For most of its modern history, to speak of Singapore was to speak of the Singapore River, physical centre of the city and site of the greater part of the colony’s entrepot trade. The river has been transformed over the last 25 years from a polluted industrial sewer choked with traffic to a clean, placid …
“Toponymics”, or the study of place-names, provides us a fascinating means of getting “under the skin” of places. Toponyms provide clues to a wide variety of social, cultural, economic and political phenomena and how they change. They may also serve commemorative functions and reflect the power of elite groups to shape landscape meanings. This book …
Among the many groups of workers whose labor built Singapore in the 20th century, there may be none as marginalized in memory as the women who travelled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as prostitutes. This study sketches in the trade in women and children in Asia, and–making innovative use of Coroner’s Inquests …
Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 Read More »
Summary: Fast-paced economic growth in Southeast Asia from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s brought increased attention to the overseas Chinese and their role in this economic growth. Events that followed, such as the transfer of Hong Kong and Macau to the People’s Republic of China, the election of a non-KMT government in Taiwan, the …
Many of the national leaders associated with the Non-Aligned Movement in both Asia and Africa wrote widely-disseminated autobiographies. Though influential, these narratives are frequently neglected by both historical and literary studies of decolonization, yet they form a dense intertextual network, each building on and responding to its predecessors. National autobiographies written by figures such as …
WPS 13 Imagined Individuals: National Autobiography and Postcolonial Self-Fashioning Read More »
Summary: The contributors to this volume explore the close relationship between education and the molding of modern immigrant societies through case studies of either Asian migrants or Asian immigrant societies. Examining the schools, kinds of education, and effects of education policies, the volume considers three questions involved in this relationship. First, what is the role …
This paper argues against a tendency to see Southeast Asian Studies as a recent, shallow and essentially foreign construct. It surveys an older pattern of writing about the region as a whole by a variety of different names, such as ‘Ultra-Gangetic India’ or ‘the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries’. Many of those who did write …
WPS 12 Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia Read More »
Pre-European Asian gunpowder technology has received insufficient attention and the transfers of firearms from Ming China to Dai Viet (modern northern Vietnam) and their implications are a case in point. On the one hand, this paper demonstrates how the Vietnamese acquired gunpowder technology from the Ming from the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. It …
WPS 11 Chinese Military Technology and Dai Viet: c. 1390-1497 Read More »
Since the 1970s, Singapore and Malaysia have witnessed a revival of interest in what is termed peranakan, baba or Straits Chinese culture and society. Definitions of what these terms mean and what specific ‘identities’ they refer to, however, continue to be contested. The aim of this essay is to address and throw new light on …
WPS 10 Transcultural Diaspora: The Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819-1918 Read More »
This paper investigates how a regional, ethnic-oriented party, the Dayak Unity Party (commonly abbreviated PD), grew out of the logic of colonial rule. The Dutch of had forged a “Dayak” identity out of a diverse, autochthonous, non-Islamic population to be juxtaposed against Islamic “Malays.” Specifically, however, the Catholic Church was the institution through which the …
