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Revolutionary remains
On Saturday, 24 March 2012, a military convoy brought the remains of fourteen prominent and less known Lao revolutionary leaders to the newly constructed National Cemetery – namely Kaysone Phomvihane,...
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Cambodia’s “Little Bollywood”
The Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 beginning their reign of terror that left 1.8 million people dead over the next three and a half years. Movies were considered a bourgeoisie...
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Natural disaster and the city – workshop
Natural Disaster and the City Historical Perspectives from Southeast Asia and Japan, 1945-2011 16-17 January 2013 Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan The Bangkok floods of 2011...
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Kuomintang in northern Thailand
On his Old World Wandering website, Iain Manley has presented a terrific interview with a Kuomintang soldier, Zhan Dening, who settled in northern Thailand. The general story is one that gets told...
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How the Khmer Rouge dehumanised their “enemies”
Photo courtesy of Akshay Mahajan (Creative Commons licence) After a long period of relative silence, the most tragic period in Cambodia’s history has experienced a renaissance of interest. Spurred by...
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Cambodia and South Africa
Source: Wikimedia Commons I recently returned from a week-long course on truth, memory and conflict at the International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE), a joint project at the University of...
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Ho Chi Minh’s surprise letter
Ho Chi Minh at Versailles, 1919 July’s Journal of Vietnamese Studies carries a remarkable document: a previously unpublished letter written by Hồ Chí Minh, dated September 8th 1921. It is one of the...
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Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
The notorious Holocaust denier, Israel Shamir, has been making the rounds among Cambodia watchers this week. This time, he’s praising Pol Pot in an article for the far-left magazine Counterpunch. Talk...
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Najib the Delayer
Malaysia’s second Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak, was a member of the Fabian Society, a socialist forerunner of the British Labour Party that rejected the revolutionary seizure of power in favour of...
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Lunching with mass murderers
The following post is an excerpt from Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, a completed but unpublished manuscript on contemporary Cambodian political...
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Perspectives on the Past at New Mandala
Just over 18 months ago, the Perspectives on the Past blog was born. Its mission is to bring new topics and perspectives on the Southeast Asian past to interested readers. Grounded in research, the...
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Lost in Translation: Jawa Pos
Frank Palmos was just 21 years old when he began his career as a foreign correspondent in the relatively new Republic of Indonesia in March 1961. To reach the skill and experience level to succeed in...
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The medieval tropics
If you’re a medieval historian, you normally work a lot with manuscripts. A manuscript is just a text written by hand, although manuscripts are distinguished from inscriptions by the material on which...
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Not the Emperor’s, not the King’s, but the Straits Chinese
The term “Chinese” is a capacious construct, referring today to political nation-states, an ethnic diaspora and a culture at once exported, exoticised and localised. When the British East India company...
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Was Majapahit really an empire?
The Javanese state that flourished throughout the 14th and 15th centuries is often called the ‘Majapahit Empire’. But was it really an empire, and what does the word ‘empire’ mean in premodern...
View ArticleNick Cheesman in conversation with Sumit K. Mandal on “Becoming Arab”
In this podcast from the New Books Network, Dr Nick Cheesman from the ANU speaks to Sumit K. Mandal about his award winning book Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World...
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Writing History in Premodern Java
Premodern Javanese wrote down their history. For at least one and a half millennia, they produced written records to serve as sources of historical knowledge. The earliest history of the island is...
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Remembering HMAS Perth (I) for the future
This month marks 79 years since the decisive defeat of Allied forces in the Battle of the Java Sea (27 February 1942) and the Battle of the Sunda Strait (28 February – 1 March 1942). These battles were...
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At what cost: The impact of Indonesia’s Omnibus law on underwater cultural...
Indonesia has had a moratorium on the commercial salvage of underwater cultural heritage since 2010. But a new and seemingly unrelated Law has reintroduced the prospect that Indonesia’s waters will...
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ASEAN on Myanmar’s Coup: Revisiting Cold War Diplomacy on Cambodia
A battle for international recognition between Myanmar’s junta and Aung San Suu Kyi’s deposed civilian government is underway. The opposition in the incarnation of the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu...
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