Between 1886 and 1891, four Japanese nationalist-activists – Yoko Tosaku, Sugiura Jugo, Suganuma Teifu and Fukumoto Makoto – described their plans for Japanese expansion to the Philippines. These men, writing during the time of ideological ferment in the early Meiji period, represented a significant trend of thought when Japan was greatly concerned with the problem of attaining an international position to assure her national security. This was also a period when the Japanese government, guided by the Meiji oligarchs, adopted a “policy of restraint” from territorial expansion which might involve Japan in foreign conflicts while they were undertaking the modernization as well the industrialization of the country.

The difficulties when making an investigation into the origin of Jaranese mosques are numerous. Owing to the limited durability of the material from which they are made – in the majority of cases of wood – the remains of old mosques are rare. There are no pictures from the 16th century; from the 17th century we have only a couple; from the 18th century hardly any. In the 19th century we find more of them.

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.

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.

Early in July 1698 the royal assent was received to an Act of Parliament which sanctioned the formation of a corporation, called the General Society, whose subscribers were vested with exclusive rights to trade in the East. The ‘New’ Company obtained its Royal Charter in September 1698 under the name of ‘The English Company Trading to the Indies' and it was to superced the ‘Old’ Company which was given a three-year grace to wind up its business. The ‘Old’ Company was expected to liquidate its East Indian assets, dismantle its Asian factories and recall its servants by September 1701.

In the Philippines a qualified system of centralism prevails today whereby most formal and all real power resides at the national level of government, though local units possess. some attributes of autonomy. Some local officials are elected but others are appointed by, and responsible to, the central government. Moreover it directs most local services and tightly controls local finances. Any explanation of this system must he sought on more than constitutional grounds. It becomes essential to examine the theory and practice of previous periods as regards central-local relations – for the interaction of these beliefs and practices are the historical antecedents of, and helped shape, this system.

“A national front without the active participation of the peasants is like a bale of jute without contents, empty and light, and hence easily blown away toy the wind”. These words of Dipa Nusantara Aidit, Central Committee Chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia – PKI), on the occasion of the party's “National Peasants' Conference” in April, 1959, may serve as an index to the theoretical and tactical importance assigned to the Indonesian peasant's role by the Indonesian Communist movement. Increasingly in the past few years the peasant and the “agrarian question”, i.e. “feudalism”, “landlordism”, debtor bondage and the problem of increasing agricultural productivity, have begun to figure prominently in the PKI program and the “essence of the Indonesian Revolution” is now described by the party as the “agrarian revolution”.

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.

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.”

A brimming reservoir of Japanese materials on South-east Asian history is ready to serve scholars with appropriate research interests and the needed linguistic tools. In this brief paper an introduction to selected sources on Malayan history will be made. Readers will see that the materials to be described are of special usefulness to economic historians working on the 1930's and 1940's, to sociologists and political scientists analyzing the complexities of a plural society, and of course to students of the period of the Japanese occupation of Malaya. To tell the military story of the Japanese conquest, accusations and apologiae have appeared from the British side and Colonel Tsuji Masanobu proundly published the victor's account. Except, however, for books by guerrilla opponents or civilian victims of Japanese rule, the occupation years are an historical blank. Little imagination is required to sense that, in the years bwbween the collapse and the return of the British, the Japanese in Malaya were obliged to face the wide range of administrative problems imposed on a governing authority. Accordingly, studies of Japanese solutions and failures could be highly instructive. Furthermore, as is generally recognized, the terrorist units of the 1948–60 Emergency were direct descendents of elements in the anti-Japanese resistance campaign, and Malayan nationalism itself moved toward maturity under Japanese pressure. Clearly the occupation years form the most dynamic and the most neglected period in modern Malayan history.

Each period has special characteristics, amongst which the pattern of employment is not the least interesting. In all except the first and last, the industry was completely Chinese in capital, management and labour; this is a major fact of Malayan history.

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.

Although, as a result of a boom in tin prices, Kuala Lumpur grew very rapidly in the last two years of the 1870s, and the headquarters of the British administration of Selangor were moved there from Klang in 1880, it still remained a pioneer mining town. A number of contemporary descriptions exist of the town (admittedly seen through European eyes), as it was in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These all portray a small, but bustling, “raw and rumbustious” settlement, with a very large Chinese element in its population; indeed, one visitor in 1879 termed it a “great Chinese village”. This settlement consisted almost wholly of wooden, attap or mud houses, arranged in the haphazard manner which had resulted from its rapid and unplanned growth. One of the major hazards which the town faced at this time was fire, and it was mainly through the fear of extensive fires that the town began to be replanned and rebuilt during the 1880s.

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

Einstein once refused to speculate on the types of weapons to be used in a hypothetical third world war; but he was succinct and specific in naming those of an ensuing fourth global contest – “rocks”. Just as nuclear arms have very possibly made World War II the penultimate great conflict, the super bombs have created a climate in which international rivalries contend through cold war confrontation, police actions and limited warfare. The total terror of our nuclear age has thus far served to confine military clashes to the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam and the Near East, all restricted arenas in comparison to those of 1914–18 and 1939–45. Fear of thermonuclear retaliation has prevented attacks on, to use MacArthur's term, the “privileged sanctuaries” of our era's prime combatants.

The more precise definition of the European impact upon South-East Asian trade and society prior to the nineteenth century has become an important pre-occupation of historians of that region in recent years. The hypothesis of J.C. van Leur that “modern capitalism” took shape only after 1820 impelled him to suggest an equality or near-equality between Asian and European commercial organization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A corollary of this view was his negative assessment of the Portuguese achievement in South-East Asia, his refusal to accord them technical or organizational superiority except in a limited military sense, his insistence upon the small and unimportant Portuguese share of inter-Asian trade, and his denunciation of the Portuguese as little better than a band of condottieri who lacked an effective central administration.