A Small voice from Laos made itself heard in 1945 amid the clamour of the nations of South-east Asia, striving to free themselves from colonial rule. The first essential moves towards unity and independence were made in Vientiane after the capitulation of Japan and during the temporary stalemate that followed, as Chinese troops occupied Laos down to the 16th parallel and French forces began to re-enter the southern provinces. The Protectorate Treaty of August 1941 was denounced (29 August), a proclamation of independence was made (1 September), and the northern and southern parts of Laos were declared to be united (15 September).1 During October a Provisional Government began to prepare a Constitution and provide for a National Assembly. Taking its first halting steps in the field of foreign affairs, this Provisional Government appealed to the Allied Governments to recognize the independence of Laos.

A Feature which has long characterized the study of Indian administrative history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the tendency of scholars to identify the British Raj with the Government of India, or more narrowly still, with the Governor-General in Council. Certainly one would not write a general history of British India and ignore the pronouncements of Calcutta. Yet by the same token one should not overlook the actions and attitudes of the several provincial governments, and especially of the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras, which, though under the general suzerainty of Calcutta, enjoyed substantial freedom of action within the limits of their own jurisdiction.

Ceylon is one of the few non-European members of the Commonwealth which has been reasonably successful in adapting the Westminster-style government to suit its own requirements. There are difficulties in operating the system—a heterogeneous population comprising religious, cultural, linguistic and caste groups whose differences are not seldom accentuated by the island's slow rate of economic growth—but despite these, it could be said from the experience of nearly twenty years of Parliament's working, that the willingness of parties and groups to differ on a constitutional plane with all the necessary corollaries of elections, political meetings, a legally established government and a recognized opposition is the generally accepted norm of political behaviour in Ceylon today.

The political system of Cambodia is often—and not inaccurately—described as one of the most stable in Asia. Such description is apt to be justified by reference to the relative absence of upheaval and disturbance which have been the fate of several new Asian states. Surface indications of stability, however, can give rise to exaggerated assumptions about the institutionalized nature of a political system, in the sense that an induced pattern of political activity has jelled to make the system a going concern. The object of this article is to examine the distinguishing features of the Cambodian political system with a view to establishing whether surface appearance reflects an inner resilience or fundamental structural weakness.

This paper stems from a dissatisfaction with the present state of historical writings on India's international economy in the nineteenth century. While the task of reducing the mass of literature available on the subject to a coherent and meaningful survey is a difficult and perhaps not a very fruitful exercise, it is rather easier to understand why such writings on Indian economic history in general and trade history in particular have remained confused and often internally contradictory.

In the hundred years before 1857, the last vestiges of the crumbling Mughal power in India slowly vanished. When forceful resistance to the British was no longer expedient or possible, the Muslims, who had been the rulers, withdrew into a purposive cultural isolation. Under the leadership of the—‘ulama’ (religious teachers), contacts with the British and Hindus were discouraged and the introduction of new cultural elements into Muslim life was severely eschewed. The result was that while the British were introducing a new administrative system, a new language and a new technology into India, and the Hindus, finally released from Muslim rule, were rapidly adopting the British offerings, the Muslims chose not to participate in the professional, governmental or educational life of the country.

It is an historical commonplace that the renewal of Western diplomatic contact with Japan, after the Tokugawa seclusion, seriously disturbed the Japanese political system, and contributed to the Meiji Restoration. Undoubtedly foreign demands for commercial and diplomatic privileges, combined with the presence of warships and military garrisons, cut sharply into the minds of all politically conscious Japanese, and added to the bitterness of internal conflict. But in the past numerous historians have gone much further than these general statements, and drawn far more specific conclusions about the policies and impact of Britain in these crucial years.

Modern Malaysian constitutional history can largely be analysed in terms of the fortunes of three federations: the Federated Malay States (1896), the Federation of Malaya (1948) and the Federation of Malaysia (1963). The last two are recent enough to fall within the domain of contemporary history. Still, it is possible to suggest that they share at least two characteristics with the first. To begin with, each assumed a highly centralized form of administration at the same federal capital of Kuala Lumpur. Protests over such centralizing tendencies led in the original case to the ‘decentralization movement’ from c. 1920 to c. 1940, and in the third instance to Singapore's separation from the Federation of Malaysia in August 1965. Secondly, all three federations witnessed controversies before their final inauguration, and political conflicts thereafter. The F.M.S. was born only after two Colonial Governors had reported in favour of the proposal, and discontent among the Malay rulers was partly responsible for the decentralization movement just mentioned. The Federation of 1948 was partly a British attempt to arrive at a modus vivendi with the Malay nationalists after the post-war Malayan Union scheme proved abortive, and it was attended by a Communist revolt and growing nationalist demands for self-government. The Malaysian Federation was the product of a ‘Battle for Merger’ (to use Mr Lee Kuan Yew's phrase), and created or exacerbated internal social and political tensions in addition to arousing Indonesian hostility.

As a turning-point in the international politics of the Far East, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 has been studied from many different viewpoints. In particular, the renowned tripartite Intervention by Russia, France and Germany into the terms of the Shimonoseki Peace Treaty has interested many students of diplomacy. However, the questions of Formosa and the Pescadore Islands and of the British attitude in regard to the Intervention remain historically unanswered, mainly because of the lack of publicized British official documents.

One of the interesting questions concerning the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is the degree to which the Western-oriented intellectuals of Japan compromised their scholarly curiosity about European civilization by serving the pre-Restoration Tokugawa government and its successor, the Meiji oligarchy. In what ways might their duties as civil servants colour their objectivity in studying the newly found academic disciplines of the West? What tensions did late Tokugawa and early Meiji scholar-bureaucrats perceive between their investigations of European knowledge and their service in a partisan regime? An examination of the career of Nishi Amane (1829–1897), who was an important scholar of Western philosophy as well as a bureaucrat in both the Tokugawa and Meiji governments, casts some light on the problem of the intellectual as public servant in early modern Japan. This study will concentrate on three important events in Nishi's life: his decision to flee his feudal clan in order to study the West in 1854; his refusal to join the Restoration movement in 1868; and his defence of the idea that scholars could serve the new state without compromising their objectivity in 1874.

On 28 November 1967, outnumbered Indonesian commandos, battling against more than five hundred guerrillas in the heavily jungled, mountainous area near Bengkajang, in the extreme western part of Indonesian Kalimantan (Borneo) close to the south-western frontier of Sarawak, were compelled to call for air support and reinforcements from the nearby crack Siliwangi army division, as the heavy automatic rifle and mortar fire of the insurgents was decimating commando ranks. The plight of the Indonesian regulars gave added significance to the concern voiced in the Indonesian Parliament a few weeks before that the Communist-led insurgents along the Sarawaken-Indonesian border should be prevented ‘from becoming a Viet Cong type terrorist band’, and to reports that Indonesian forces, engaged for some time in running battles with the guerrillas, had recently discovered in the forests near Sajung Kampong, Sebaloh and Punti various guerrilla caches of arms and supplies, including 'insignias with quotations of Mao Tse-tung’s teachings inscribed on them’.

There were two main reasons for writing my original article. The first was to show that man's economic environment is not the only variable (or set of variables) in economic development and that man does have some control over his own economic destiny. The second was to attempt a multi-disciplinary explanation of the Malays' economic retardation.

Some people would no doubt be surprised to learn of a man like Kaiseki Sata who in the early days of Meiji zealously asserted that ‘every expedience is an evil and every inexpedience a benefit’, and that umbrellas, lamps, railways, steamships and other similar innovations could only be harmful. But others whose personal knowledge and experience of such things as the noise and polluted air of big cities, the growing toll of road accidents and the horrors of the atomic bomb have convinced them that too much so-called civilization does not secure human happiness might be more inclined to sympathize with him. In fact, Sata merely represented the feelings of men in the street, by no means small in number, who, accustomed to the traditional way of life under the Shogunate, were either implicitly or explicitly opposed to the new government or at least unable to adapt themselves to the new way of life which made its appearance so suddenly. To Sata anything brought in from abroad seemed harmful, for he feared that innovations might lead to the impoverishment of those who lived by traditional trades and so land the whole nation in misery. He never ceased to write and lecture on this topic, and even went as far as to petition the government to stop the importation, and discourage the use, of any foreign commodity whatsoever. However, because his influence was extremely small compared with that of the notorious motto 'Civilization and Culture', and because his attitude was seen as a mere feudal reaction to what was inevitable, his was after all a voice crying in the wilderness1.

An anthropologist has recently remarked on an ‘orthodoxy’ of economic development that has grown up among some economists. The same writer continues with the observation that

there is also, among some economists, an orthodoxy of the relevant background factors in development. When the tools of economic analysis appear inadequate fully to deal with specific instances of economic change or economic stagnation, the psychology and attitudes of the people concerned are invoked, as is the inertia of indigenous institutions.

To an Englishman of my generation, whose schooling took place during the 1920–30s, the practice of comparing Japan with Britain has long been a commonplace. School geography lessons on Japan invariably began with a reference to the temperate offshore island kingdom of eastern Asia as the ‘Britain of the East’, and this theme was often elaborated to include the characterization of Osaka and Kobe respectively as the Manchester and Liverpool of Japan. But following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 the climate of opinion began to change, and so did the analogy. In 1936, Freda Utley, in a book which attracted widespread interest, observed:

Although the real Japan comes a little closer to being the Prussia of Asia than the Britain of Asia, it is fundamentally unlike all these romantic pictures, and in so far as it resembles another country, that country is Russia under the tyranny of the Tsars.