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The historiography of South-East Asia provides examples of every type of Imperial relationship and of others that at first sight do not seem Imperial. The concept of South-East Asia as a region is under challenge. The historiography of British South-East Asia gives opportunities for studying both the territories of South-East Asia and the region as a whole and considering the interrelationships. In the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the writing on British imperialism in South-East Asia grew for a number of reasons. The study of British imperialism in South-East Asia until the late 1960s had been constrained by the fifty-year rule. The change to a thirty-year rule by the Wilson government had a number of effects, both short- and long-term. The historiography of South-East Asia was being enriched, not only by the extension of its purview, but by its deepening. In the 1990s, a new wave of nationalism penetrated the historical profession in South-East Asia. So far, the historiography of South-East Asia, in part perhaps because it has grown out of studies of Imperial activities, has been enriched by an international approach in method, in authorship, and in publication.

The exercise of British power in South-East Asia until 1914 was shaped by the expansion of the colonial state, fluctuations in world capitalism, nationalist reactions, and international relations. The more heavily colonialism bore down upon South-East Asian societies, the more complex became problems of managing collaborators, controlling opponents, manipulating minority groups, and balancing communal interests. Preoccupied with Europe and lacking either an alliance with the United States or adequate military resources to act alone, Britain was unable to defend her South-East Asian Empire during 1941–2. A discussion on British imperialism and South-East Asia nationalism to 1941, the Japanese occupation and British wartime planning during 1941–5, and the new imperialism and end of Empire after 1945 is provided. The history of the British Empire in South-East Asia during the 20th century is partly a tale of diminishing British power associated with economic and military decline, aggravated by local resistance.

The investigation of two parallel texts is used to show that co-compounding in continental Eurasia is distributed in a highly predictable way based on area, thus demonstrating the importance of frequency studies in areal typology. The individual consideration of Eurasian language families and isolates across spread and residual zones confirms this result. However, there are also considerable differences in frequency in different styles and registers within individual languages, as shown in a case study on Erzya Mordvin. Different structural properties of various East and South East Asian languages are discussed, illustrating that convergence in general frequency and diversity in details of structure go hand in hand. A discussion of several possible predicting factors for the frequency of co-compounds shows that co-compounds are highly independent from other features. An appendix treats the distribution of co-compounds beyond Eurasia, mainly in New Guinea and Meso-America.

Despite being minnows on the world stage, Thailand and the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia embraced sport during the Cold War as a means of nation and region building. This essay examines the political dimensions of the South East Asia Peninsular Games—the precursor of today’s Southeast Asian Games—founded in 1959 by US ally Thailand. This event reflected and reinforced the Cold War culture of Thailand and Southeast Asia. The games embodied motifs of regional friendship and antagonism between the “free” anti-Communist and neutralist nations of peninsular Southeast Asia; domestically, they embodied key themes in the domestic Cold War culture of Thailand, including nationalism, developmentalism, the revival of the monarchy, and militarization. This essay examines the Thai military junta’s objectives in founding the event, the effectiveness of the inaugural South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games, and the cultural and semiotic features that reinforced the games’ major themes.

Chapter 6 focuses on the place of "mountains" in the colonial project. In the first place, the colonial power optimized its occupation and control of the territories it had claimed by identifying and mapping all the landforms that served as natural ramparts and obstacles to free movement. Second, it circumscribed populations judged singular from the start, using the mountain environment as a social indicator and as a vehicle for naturalizing the peoples encountered there. The category of “the mountaineer” proved, once again, to be useful for this purpose, for qualifying both local people living in the mountains and mostly Western mountain climbers who were to promote oropolitics in the Himalayas, the Caucasus and the Andes.

In this chapter we revisit this first era of classical developmentalism and industrialization in South East Asia from the late 1960s to the early to mid 1980s. The chapter argues that in keeping with the discussion of Lewis and Kuznets, the outcomes were impressive, and the end of classical developmentalism in South East Asia was due to global forces and the mode of global incorporation. The state was important in managing distributional tensions to address the Kuznetsian upswing of inequality that structural transformation unleashes. Specifically, the focus on agriculture and rural development ensured a social basis—improvements in welfare for the rural masses—that compensated for democracy. Agricultural development also supported industrialization. It is important to note, though, that absence of elite conflict, which facilitated structural transformation and inclusive growth in the region, had a high price in terms of the curtailing of political opposition, and political freedoms.

This chapter describes the effect of law on economic development. It specifically explores the reality of credit and security law in the region covered by the bank. Economic factors in credit allocation and debt recovery are various. In addition, politics takes various turnings with credit allocation and debt recovery. The cultural aspects of the subject are at once the most difficult and yet possibly the most important because it is an extremely complex blend of factors difficult to determine separately. Discussion on the law of borrowing and debt recovery is provided. It is stated that the rhetoric of the rule of law is one weapon in the battle for fairer and more economically efficient credit allocation and debt recovery.

This chapter provides an analysis of the factors that have driven recent trans-migration of Uyghurs through Southeast Asia and explores potential linkages to terrorism. It argues that the trans-migration of Uyghurs via Southeast Asia cannot be isolated from the larger social resistance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang against Han Chinese rule. China’s harder line in Xinjiang under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, in particular, have left many Uyghurs with choices that are either to migrate, to abandon their culture and religious identity in favor of a homogenous Chinese identity, or to give expression to their identity either through violent or non-violent resistance. This situation has provided not only the impetus for thousands of Uyghurs to migrate but also the opportunity for the intersection of Uyghur aspirations with the global forces of Islamist radicalism.

Following the pound's devaluation, the Wilson government entered into a period of austerity and deflation with increased taxes and currency restrictions that reduced standards of living and further decreased the Labour Party's popularity at the polls. Military policy consisted of further budget cuts and the proposed withdrawal of British forces in the Middle East and South East Asia. Ethnic violence, class conflict, and the youth revolution were also witnessed in Britain. Nationalist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, racial tensions, and the threat of Northern Island all contributed to the period's turbulence. This, coupled with continued low productivity undermined the government's effort at economic recovery. Industrial relations continued to be chaotic and institutional reform in local government, particularly in civil service, lagged behind. International relations also suffered, with conflicts in the commonwealth zones. Wilson's term ended on a slightly positive note through a balance-of-payments surplus and improvements in education and technology.

This chapter discusses forest and forest conservation in South and South-East Asia within a comparative perspective. It also discusses the future of political forests wherein reforestation movements will be in constant conflict with commerce and agriculture. Compared to the history of colonial forestry, the making of the forest policy in the post-colonial period was defined by the complexities of the political matrix and political machinery. Although forests nowadays are more politically influenced, the Assam forests in the colonial period were not entirely free from political negotiation and machinery. It was also under the commercial and profit-generating interests of the imperial rule and the powerful political class. Apart from discussing the history of the Assam forests, its difference and similarities in other forests, the chapter also evaluates how the present day ecological conflicts are intricately woven in the colonial era when forests, land and resource-based conflicts began to take shape.

In this chapter, we consider the ‘miracle’ in its heady heyday of exceptionally fast growth rates and structural transformation from the mid 1980s to the eve of the Asian financial crisis in the mid to late 1990s. We argue for a simpler explanation of rapid growth and structural transformation in this period in South East Asia. That is, that changes in international prices—the global oil price shock—induced a crisis. Then a new form of developmentalism evolved which opportunistically took advantage of another change in global prices—national exchange rates vis-à-vis the US dollar and yen, and global versus national interest rate differentials—to trigger, respectively, large inflows of foreign direct investment and finance capital. These inflows were attracted by what the first era of developmentalism had built in infrastructure, financial systems, and human capital, and drove growth and employment until the exchange rate advantage diminished.

This chapter examines the interaction between international education and foreign policy in the context of New Zealand, a small country of 4.2 million people but one which has seen dramatic growth in international students studying within its shores. It identifies a major growth in students travelling, first from South East Asia but more recently especially from China, Japan, India and Saudi Arabia. It argues that the links between foreign policy and international education are clear to see, even if policy scholars, civil servants and policy makers in the country have yet to realise their significance. It notes that the foreign policy objectives of aid and the defeat of communist interests from South East Asia lay behind the first, limited opening up of New Zealand's borders to international students in 1951 under the Colombo Plan.

The conclusion revisits the extent to which Pakistani Shi‘is have been increasingly drawn into the circuits of the Shi‘i international in the course of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. It argues that both Sunni and Shi‘i scholars have not been satisfied with merely being relegated to peripheral positions. Rather, Pakistani Muslim thinkers have been actively carving out spaces of influence for themselves. They continue to insist on the historical intellectual contributions of the Indian subcontinent and at times even claim hermeneutical hegemony for the region. The conclusion also takes a comparative look at India, where Shi‘i intellectual life was significantly less disrupted than in Pakistan. The conclusion calls for a new research paradigm that would take seriously the importance of bidirectional flows of thought between South Asia and the Middle East. Such a novel perspective has the potential to fundamentally reshape existing understandings of present-day phenomena such as Islamism.

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale for the book, the existing literature, the intended contribution of the book, the methodology, and analytical approach taken in the book and the structure of the book. The chapter introduces the ‘developer’s dilemma’ at the core of the book. Specifically, how are developing countries to address the tension between economic development and structural change, putting upward pressure on income inequality and the need for inclusive growth to provide social stability to capital accumulation, which requires steady or even falling income inequality to spread the benefits of economic growth more broadly. It is argued that South East Asia is a region of interest for understanding the developer’s dilemma as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand achieved structural change with more or less steady inequality up to a point.

This chapter uses the term ‘public participation’ in an examination of the role of non-governmental organisations in the context of environmental issues. It begins with an examination into public participation in two ASEAN states, Thailand and Malaysia. In particular, it draws on the examples of dam development in both countries, so as to provide a basis for comparison. It then takes a brief look at the state of public participation in the remaining states in ASEAN. It shows that the nature and extent of public participation in South-East Asia vary considerably. While it may be ingrained in the culture of the Philippines, and has received constitutional affirmation in Thailand and Indonesia, it is almost non-existent in the newly emergent states of Laos and Cambodia. In the case of Thailand and Malaysia, the role of the public is not clearly defined.

This chapter gives an overview of how historical linguists classify languages into families. While the comparative method and internal reconstruction are preferable when abundant data are available, the limited data on sign languages indicate that lexicostatistics is the most useful method. This method is made reliable by using the Swadesh word list revised appropriately for sign languages. Languages can have multiple ancestors, that is, languages that have contributed significantly to the daughters (thus creolization is included). The history of sign languages must be studied, not assumed, in order to be understood. An examination of families of signs in Southeast Asia and Central America alerts us to the endangered status of indigenous sign languages, often at the hand of ASL.