Recent efforts have re-dated the Wat Bang Sanuk inscription to 1219, long before the Ram Khamhaeng inscription of 1292. Attempts to assess the implications force a re-thinking of Thai rebellion against Angkor by linking rebellion to religious thought, including especially the discovery and public show of relics of the Buddha.

This article attempts to bring together recent literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which ‘Malay’ or ‘Melayu’ have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of ‘Melayu’ were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently. Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made ‘Melayu’ a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term ‘Indonesia’ might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country.

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.

Although the Indonesian Marriage Law of 1974 set a minimum age of marriage for females of 16, among some groups – notably Sundanese in West Java and Madurese in East Java – early marriage remained common well after the Marriage Law was promulgated. Early marriage has since declined but certainly not disappeared among these groups. This paper analyses trends in early marriage and reports on a field study among the Madurese.

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.

Based on linguistic, archaeological, and historical evidence, this essay describes the environment that produced the culture associated with the ‘Melayu’, or the Malays. It also argues that Melayu ethnicity was never predetermined but was contested on both sides of the Straits of Melaka.

This article rebuts recent attempts to diminish Sir Gerald Templer's role in the Malayan Emergency. It contends that the revisionists overlook the decisive psychological impact of Templer's Malayan sojourn. Fundamentally, through very deliberate words and deeds, he gave both government and Malayans confidence that the communists could and would be beaten.

In the eighteenth century the descendants of a variety of groups, including Minangkabaus, formed a new Malay state known as Siak. Through an examination of a traditional text, Hikayat Siak, a better understanding of how Malay identity expanded beyond the polity of Johor–Melaka, and was understood, is provided. A key factor in this transformation is how a prince, Raja Ismail, developed a Malay identity through raiding and violence.

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.

Anti-Japanese activities in North Borneo before the Pacific War were part of a larger anti-Japanese campaign waged by the Chinese in Southeast Asia. In North Borneo one of the most important outcomes was politicisation of the Chinese community. During this period the North Borneo Company, which had previously welcomed Japanese capital and labour, also began to take steps to curb Japanese activities in the state.

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.

The descendants of Bugis mercenary forces that liberated Riau from east Sumatran invaders became an integral part of the local Malay community by the mid-nineteenth century. At that time Raja Ali Haji and Haji Ibrahim, two Malay authors of Bugis descent, wrote various tracts to legitimise their presence in Riau and to facilitate Bugis integration into the Malay community, but may have led to continuing divisions along ethnic lines in later years.

This article is a critique of ethnicity theories based on essentialism – the idea that ethnic traits are innate (essences) both in the individual and the ‘ethnie’ as a social group – which have been adopted, wittingly or unwittingly, by historians in mainstream Malaysian historiography in their effort to explain the formation of ‘Malay-Malayness’ as a social identity. It proposes instead that Malay ethnicity is not innate but rather learned or constructed, and Malay-Malayness has been created as a result of intersecting historical, cultural and social factors at a particular moment in a culture's life and history. Indeed, Malay-Malayness has been constructed by a colonial historiography and subsequently adopted uncritically by most historians in postcolonial Malaysia, both Malays and non-Malays.

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.

This article consists of two parts. First, some of the presuppositions that have moulded the dominant view of and approach to Indonesian literature are examined and contrasted with certain facts in the literary life of modern Indonesia. This results in the proposing of a ‘project’ in which this view and approach will have changed fundamentally. The biological species of the mycelium is used as a metaphor to reflect this change. The second part of the article is a case study that suggests how in a concrete way the Indonesian mycelium of literatures in Malay might be approached.

Through a discussion of language use in Kalimantan Barat (Western Borneo) a better understanding of cultural and sociolinguistic phenomena that are relevant to any discussion of Malay identity can be achieved. In this complex setting, the colonial nomenclature of Malay and Dayak, though widely adopted by the people of Kalimantan, does not adequately represent the intricacy and the fluidity of social relationships and identities. Colonial knowledge matches neither the results of linguistic research nor what the Malays and Dayaks know about themselves, their languages and their identities.