This book offers a variety of essays and perspectives on some of the foreigners and traders who came to the Malay World and wrote fiction and “faction” (writing that portrays real people or events in a dramatised manner) during their sojourn – regardless of whether they continued to stay in the region, returned to their home country, or migrated to another country. The essays tend to cross generic and disciplinary boundaries as the contributors of this book are drawn from various fields within the arts and humanities, including history, geography, language and literature and translation. All of them, however, deal with colonial texts, the Malay World, or primarily cover the period from the 18th to the 20th century. Including readings of fiction, diaries, vignettes, letters written by traders or colonial officers, the uniqueness of this book lies in the personal, private and/or informal nature of the various documents studied. The encounters of these ‘outsiders’ with the ‘natives’ not only offer fascinating historical insights into the Malay World, but, to a significant degree, vividly express the views and personalities of the writers themselves, as mediated through their assigned commercial and colonial roles.

Written by Sultan Nazrin Shah - the author of the highly acclaimed works Charting the Economy and Striving for Inclusive Development - this book is a pioneering study of the many economic and social changes in the natural resource-rich Malaysian state of Perak over the last two centuries. When globalization first took hold and international trade networks broadened and deepened in the first half of the 19th century, and a new capitalist world order emerged in the second, Perak was a key player. Its tin was in high demand in Western industrializing countries and foreign capital, labour, and technology propelled it forward. By 1900, Perak accounted for almost half of Malaya's tin output and a staggering quarter of world output, with its prosperity making it the Malay peninsula's commercial hub. Likewise, during the global rubber boom that began in the early 20th century as cars were mass produced for the first time, Perak was the largest rubber-producing state in the peninsula. This book brings together a range of key sub-themes - economic geography, the institutional legacy of colonialism, increasing federal government centralization, forces of economic agglomeration, and human migration - which drove Perak's fortunes in sometimes dramatic economic cycles and ultimately led to the collapse of its tin and rubber industries and the migration of many of its young and skilled. The book concludes by looking forward, analysing Perak's characteristics, and extrapolating lessons from formerly wealthy industrial centres originally blessed with natural resources but subsequently left behind by new waves of globalization, such as Cornwall and Sheffield in the United Kingdom, and Pittsburgh and Scranton in the United States. With a new vision Perak can regenerate itself and once again emerge triumphant against a tough global background-Covid-19, war, and deglobalization.

"Flora Malesiana is a systematic account of the flora of Malesia, the plant-geographical unit spanning six countries in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. The family treatments are not published in a systematic order but as they come available by the scientific efforts of some 100 collaborators all over the world. Each family treatment contains keys for identification, descriptions of the recognized taxa from family to variety, and a large amount of information (with literature references) on, e.g., taxonomy, variability, synonymy, typification, distribution, habitats and ecology, morphology and anatomy, phytochemistry, and uses. Attention is given in the first place to the indigenous species but non-native, cultivated or escaped species are also treated (described and keyed out) or at least mentioned. Drawings and photographs illustrate the treatments, and as a general rule at least one species of each native genus has a full-page drawing. There are two series: I, Seed Plants, and II, Pteridophytes." -- Publisher's website.

Eastern Africa is often neglected in surveys of African `art'. Masks and sculpted human figures, which are generally the main focus of interest for historians of African `art', are most notable for their relative rarity when compared with the rich accomplished traditions of the Zaire basin and West Africa. Therefore the question most often posed by sceptics is: `Is there `art' in East Africa?' Although various theories have been put forward as to why, for instance, East African sculptural traditions are apparently `inferior' to those of West and Central Africa there is no evidence, in the end, to suggest that East African peoples are significantly less concerned than other African people with `beauty' (however it is defined) and with appreciation of apt or meaningful form and with creative expression. The real challenge is not to explain why one culture produces more or less in the way of material objects than another, but to establish how particular expressions or forms of creativity relate to their makers' and users' intentions and how they function and are given meaning in particular social contexts.