Vincent Houben

Southeast Asia and Islam

Southeast Asia is the most populous Islamic region in the world yet has gained only limited attention. This survey article tries to explain what are the specific characteristics of Islam in this world region. After a historical overview of the spread of Islam in insular Southeast Asia, its contemporary political contexts in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Thailand, and the Philippines are scrutinized. Finally, a number of contentious issues in Southeast Asian Islam are discussed, such as the nature of Islamic revivalism, current outbreaks of ethno-religious conflict, and the possible threat of extremism.

A Torn Soul: The Dutch Public Discussion on the Colonial Past in 1995

The Dutch cherish a comforting self-image that presents the nation as a wellmannered, civilized, and tolerant community of burghers. Dutch history, as it is taught at school, reinforces this assumption. The Eighty Years War against Spain (1568-1648) is described as a struggle for political independence and as the defining conflict that served to establish the Protestant religion as the basis for public life. The rebellion against Spain was accompanied by a great freedom of expression, both in the printed form as well as orally, which attracted many dissenters from other countries to settle in the Dutch Republic.

Kraton and Kumpeni : Surakarta and Yogyakarta, 1830-1870

The Javanese realms of Surakarta and Yogyakarta in Central Java were of prime importance in the politics of the Netherlands Indies, located, as they were, at the heart of the Dutch colonial state. This book covers forty years of the history of the Javanese Principalities in the post-Java War period (1830-1870).

Economic crisis and the culture of reform in Southeast Asia

The economic crisis in Southeast Asia has provoked a debate on the economic and political culture of the region. Is Asian capitalism really suffering from structural deficiencies or does it only signify the imposition of western ethnocentric values? Inside Southeast Asia, public discussion on the issue of corruption has erupted, involving culturally specific notions of what is acceptable or not. Likewise, unbridled exercise of power increasingly faces an indigenous demand for more accountability of the powerholders. The reform debate that is conducted between Southeast Asians themselves seems to be more promising than western calls for democracy and economic transparency.

New Area Studies, Translation and Mid-Range Concepts

This chapter starts by revisiting the Anglo-American debate on Area Studies. After having been exposed to fundamental criticism and its partial replacement by new interdisciplinary study formats, the potential of Area Studies had been rediscovered on the basis of a reassessment of their relationship to disciplinary knowledge production. The author then moves on to outline the epistemological and methodological bases of new Area Studies. At its core is what he refers to as a double-layered hermeneutic circular “motor” involving a highly reflexive and mutually reinforcing determination of four variables: area, theme, perspective and epistemology. The final part of the chapter explains how new Area Studies functions in concrete research. This includes a three-step approach, moving from situational analysis to translation and finally to mid-level analysis based on the coining of middle-range concepts.

The unmastered past: decolonization and Dutch collective memory

The decolonization of Indonesia is far from being a peripheral issue for Dutch national identity. Since the 1970s, but especially in 1995, public debate has erupted in an attempt to come to terms with this part of national history. The protestant ethic is still so strong that discussions revolve in particular around morality and a final verdict. Opinion leaders and historians have, however, not been able to solve the issue, so that the way in which the Netherlands lost their Southeast-Asian colony continues to trouble the Dutch self-image.

Repertoires of European Panic and Indigenous Recaptures in Late Colonial Indonesia

This chapter surveys a series of crisis situations in colonial Indonesia between the 1890s and early 1940s which invoked fear, angst and even panic among Europeans. In these the incongruity between representations of stability and the actual fragility of the modernizing imperial order became evident. European panic was primarily linked to frontiers of violence, on the battefield and in the workplace. Angst, which provoked repression, grew when Indonesians started to contest Dutch power with anti-imperial and modernist Islamic ideas. The political awakening of Asia as well as Japanese expansion increased colonial anxieties further.

Islam and the Perception of Islam in Contemporary Indonesia

Islam in post- reformasi Indonesia is covered by a wide multi-disciplinary literature, in which ‘Islamization’ has gained acceptance as the predominant frame for understanding contemporary developments. Here Islamization is taken to be a move away from an Indonesian Islam that was highly localized and mystical in nature. Adopting an area studies approach, this paper reviews the literature on contemporary Islam in Indonesia and challenges this understanding of Islamization. It is argued that older cultural styles and variations within local Islam have not disappeared, and that, more generally, characterizing the development of Indonesian Islam by using a single label is misleading.

Southeast Asia. Koloniale Schweiz: Ein Stück Globalgeschichte zwischen Europa und Südostasien (1860–1930) . By Andreas Zangger. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011. Pp. 473. Maps, Tables, Notes, Bibliography.

Koloniale Schweiz: Ein Stuck Globalgeschichte zwischen Europa und Sudostasien (1860-1930) By ANDREAS ZANGGER Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011. Pp. 473. Maps, Tables, Notes, Bibliography. doi:10.1017/S0022463413000143 At first sight, this book, a Ph.D. thesis defended at Zurich University, is on a nonexistent theme since it deals with the colonial history of a small, predominantly inward-looking European country without colonies. However, as modern imperialism was a multinational undertaking, Switzerlands people as well as Swiss industry were definitively involved in European colonialism in Southeast Asia. On almost five hundred pages the historian Andreas Zangger meticulously describes this hitherto unknown past from an economic and social history perspective and links it with current insights on global and transnational history. His theme is the history of Swiss who were engaged in trade, plantation agriculture and science during the period of high imperialism, between 1860 and 1930, with a special focus on the triangle between Singapore, Deli (in North Sumatra) and Penang. The book is divided into three major sections, first on the Swiss textile exports to mostly Singapore, then on the role of the Swiss and their capital in the plantation belt of East Sumatra and finally on the networks between Southeast Asia-based Swiss and the homeland. Around the mid-nineteenth century Switzerland was one of the major exporters of European textiles to Asia; thus in Singapore a distribution system was created and run by young Swiss agents and supported by Swiss employees of international trading houses there. Although the Swiss tried to sell their products through active marketing and branding, in the end it was quality that counted and not the country of origin. The Swiss cooperated particularly with German firms, but together they still occupied a rather marginal position in a trade dominated by the British, Dutch and Chinese. Sumatra, especially in Deli, had a relatively large population of Swiss, some owners of small plantations at the fringes of the cultivated area specialising in niche produce but most working as plantation managers. Since the Dutch were apprehensive of too great a British presence in East Sumatra, the Swiss could act as facilitators for the latter. And because Swiss and Germans often knew each other from collaborating in trading houses in Penang and Singapore, they supported each other. The virtues of masculinity at the frontier seemed also to attract a substantial number of noble or upper middle class Swiss to this area. Whereas the first two sections of the book inform the reader about Swiss participation in the world of European commerce and plantation agriculture, the final part of the book focuses on the entanglements between Switzerland and insular Southeast Asia in two directions. The Swiss were part of a connective structure between metropoles and colonies and their role is analysed in four spheres: transport insurance, capital investments in plantations, scientific endeavours and Swiss associations. …

Economic crises in the ASEAN area: types and responses

Southeast Asia, the world region covering the countries of ASEAN, lies at the crossroads between China and India. Since early times it has been part of the global economy, going through cycles of boom and bust at least from the nineteenth century onwards. This essay compares three successive economic crises during the 1880s, 1930s and late 1990s. It shows how different types of crisis reflected as well as produced changes in the connectivity between production factors and institutional arrangements. Whereas the crisis of the 1880s was ‘local’, that of the 1930s was both ‘national’ and ‘delegated global’ and that of the 1990s ‘regional’ in nature. The types of crisis and the ways in which they were handled reflected structural changes in the institutional architecture of the global economy.