BiblioVault

China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368

A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People During the Southern Song and Yuan Periods

Lo Jung-pang

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

Lo Jung-pang argues that during each of the three periods when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and early Tang dynasties, and Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), coastal states took the initiative at a time when China was divided, maritime trade and exploration subsequently peaked when China was strong and unified, and declined as Chinese power weakened. At such times, China's people became absorbed by internal affairs, and state policy focused on threats from the north and the west. These cycles of maritime activity, each lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction.

In the early 21st century, a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang's analysis suggests useful questions for the study of events as they unfold and decades to come.

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China's Footprints in Southeast Asia

Edited by Maria Serena I. Diokno, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, and Alan H. Yang

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

The countries that make up Southeast Asia are seeing an incredible resurgence in their economic power. Over the past fifty years, their combined wealth has reached the same level as the United Kingdom and, taken together, they are on track to become the fifth-largest world economy. But that stability and success has drawn the attention of the second largest world economy—China. The emerging superpower is increasingly involved in Southeast Asia as part of the ongoing global realignment. As China deepens its influence across the region, the countries of Southeast Asia are negotiating spaces for themselves in order to respond to—or even challenge—China’s power.
This is the first book to survey China’s growing role in Southeast Asia along multiple dimensions. It looks closely and skeptically at the multitude of ways that China has built connections in the region, including through trade, foreign aid, and cultural diplomacy. It incorporates examples such as the operation of Confucius Institutes in Indonesia or the promotion of the concept of guangxi.China’s Footprints in Southeast Asia raises the question of whether the Chinese efforts are helpful or disruptive and explores who it is that really stands to benefit from these relationships. The answers differ from country to country, but, as this volume suggests, the footprint of hard and soft power always leaves a lasting mark on other countries’ institutions.

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Cold War and Decolonisation

Australia's Policy towards Britain's End of Empire in Southeast Asia

Andrea Benvenuti

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

In this book, Andrea Benvenuti discusses the development of Australia’s foreign and defense policies toward Malaya and Singapore in light of the redefinition of Britain’s imperial role in Southeast Asia and the formation of new postcolonial states. Benvenuti sheds light on the impact of Britain on Australia’s political and strategic interests in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. It will be of interest to historians of Australia’s foreign relations, Southeast Asia, and the British Empire and decolonization.

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Colonial Law Making

Cambodia under the French

Sally Frances Low

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

An important case study in the history of law under colonialism.

Covering a previously neglected area of Cambodian history, Colonial Law Making explores the structural forces and contingent exchanges that shaped colonial law in Cambodia and examines its post-independence colonial legacy.

The court of King Norodom and the temples of Angkor Wat became orientalist icons in the French colonial imagination, perpetuating an image of the Protectorate (1863–1953) as special and worthy of preservation. This contributed to exceptionalism in the way the Kingdom was colonized, including through law. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, Sally Low presents a comparative case study of French approaches to colonial law, jurisdiction, and protection. Although the voices of non-elite Cambodians are largely absent from the archives, their influence on colonial law is evident as they resisted efforts to regulate their lives and their land. Low argues that the result was a set of state legal institutions and an indigenous jurisdiction that blended Cambodian and French notions of patronage and royal power as the source and authority for law.

This work is a case study of colonial law as an instrument of control and administration in an indirectly ruled colony. It adds depth to our understanding of the impact of European colonial law and the significance of different forms of colonial rule—direct, indirect, and unofficial. It is easily accessible for non-lawyers and is a must-read for those interested in the recent past of Southeast Asia and the countries that were previously colonized as French Indochina.

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The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory

Kevin Blackburn

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

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 Japanese empire during World War II remains an important and emotional topic around the world. Most scholarship concentrates on Korean comfort women, with less on their counterparts in Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even less on Southeast Asia. That gap persists despite widespread knowledge of the elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, that were organized by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why, the author asks, did no former comfort women from Singapore come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s?

To understand this silence, this book offers a detailed examination of the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls, and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Kevin Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore’s memory, including newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. Bringing great care, balance, and sensitivity to a difficult subject, Blackburn helps to fill an important gap in our understanding of this period.

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Contesting Malayness

Malay Identity Across Boundaries

Edited by Timothy P. Barnard

National University of Singapore Press, 2014

People who call themselves Malay - Melayu - are found in many countries, united by a notional shared identity but divided by political boundaries, divergent histories, variant dialects and peculiarities of local experience. While the term 'Malay' is widely used and readily understood in Southeast Asia, it remains elusive and open to varying interpretations. "Malay" as an identity, or nationality, is one of the most challenging and perplexing concepts in the multi-ethnic world of Southeast Asia. This book assembles research on the theme of how Malays have identified themselves in time and place, developed by a wide range of scholars. The authors include Malaysian anthropologist Shamsul A.B., Indonesian poet Tenas Effendy, and linguists and historians based in Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore and the U.S.A. While the authors describe some of the historical and cultural patterns that make up the Malay world, taken as a whole their work demonstrates the impossibility of offering a definition or even a description of 'Melayu' that is not rife with omissions and contradictions.

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Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore

Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment

Brenda S.A. Yeoh

National University of Singapore Press, 2003

In the British colonial city of Singapore, municipal authorities and Asian communities faced off over numerous issue. As the city expanded, disputes arose in connection with sanitation, housing, street names, control over pedestrian 'five-foot-ways', and sacred spaces such as burial grounds. Brenda Yeoh's Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore details these conflicts and how they shaped the city. The British administration structured the private and public environments of the city with an eye toward shaping human behaviour, following scientific principles and the lessons of urban planning in other parts of the world. For the Asian communities, Singapore was the place where they lived according to their own values, priorities and resources. The two perceptions of the city frequently clashed, and the author reads the cityscape of Singapore as the result of this contest between discipline and resistance. Drawing on meticulous research and a theoretically sophisticated use of cultural and social geography, post-colonial historical discourse, and social theory, the author offers a compelling picture of a critical stage in Singapore's past. It is an important contribution to the study of colonial cities and an indispensable resource for understanding the shape of modern Singapore.

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Cosmopolitan Intimacies

Malay Film Music of the Independence Era

Adil Johan

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

The 1950s and ’60s are now thought to be the Golden Age of Malay film. A big part of what made films of this era so popular was their beguiling music. In this absorbing study, the scholar and musician Adil Johan examines the social and cultural impact of the film music of the period, and its role in nation-making.
Drawing on analyses of lyrics and music, interviews with musicians, and the content of Malay entertainment magazines, in an approach that spans ethnomusicology and cultural studies, he reveals this body of work to be a product of a musical and cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of a nation-making process based on ideas of Malay ethnonationalism, initially fluid but increasingly homogenized over time. Malay film music of the period covertly expressed radical sentiments despite being produced within a commercialized film industry.
Written in a lively style and illustrated with musical examples, the book will satisfy ethnomusicologists, composers, and film studies scholars interested in Southeast Asia and the Malay world. It will equally be of interest to scholars interested in the role of culture in nation-making more broadly.

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Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary

Global Encounters via Southeast Asia

Edited by H. Hazel Hahn

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

For years, the study of how culture operates in colonial contexts was dominated by the ideas of transmission and influence. Yet the more we learn, the less useful those concepts seem to be. This collection deliberately complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized in order to establish a more effective framework for understanding. The contributors address a wide range of questions, rooted in specific colonial experiences: How can a controversy about forms of deference in Java reveal tensions around colonial policies and the rise of nationalism? What was Vietnamese about the French colonial governor’s palace in Hanoi? What can the circulation of jazz in Asia tell us about its evolution, circuits of exchange, colonial culture, and its appropriation? Through such inquiries, the volume traces the multilinear trajectories of the flow of decorative objects, architectural styles, photographs, sartorial practices, music, deference rituals, and ethnographic knowledge, in a transimperial framework within and beyond Southeast Asia and Europe. Highlighting a wide range of actors along with their motivations and interactions, this volume treats cultural heritage as dynamic processes.

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