NUS Press - Publishing in Asia, on Asia, for Asia and the World

Exciting NEW releases available immediately!

• Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story - NEW the secrets of Singapore's healthcare system, delivering top health care outcomes at low cost
• From the Blue Windows: Recollections of Life in Queenstown, Singapore, in the 1960s and 1970s - NEW …growing up in one of Singapore's oldest housing estates…
• Organising under the Revolution: Unions & the State in Java, 1945-48 - NEW The formative years for state-labour relations in revolutionary Indonesia
• Strong Soldiers, Failed Revolution: The State and Military in Burma, 1962-88 - NEW …the expansion of the military's role in Burma during the Ne Win years…
• Surabaya, 1945-2010: Neighbourhood, State and Economy in Indonesia's City of Struggle - NEW. …sixty-five years of one of Indonesia's great cities, seen from the perspective of an urban kampung…
• The New Economic Policy in Malaysia:
  Affirmative Action, Ethnic Inequalities and Social Justice - NEW …a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the New Economic Policy and its successors…
• The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos - NEW. …a provocative reinterpretation of U.S.-Laos relations in the years leading up to the Vietnam War…
• A Matter of Risk: Insurance in Malaysia, 1826-1990 - NEW. Since the earliest days of Western expansion into Malaya, the insurance industry has been key to the development of the economy. Government, local and foreign players have wrestled to structure the insurance industry as it responds to new social, economic and political needs.
• Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Singapore and Malaysia - NEW. What happens when a country splits apart? Seeking answers to this question, two Singaporeans set off to cycle around Peninsular Malaysia. They found two countries that have developed economically but are still struggling to find their souls.
• Crossing Borders: Selected Papers from the 13th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, Volume 1 - NEW. This volume focus on cultural practices and materials which reflect processes of integration, specification and diversification in the prehistory and early history of Southeast Asia.
• Connecting Empires and States: Selected Papers from the 13th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, Volume 2 - NEW. This volume focus on early state formation, development of material cultures, and the transfer of iconographic concepts from late prehistoric to historic times in Southeast Asia.
• China as a Sea Power, 1127-1368: A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People during the Southern Song and Yuan Periods The author argues that during each occasion when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises, these cycles of maritime activity corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction.
• Studying Singapore's Past: C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore The book offers an evaluation of established understandings of Singapore's history, and gives an indication of new directions that researchers are exploring.
• Industrialization with a Weak State: Thailand's Development in Historical Perspective This volume of collected essays offers a critical assessment of Thai industrialization with a focus on industrial policy, rent seeking and income inequality. Combining institutional economics with a historical perspective, the work provides a unique analysis of the transition of the Thai economy from around the mid-19th century until 2000.
• The Contours of Mass Violence: 1965-1968 The case studies here account the impact and interpretations of the September 30th Movement and its aftermath; the roles of military and civilian groups in fomenting and perpetrating violence; short- and long-term detention; and the legacies of the assault on the political Left.
• Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to Present This book draws on a formidable body of sources to situate the Javanese religious experience from the 1930s to the present day.
• China's Left-Behind Wives: Families of Migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s-1950s The author tells the extraordinary story of an often overlooked group of women who played an important rols in one of the largest waves of migration in history.
• Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia This volume engages critically with the concept of modernity, considering the way it has been used in the analysis of cultural, social, economic and political processes in the two countries.
• Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore Given that Singapore is a unique place on the world map of press freedom and democracy, this book provides a constructive engagement with ongoing debates about the city-state along with a significant contribution to the comparative study of journalism and politics.
• Plaited Arts from the Borneo Rain Forest This gorgeous and lavishly illustrated volume gives long overdue recognition to the woven masterpieces created by Borneo's rain forest artists. It aims to stimulate appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of ingenious and attractive everyday utensils. These long overlooked plaited objects, unsurpassed in their combination of beauty, form and function, provide a unique window on the way of life of Borneo's inhabitants.
• Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia The contributors to this volume show how the practices of health in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries were mediated by local medical traditions, colonial interests, governments and policies, international interventions, and by a wide range of health agents and intermediaries.
• Islam, Nationalism and Democracy: A Political Biography of Mohammad Natsir This political biographt positions an important Muslim politician and thinker in the context of a critical period of Indonesia's history, and describes his vision of how the newly independent country could embrace religion without sacrificing its democratic values.

Selection of Recent Releases

• The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo The author employs the phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system.
• Modern Thai Buddhism and Buddhadasa Bhikkhu: A Social History This book is a lively intellectual and social history of contemporary Thai Buddhism built around the life of an exceptional monk who captured the interest of Buddhists pursuing spiritual depth in the context of the ideological conflicts of the Cold War.
• Heroes and Revolution in Vietnam. This study presents and analyzes the process by which "new heroes were invented." Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than a half century to the reconstruction of the national immagination and development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam.
• Red Star Over Malaya: Resistance & Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946 (Fourth Edition). Based on extensive archival research in Malaysia, Great Britain, Japan and the United States, this volume provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed surrender.
• To Cage the Red Dragon: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia, 1955-1965. This volume examines the role of SEATO during its first ten years as a military alliance and at the same time details the actions of member states.
• The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575-1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy. Making extensive use of contemporary Portuguese sources, the author uses a geopolitical approach to analyze the financial, political, economic and military institutions that underlay a system that persisted in the Straits because no one power could achieve an undisputed hegemony.
• War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore. This volume provides a forum for previously marginalized and self-censored voices, using the stories they relate to reflect on the nature of conflict and memory. It offers a deeper understanding of the searing transit from wartime occupation to post-war decolonization and the molding of postcolonial states and identities.
• The Cardamom Conundrum: Reconciling Development and Conservation in the Kingdom of Cambodia. This book consciously seeks to avoid the mentality of "trade-offs," in which pro-development advocates view conservation efforts as impediments, and conservationists are convinced that development inevitably leads to a loss for nature. The author argues that wise management of renewable natural resources can promote sound economic growth and that wise management of Cambodia's such resources will facilitate economic growth.
• Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia. The authors apply a theoretical literature on social memory developed over the past two decades to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Readers seeking a nuanced and complex understanding of the past and its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.
• Philippine Ancestral Gold. This is a spectacular publication in full-color that features more than 1,000 gold objects that were recovered in the Philippines from the 1960s to 1981 and now form part of the collection of the Ayala Museum in Manila.
• Revisiting Rural Places: Pathways to Poverty and Prosperity in Southeast Asia. The authors return to sites of the earlier research in Southeast Asia to examine how the rapid pace of change in the countryside has affected places, spaces and people that they originally studied decades ago. The accounts map out diverse pathways to poverty or prosperity.
• Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness. The volume examine the chequered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu.
• Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hope, Politics and Practice. Taking a critical approach to post-development theory, the author argues that politics and ideology are an intrinsic part of development work, and that an active engagement with the politics of development is essential for professionals hoping to make a difference.

Focus on the arts and literature

• Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia While contributors discuss Indonesia-language expression at the national level, a particular focus of the collection is on regional, local and minority language, where problems associated with decentralization find their counterpart in the role that language plays in the workings of regional and national identity politics.
• Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. In this book, the authors document the rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, arguing that they are a genuine outcome of the democratization and liberalization of film productions.
• Intimating the Sacred: Religion in English-Language Malaysian Fiction. This study provides insights on the practices of everyday religiosity as represented in literature. It also reveals the intersections between religion and other facets of colonial and postcolonial identity.
• Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in the 19th-Century Malay Syair. The author uses tools drawn from literary criticism and gender studies to look at a previously neglected corpus of Malay literature in a new light. The book develops a nuanced textual analysis of the material, and explores the interplay between social reality and literary fiction.
• Colony, Nation and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature. Focusing on themes of home and belonging, the author illuminates many aspects of identity anxiety experienced in the region, and helps construct a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the Anglophone literatures of Singapore and Malaysia.

Check out our subject lists for more information on NUS Press books.