8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

— Beyond Rebellion: Resistance, Rivalry, and the Law in Colonial Burma, 1930-1937 
Maitrii Aung-Thwin (National University of Singapore)
British Burma’s Saya San Rebellion (1930-1932) is considered to be one of Southeast Asia’s quintessential anti-colonial 
movements. The series of armed-uprisings featured numerous acts of vandalism and violence against colonial instal-
lations and figures of authority, particularly government representatives and recent immigrant populations connected 
to the rice-economy. 

euroseas 2015 . book of abstracts
20
The rebellion drew world-wide attention for its exotic features and extraordinary accounts of a peasant leader (Saya 
San) who convinced his followers to rise up against the British in order to restore the Burmese monarchy, rescue Bud-
dhism, and rid the country from foreigners. Believing Saya San to be their prophesized king, rural cultivators adorned 
themselves in protective tattoos, recited magical incantations, and drank sanctified oath water to signal their belief in 
his powers and allegiance to his cause.
Scholarship’s understanding of the rebellion has been based on official reports that were themselves the product of 
Special Rebellion Tribunal judgments. These records, largely overlooked by both domestic and foreign scholars, reveal 
that the facts concerning Saya San and the movement itself were based on a problematic evidential foundation. One 
aim of this paper retraces the making of the official narrative and explores the role that colonial law and ethnography 
played in the historical construction of the Saya San Rebellion. 
This study also reveals the diverse experiences of those who were labeled “rebels” by the authorities. Largely obscured 
by the authoritative shadow of the Saya San narrative and its chronological boundaries, the trial records also shed light 
upon the underlying tensions and divisions amongst those whose lives and deaths were adjudicated by the special 
rebellion tribunals. Underneath the veneer of rebellion, local rivalries and personal interests were contested through 
the procedures and power of the tribunal. Burmese rural actors used the mechanisms of colonial law and the govern-
ment’s anti-rebellion discourse for their own priorities and concerns.
— Colonialism and the Contingencies of Christianity in Southeast Asia
Julius Bautista (National University of Singapore)
While relatively small in number of adherents, Christianity has inspired major social and political change in Southeast 
Asia. The objective of this paper is threefold. First, I discuss the role of colonialism in the historical and anthropologi-
cal construction of Christianity in the region from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The embeddedness of both Protes-
tant and Roman Catholic orders to colonial regimes did not just facilitate the introduction of the faith to local com-
munities. This intertwinement had conditioned the way Christianity had been enculturated and localized, resulting in 
some degree of variety in the way converts had evaluated the theological and soteriological prospects of conversion. 
Secondly, I discuss how Southeast Asians negotiated piety in ways that were responsive to prevailing social, political 
and economic conditions in the colonial era. This will lead, finally, to a discussion of the extent to which local adapta-
tions of the Christian message inspired the struggle towards post-colonial nationhood. A central theme of this paper, 
then, is to examine how Christianity itself provided the symbolism, idiom and ideological scaffolding for post colonial 
modernity, both from within and outside the Church’s fold.
— The Dispute of Pedro Peláez and Doña Luisa Dionisio: Re-Thinking the 1812 Constitution’s Impact on Laguna 
Province
Ruth de Llobet Franch (National University of Singapore)
This paper explores the impact and understanding of the 1812 Constitution in the province of Laguna, through the 
analysis of the dispute between José Pelaéz, ex-Alcalde Mayor (provincial governor) of Laguna in 1814, and Doña Lu-
isa Dionisia of the town of Majayjay. The aim of this paper is to dismantle the widespread notion that the impact of the 
1812 Constitution in the Luzon countryside was irrelevant. I hope to show that the internal sociopolitical dynamics 
in the provinces were much more complex than those represented in the binary notions of “class struggles” between 
native elites and cailianes (commoners); or “colonial struggle” between natives and non-natives. The documentary 
evidence that I have examined points to the fact that by erasing class differences among indigenous people, but also 
by putting in equal legal foot indigenous people with creoles and Spaniards, the charter brought a momentary politi-
cal agency into the provinces. Although the constitutional period was short-lived —barely one year in the provinces 
(1814-1815) — it challenged the sociopolitical and colonial status quo. The segmentation in decrees and the Consti-
tution abstract character allowed for a wide interpretation among the different sectors of colonial Philippine society, 
and each sector responded to it according to its possibilities and interests. Moreover, the fact that some sectors of pro-
vincial society interpreted the decrees and laws produced during the constitutional interregnum as royal orders that 
continued to be valid despite the abolition of the charter, shaped the political provincial landscape until the late 1820s.

euroseas 2015 . book of abstracts
21
— Colonial Sinology, Private Law and the Translation of Patriarchal Property Rights for the Creole Chinese in 
19th Century Java 
Guo-Quan Seng (University of Chicago)
Although the proposed legal code “Private Legal Status for the Chinese in Java”, first mooted in 1857, never passed 
into law until 1917, half a century of expert witnessing and juristic debate among colonial jurists, Sinologists and 
Chinese mercantile leaders created an archive of ethnographic theories and legal precedents about Chinese family life 
and Chinese women’s property rights. This paper deconstructs the legal-Sinological epistemology of colonial “Chi-
nese law”, and examines the slippages and conflicts between the colonial administration of private “Chinese law” and 
the bilateral kinship system of the creole Chinese settler communities in nineteenth century Dutch Java. Influenced 
by Henry Maine’s stagist comparative legal method, Sinology-trained colonial translators often interpreted juridical 
questions by reading “patriarchal theory” into their Chinese legal sources. Literalist readings of the Qing empire’s legal 
code were supplemented by research into the Confucian classics for substantiations of the absolute property rights 
of the Chinese father. The Sinological purists held sway between the 1860s and 1880s, during which daughters of ab-
intestato deceased Chinese fathers, and testament-appointed maternal heirs lost their rights of inheritance to brothers 
and sons. Yet a more fundamental disconnect stemmed from early Dutch Sinology’s failure to recognize the creoliza-
tion of the Chinese family structure through intermarriage with indigenous women and acculturation into colonial 
society. The paper ends by examining how a creole Chinese matriarch manipulated contracts and wills to circumvent 
the patriarchal restrictions and transmit wealth bilaterally to her father’s and her husband’s patrilineal descendants.
— White Women in British Colonial Courts – The Case of Marie Gorski
Nurfadzilah Yahaya (National University of Singapore)
This paper probes how far colonial law was determined by common business interests instead of other factors such as 
race. Though highly mobile and active, European women in the colonies were closely monitored. During the late nine-
teenth century, a young European woman’s strategy for self-preservation was constrained by British colonial courts in 
Singapore in favor of a wealthy Arab merchant. It is a story of the relationship between gender, race and class within a 
colonial context. Colonial parochial attitudes played a role through legislation in perpetrating injustice against women 
in a commercial port-city that highly valued merchants’ contributions to imperial coffers. As a destitute unmarried 
white woman, the half-Austrian, half-Polish protagonist of this story, Marie Gorski, represented British imperial anxi-
eties about intimate relations between male colonial subjects and European women. Her precarious poverty attracted 
the attention of prominent Europeans in Singapore though none were able to alleviate it. Although her lover, an Arab 
merchant, was charged with attempting to induce her miscarriage, he was subsequently acquitted while she bore 
blame for ruining his reputation. Emotion and sentimentality were just as powerful forces in the case as were political 
and economic priorities. Outcries during trials were directed at the injustice suffered by the Arab merchant out of fear 
that he might leave the British colony with his capital. Reactions during courtroom trials pointed towards the develop-
ment of public opinion in the colony that coalesced around the mercantile class - Europeans and Asian subjects alike.
Panel: History and Memory: (Post) Cold War Knowledge Production of/on the Left 
 in Singapore and Malaysia 
convener: Guat Peng Ngoi (Nanyang Technological University)
panel abstract
What does it signify in the term “Singapore and Malaysia’s Left”? What political groups are included in it? How do 
we further re-contextualize it? How do we understand this part of “History”, which appears in past tense, and the 
“Memory” in present tense? The historical context of the (post) Cold War Singapore and Malaysia’s Left has been 
facing its limitation in contemporary representation. This phenomenon suggests that the Cold War factors still exist 
today. During the past two decades, there have been a large number of historical writings, literary fictions and image 
recordings about the Leftists, MCP (Malayan Communist Party) and political exiles. These knowledge productions 
enable us to rethink and rediscover some groups that have been stuck in historical structure—who later became “po-

euroseas 2015 . book of abstracts
22
litical refugees” historically.
Therefore, this panel attempts to reconstruct the history and memories of the Left in Singapore and Malaysia, by 
means of the historical writings (including those from the Leftists and MCP), literary fictions and films that surfaced 
in (post) Cold War period. The examination has to be carried out under the politico-cultural context of Southeast 
Asia, in order to tackle and question the historical structure configured in the (post) Cold War period. It also purports 
to showcase the ideological struggles of different camps, as well as to uncover the different perspectives in represent-
ing subjects in history and memories, providing a new entrance in understanding the intricate patterns of history in 
period of the 50s and 60s.
— Mute Speeches: Recent Documentaries on the Communist Insurgency in Malaysia and Singapore
Fang-Tze Hsu (National University of Singapore)
The communist insurgency might be one of the most strategically coded terms in the geopolitical rhetoric of the Cold 
War, especially in Southeast Asia. The surge in interest by documentary filmmakers starting to decipher this muted 
brutality in the national history is not abrupt. Recent examples include Rithy Panh’s Oscar-nominated work Miss-
ing Picture (2013) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s controversial production The Act of Killing (2012). The subject of the 
communist insurgency gets even more complicated when the rhetoric is adopted by the soft authoritarian regimes 
of Singapore and Malaysia in the name of nation-building. Somehow these fragmented memories urged filmmakers 
such as Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad and Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin to revisit those scattered and 
muffled narratives via filmmaking. By focusing on political exiles who were alleged to be members of communist 
groups, Amir Muhammad’s Apa Khabar Orang Kampung (English title: Village People Radio Show, 2007) and Tan 
Pin Pin’s To Singapore, With Love (2013) seem to depict those exiles particularly in their denial of citizenship by “a 
unitary State apparatus” from Gilles Deleuze’s perspective. The essay examines the issue of nomads iterated through 
the journeys of political refugees and reiterated by the mobility of the camera. In the meantime, the research takes 
a close look at the dialectical image created by the convergence of the past and the present in the still shots of the 
archival photos and the montages of private correspondences and clips of news reportage juxtaposed with haptic and 
optical visuality embodied by the long takes employed in portraying those interviewees. The essay suggests that rather 
than merely documenting, archiving, and recreating the past in the present, these two documentaries intend to pro-
duce a decoder in a collective intimacy of those exiles’ everyday life to disenchant the phantasm of the history of the 
communist insurgency.
— Contestation and Limitation: A Review of the Historical Construction of Malay Communists
Guat Peng Ngoi (Nanyang Technological University)
Currently there is a variety of communist resources and writings that had been published in Malaysia and Singapore. 
The academia, civil society and communists themselves started to research on communist’s history and thought. 
These made some of the forbidden issues could be reviewed and discussed in recent times. On the other hand, it has 
revealed that the historical imagination of communists is very much influenced by flat narratives and nation build-
ing discourse. Historical discourse of Communist can be seen as a method to understand better about the way of 
history construction and also the limitation of the historical discourse. This paper intends to raise the problematique 
of Malay Communist historical discourse, trying to discuss the inner thoughts and spiritual ideas of several Malay 
communist leaders through their memoirs, such as Abdullah C.D., Ibrahim Chik, Rashid Maidin and Suriani Abdul-
lah. Moreover, I would like to discuss the ideologies contestation of Communism with Socialism, Islamism and Malay 
Nationalism in Malaya in 1950-60 era.
— Revisioning History: Ng Kim Chew and His Nanyang Revolutionary Trilogy
Ying Xin Show (Nanyang Technological University)
As a Sinophone writer growing up in Malaysia, studying and working in Taiwan, Ng Kim Chew’s writings involve the 
recreation of historical landscapes of Malaysia, especially the rubber estates (where he grew up at) and the legends of 
Malayan Communist Party whose stories occurred around the estates and jungles. On the other hand, Taiwanese ex-
perience has also interfered and enriched his writings about “home” and history. These images (rubber estates, MCP, 
Taiwanese academia) continuingly form the historical background in Ng’s works, and become important symbols for 

euroseas 2015 . book of abstracts
23
Ng to construct his imagination of Sinophone histories. The short stories are seemingly sui generis, yet reciprocally 
work in concert with one another intertextually. This shows Ng’s effort to keep hold of the fragments of histories, prob-
ing into them, subverting them and further revisioning them. In the past three years, Ng Kim Chew has been widely 
engaging in his master project of (re)writing stories on the Malayan Communist Party. This paper tends to focus on 
his Nanyang (South Seas) revolutionary trilogy: Memorandum of the People’s Republic of Nanyang (2013), As If See-
ing Fuyu (2014) and Fish (forthcoming 2015), to further examining his process of revisioning history through the 
medium of literary fictions. It suggests that Ng’s probing into the revolutionary Nanyang not only gives prominence 
to the Sinophone histories (not made in China), but also succumbing to that racial politics in Malaysia today work in 
tandem with the implications of the Cold War. More importantly, literary fictions, particularly through the techniques 
of metafiction in Ng’s works, have established the dialogical connection between texts and history.
Panel: Transfers, Dissemination and Manipulations of Knowledge: Education in  
Southeast Asia in Historical Perspective 
convener: Thomas Bruce (School of Oriental and African Studies)
panel abstract
Knowledge transfer is one of the most important engines of industrialization and modernization. Because the West, 
from the nineteenth century, was the fount of ‘modern’ methods of public, financial and business administration, 
‘modern’ technology, and certain hegemonic ideas (such as the nation-state and the international system) which con-
stituted ‘modern’ thought, the extra-European world had to attain these new ways of doing things and did so in a vari-
ety of ways. Although this process took place at all levels of society, often indirectly, it was the local elites that took on 
the responsibility systematically. The establishment of new schooling institutions and curricula was the most tangible 
manifestation of the post-19th century phenomenon. However, knowledge is seldom received in whole and is often 
selected and manipulated by the recipients for their own purposes or to suit the very idiosyncratic conditions that 
prevail there. This was particularly the case when one of the principal purposes was to forge a nation-state. The extra-
European world was not passive in its reception of these ‘modern’ ways, and indeed its active acquisition amounted to 
resistance to Western hegemony. Techniques, such as the scientific method, were not unique to the Western tradition 
nor indeed were Europeans the only ones who bore the new ways and ideas over the globe. Likewise, local modern 
institutions were employed to teach recalibrated traditional knowledge and traditional institutions adapted to teach 
‘modern’ curricula while local conditions affected the character of education that emerged. This panel explores the 
phenomenon of knowledge transfer, innovations, and its dispersion in South East Asia, a region that experienced a 
variety of colonialisms, and in the case of one polity went uncolonized, and was therefore subject to different patterns 
of knowledge transfer. This panel will present papers on the topic of education from a particularly formative period 
in the life of South East Asia.
— Shoemaking and the Emergence of Technical Education and a National Economy in Thailand
Thomas Bruce (School of Oriental and African Studies) 
Vocational training emerged in Thailand alongside the country’s modern education system in the first two decades of 
the twentieth century. In the nineteen-forties, the idea of technical education grew in importance as a means to train 
an ethnically Thai workforce in the skills needed in newly imported industries, such as shoemaking. Footwear had 
previously been a commodity consumed by elite circles alone, but following the reforms of the 1890s the commodity 
attracted the attention of the military and the bureaucracy, which sought to secure a local supply of the footwear they 
needed. The interest of successive Thai governments in promoting domestic shoemaking therefore not only reflected 
the need to reduce import dependency, but also reflected the state-level importance footwear had acquired. The fact 
that the manufacture of footwear in Thailand was almost entirely controlled by the Chinese migrant community 
provided an additional imperative to indigenise the gentle craft. As such, the promotion of technical education was 
not merely considered a policy aimed at stimulating new industries or obviating unemployment, but became a means 
by which national sovereignty might be realised in that it aimed to make shoe supply a national rather than an in-
ternational undertaking. This paper examines the creation of a school dedicated to the training of shoemaking and 

euroseas 2015 . book of abstracts
24
leatherwork and assesses the impact the school had on the shoemaking industry and through it the state of technical 
education during the first half of the twentieth century in Thailand.
— Becoming Thai: Thai Strategies of Indoctrination through Textbooks in Indochina during World War II
Wasitthee Chaiyakan (SOAS)
Thailand invaded parts of French Indochina in 1941 and turned them into 4 provinces: Battambang, Phibun Song-
kram, Nakhon Champasak, and Lan Chang. After the annexation, the process of ‘Siamisation’ in these new areas 
began. These processes continued the building of the nation-state, which had started in Siam during the King Rama 
V period. People in newly conquered areas in Indochina were usually Theravada Buddhists, and of the same racial 
stock as the Thai. In Nakhon Champasak and Lan Chang, people spoke a Tai language, though people in Battambang 
and Phibun Songkram spoke Khmer. After regaining control over Indochinese territories, the Thai government was 
concerned about a new problem: the lack of Thai national consciousness among the local people. Thus, the Thai gov-
ernment sought to impose an intensive nationalistic indoctrination through education for the newly annexed citizens 
of this area. It was seen as important for the government to start the process of ‘Siamisation’, in order to turn people in 
conquered parts of Indochina into Thai. One important tool was indoctrination through education, particularly using 
textbooks. This is because education and textbooks are major means by which people become national citizens. State 
officials published tens of thousands of Thai elementary reading books in order to increase literacy in the Thai script 
and language, and indoctrinate people to become ‘Thai’. The new provinces reported to the Thai government that the 
literacy rate increased dramatically in the early 1940s. However, after 1945, the Thai government had to return these 
areas to French. As a result, the process of indoctrination in Indochina ended. Therefore, it is difficult to judge what 
was the impact of Thai nationalistic propaganda via education in this region in the long term.
— A Claim of Inheritance: Education, Kinship, and Personhood in Iloilo, Philippines 
Resto Cruz (The University of Edinburgh)
Historical accounts often portray public education in the Philippines as an enduring legacy of the half-century Ameri-
can occupation. I shift the focus in this paper by pondering on a claim I heard a number of times during my fieldwork 
in the central Philippines: that education is a form of inheritance. Turning mainly to the story of one of the families I 
met in the field, I foreground here how efforts to bequeath education bear the marks of entrenched inequalities, par-
ticularly the concentration of land in the hands of local elite families; and how such efforts constitute attempts by older 
generations to gain for the younger ones opportunities that were foreclosed in the past by poverty and war. Yet, these 
efforts and the concomitant crafting of new selves and practices may also set in motion the forging of paths away from 
received ways of living. Thus, whilst education is a vector of intergenerational transmission, it is also a means through 
which breaks between and amongst past, present, and future, and between self and kin are instantiated.