South East Asia (GR)

As someone who has studied history for much of my life, I have found the past fascinating. But it has always been some grand and even intimidating universe that I wanted to unpick and explain to myself. Wang Gungwu is one of Asia’s most important public intellectuals. He is best-known...

First published in 1977, C. M. Turnbull's one-volume history of Singapore has been an essential resource for more than forty years. Turnbull's History provides a solid foundation for understanding of the two-hundred-year trajectory of Singapore from colonial outpost to world city. While many modern studies focus on current affairs or...

In the early twentieth century, social banditry was endemic in the countryside near the border between the northern Malaysian state of Kedah and Siam, and some outlaws became local heroes. Cheah Boon Khengs account of peasant banditry and the society where it flourished draws on colonial records, literary sources and...

What happens when a country splits apart? Forty-five years ago, Singapore separated from Malaysia. Since then, the two countries have developed along their own paths. Malaysia has given preference to the Malay Muslim majority - the bumiputera, or sons of the soil. Singapore, meanwhile, has tried to build a meritocracy...

Guns of February shows the Fall of Singapore and Japans 1941 military campaign in Malaya through the eyes of Japanese soldiers who took part, based on interviews, memoirs, war diaries, and other Japanese-language sources. Although an enormous number of books have been published on Japans wartime advance into Southeast Asia,...

The golden age of Malay film in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a musical and cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of a nation-making process based on ideas of Malay ethnonationalism, initially fluid, increasingly homogenised over time. The commercial films of the period, and in particular their film...

People who call themselves Malay - Melayu - are found in many countries, united by a notional shared identity but divided by political boundaries, divergent histories, variant dialects and peculiarities of local experience. While the term Malay is widely used and readily understood in Southeast Asia, it remains elusive and...

In postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia, Pentecostal megachurches dominate the Christian landscape, but the "big four" Protestant churches-Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Brethren-remain religions of heritage for many. Sixty Malaysian and nineteen Singaporean assemblies identify themselves as Christian Brethren, and most trace their roots to independent local churches formed in Penang and...

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a miracle. Why?In an era of growing cultural pessimism, many thoughtful individuals believe that different civilisations-especially Islam and the West-cannot live together in peace. The ten countries of ASEAN provide a thriving counter-example of civilizational co-existence. Here 625m people live together in peace....

Although Chinese emigration has a long past, its modern phase dates from sixteenth century, when European colonialists began to collaborate with Chinese emigrants to develop a worldwide trading system. In this book, distinguished historian Philip A. Kuhn tells the remarkable story of five-centuries of Chinese emigration as an integral part of...

Few authors have as much to say about Singapore and Johor in the early 17th century as Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge (c.1570-1632). This admiral of the Dutch East India Company sailed to Asia in 1605 and besieged Portuguese Melaka in 1606 with the help of Malay allies. A massive Portuguese...

Chin Woon Pings ""Hakka Soul"" chronicles the dreams, ambitions and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country and...

Rice is a staple part of the diet of virtually every Malaysian, to the extent that in each of the major languages used in Malaysia, rice means food and food means rice. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Rice in Malaya opens with an examination of the often fragmentary...

Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any...

The Malay-language term used for indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, Orang Asli, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by...

Singapore fell to Japanese forces on 15 February 1942. Within a matter of days, the occupying army took prisoner more than 100,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers, and massacred thousands of Chinese civilians. A resistance movement formed in Malayas jungle-covered mountains, but the vast majority of people could do little...

No countrys history is so well documented yet so poorly understood as that of a former colony. Singapore and Malaysia are particular victims of this historical paradox, and Carl Trockis account of the history of Johor and Singapore marks a decided advance in Malaysian scholarship. A study of the Temenggongs...

Japanese forces invaded Malaya on 8 December 1941 and British forces surrendered in Singapore 70 days later. Japan would rule the territory for the next 31/2 years. Early efforts to maintain pre-war standards of comfort gave way to a grim struggle for survival as the vibrant economy ground to a...

In Malaysia race is viewed not as an external attribute attached to a person but rather as an innate characteristic. Starting from this foundation, race and indigeneity have featured prominently in Malaysian politics throughout the post-war era, influencing both the civil status and property rights of broad sectors of the...

International politics in Southeast Asia since end of the Cold War in 1990 can be understood within the frames of order and an emerging regionalism embodied in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But order and regionalism are now under seige, with a new global strategic rebalancing under way....