This article examines the development in the trade of lakawood as an example of the passage of a commodity from its initial introduction to being highly prized by its recipient market from the Song to early Ming period, and attempts to understand the interactive dynamics of the maritime trade between China and the Malay world at a micro level during the classical period of the Malay world's history.

Over the 400 years of the Lê dynasty (1428–1788), the village in northern Vietnam progressively evolved as an administrative institution. The article traces this process, and analyses the changing relationship between villages and the central government, contrasting the early decades of the dynasty when the court exercised strong control over the village with later centuries when the trend was towards autonomy.

On the basis of a new database of stock and commodity prices, along with measures of government revenues, commodity exports and immigration, the article assesses the impact of the opium trade on the economies of colonial Malaya, the Netherlands Indies and China from 1873 to 1911. Stock returns for a few Malayan industries related to international trade are significantly correlated with opium price changes, as are prices for labour-intensive, Chinese-dominated export commodities such as tin and gambier. However, opium price changes explain, at most, only a small fraction of the behaviour of stock and commodity prices. On balance, stock and commodity markets ascribed only secondary importance to ups and downs in the opium trade as measured by the price of the drug.

The K5 Plan for the defence of the Cambodian–Thai border was the response of the People's Republic of Kampuchea and its Vietnamese mentors to the threat posed by the resistance forces, particularly the Khmer Rouge, to its efforts to rebuild the nation and consolidate its administration. The very real defence gains, however, were made at the cost of bitter popular resentment over the way those gains were made.

Police manuals produced in the Siak and Riau-Lingga sultanates during the 1890s reveal something of the concerns of each society in an early stage of colonial state formation, and how they dealt with changing understandings of crime and punishment. Despite their many similarities, the manuals show that each Malay state had a distinctive character, and differed in its approach to issues of modernisation.

Yuan Buddhism is a particular variant of Theravada Buddhism that prevails among the Tai-speaking people of the upper Mekong region. A salient feature of Yuan Buddhism is belief in ‘holy men’ who gain renown for their charismatic attributes and construction of religious monuments. I argue in this article that the modern ‘holy man’ tradition, initiated by the forest monk Khruba Siwichai, is a form of religious revivalism that combines the bodhisattva ideal with sacral kingship. This form of revivalism condemns the modern state for its failure to uphold Buddhist morality, resists state control and fosters visions of utopian Buddhist realms.