This article compares how elite music was classicised or canonised as part of the process of constructing national culture in India, Indonesia and Thailand. Issues examined include the role of the middle class; homogeneity and heterogeneity in national culture; the rise of mass education and innovative forms of musical transmission; the institutionalisation of music theory and music scholarship; dynamic influences from the West; and transformations in the roles of musician, patron and audience.

The article studies migrants from Uttar Pradesh in Singapore who have historically identified themselves as ‘Hindustani’ – a group that has largely been ignored in historical literature of the Indian diaspora in Singapore. Through an examination of British expansion in India in the early nineteenth century, parallel developments in Southeast Asia, community publications and oral testimonies, the article attempts to ‘(re)discover’ the history of Hindustani migration in Singapore.

With the end of effective resistance to British rule after the Third Anglo-Burmese War, Burma experienced significant economic growth, which led to larger numbers of foreign travellers going there. This article traces the publications of three travel writers – Mrs Ernst (Alice) Hart, R. Talbot Kelley and V. C. Scott O'Connor – by investigating the ways in which they relied on the concept of ‘picturesque’ to understand Burmese landscapes.

The trend to portray Indonesian presidents as punakawan (clown servants) in wayang (shadow puppetry) was started under the former President Soeharto. Whereas Soeharto chose to be conveyed as Semar, a clown but also a former god, greater artistic freedom post-Soeharto led to a more farcical depiction of Habibie and Gus Dur as Semar's sons, Gareng and Bagong.

This article is critical of the culturalist perspective as an explanation for the development of Chinese entrepreneurship. Drawing on Eu Tong Sen's business strategies and career between 1897 and 1920 as case study, it identifies the endogenous and exogenous conditions affecting Chinese business activities in colonial Malaya. Alfred Chandler's work on the rise of the modern business enterprise is argued to be particularly relevant for an economic history of Chinese business in Southeast Asia.

With the transformation from the Malay kerajaan rule based on economic extraction and the capability to take life to British colonial rule, Malays aspiring to govern others were now subject to a set of mundane disciplinary techniques seeking to promote a bureaucratic ethos that precipitated around academic merits, team spirit and above all the strange distinction between public and private spheres of action.

This article challenges existing interpretations of Ngô Dình Diêm by examining his activities during the decade before he became leader of South Vietnam in 1954. Diêm actively pursued power in these years, and he achieved it mainly due to his own efforts and to those of his Vietnamese allies. At the same time, he and his brother Ngô Dình Nhu were outlining the distinctive vision of modernisation which would inform South Vietnam's post-1954 nation-building strategies.

Using declassified British documents and Chinese-language newspapers, this paper seeks to supplement existing understanding of Chief Minister David Marshall's Labour Front-Alliance Government in Singapore from April 1955 to June 1956. From the outset, the government's reforms were hampered by its own weaknesses. It was viable only because British policy was to keep it ‘in position’.

The narrative of the origins of the Lao people in contemporary Lao-language history books and textbooks is divided among divergent interpretations. The most popular reading is the ‘Ai-Lao’ version, an implicit response to Thai nationalist historiography. Marxist-Leninist-orientated historiography, by contrast, resembles the Vietnamese Communist narrative. As far as likely future trends are concerned, a journey back to the ‘roots’ seems ultimately to reveal the biography of a pre-modern spatial identity.

Western secular historiography has conventionally viewed the history of Catholicism in Vietnam through a political optic, a perspective which has distorted the early nineteenth-century religious situation in both Vietnam and France. This article discusses how Vietnamese understood Catholicism at the popular level and what attracted people to the religion, as well as introducing an important European Catholic fund-raising society whose interventions into Vietnam long predated any serious French political designs on the country.

Jamit Singh's legacy as a charismatic trade unionist and political activist on Singapore's waterfront coincided with its changing political developments. He was instrumental in bringing about this change by transforming the dock workers into an effective political force. His subsequent banishment by the People's Action Party government brought an end to a colourful episode in the history of Singapore's harbour.

The establishment of the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall marks the PAP government's charting of a revolutionary, modernising genealogy of seismic proportions for the fashioning of a ‘Big Singapore’ as the political, economic and cultural focus of the Chinese diaspora. Such effort in reorienting history is problematic and the ethnicisation of national identity is contested, not least by Singapore's Chinese-language intellectuals.

The article investigates the operation of the jade trading networks from Burma to Thailand during the period of the Burmese socialist regime. The trade, a significant ethnic enterprise undertaken by Yunnanese migrants, has relied on transnational networks that deal with different political and economic systems beyond the jurisdiction of the state. The network approach is used to analyse the intertwining of guanxi formation and regulatory observance.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

The social construction of hazard is a matter of considerable moment to those engaged in disaster preparedness, management and relief. All too often, insufficient recognition is accorded to the manner in which people's actions are influenced by their cultural interpretation of what they are experiencing. Behaviours that appear inappropriate or illogical to external agency or relief workers may be entirely consistent and rational actions when understood in the context of the operating schema of the individuals experiencing such phenomena.

Preoccupied with French mission agitation in the late 1850s and during the Franco-Spanish invasion of southern Vietnam, scholarship has long neglected the dramatic change taking place in preceding decades at the local level between Catholics and mainstream society. Exploring negotiation between Catholic communities and authorities, as well as organisational shifts in mission activity, this article brings into sharper focus the turmoil of the late 1830s and 1840s Nguyên repression of Catholicism.

This study discusses paid domestic service employment in Thailand. Disparities in income distribution in the country and elsewhere in Southeast Asia provide a supply of domestic workers. Despite being commonly known as an exporter of domestic workers, Thailand is in fact a primary importing country as well. Domestic service is an arena in which gender, class and ethnicity collide.

This article investigates images of men and masculinities in post-New Order Indonesian popular culture, focusing on a recent and path-breaking Indonesian film, Kuldesak. The theoretical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is utilised to suggest that if Indonesian women are to be assisted in their efforts to resist the gender inequality of Indonesia's patriarchal gender regime, then the social gendering of men and masculinity must also be understood.

Iranun and Balangingi. Globalization, maritime raiding and the birth of ethnicity By JAMES FRANCIS WARREN Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 585. Maps, Figures, Tables, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

James Warren's rewarding Iranun and Balangingi (2002) expands on his classic The Sulu Zone (1981) but retains the explanatory model: Southern Philippine slave-raiding (1768–1898) was caused by the capitalist world economy's demand for commodities. This essay suggests that Warren's depiction of servility is too undifferentiated, that he may have overestimated labour needs and elite control while underestimating free trade.

Ahmad Tohari's trilogy of novels conjures up national demons of Indonesia's darkest historical moment. In reading across the grain of anti-communism and pro-moral reform, this article analyses a wealth of gender imagery. Javanese complementarity, although unequal, recognises a kind of dramatic feminine power that need not be threatening as long as men exercise self-restraint. Although modernisation tends to dichotomise persons into ‘castes’ of the sinful and virtuous, alternative modernities drawn from Javanese cultural sensibilities are also conceivable.