Malaysia

Between Frontiers
Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland
By Noboru Ishikawa

A staple of postwar academic writing, “nationalism” is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction. It is generally treated as something “imagined,” “fashioned,” and “disseminated,”as an idea located in the mind, in printed matter, on maps, in symbols such as flags and anthems, and in collective memory.

Japanese Empire in the Tropics
Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak, Northwest Borneo, 1941–1945
By Ooi Keat Gin

Although the Japanese interregnum was brief, its dramatic commencement and equally dramatic conclusion represented a watershed in the history of the young state of Sarawak.In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interest in the war years, culminating in an attempt at reassessment of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia by Western and Japanese scholars as well as by those from Southeast Asia.Presented

Violence and the Dream People
The Orang Asli in the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960
By John D. Leary

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya.

Jan Compagnie in the Straits of Malacca, 1641–1795
By Dianne Lewis

In 1500 Malay Malacca was the queen city of the Malay Archipelago, one of the great trade centers of the world. Its rulers, said to be descendents of the ancient line of Srivijaya, dominated the lands east and west of the straits. The Portuguese, unable to compete in the marketplace, captured the town.

Beyond the Archipelago
Selected Poems
By Muhammad Haji Salleh

A collections of 70 poems from one of Malaya’s leading poets, that depict longing, loneliness, modernization, and insights in Malaysian culture.

Running Amok
An Historical Inquiry
By John C. Spores

Amok, one of the few Malay words commonly appearing in English, names a syndrome of unpredictable and indiscriminate homicidal behavior with suicidal intent. In tracing the development of this behavioral pattern, Spores examines historical data, including frequently colorful colonialist accounts of such episodes, from British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies during the period 1800–1925.Spores

From Kampung to City
A Social History of Kucing Malaysia, 1820-1970
By Craig Lockard

One of the major processes in modern Southeast Asian history has been the development of ethnically heterogeneous towns and cities. Kucing, an intermediate-sized urban center in Sarawak, Malaysia, is today an institutionally complex, predominantly Chinese city of 100,000 led by modern political leaders. Lockard’s account of the development and growth of Kucing over 150 years devotes particular attention to the remarkable absence of ethnic conflict in the mixed society of Kucing.

Broker, Mediator, Patron, and Kinsman
An Historical Analysis of Key Leadership Roles in a Rural Malaysian District
By Conner Bailey

This study attempts to relate questions of rural leadership to the constantly changing social and economic environment of a rural district in Malaysia during the twentieth century. The study itself began as an effort to analyze a single instance of structural change in Malay village leadership which occurred while the author worked in Sik District as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1968–1971).