Chinese migrants fleeing from the incoming Qing regime assumed a range of political and economic positions as the Nguyễn court sought to extend its control to the south. A nuanced exploration of the historical experience of two powerful Chinese migrant families to Vietnam through their clan genealogies reveals two rather different paradigms — the Minh Hương paradigm and the Frontier paradigm. These paradigms reflect not only the Chinese migrants' varied, resourceful manoeuvres in their quest for a firm foothold in the evolving and expanding south, but equally, they demonstrate the Nguyễn court's flexibility in accommodating and capitalising on the strengths of different migrant groups it sought to incorporate into its realm.

Colonial Singapore witnessed the movement and settling of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab, European and other mercantile groups as a free port and emporium of the British Empire. This social landscape was defined by boundaries between the different ethnic communities, often drawn up by the British, in contrast to the cosmopolitan exchanges of the market. This article focuses on the Indian business communities which had played a significant role in maritime trade networks since pre-colonial times and continued to be a part of Singapore's developing society and economy in the British period. A minority in the colonial era port city and largely confined within intra-ethnic economic and social circuits, Indians participated in the complex colonial structure of trade and credit alongside British, European and Asian traders and merchant houses, as brokers, agents, and retailers. British hegemony over the Indian subcontinent was both an advantage and a disadvantage for these Indian trading communities. This article brings to light the history of Indian networks in the colonial transnational flows of capital and entrepreneurship, and their patterns of integration into and role in the development of Singapore, a role marginalised in the scholarship and the national narratives alike by a focus on the large-scale Indian labour migrations.

Indigeneity, a concept and construct, is increasingly gaining currency in academia, in the political sphere, and in public debates. Indigeneity as an active political force with international support has become a resource in identity politics. This article focuses on the dynamics of how the transnational idea of indigeneity has been nationally installed and locally translated within the context of the ethnohistory of an Indigenous movement that stemmed from local–societal relations with the state. The idea of indigeneity is seen as both local and global because it is globally circulated but locally articulated as well as globally charged but locally framed. Focusing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia and home to 11 Indigenous groups in Bangladesh, the article argues that the local translation of global indigeneity is necessary for ensuring the rights and entitlements of Indigenous Peoples.

We argue in this article that the social and economic conditions in the Angkorian society of the tenth century or earlier contributed to the decline in status of some middle-level officials, as is evident from the mid-eleventh century. Many Angkorian inscriptions written between the late ninth and late twelfth centuries record purchases and donations of lands acquired for religious foundations. The texts often contain details of transactions and disputes seeking to validate title to these holdings. The buyers include middle-ranking loñ and vāp, and increasingly, higher-ranking officials. An analysis of the roles and activities of the officials reveals something of their relative status and helps explain the disappearance of vāp from the inscriptions in the eleventh century, and the relegation of loñ to temple roles by the twelfth century. The transfer of communal lands and lands owned by these officials to elites is attributed to hierarchical restrictions on land purchases, a reduction in fiscal immunities, and the need for taxes to be paid to the centre with high-value goods in Angkor's moneyless economy.

What are the practical and cultural consequences of embracing the ‘Indigenous’ label? Despite universalising aspirations, the concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Philippines, where the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act has created a bureaucracy that purportedly responds to the special needs of Indigenous Peoples, including the preservation of cultural traditions and securing title to ancestral lands. While laudatory on the surface, in practice the current legal and bureaucratic framework allows the state to impose its own definition of indigeneity, often compelling indigenous minorities to conform to stereotypes in order to acquire the fundamental rights and benefits that, by law, are supposed to be guaranteed. The Philippine states’ requirements for being recognised as ‘Indigenous’ are transforming how Indigenous Peoples maintain and perform their ancestral traditions, often leading to highly divisive internal debates about proper cultural and political representation. This article examines the case of Higaunon Lumads in northern Mindanao, who have been responding locally to over thirty years of national trends in participatory development that require increased engagement with government bureaucracy. I explore how ‘indigeneity’ has been defined and employed by Higaunons in the service of ‘preserving tradition’, the political and other consequences that have emerged in this context, and the perils of representing and commodifying indigeneity in modern Southeast Asia.

The European rivals for colonial domination on the island of Timor in the eighteenth century relied on alliances with the many Timorese principalities for influence outside their own small settlements; the Dutch at Kupang and the Portuguese at Lifau. The central Timorese principality of Maubara sought an alliance with the Dutch in 1755, resulting in the building there of a Dutch fort a few years later. The Dutch had hoped that this alliance would facilitate extension of their authority in the eastern districts. However, the Portuguese moved their capital to Dili in 1769 and Maubara was soon surrounded by Portuguese allies. The Dutch continued to supply Maubara with sporadic support, but finally surrendered it to the Portuguese in 1861. This article examines the Dutch claim to Maubara, the circumstances surrounding the erection of the fort, and the reasons for its later abandonment to the Portuguese.

The year 1819 is almost universally taken as a seminal date in Singapore historiography. Yet Stamford Raffles’ founding of a British trading post there was controversial from the start. The Dutch and the British haggled as to whether or not Raffles had overstepped his authority, and whether the trading post was legal. From the start, the Dutch demanded that the British quit their occupation of Singapore. During a three-year hiatus in the Anglo–Dutch negotiations (1820–23), Anton Reinhard Falck, the lead Dutch negotiator, decided to drop claims to Singapore in favour of a rearrangement of possessions in the archipelago. Crucially, he concluded that dropping claims over Singapore would not amount to a real loss. Instead, Falck hoped to use Singapore as a bargaining chip to squeeze additional concessions from the British. The Dutch formally relinquished their claim over Singapore in article 12 of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave full recognition and legitimacy to the British post, and sanctioned a breakup of the Johor-Riau Empire with the Singapore Straits acting as a notional dividing line. Earlier studies were substantially based on English-language materials and present the British as dominating the negotiations. The present article, based on Dutch archival materials as well as studies and sources in French, Dutch and English, reveals a fuller story of diplomatic disputes, territorial concessions, errors of judgement, and the triggering of the Dutch empire in the archipelago, in a paper war for the contested space of Singapore.

Lord Reid played a vital role as chairman in a Commonwealth commission in framing the Malayan Independence constitution between 1956 and 1957. The Scottish Lord of Appeal sought to ensure the commission's impartiality and to achieve a fair balance between the demands of the various interest groups. The Federation of Malaya was a complex emerging nation-state with a diverse population and the framers had to manage competing interests and demands. This article, through a close examination of the primary constitutional documents, considers Reid's influence on the framing of the Malayan (and hence, Malaysian) federal constitution. The article begins with a brief discussion of Lord Reid's appointment to head the commission and then considers in some depth areas where his influence on the framing of the draft constitution is evident. The article argues that Reid was the main playmaker and moderator during the constitution-framing process and played a critical role in ensuring a balance was achieved between the competing demands of the federal government and the states, safeguarding the fundamental rights of the citizens against the state, and in moderating the various communal demands.

This article explores the idea of Singapore's repute as the ‘Liverpool of the East’ and the depictions of Britain's maritime empire in Asia. It does so via two important cruises related to the British Empire. The first is the Royal Tour of 1901 and the second cruise was the Empire Cruise of 1923 to 1924. By examining the reception afforded to both royal and naval visitors, this article argues that we have insights into what it meant for Singapore as a port city in a British maritime and imperial network. This article explores how Singapore was depicted as a maritime hub through these tours and concludes with a reflection that similar descriptions still hold a place in modern descriptions of Singapore.

After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, Philippine policymakers became the first in Asia to recognise indigeneity and Indigenous rights. By law, Indigenous groups throughout the archipelago now have priority rights to their ‘ancestral domains’, but in return they are expected to maintain an ‘ecological balance’ and cooperate with environmental regulations. As in many other parts of the world, the conditionalities of recognition mean that invocations of Indigenous rights often serve to initiate ever-deeper entanglements with governmental power. At the same time, however, Indigenous Peoples and their advocates do not approach the dilemmas of recognition as hapless bystanders; rather, they negotiate them in strategic and often unexpected ways. This article considers how members of Indigenous Palawan communities in the southwestern Philippines have used dominant policy assumptions to intervene in dispossessory processes. Specifically, I examine instances in which they have: (1) codified a ‘tradition’ of inheritance to influence legislative outcomes; (2) performed the policy narrative of ‘ecological balance’ to shape the outcome of conservation interventions; and (3) filed a civil case tacitly challenging official expectations that they govern themselves as homogenous collectivities. These examples, I argue, offer broader insights into the paradoxical and at times unexpected consequences of legislating Indigenous rights.

This volume contains an introduction and eight papers presented at an international symposium ‘Let's Talk about Trees’, which was organised by Ritsuko Kikusawa and hosted by the National Museum of Ethnology of Osaka, Japan, in February 2013. The stated purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the pros and cons of the classic tree model of historical linguistics in describing the order of splits within a language family. Because the problem of modelling relationships of descent is common to other disciplines, contributors were invited from a range of academic disciplines, including not only linguistics, but also what is described on page one as ‘cladistics’, ‘biology’ and ‘genetics’, although cladistics is clearly a part of biological taxonomy, and not an independent discipline.

While Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles led the expedition that founded colonial Singapore in 1819 and conceptualised many of the early institutions that developed the trade port, it was the depiction and commemoration of his time in the region that made him an icon of imperial mythology. This was part of a process in which admiration of his name and exploits were exalted, ultimately representing a core element in the Victorian mentality, the need to create heroes to glorify the British Empire. This article will survey and analyse how the commemoration of Raffles in the first 75 years of colonial rule, through the commissioning of statues and the attachment of his name to establishments and institutions, solidified and justified a British presence in the region and larger imperial history, which continues to echo in the modern nation-state of Singapore and its history.

This article, which looks at Indigenous communities in the multiethnic, multicultural region of Sabah, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, argues that indigeneity is not primordial, but exists in relation to dominant identities as well as other non-dominant, Indigenous groups. Moreover, Indigenous Peoples are not passive recipients of colonial or even postcolonial Othering: their identity is contextualised and contested within majority–minority relations. The article begins with a brief history of the dominant Kadazandusun nationalism in Sabah, in the context of the overarching Bumiputra policy of Malaysia, which privileges constructed Malayness, as background to the discourses and practices of smaller groups of land-based Murut and the sea-oriented ‘Bajau’, where identity switching is taking place in tandem with environmental justice claims. The land-based communities (Murut) have found leverage in making identity and livelihood claims attached to place (here, state-declared forest reserves that seek to exclude them) in line with the recent global environmental justice focus on participatory conservation rather than the older ‘fortress conservation’ model still dominant in state conservation thinking. However, the sea-oriented peoples (Bajau) require other social symbols than land for making their identity claims, in this instance, via claims to ‘modern’ livelihoods and as managers of marine resources with reference to the newly established Tun Mustapha Park. In Sabah, participatory conservation is being reappropriated by Indigenous Peoples to assert claims about place and /or livelihoods; if bureaucratised, however, this form of conservation might turn out to be less than participatory.

1819 represents a highly charged moment in the Singapore imagination. It marks the birth of our modern city-state, yet it also signals the beginning of our colonisation: the domination of Malay and other Asian cultures by Western powers. Artists have thus responded to the event with widely variant attitudes, ranging from E.W. Jesudason's laudatory Raffles Institution Anthem (c.1963–66) to Isa Kamari's stridently anti-colonial novel, Duka Tuan Bertakhta / 1819 (2011). The prevailing sentiment, however, has been one of playful ambivalence. While accepting the fact of colonisation, artists have rejected a founding myth that glorifies our primary colonist, Sir Stamford Raffles. Instead, we have lampooned him in works like Robert Yeo's play The Eye of History (1991) and Colin Goh's film Talking Cock: The Movie (2002); raised ourselves to the height of his statue in Lee Wen's art event Untitled (Raffles) (2001); highlighted narratives of overlooked figures in the drama of colonisation: William Farquhar, Sophia Raffles, Nonio Clement, Sultan Hussein Shah, Munsyi Abdullah, and Sang Nila Utama. As a cultural researcher and author of the biographical drama The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles (2008), I shall examine trends behind these divergent representations of our colonisation. I argue that artists have chosen to retell 1819 not as a year of conquest, but as a polymorphous moment of transformative contact between East and West; one in which we may view ourselves, not as the victims of change, but as its agents.