Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia offers the reader an accessible journey through Southeast Asia from pre-colonial times to the present day with themes ranging from conquest and management to decolonization.

Written by a multinational team of experts who deploy their disciplinary strengths in history, sociology, social anthropology, political science, and philology to analyze a wide range of sources, including royal chronicles, missionary dictionaries, colonial archival documents, audio- and videotapes, and face-to-face interviews, Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia adds to the small but growing body of publications on warfare in Southeast Asia and colonial armies. Military-society relations are examined in a wide range of ways: traditional strategies of augmenting populations, mutinies, and mutiny attempts, imperial anxieties, Japanese military legacies, the transoceanic experiences of Southeast Asian and European soldiers, postwar demobilizations and postconflict biographies, and the transformation of communist guerrillas into guardians of the state and their development of capitalist enterprises. This volume will be of interest to Southeast Asianists and military historians alike as it not only covers traditional territorial grounds, thematic terrains, and temporal landscapes but also extends to individuals and further includes the national, regional, and transnational lives of military institutions.

This is the first study by a Western scholar of a significant facet of the history of the Second World War - Japanese-trained independence and volunteer armies as agents of revolution and modernization. At the time, the Japanese did not see that their military imprinting would affect a whole generation of political/military leadership of nations of post-Second World War Southeast Asia. Leaders like Suharto, Ne Win and Park are all products of Japanese military training.

In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

This study of warfare in Southeast Asia between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries examines the chief aspects of warfare in the region. It begins with an examination of the cultural features that made warfare in the region unique, followed by a discussion of the main weapons used, and the two major sites of fighting, sieges and naval contests. Three chapters examine the role played by animals such as elephants and horses. The final two chapters examine the shift from mercenary armies and masses of levies to smaller standing armies. The study closes with an examination of the tumultuous nineteenth century, in which European naval power won the coast and rivers, while Southeast Asians held the advantage further inland.

From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.

The Family in Flux in Southeast Asia addresses the need to understand new trends affecting basic family structures in the region: decreases in fertility rates, aging populations, rising divorce rates, increases in female-headed households, smaller families, and increasing mobility of migrant workers. Leading scholars from disciplines including history, political science, economics, sociology, literary studies, and anthropology address topics including legal institutionalization, polygamy, national identity, gender roles, migration, and transnational marriage. They present cases of complementary, alternative, or parallel developments form Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. The authors provide a critical look at how notions of the family are negotiated amidst worries over the family's disintegration in the face of globalizing trends and increasing mobility, and how it is affected by increasing flows in the globalizing world.

Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil–military relations in Southeast Asia from colonial times until today. It analyzes what types of military organizations emerged in the late colonial period and the impact of colonial legacies and the Japanese occupation in World War II on the formation of national armies and their role in processes of achieving independence. It analyzes the long term trajectories and recent changes of professional, revolutionary, praetorian and neo-patrimonial civil-military relations in the region. Finally, it analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building; political domination; revolutions and regime transitions; and military entrepreneurship.