When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?

The article suggests that the development of Chinese capitalism in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia was intimately connected to the participation of Chinese merchants in the financing and operation of opium revenue farming concessions. It examines the development and structure of the opium farming system as it operated in the region.

Throughout Thai history there have been religious ascetics credited with the ability of precognition (mii yaan) as a result of accumulated virtues and meditation abilities. One such religious figure, perhaps the most widely acknowledged “saint” in modern times, was Phra Ajaan Man Phuurithatto (1870–1949). Of particular interest to this paper is the recorded prediction made by this ascetic monk shortly before his death, documented by a former disciple Phra Aajaan Wiriyang, that there would be a proliferation of self-proclaimed meditation masters and pupils and fragmentation into urban-based “cults” or religious movements (yaek pen kok pen lao).

The political concept of the Malays was essentially a product of the society they lived in. Before the British intervened in the Malay States in 1874, the Malay society was a feudal society par excellence. The Ruler, known as the Sultan, was eminently feudal and autocratic. He was responsible to none. He was assisted, in his capacity as Ruler, by senior and minor chiefs whose number varied from State to State. For example, in Pahang, there were four Major Chiefs, known as Orang Besar Ber-Empat. Under them there were the Orang Besar Lapan, the Eight Chiefs, and this group was followed by that of sixteen and thirty two. This was essentially a Hindu political pattern. In other Malay States this regular arrangement did not exist, but the main principle remained, namely, that there ran in descending order, from the Sultan downwards to the Penghulu, the village headman, an absolute autocracy. Each chief or Penghulu in his respective capacity was a sultan miniature.

Modernisation theory and political development theory played a key role in the formalisation of the study of Southeast Asia, while the dramatic transitions from colonies to nation-states in the region and the deepening war in Vietnam were also pivotal to the rise and transformation of modernisation theory. This article provides a critical historical overview of the rise and elaboration of theories of political development and nation-building between 1945 and 1975.

This article challenges the perceived image of ‘traditional’ Vietnam by viewing the polity's early history from the sea. A trading zone existed in the Gulf of Tonkin area, stretching to Hainan Island and northern Champa by sea, and overland to Yunnan and Laos. Commerce and interactions of peoples in this area played a crucial part in state formation for Vietnam.

The history of the state of Nan-chao () is closely interwoven with episodes in the history of Northern South-East Asia. The writings of Pelliot and G. H. Luce have shown the importance of eighth and ninth-century Nan-chao incursions into what is now Burma, while a Nanchao invasion of Tongking in the ninth century, with the help of local tribes, played its part in weakening the Chinese grip and contributing to the independence of Vietnam. There is, moreover, the vexed question of the relationship between Nan-chao and the Thai states of Siam, still far from being solved.

The Chinese have always been known to have elaborate family and clan systems. In traditional Chinese society, the family was a close-knit group with four or five generations under the same roof. It was a biological and economic unit, and was the nucleus of all important social activities. The clan, which comprised various kinship-bound families, also formed an important part of the social fabric of the traditional Chinese society.

Various students of Southeast Asian agriculture have been at a loss to explain the peculiar distribution of glutinous rice as a staple crop throughout northern and northeastern Thailand, Laos, and neighbouring regions of Yunnan, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia (see map).1 Moerman has observed that, “Although this crop … helps to define and isolate a continuous culture area of about 200,000 square miles, it is given scant and inaccurate mention in the literature on rice.”2 He goes on to suggest that certain “environmental factors” have probably played an important role in establishing glutinous rice in this area.3 This environmental explanation of origins is echoed with equally little elaboration by Watabe,4 but the latter denies that physical geography alone can account for the continuing preference for glutinous rice over modern non-glutinous varieties of comparable suitability. He contends that the persistent cultivation of glutinous rice, “is primarily due to an acquired preference of traditional use in the local diet.” Moerman5 and others have recognized the inadequacy of dietary preference as a sole explanation for persistence, but have so far refused to proceed beyond environmental speculations, even though they have provided a wealth of relevant ethnographic data.

Development policies for fishery resources within the Mekong River Basin are increasingly divided between aquaculture and capture fisheries. The modern production orientation of aquaculture has been adopted by government and NGOs and justified by the rhetoric of poverty alleviation and rural development. In contrast, capture fisheries has been subjugated as an activity that reaffirms the dependency of the rural poor on natural resources. This paper critically analyses the division between aquaculture and capture fisheries in Cambodia, Thailand and Lao PDR by tracing the emergence and influence of ‘development narratives’ used to justify contemporary policy and practice.

This article explains the ways in which power and factional struggles broke out and ended in post-independence Burma. In so doing, it argues that the key to a proper understanding of the situation resides in a careful examination of the internal power structure of an existing government. On the basis of the historical analysis as explicated in the article, it may be surmised that the existence of a hegemon that is able to mediate between factions while not relying on them in turn for his own influence and authority, yields a good possibility of a stable government. Conversely, the absence of such a hegemon results in an unstable government. Stability, however, being simply a condition, does not naturally predispose a hegemon towards virtuous governance.

In 1961 I published in this Journal a paper on the Islamization of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. It was a paper I had presented to the first meeting of the conference of historians of Southeast Asia organized in January of that year at the University of Malaya in Singapore by the then Raffles Professor of History, K.G. Tregonning. It was a paper often referred to in discussions concerning the coming of Islam to the Malay world, and attracted its share of approbation and criticism.

In the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, that is Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and, to some extent, Vietnam, the articulation of secular and religious authority developed in historically particular ways. Scholars have explained these historical changes in terms of religious and political modes of constructing and negotiating power characteristic of the galactic polities of Southeast Asia and their Theravāda Buddhist tradition, such as state-saṇgha relations and the notion that one's position within the social hierarchy is perceived as a function of, and hence validated by, one's ability to engage in merit-making ritual exchange to support the Buddhist dispensation generally and the saṇgha in particular. Trevor Ling has argued that the differences created by country-specific developments in the social history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia are more significant than communalities found in the Pali scriptural tradition.

Ayutthaya rose as a maritime power with involvement down the peninsula and in the China trade. Early Ayutthaya resembled coastal polities of the archipelago more than hinterland states of the mainland. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ayutthaya changed by absorbing people, political structures, and cultural practice from the north.

The article investigates the operation of the jade trading networks from Burma to Thailand during the period of the Burmese socialist regime. The trade, a significant ethnic enterprise undertaken by Yunnanese migrants, has relied on transnational networks that deal with different political and economic systems beyond the jurisdiction of the state. The network approach is used to analyse the intertwining of guanxi formation and regulatory observance.

Analysis of the earliest sculpture and epigraphy of Southeast Asia reveals contrasting geographic patterns regarding the worship of Hindu deities. During the seventh century, efforts to consolidate political authority by Khmer rulers led to the deployment of Harihara, a god that embodied multiple conceptions of power and could serve as a ready statement of political and religious unification.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.

This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.

Based on archaeological evidence from the Phimai region and elsewhere in Northeast Thailand, late prehistoric exchange patterns, focused on local and regional centres of redistribution and perhaps markets, formed the foundation of the Khmer temple and market centred economy. Early regional exchange networks and the Khmer economic system into which they evolved were adaptive responses to the unpredictability of a monsoonal climate.

This essay suggests that one reason for the success of Theravāda Buddhism in early Southeast Asia was its appeal to women. The maternal metaphor, a prominent theme in Buddhist texts, was both familiar and relevant to the lives of all females, regardless of their social standing. Translated into a local environment, the interaction between motherhood and merit-making provided new opportunities for lay women to display their piety and strengthened their links with the monkhood.