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Gambling with the Land: The Contemporary Evolution of Southeast Asian Agriculture
By Rodolphe De Koninck and Jean-François Rousseau Since the early 1960s, Southeast Asia countries have satisfied local demand for food while catering increasingly to the world market for agricultural produce, primarily through the export of industrial crops. Local production of...
Digital Atlas of Indonesian History
by Robert Cribb There was much praise for Cribb's "Historical Atlas of Indonesia". However, many were disappointed that a paperback edition did not follow. This is remedied with the publication of the "Digital Atlas of Indonesian History", which is based...
Minimum Deterrence and India's Nuclear Security
By Rajesh M. Basrur In this book, a leading authority on India's nuclear programme offers an informed and thoughtful assessment of India's nuclear strategy. He shows that the country's nuclear-strategic culture is generally in accord with the principle of minimum...
In the Land of Pagodas: A Classic Account of Travel in Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou
by Alfred Raquez, edited and translated by William L. Gibson and Paul Bruthiaux China, 1898: a time of war, intrigue and growing foreign power. Onto the scene comes a Parisian fugitive with a gifted pen and a journalist’s eye. Alfred...
At a Moment's Notice: Indonesian Maids Write on Their Lives Abroad
edited and translated by Jafar Suryomenggolo Life abroad for Indonesian women hired as domestic workers is more than the job. In their spare time, some will plan a better life back home when their work contract ends. Others will venture...
Fieldwork in Timor-Leste: Understanding Social Change through Practice
edited by Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Angie Bexley This ground-breaking exploration of research in Timor-Leste brings together veteran and early-career scholars who broadly represent a range of fieldwork practices and challenges from colonial times to the present day. Here, they introduce...
Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer or Reformer?
Syed Hussein Alatas, Introduction by Syed Farid Alatas The name of Thomas Stamford Raffles continues to be a mark of prestige in Singapore, more than 200 years after he first established a British factory on the island. Not one but...
lives & times of hrh
Winner: Best Non-fiction Title, Singapore Book Awards 2021Herman Ronald Hochstadt We came into the public service … at a time when there were only two choices – do or die – hrh Herman Hochstadt, or hrh as he is better...
Prisms on the Golden Pagoda: Perspectives on National Reconciliation in Myanmar
Edited by Kyaw Yin HlaingContributions by Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Thamarr Taman, U Shwe Ohn, Widura Thakin Chit Maung, Robert H. Taylor, Derek Tonkin and Lian H. Sakhong Just as the prismatic effects of glass mosaics or mirrors produce the spectrums...
Soldiers and Diplomacy in Burma: Understanding The Foreign Relations Of The Burmese Praetorian State
By Renaud Egreteau and Larry Jagan, Preface by David I. Steinberg Soldiers and Diplomacy addresses the key question of the ongoing role of the military in Burma's foreign policy. The authors, a political scientist and a former top Asia editor...
[Re]Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
By Alice D. Ba This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): how have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably...
The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World
By Mohammed Ayoob Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam....
The Malay Archipelago Through Travellers' Eyes: 1800–1900
Forthcoming Judith E. Bosnak & Rick Honings What did 19th-century travellers actually see when they journeyed through the Malay Archipelago—and what did they miss? The travelogues penned by British and Dutch explorers reached a wide readership; they have shaped how...
Taming the Wild: Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya
Sandra Khor Manickam BFM89.9 hosted Sandra to discuss her thoughts on the historical construction of Malay and Indigenous identities and the lessons they still hold for us today.In Malaysia race is viewed not as an external attribute attached to a...
Thai Politics in Translation: Monarchy, Democracy and the Supra-constitution
edited by Michael K. Connors and Ukrist Pathmanand Since Thailand’s prolonged political crisis began with royalist mobilization against prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2005, international observers have been treated to easy clichés about reactionary Thai elites. The chapters in this...
Boundaries and Beyond: China's Maritime Southeast in Late Imperial Times
By Ng Chin-keong Using the concept of boundaries, physical and cultural, to understand the development of China’s maritime southeast in late Imperial times, and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas, these linked essays by a senior...
Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia
Finalist: EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize 2022 Sandeep Ray How should colonial film archives be read? How can historians and ethnographers use colonial film as a complement to conventional written sources? Sandeep Ray uses the case of Dutch colonial film...
Southeast of Now Vol. 8, No. 1
The first issue of the eighth volume features: Articles Fifty Years Later: Art, Ecocide and Animatedness in VietnamBrianne Cohen Why Exhibit Trauma?Serubiri Moses Telemetric Feeling in Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s The Ring of Fire (2014–Present)Soh Kay Min /Shi: A...
Early Southeast Asia: From First Humans to First Civilizations
by Charles Higham a History Today 2025 Book of the Year Recent discoveries and improved investigative techniques since the first edition of this book was published in 2014, have opened up dramatic new insights into Southeast Asia's past. We now...
Nemesis: The First Iron Warship and Her World
Adrian G. MarshallThe Nemesis was the first of a generation of iron-clad, steam-powered naval vessels that established British dominance in Asian waters in the nineteenth century. The world’s first iron warship, the first vessel with truly watertight compartments, and the first iron vessel...
The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island
By Nils Bubandt AwardHonorable Mention, Clifford Geertz Prize (Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association)The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too...
Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Malay Syair
By Mulaika Hijjas In Victorious Wives, Mulaika Hijjas uses tools drawn from literary criticism and gender studies to look at a previously neglected corpus of Malay literature in a new light. The relatively equal gender relations in Southeast Asia have...
The AWARE Saga: Civil Society and Public Morality in Singapore
Edited by Terence Chong ebook available at: and In March 2009, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) was briefly taken over by a Christian faction. Their coup was overturned within a matter of weeks, but the episode...
Studying Singapore Before 1800
by Kwa Chong Guan and Peter Borschbergwith the assistance of Benjamin Khoo Historians rely on Singapore’s strategic position to explain its great success as a royal trading port in the 14th century, and as a British colony after 1819. What,...
Jin Ping Mei – A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature: Essays on Texts, Illustrations and Translations of a Late Sixteenth-Century Masterpiece
edited by Vibeke Børdahl and Lintao Qi The late 16th-century novel Jin Ping Mei has been described as a landmark in the development of the narrative art form, there being no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in...
Reluctant Restraint: The Evolution of China's Nonproliferation Policies and Practices, 1980-2004
By Evan S. Medeiros Reluctant Restraint examines one of the most important changes in Chinese foreign policy since the country opened to the world: China's gradual move to support the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, missiles, and their related goods and...
Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand
by Barend Jan Terwiel First published in 1975, B.J. Terwiel's "Monks and Magic" remains a widely cited text. This is an absorbing study of Buddhism as practised at that time in a community in rural Central Thailand. It describes how...
Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia
Edited by Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on...
The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia
Meredith L. Weiss The Roots of Resilience examines politics from the ground up in Singapore and Malaysia—two regimes that blend politically liberal and authoritarian features in their governance. Although curbed civil liberties and a dose of coercion help sustain these regimes,...
The British and the Vietnam War: Their Way with LBJ
By Nicholas Tarling During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the British government sought to avoid escalation of the war in Vietnam and to help bring about peace. The thinking that lay behind these endeavours was often insightful and it is...
Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam
Edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, Introduction by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, Contributions by Sina Emde, Oliver Tappe, Markus Schlecker, Elaine Russell, Christina Schwenkel, Vatthana Pholsena, Susan Hammond, Krisna Uk and Ian G. Baird There has been little...
Savu: History and Oral Tradition on an Island of Indonesia
by Geneviève Duggan and Hans Hägerdal This book demonstrates the possibilities of writing history based on bridging traditional archival historical evidence with evidence from oral sources and anthropological work, especially relevant for Austronesian societies where genealogical information is preserved in many...
A Meeting of Masks: Status, Power and Hierarchy in Bangkok
by Sophorntavy Vorng A fresh understanding of the ongoing Thai political conflict is offered by this highly accessible ethnographic study, which explores the connections between status, space, and social life in Bangkok. The author argues that the notion of the...
Isan Writers, Thai Literature: Writing and Regionalism in Modern Thailand
By Martin B. Platt Regional characteristics and regional language feature prominently in discussions of Thai identity, but there is little mention of regional literatures. In northeastern Thailand's Isan region, authors write primarily in Thai, but it is possible nonetheless to...
Tensions of Empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World
By Ken'ichi Goto Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the...