The extended metropolitan regions of Southeast Asia are the dynamic cores of their national economies and societies and the frontiers of accelerating globalization. ""The City in Southeast Asia"" explores ways of moving beyond outmoded paradigms of the Third World City or a Southeast Asian city 'type'. It begins by contrasting the acknowledged ......
Trade and Merchant Communities in 17th-century Insulindia
An in-depth exploration of the Dutch East-India Company and what its history reveals about the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies. Connections between Asian and European markets increased dramatically in the seventeenth century, indicating a turning point in the global history of trade. The Dutch East-India Company (or VOC) was central ......
A new framework for understanding how airports interact with their surrounding region. Airports are major drivers of economic development. While firmly rooted in local landscapes, they serve as vital links to global networks. However, the massive infrastructures and externalities of airports-like noise and pollution-create tensions and present ......
Singapore in the writings of Joseph Conrad: a node in the networks of colonial modernity. In the 1880s, Joseph Conrad spent three extended stints in the colonial port city of Singapore, while working on ships around the region. Over the next thirty years, he would return to this place many times in his writing. Singapore is the principal, if ......
Studies of the Tai world often treat 'state' and 'community' as polar opposites: the state produces administrative uniformity and commercialisation, while community sustains tradition, local knowledge and subsistence economy. This assumption leads to the conclusion that the traditional community is undermined by the modern forces of state ......
Neighbourhood, State and Economy in Indonesia's City of Struggle
Surabaya, 1945-2010 presents the recent history of one of Indonesia's great port cities as viewed from a crowded low-income neighbourhood (kampung) called Dinoyo. By following the lives of Dinoyo residents over three generations, it provides a new perspective on landmark moments in the country's modern history, including the war for independence, ......
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, then, accounts for the many centuries when it seemed not to thrive, and was seen in the words of John Crawfurd as "only the occasional resort of pirates"? This seeming paradox sits ......
A new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism. Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a ......
Ethnography of Statelessness Written by a Stateless Academic
"In the springtime of the year that I was twenty-one, I found myself stuck at the border between two familiar countries, unable to enter either. I had never felt my statelessness so keenly." Japan's 1972 termination of diplomatic ties with the Republic of China left 9,200 Chinese residents stateless. Tienshi "Lara" Chen was one of them, born to ......
