some kind of co-existence with Asia. Again and again Australians are informed by their historians, political scientists and poets alike that theirs is the task of reconciling the legacy of a Europocentric history with the immutable and oft-times unpleasant facts of geography.

In any attempt to clarify ths problems generated by the writing of history, one is always beset by the difficulty of selecting a point of departure. This is particularly the case with the study of Malaysian history, by which term I mean Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. Close as we now are to a political Malaysia, this term is used here purely in the geographical sense.

Long before the time of Majapahit there had been small communities of Arab merchants living in South East Asia. Groeneveldt (1880, 14–5) quotes a Chinese source dated 674 A.D. as mentioning an Arab settlement which he believed was on the west coast of Sumatra. By 915 Arab traders had sailed across the Bay of Bengal and discovered a large trade market south of the Isthmus of Kra. But by 1300 Islam had begun to appear east of India as a proselytizing force. Its power was to bring about the downfall of Majapait two centuries later, and politically to change the face of South East Asia.

It should be plainly stated that historical study and writing in Indonesia have so far played a very slight part in academic work, “but there is reason to expect that this situation will change in the years to come. Indonesia entered the postwar period with a heritage consisting mostly of Dutch colonial historiography. Deeply affected by the national revolution in the cultural scene, particularly in the field of history, a reconstruction and rewriting of Indonesian history was urgently felt. Many conceptions had tobe reviewed and many facts reinterpreted. A growing acceptance of this new approach has come to focus historical study on old regional or local sources on the one hand and the formulation of the idea of the history of indonesia as a national history on the other.

This article is intended as a ‘footnote’, written from the political science point of view, to more comprehensive accounts of the subject. Its main concern is to underline some respects in which Philippine nationalism is atypical in Southeast Asia. It is not proposed to define nationalism. Many definitions seem to fall into one of two groups, the unsatisfyingly general or the (still unsatisfying)determinedly specific. An example of the former is that nationalism consists in “on one side the love of a common soil, race, language or historical culture…” This immediately prompts the question, “which soil, which race etc.”? The latter group is exemplified by the definition of Karl W. Deutsch, which is based on the existence of “complementary habits and facilities of communication.”

An interesting episode in the development of British relations with Malaya, and in particular with Trengganu, is that of the jumk “Kim Eng Seng”.

From the opening of Thailand (Siam) to the West in the middle of the nineteenth century until World War II the dominant European influence in thissmall independent country was that exerted by Great Britain. Although other Europeans played important roles in the technological and administrative development of Thailand, the British were able to retain a pre-eminent position in the affairs of the country. The bulk of Thailand's rice trade was with the British empire, and a British expert was traditionally employed by the Thai absolute monarchs as their leading financial adviser. The British likewise played a vital role in preventing the French from seizing larger territories in Thailand as these two leading colonial powers clashed in Southeast Asia in the 1890's. An agreement between Great Britain and France in 1896 enabled Thailand to retain its national independence, and until World War II Thailand served as a buffer state between the British colonialists in Burma and the French colons in Indochina.