The earliest known evidence for the existence of the opium poppy has been traced to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages in west central Europe. Arab traders introduced opium into Asia, and in the eighth century A.D., it had been used in China. By the nineteenth century, China provided the most lucrative market for traders, primarily British and American, who brought opium to China from India and the Ottoman Empire. Opium use also proved to be popular among the overseas Chinese communities in Siam, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The Chinese demand for opium, the lucrative profits to be gained from the manufacture, transfer, and sale of opium, and official connivance at edicts to prohibit its import into China, served to create a flourishing trade.

I joined the Maritime Silk Route Expedition organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a member of the International Team of Scholars. We sailed on the Fulk-al-Salamah, the expedition ship, from Oman to China, stopping in the following countries: Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. International seminars were held in each one of these countries during the expedition.

Lingering recollections of Pattani's proud tradition as an independent state were crystallized into a popular desire for the separation of the predominantly Malay Southern Provinces from Thailand, largely as a result of the aggressively nationalistic policies of Phibul Songkhram's wartime administration; when the war ended, widely circulated rumours encouraged Malays in the area to believe that the United Kingdom intended to annex the region to British Malaya as part of a peace settlement. Although this hope was dashed by the Agreement between the two countries of January 1, 1946, the idea of separation from Thailand continued to provide a goal towards which a variety of groups struggled by means ranging from polemics to sporadic acts of violence.

In the aftermath of World War Two, Malaya saw the emergence of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its attempt to mobilize labour support against the returning British colonial government. The Pan Malayan General Labour Union (PMGLU), later renamed the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Union (PMFTU), was established as a front organization to harness multiracial labour support and to work in close liaison with other left-wing political groups. Trade unions that mushroomed after the War were invariably dominated by the PMGLU and used as tools for the realization of communist political objectives in Malaya.

To historians of Southeast Asia, the Bandung conference of 1955 presents itself as one of the most striking international initiatives undertaken by newly-independent Indonesia. For historians of Indonesia, it marks the emphasis on foreign as against domestic policy that was associated with Sukarno's growing dominance. To biographers of Sukarno it appears to be both a strategic device in domestic politics and a farsighted perception of a shift in international relations. Internationally it was both to demonstrate the influence of India and to show its limits. Even more it was to mark some kind of success for the People's Republic of China and for Chou En-lai in developing the foreign policy line associated already with Geneva and the five principles of co-existence.

Recent trends in fertility in Malaysia1 have created uncertainty about the course of the demographic transition. While Chinese and Indian fertility continued to decline into the 1980s, since 1978, Malay fertility has levelled off and even risen slightly. Evidence up to the early 1980s suggests that the phenomenon may be temporary, attributed mainly to the bunching of births caused by the postponement of marriage among the Malays. More recent evidence, however, point to sustained levels of high Malay marital fertility through the late 1980s — TFRs (total fertility rate) among Malays averaged 4.5 and above between 1982 and 1987 while Chinese and Indian TFRs continued to fall from 2.7 to 2.3 and 3.8 to 3.5, respectively.