Owing to the absence of dates in historical manuscripts and on monuments, Brunei chronology has been based upon traditional dates of uncertain origin. The object of this article is to take such events in Brunei as can be chronicled in external sources and to compare these foreign dates with those traditionally accepted.

Archaeologists have long sought to identify the key indicators which would allow them to measure the level and rate of cultural development. Technology and energy capture are two of the indicators which have been proposed, but there are grounds for objecting that these are still variables dependent on another factor: the capacity of a culture to record and process information. The communication of information has been studied by archaeologists but their paradigms, such as the diffusionist model, have been found wanting and discarded. The goal of studying ancient communication processes is an ideal, but achieving it with the data available to archaeologists will be very difficult.

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.

Douglas J. Jardine was Governor of British North Borneo (Sabah) from August 1934 to May 1937. Despite his short period in office, Jardine succeeded in bringing about considerable improvement in the country. The most important feature of his administration was his personal interest in the welfare of the native population, particularly with regard to their administration, education and health.

Archaeological research at the Yarang complex of moated sites in Pattani demonstrates that this was an early historic Buddhist ceremonial centre and a later Islamic fortification, but probably not the early trade centre called Langkasuka. At Kerisik archaeological evidence supports the identification of this complex as the location of the fifteenth-eighteenth century trading port city of Patani.

Responding to the new forces unleashed by the Second World War, Whitehall planners devised a new scheme that envisaged the creation of Malayan Union Citizenship. In a fundamental break from past practice, the new scheme sought to confer citizenship privileges on Malaya's non-Malay population. In the aftermath of the War the implementation of the new policy embroiled the Colonial Office in a major constitutional controversy that threatened not only Britain's traditional relationship with the indigenous Malay community but also the bases of British rule in Malaya.

An analysis of the archaeological data available in recent years indicates the development of local maritime networks both in peninsular Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent by the middle of the first millennium B.C. By the second-first centuries B.C. these networks formed a part of the larger regional sailing circuit in the Bay of Bengal. Tangible indicators of this are carnelian and glass beads and bronze bowls with a high tin content. A demarcation of these networks is essential, before questions like the organization of trade or the channels through which religious ideology spread, can be explained.

Japan's economic expansion into Southeast Asia which began during World War I laid the foundations for the contemporary regional order. Based mainly upon Dutch sources, this article reviews the interwar expansion of Japanese trade, shipping and investment in Indonesia, examines its corporate structure, and considers how the phenomenon should be interpreted.

Adopting an approach that situates texts in their historical, political and cultural contexts, this discussion suggests that a strictly literary estimate of Singapore novels in English is an unrewarding, debunking exercise which prevents a more appropriately serious consideration of the insights that can yield about class, contemporary values, issues and society in Singapore.

The war between Bangkok and the Lao in the years 1827–29 constitutes a watershed in the relations between the Thai and the Lao. Up to now, this conflict has been accounted for largely by only one source: The Royal Chronicles of the Third Reign of the Bangkok Dynasty by Chao Phraya Thiphakarawong. It is time to go beyond this, and to explore the available Lao annals, Vietnamese primary documents, the archives of the Thai National Library and the accounts of western travellers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This paper also introduces Lao historiography and historians who have written about the war.

Consistent with the call of the times to “return” to Islam, Malaysia's Sastera Islam of the 1970s and '80s upholds literature as a legitimate tool for “dakwah”. Within this framework, production of Islamic literature demonstrates involvement of the “religious” sector and formalistic demands for Islamic moral underpinnings, the latter manifested largely in narrative concerns with individual morality and salvation.

This paper combines historical with anthropological evidence on the relationship between Christianity and messianism among the Hmong of Southeast Asia and China. The lack of literacy is a motivating factor in Hmong Christian conversions. Messianism is seen as a reaction to Christian conversion, which encourages the alienation of minority groups.