Based on two years of intensive fieldwork, this detailed community study breaks new ground. Combining anthropological and historical disciplines, it deals with village politics amongst rural Malays growing oil-palm and rubber. This study traces the continuing influence of the colonial and post-colonial state policies on contemporary rural development. It shows that village political cleavages are not just the result of modern electoral practices introduced after World War II but are responses to politico-economic events at the national and even international levels. It examines not only inter-party rivalry between the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) but also the intra-party politics of both organizations at the local level.

Providing the basis for a reconceptualization of key features in Southeast Asia's history, this book examines evolutionary patterns of Europe's and Japan's Southeast Asian empires from the late 19th century through to the 1960s.

Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia shows that the cultural reconfiguration of domestic and international relations around Asias new rich has often been characterised by tension and division.

Using primary sources, this study documents the changing economic circumstances of rubber producers in Malaysia, the world's principal source of this commodity. It also explains government intervention in the shape of schemes restricting rubber exports.

Through a study of Malaysia, Taming Babel examines how empires and postcolonial nation-states struggle to govern multilingual and polyglot subjects.

This book explores the ethnography of the emerging proletarian social consciousness and resistance as Malay peasants from east coast peninsular Malaysia find themselves reconstituted as a "class" not only as an economic category but also as a "community" in plantation society. The plantation, as a "window" to capitalism, serves as an excellent small-scale empirical ambience and testing-ground to probe how Malays respond to both industrial class-status authority and wage labouring work. The author subsequently analyses how the nuances of Malay proletarian moral economy and dignity are articulated with their notions of class, culture, ethnicity, and humanism.