Search results for ""NUS Press""
NUS Press The Men Who Lost Singapore
The British military failure against the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1942 is a well-documented and closely examined episode. But far less attention has been paid to the role of the colonial governor and his staff during this period, an oversight Ronald McCrum corrects with this insightful history. As McCrum shows, the failure of the civil authorities in conjunction with the military to fully prepare the country for the possibility of war was a key factor in the defeat. In The Men Who Lost Singapore, McCrum closely examines the role and responsibilities of the colonial authorities before and during the war. He argues that the poor and occasionally hostile relations that developed between the local government and the British military hierarchy prevented the development and implementation of a strategic and unified plan of defense against the growing threat of the Japanese. Consequently, this indecisive and ineffective leadership led to significant losses and civilian casualties that could have been prevented.
£32.26
NUS Press Agriculture in the Malaysian Region
Covering Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, Agriculture in the Malaysian Region, originally published in 1982, presents a detailed description of the region's agro-systems, including shifting cultivation, wet rice production, smallholder tree-crop and mixed forms cultivation, plantation systems, and intensive market-gardening with livestock production. For this edition, the author has updated the original text while retaining the original framework of analysis, setting major developments in agriculture against the backdrop of cultural change affecting the region's economy as a whole. Singapore has seen a shift from highly labour intensive production to very capital intensive and specialised forms of production. Capital intensity has also increased in Malaysia, which now faces the problem of increasing labour costs. The book concludes with an attempt to identify likely changes in the agricultural sector in the medium term.
£27.95
NUS Press The Politics of the Malayan Communist Party from 1930 to 1948
By 1946, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had become one of the most successful communist parties in Asia. This volume offers a new evaluation of the history of the MCP from its foundation in 1930.
£34.25
NUS Press Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia
How should colonial film archives be read? How can historians and ethnographers use colonial film as a complement to conventional written sources? Sandeep Ray uses the case of Dutch colonial film in Indonesia to show how a critically-, historically- and cinematically-informed reading of colonial film in the archive can be a powerful and unexpected source, and one more easily accessible today via digitisation.The language of film and the conventions and forms of non-fiction film were still in formation in the first two decades of the 20th century. Colonialism was one of the drivers of this development, as the picturing of the native "other" in film was seen as an important tool to build support for missionary and colonial efforts. While social histories of photography in non-European contexts have been an area of great interest in recent years; Celluloid Colony brings moving images into the same scope of study.
£37.26
NUS Press Workers and Democracy: The Indonesian Labour Movement, 1949-1957
This book is a study of workers activism and labour unions in the eight years between the recognition of Indonesian sovereignty by the Netherlands at the end of December 1949 and the nationalisation of Dutch assets in December 1957. It contributes to a re-evaluation of the era of liberal parliamentary democracy in Indonesia. The focus is on the agency of workers and the structures, strategies and industrial campaigns of unions in the context of intense ideological conflict, competing union federations, the opposition of employers to collective action and the efforts by the Indonesian state to manage industrial conflict. The imposition of martial law in March 1957 was the deathblow to parliamentary democracy and to the freedom of workers and unions to engage in collective action. It was not until Suharto's 'New Order' regime collapsed in 1998 that Indonesian workers regained the freedom of association and the right to engage incollective action.
£35.26
NUS Press Reconstructing God: Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor's West Mebon Visnu
A fully illustrated archaeological and art historical analysis of one of the most important artworks of Angkor, rewriting the chronology of the royal capital. In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Visnu, the largest bronze remaining from pre-modern Southeast Asia, and a work of great artistic, historical, and political significance. Prominently placed in an island temple in the middle of the vast artificial reservoir, the West Mebon Visnu sculpture was an important focal point of the Angkorian hydraulic network. Interpretations of the statue, its setting, date, and role have remained largely unchanged since the 1960s—until now. Integrating the latest archaeological and historical work on Angkor, extensive art historical analysis of the figure of Visnu Anantasayin in Hindu-Buddhist art across the region, and a detailed digital reconstruction of the sculpture and its setting, Marnie Feneley brings new light to this important piece. Highly illustrated, the book will be of interest to art historians and curators, historians of Southeast Asia, and anyone curious about the art and history of Angkor.
£76.19
NUS Press State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941: The Mismanagement of an American Colony
During the First World War, ill-advised steps by colonial officials in the Philippines who were responsible for the colony's finances created a crisis which lasted from 1919 until 1922. The circumstances shook the foundations of the American colonial state and contributed to Manuel L. Quezon's successful effort to replace Sergio Osmea as leader of the politically dominant Nacionalista Party. These events have generally been blamed on a corruption scandal at the Philippine National Bank, which had been established in 1916 as a multi-purpose, semi-governmental agency whose purpose was to provide loans for the agricultural export industry, to do business as a commercial bank, to issue bank notes, and to serve as a depository for government funds.Based on detailed archival research, Yoshiko Nagano argues that the crisis in fact resulted from mismanagement of currency reserves and irregularities in foreign exchange operations by American officials, and that the notions of a ""corruption scandal"" arose from a colonial discourse that masked problems within the banking and currency systems and the U.S. colonial administration. Her analysis of this episode provides a fresh perspective on the political economy of the Philippines under American rule, and suggests a need for further scrutiny of historical accounts written on the basis of reports by colonial officials.
£32.26
NUS Press Innovation and China's Global Emergence
A pressing investigation into the global implications of China’s shift to an innovation economy. As China shifts to an economy driven by innovation and productivity growth, the global implications of this transition will be significant. Amid the rise of techno-nationalism and a changing strategic calculus around the world, the manner and means of China’s transition faces a high degree of scrutiny. China is attempting to balance a reliance on overseas sources of technology alongside efforts to strengthen domestic innovation capabilities as a hedge against the risks of a United States-led “decoupling.” In these circumstances, it is essential to understand the many different forces of change within China, and the way China responds to outside changes. The evolution of China's innovation economy will be one of the key economic stories of the early twenty-first century, and the world will need China as a source of innovation in the decades ahead. The aim of this book is to help build a better framework for policymakers to find a new equilibrium in negotiating the terms of an oncoming shift in geopolitics.
£33.26
NUS Press Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c.1600–c.1906
The eastern archipelagos of Southeast Asia stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of the inhabitants of this area are often described as “people without history,” in part because colonial borders long ago cut across shared underlying patterns of relations. Yet many of these societies were linked to transoceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some of the world’s most prized commodities once came from territories which were either “stateless” or under the tenuous control of loosely structured polities in this region. In this book, trade provides the integrating framework for local and regional histories that cover more than three hundred years, from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, when new technologies and changing markets helped lead to Western dominance. This book presents theories from the social sciences and economics that can help liberate scholars from dependence on states as narrative frameworks. It will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, state formation, the evolution of markets, and anthropology.
£43.23
