Present-day political systems in the nation states of Southeast Asia can be classified in accordance with various criteria; they can, for example, be politically grouped on a spectrum ranging from parliamentary democracy to totalitarian dictatorship. The focus of the present inquiry is the sociology of political elites rather than the forms of polity which these elites have created or helped to create. It deals exclusively with the ruling “national” elites, leaving out of consideration secondary groups, such as territorially- or ethnicallybased local and regional elites, religious leaders, and other traditional elites. Two kinds of “national” elite can be discerned in contemporary Southeast Asia, which we shall call “intelligentsia elites” and “modernizing traditional elites”. Disregarding for the time being the constitutional frameworks and the degree of popular participation of each individual state, it may be said that both elites are in many respects oligarchies.

When Dutch rule in Indonesia came to an end in 1950 the new Republic inherited a complex legal system whose main component parts were Dutch criminal and civil law, Adat or customary law and Islamic law. The Dutch legists had been divided in their ideas about what the proper content of “Indies” law should be. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century most jurists favoured the establishment of a positive, unified legal system throughout the Netherlands East Indies, based on modern Dutch law, modified where necessary to suit local conditions. It was anticipated that as education, effective administration and new legislation progressed the authority and operation of the “irregular” or non-Western legal systems would diminish. The non-Western systems of law encompassed regional and tribal customary law, often combined with Islamic law, and the legal usages and practices of the “foreign oriental” minorities, mainly Chinese and Indian.

In the heyday of British imperialism some fifty years ago, when Lord Cromer could find that the empire was “the main title which makes us great”, imperialists were apt to compare the British with the Roman empire and to seek “in the history of imperial Rome for any facts or commentaries gleaned from ancient times which might be of service to the modern empire of which we are so justly proud”.1 A critic of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, sourly remarked of such enterprises that “history devises reasons why the lessons of past empires do not apply to our own”. Prima facie, however, the comparison was encouraging. Both the Romans and the modern imperial powers claimed that it was their purpose to govern in the interests of the subjects; both had undoubtedly established peace and order in a large part of the world; both had extended their own law and their own civilization.

Recent interpretations of slavery in the United States suggest that we may be entering a new phase of scholarship on slavery as new approaches and categories are introduced by historians, and as anthropologists and sociologists again take up the study of an institution that was of such concern to their nineteenth century predecessors.

Can the historian bring his presumably hard-headed and objective analytical devices to bear upon so impalpable a subject as man's art? At both ends of esthetic experience there is an elusive subjectivity: the artist (his “style” and “expressive content“) and the beholder (his “taste” and “feeling”) seem to take part in the experience on the basis of no rigidly determinable criteria. Yet here, as in the other gossamer realms of religion, philosophy, personal psychology or “national character”, the historian has never let mere impalpability daunt him. He may be aware of a caveat or two, but up into the rarefied heights he soars determined to transmit the historian's-eye view of the whole of human experience.