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 ......
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 ......
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 ......
Singapore's transformation from a trading port to a global city offers a compelling case study in long-term economic change. The Economic History of Singapore presents a detailed account of the city-state's evolving economic roles, from regional entrepot in the fourteenth century, to colonial port city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ......
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 ......
