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 ......
A balanced, sensitive study of the history of comfort women in Singapore during World War II. "Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War, and has become the term generally used in English to discuss the subject. The role of comfort women in the ......
The British military failure against the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1942 is a well-documented and closely examined episode. But far less attention has been paid to the role of the colonial governor and his staff during this period, an oversight Ronald McCrum corrects with this insightful history. As McCrum shows, the failure of the civil ......
Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia
A detailed study of the failure of poverty reduction programs in Indonesia to reduce food insecurity. Economic growth in the middle-income countries of Southeast Asia over the past few decades has been widely praised for reducing poverty in both absolute and relative terms. Indonesia is a prime example. But while poverty has declined in ......
Policing As Politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1926-1941
Digul was an internment colony for political prisoners that was established in 1926 in West Papua. This book argues that Digul is the key to understanding Indonesia's colonial governance between the failed communist rebellion of late 1926 and the declaration of independence in 1945, a time when the Dutch regime attempted to impose what they called ......
A new evaluation of the history of the Malayan Communist Party. By 1946, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had become one of the most successful communist parties in Asia. From its foundation in 1930, it had built up a membership in the thousands, mainly among Chinese and Indian workers in Malaya. When the Japanese arrived, the MCP organized the ......
The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing
Examines the ways Singapore's impressive public housing program is central to the political legitimacy of the city-state's single-party regime, and the growing contradictions of its success. The achievement of Singapore's national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the ......
A complete narrative history of Southeast Asia. The oldest figurative cave paintings in the world are found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Hand stencils and animals painted some 45,000 years ago attest to a long history of human creativity. The Story of Southeast Asia tells how the peoples of the region have crafted their diverse ......
This is a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual, an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch-educated, Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a conservative society. This biography delves into its subject's interior life: the ......
