World War One In Southeast Asia

An original study of the First World War's impact in Southeast Asia, extending our understanding of the conflict as a global phenomenon.

The first comprehensive account of the impact of Japanese occupation on Southeast Asian economies and societies during World War II.

This history covers mainland and island Southeast Asia from Burma to Indonesia. Volume I is from prehistory to c1500. Volume II discusses the area's interaction with foreign countries from c1500-c1800. Volume III charts the colonial regimes of 1800-1930 and Volume IV is from World War II to 1999.

Illustrates how the political and social fallout from the World War II is still alive and divisive in South and East Asia.

Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis in Arc of Containment is the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. In Arc of Containment Ngoei shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was, in fact, far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations—Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia—had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed from an era of Anglo-American predominance into a condition of US hegemony. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.

A Sudden Rampage describes Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II in the context of its relationship with the outside world. The first two chapters focus on the period between the Meiji restoration, the end of World War I, the interwar period, and the outbreak of war in the Pacific. Subsequent chapters offer a short narrative of the Pacific conflict and a country by country description of Japan's political activities in the occupied region and economic activities undertaken by the Japanese in wartime Southeast Asia. The concluding chapter assesses the contribution the occupation made to postwar Southeast Asia in the light of the suffering and destruction rendered on the region.

The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University

This book sketches an outline of Southeast Asian history from earliest times to the present, showing how the diverse political, economic, social, and cultural patterns developed over several thousand years and the role played by the region in the larger world. Approximately one third will be devoted to the centuries before 1500 CE, when civilizations and kingdoms emerged and some Southeast Asians became active in Asian and Pacific maritime trade networks. It discusses the connections to India and China, the great kingdoms such as Angkor, the maritime trade, and the emergence of diverse cultural traditions, including the Theravada Buddhist, Islamic, and Vietnamese realms. Another third covers the period of Western expansion and colonization between 1500 and 1941, when various Western nations began to gradually influence and then reshape the region and Southeast Asians became more deeply involved with world trade. This includes an extensive discussion of the impact of colonialism on Southeast Asian societies, cultures, economies and politics. The final third examines the rise of nationalism and independence movements, decolonization, the wars in Indochina, and the links between past, present, and future.