Murder, Rebels, Refugees and Telegrams in Late-19th-Century Southeast Asia
A few days ago I wrote about the technology of “wireless telegraphy” and its use in areas of Southeast Asia under colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Today I…
Connecting Southeast Asia through Wireless Telegraphy
Today I read a letter that Lester Maynard, the US consul-general in Sandakan, British North Borneo, wrote to the Secretary of the Philippine Commission (an American colonial official) in Manila…
Typewriters and Colonial Security in Southeast Asia
I’m reading Alfred McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). It is an impressive piece…
The Place of “Ta” in “Khoa Học”
I still don’t understand what the term “khoa học” means to Vietnamese scholars. It is how the term “science” was originally translated into Vietnamese, but today I don’t know anyone…
Masaharu Homma and José Laurel
Today I came across some documents from the office of José Laurel when he was “commissioner” of the Philippines in 1942. In 1942 the Philippines had just come under Japanese…
Business Success Under Colonial Rule in the Philippines
So one of the first things which popped into my mind when I saw the picture for this adverstisement was that it was a symbol of American economic and cultural…
Jane Palomar on Marriage and the Filipino Race
I came across this article about the Filipino actress, Jane Palomar, from the early 1960s in a magazine called Graphic. The article is called “Girl With a Mind of Her…