I

The rise of the three great rice-producing and -exporting deltas of mainland Southeast Asia numbers among the most familiar chapters in the modern history of the region.Footnote ¹ On a macro level, it exemplifies the integration of the region into the North Atlantic-centered world economy during the age of high imperialism and the consequent shock of the depression of the 1930s. On a micro level, that rise has offered historians an opportunity to examine the responses of Southeast Asian cultivators to market signals; the variation in the allocation of factors of production across the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya and Mekong deltas; and the implications of those responses and that allocation for reactions to the shock of the inter-war crisis. The principal features of the history of the mainland rice economies between 1850 and the 1930s have indeed grown so familiar as to make that history seem like yesterday's topic. Occasional attempts to propose significant revision to the story have had little impact.Footnote ² And the need for a major monograph on the economic history of the Mekong delta during the French colonial period remains unmet.Footnote ³

If in very different ways, the two works reviewed here prove that historical study of the great rice deltas is anything but stale, however. Revisiting the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya deltas, Ian Brown and Han ten Brummelhuis make the histories of those areas fresh and vivid for a new generation of scholars. Their books not only suggest numerous empirical and interpretive issues deserving additional research but also pose a series of difficult epistemological and methodological questions for students of Southeast Asia's economic history. Ironically, these questions emerge from the two historians' stated purposes and their difficulty in achieving those purposes.

II

As only the latest instalment in Ian Brown's large body of work on the economic history of modern Southeast Asia, A colonial economy in crisis offers an original, provocative interpretation of the impact of the great depression of the early 1930s on the Irrawaddy delta.Footnote ⁴ Brown casts the book, with unwarranted modesty, as above all an attempt to revisit his well-known, two-decade-old article, ‘Rural distress in Southeast Asia during the world depression of the early 1930s: A preliminary reexamination’.Footnote ⁵ Few students of the economic history of the region will have read this article but once. Indeed, for many of those students, ‘Rural distress’ will have served as a rather bracing first exposure to Brown's invaluable work, not least on the inter-war depression.Footnote ⁶ For present purposes, two dimensions of the article have relevance.

One dimension is interpretive, substantive and thematic. The import of ‘Rural distress’ lay in its argument against previous, rather homogenous, understandings of the impact of the inter-war depression on rural Southeast Asians.Footnote ⁷ Challenging that homogeneity, Brown called for appreciation of geographical variation in that impact. In support of this general case, the article argued that previous scholarship overstated the inflexibility of tax and debt collection and thus the burden of taxation and indebtedness on depression-era cultivators.Footnote ⁸ In its discussion of taxation, ‘Rural distress’ makes a particular target of James C. Scott's influential The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁹

The second significant dimension of ‘Rural distress’ is methodological and epistemological. Brown viewed the article as ‘a preliminary reassessment’ and ‘an initial, tentative exploration’ of the topic at hand, and with good reason.Footnote ¹⁰ The breadth of the article's coverage, extending across mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, and its reliance on published statistics and secondary material account for the article's preliminary quality. Its tentativeness derives from the meticulousness with which Brown assesses statistical data and reasons his way to possible readings of those data. He takes pains to expose rather than conceal the features of extant data-sets which make robust conclusions impossible. But hard work and his own considerable inventiveness enable Brown to wring, even from such data, a series of modestly stated points. This modesty or tentativeness also emerges in the central argument of ‘Rural distress’, which lies in its questioning of the understanding that depression-era rural Southeast Asia suffered undifferentiated hardship and stress. Brown makes this challenge credible, but his case remains fundamentally negative. He does not, in this preliminary study, offer a strongly stated case of his own for the nature of the impact of the inter-war depression on the Southeast Asian cultivator.

In its thoughtful and careful use of quantitative data and other sources and its even-handed re-examination of commonplaces in the economic history of the region, ‘Rural distress’ exemplifies what one can justifiably call Ian Brown's trademark approach to the economic history of modern Southeast Asia. This approach marks the useful topical chapters of his Economic change in South-East Asia, c.1830–1980. It also characterises his The elite and the economy in Siam c.1890–1920.Footnote ¹¹

That latter volume collects five carefully researched, closely argued studies of such matters as irrigation policy, technical change in rice cultivation, tin and teak, and banking. Brown would use them to conclude that Siam's constrained international position, rather than the self-interest or short-sightedness of its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century elite, accounted for its failure to diversify beyond primary-commodity production in that period. In thus taking issue with Thai scholars of the ‘political economy’ school who draw unflattering comparisons between the complacently agrarian Siam and the ambitiously industrialising Japan of that era, Brown contends in The elite and the economy that the former economy faced greater international constraints. He holds that this factor outweighed such other salient factors as institutional, administrative, social, economic and cultural differences between Japan and Siam.Footnote ¹² While modestly made, Brown's case nevertheless comes down to bald assertion. The substantive chapters of The elite and the economy do not, for all their careful argumentation and scrupulous assessment of sources, offer systematic assessment of these other salient factors.

Assessment of A colonial economy in crisis requires awareness of these defining epistemological and methodological characteristics of Ian Brown's approach to the economic history of modern Southeast Asia. Such awareness is indispensable to consideration both of the book's success in achieving its stated purpose and of any respects in which it falls short of its goals. Brown makes those goals clear in the prologue to A colonial economy in crisis. ‘Rural distress’, he now recognises, focuses on the wrong question. Rather than geographical variation in the impact of the inter-war depression on rural welfare in Southeast Asia, ‘the crucial dynamic’ is ‘the variable impact as between the different categories of agriculturalist–landless labourer, tenant, owner-cultivator, landlord’.Footnote ¹³ Data permitting, it is on this pattern of variation that Brown proposes to concentrate in his close study of the Irrawaddy delta during the inter-war depression. Moving beyond the use of crude per capita data in ‘Rural distress’, analysis of variation among what Brown calls ‘classes of agriculturalist’ promises to capture in a much more sophisticated way the experiences and fortunes of the delta's inhabitants during the early 1930s.Footnote ¹⁴

At one level, this redirection of focus makes very good sense. Three decades ago, after all, Robert Elson placed at the centre of his trenchant critique of Clifford Geertz's concept of ‘agricultural involution’ the point that Geertz treated the Javanese peasantry as an ‘undifferentiated mass’.Footnote ¹⁵ In a subsequent book, Elson in fact considered the impact of the inter-war depression on east Java's Pasuruan region by what Brown calls ‘classes’ of rural people.Footnote ¹⁶ In proposing to take a similar approach to the Irrawaddy delta in A colonial economy in crisis, Ian Brown works in a distinguished tradition. Among other important contributions to that tradition, the work of the urban historical geographer Daniel Doeppers on Manila likewise merits particular mention.Footnote ¹⁷ Doeppers's careful decomposition of the consequences of the inter-war depression by occupational group in that city results in just the sort of historiographical break-through at which Brown aims in both ‘Rural distress’ and A colonial economy in crisis. In fact, Doeppers explicitly cites the former work as one of the inspirations for his own study.Footnote ¹⁸

On another level, one wonders about Brown's decision to redirect the focus of his research into the impact of the inter-war depression from geographical district to class of cultivator. Why not, above all in studying so data-rich a society as colonial Burma, design his research around what political scientists call ‘cross-cutting cleavages’? Why not, that is, examine variations among districts of the Irrawaddy delta and among classes of cultivators there? Indeed, the many insightful analyses embedded in A colonial economy in crisis include at least one finding, in Brown's chapter on cultivator debt and loss of land, that hinges on variation across districts on the Irrawaddy delta. Variations in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century agrarian history of those districts, Brown argues, meant that the inter-war depression brought higher rates of alienation to areas that already had the highest rates thereof.Footnote ¹⁹ Brown does not build on this finding.

On yet a third level, Brown's interest in varying impacts of the inter-war depression among classes of Burmese agriculturalist raises in an unexpected way what was always to be one of the first questions asked about A colonial economy in crisis. That is, how do the book's approach and interpretation compare to those of Michael Adas's classic The Burma delta: Economic development and social change on an Asian rice frontier, 1852–1941?Footnote ²⁰ Now nearly 35 years old, The Burma delta remains the most influential historical study in English of the rice economy of the Irrawaddy delta.Footnote ²¹ Further, Adas made the changing fortunes and prospects of different classes of Burmese cultivator a central part of his analysis of the history of the delta's rice economy. So, in the period between the 1850s and the second half of the first decade of the twentieth century, Adas's systematic consideration of the position of landlords, cultivator-owners, tenants and landless labourers led him to stress ‘great fluidity’ and ‘a high degree of mobility’ as ‘the dominant characteristic of rural social structure in Lower Burma’.Footnote ²² In contrast, Adas's careful examination of the same groups during the two decades after 1910 revealed declining social mobility, ever more rigid differences among the four classes of Burmese agriculturalist, and a time during which ‘the solvency and well-being of the great majority of persons engaged in agricultural production was gradually undermined’.Footnote ²³

In A colonial economy in crisis, Brown examines a much shorter span of time. But, even more so than Adas, he would place the experiences of various classes of agriculturalist at the centre of his analysis. How exactly does this analysis proceed, through the successive substantive chapters of the book?

In tracing the Irrawaddy delta's rapid emergence as a rice-exporting zone after the mid-nineteenth century and the patterns of debt, default and foreclosure in which it had resulted by the 1920s, the first such chapter notes the limited opportunities for social mobility open to tenants and landless labourers by the eve of the depression.Footnote ²⁴ Through a detailed examination of price trends, Brown then identifies the final months of 1930 as the moment when the shock of the depression really hit cultivators on the delta. This discussion numbers among the most illuminating and rigorous of the book. Brown focuses his discussion of that shock on one class of delta agriculturalist, the cultivator-owner. He views late 1930 as the point at which ‘it must have been frighteningly clear to cultivator-owners across the delta that they would lose their own holding – not temporarily now but irrevocably’.Footnote ²⁵

Subsequent chapters turn to rates of foreclosure on mortgaged land and survival strategies adopted by residents of the delta to cope with the extreme economic down-turn. Necessarily, the former chapter concentrates on landed classes; it introduces the idea that the depression brought sudden, ‘huge damage to the landowner's expectations and aspirations’.Footnote ²⁶ The latter chapter introduces the findings of an October 1930 report, prepared by one Stanley Grantham, on agrarian conditions in Burma. Brown's discussion of those findings is the only place in A colonial economy in crisis in which he treats the full range of the classes of agriculturalist – labourers, tenant, cultivator-owner, landlord – on whose experiences he would focus. What Grantham found corroborates what much scholarship on the inter-war depression in Southeast Asia has come to contend, that falling commodity prices and resultant deflation actually left some people better off.Footnote ²⁷ In the specific case of the early-depression Irrawaddy delta, this general pattern meant that labourers and tenants fared reasonably well while most cultivator-owners and market-dependent landlords fell quickly into trouble.Footnote ²⁸ To try to make clearer sense of this fragmentation of impact, Brown offers his own, original interpretation of the so called ‘Hsaya San rebellion’.Footnote ²⁹

Simply put, that interpretation casts the rebellion as an uprising of the landed. Brown begins his final substantive chapter, on the rebellion, with critiques of the earlier interpretations of James C. Scott, Michael Adas and others. With a careful exploration of the evidence, he contends that Scott attached undue importance to the capitation tax in his explanation of the outbreak of the uprising in The moral economy of the peasant.Footnote ³⁰ He notes that Adas's emphasis on the millenarian aspect of Hsaya San's leadership means that, in that scholar's account, ‘[t]he rebellion is not sited in the depression’.Footnote ³¹ In Brown's own reading, the depression – and above all its late-1930 ‘darkest hour’Footnote ³² of suddenly collapsing rice prices – served as ‘detonator’ of the rebellion.Footnote ³³ How, precisely? Brown offers a two-stage argument.

First, Brown cites a single British report, dating from 1938, on the rebellion in Dedaye township, Pyapon district.Footnote ³⁴ This report notes that many participants in the rebellion ‘were in the grip of money-lenders’ and that its local leadership ‘had recently lost land to the Chettyars’.Footnote ³⁵ Brown rests his case for the uprising as a revolt of the landed, triggered above all by the collapse in rice prices in the final months of 1930, on this source. He explains away the paucity of additional sources on the ‘rank and file’ membership of the rebellion by noting colonial officers' incentive not to investigate economic aspects of the uprising. Such investigation, Brown avers, might undermine official determination to represent the rebellion as a strictly political event.Footnote ³⁶ The plausibility of this explanation, the degree to which it squares with the sensitivity to issues of rural welfare that characterised many officials in British Burma, must remain open to question.

Nevertheless, on logical grounds alone, Brown is on to something. To the extent that the onset of the depression played a role in the timing of the Hsaya San rebellion, Burmese cultivator-owners and some landlords had, as of December 1930, suffered most from the collapse of rice prices and consequent foreclosure on their land. Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, therefore, one must take Brown's case for an uprising of the landed seriously. It offers a fresh perspective on the social, economic and political histories of the mainland Southeast Asian rice deltas, one of unmistakable potential value in future scholarship.Footnote ³⁷ In addition to the lack of evidence supporting Brown's contention, however, two further cautionary points merit mention.

For one, in the second stage of his argument, Brown returns to his earlier point about Burmese landowners facing the prospect of an irrevocable decline in socio-economic status in late 1930. He writes that the destruction of ‘all optimism and expectation’ of the delta's landed, ‘particularly the modest, marginal owner-cultivator’, may prove most significant to understanding the eruption of the Hsaya San rebellion.Footnote ³⁸ In stressing the psychological impact of economic crisis, Brown effectively takes his place alongside Scott, Adas and other scholars of Southeast Asia in focusing on the usefulness of ‘peasant consciousness’ or ‘peasant world-views’ in explaining violent collective action. But the consciousness or world-view in question reflects not communal norms or folk beliefs but rather the experience of successful adaptation to Burma's integration into international commodities markets. Also, Brown cites not a single source for the feeling of sudden hopelessness among the owner-cultivators of the Irrawaddy delta. He offers not a single example of its expression. That feeling is, rather, simply deduced.

For another, Brown muddies his point in attributing this psychological blow ‘to the expectations and aspirations of all of the delta's agriculturalists, whether they owned land or not, whether they lost land at this point or not’.Footnote ³⁹ In other words, perhaps the so-called Hsaya San rebellion was not after all a rebellion of the landed. Perhaps tenants and labourers also joined in, despite the fact that the rebellion broke out at a time when deflation had given them some respite and that, as Adas makes unequivocally clear in The Burma delta, few of them had had any reason to nurture aspirations of socio-economic mobility for some two decades. Perhaps, that is, the long-term hopelessness of the Irrawaddy delta's landless and the sudden despair of its landed converged in December 1930.

But such theorising must remain speculative. While stimulated by the diligence and originality that distinguish A colonial economy in crisis, it awaits a broader study, one that taps sources adequate to permit engagement with and perhaps expansion upon Brown's interpretation of the depression-era Irrawaddy delta and the violence that struck it.Footnote ⁴⁰

III

Along with the violence and tragedy that struck the Irrawaddy delta during the 1930s, the handful of most compelling aspects of the histories of the three great mainland Southeast Asian rice deltas include the effort of a poorly understood Dutch engineer who sought to remake the Chao Phraya delta between 1902 and 1909. Numerous students of Thai history have treated the curious case of J. Homan van der Heide and his scheme to bring modern irrigation to Siam.Footnote ⁴¹ But the man, his background and his ideas have remained obscure. KITLV Press thus performs a real service in publishing King of the waters, an English translation of the dissertation for which Han ten Brummelhuis conducted archival research in the mid-1980s and that he submitted to the University of Amsterdam in 1995.Footnote ⁴² Finally, we have a book-length study of Homan van der Heide.

Its author's tirelessness in engaging his sources, his insight into the social history of pre-1900 Siam, his linguistic prowess, and his understanding of certain technical aspects of water control make King of the waters an impressive, rewarding book. But it is also a book that is, for several reasons, scarcely less curious than its subject.

First, and perhaps because it is the translation (rather than revision) of a dissertation, the central chapters of the book have an undigested, unsynthesised feel. They offer up narratives coming directly from archival materials, without the reduced level of detail and increased attention to broader considerations that the revision of a dissertation is meant to bring.

Second, the book is not – and about this matter its author is very clearFootnote ⁴³ – a biography of J. Homan van der Heide. This is a shame. For a biography of Homan van der Heide, treating his life before and after his seven years in Siam, might in fact illuminate those years more effectively than does King of the waters in its present form. Several times, for example, ten Brummelhuis notes that Homan van der Heide was a Delft-trained engineer.Footnote ⁴⁴ This observation clearly means something to ten Brummelhuis. It may also mean something to most Dutch readers. But the substance of ‘the Delft culture of technological schooling’, the implications of that schooling for encounters such as Homan van der Heide's in Siam, benefits from no discussion. Similarly, the decade that Homan van der Heide spent on Java before his stint in Siam, his exposure there to Dutch approaches to Southeast Asian villagers and his well-known commitment to the Ethical Policy in the Netherlands East IndiesFootnote ⁴⁵ can only have informed what he tried to accomplish on the Chao Phaya delta. Finally, after his retirement from the Indies to the Netherlands, Homan van der Heide devoted himself to the Dutch National Socialist movement, consequently faced arrest after V-E day in 1945, and indeed died a political prisoner in his own country.Footnote ⁴⁶ What, one can only wonder, did his National Socialism owe to insights about the relationship of citizen to state formed – and in fact both articulated and put into practiceFootnote ⁴⁷ – during his time in Siam? In short, all of these features of his biography might inform the story of Homan van der Heide's work in Siam much more than ten Brummelhuis allows. One senses that he has squandered the opportunity to write a rather more arresting book than this one.

Third come ten Brummelhuis's clear goals for the book that he has in fact written, which number two. As well as to ‘paint a dramatic picture of clashing cultures, comparable to many encounters in contemporary development cooperation’,Footnote ⁴⁸ he aims to explore ‘the political economy of the Siamese state around 1900’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Cultures do clash in King of the waters; let us come back to that point below. As for political economy, such an approach promises to lift ten Brummelhuis's treatment of agricultural policy to a more sophisticated level of analysis than the ‘modernisation’ paradigm that marks the best known scholarship on the so-called Chakkri reforms. While, however, his book makes clear the Chakkri state's almost comic fickleness in its interest in irrigation between the 1890s and 1920, at a more fundamental level, it renders the reform programme even less problematic than does earlier scholarship.Footnote ⁵⁰ After all, educational and administrative reform in Siam had serious internal enemies. Contestation over Homan van der Heide's brilliant 1903 General report on irrigation and drainage in the lower Menam valley Footnote ⁵¹ and its proposals, in ten Brummelhuis's telling, involved less serious divisions. Issues covered include Siam's fiscal caution and the enormity of the social gap between a commoner minister of agriculture and his monarch in which recent Chakkri absolutism had so quickly resulted.Footnote ⁵²

Nevertheless, Homan van der Heide's seven years in Siam do raise important issues. From the point of view of the economic historian of modern Southeast Asia, there is much to be treasured and to stimulate further research in King of the waters. Four areas merit especial mention.

First, ten Brummelhuis begins his book with a superb discussion of water control, agriculture and the state in pre-modern Siam. It ought henceforth prove impossible to write or teach about such basic facets of the history of the late Ayuthaya and early Bangkok periods of Thai history as labour control and scarcity and the sakdina system without reference to the first two or three chapters of King of the waters. For heuristic purposes, those chapters prompt one to conceive of water as a fourth factor of production in the Siam of that era. Further, their argument for the Siamese state's disengagement with agriculture suggests a need to reconsider truisms about historical concern for that sector such as those derived from the ‘In the water there are fish; in the fields there is rice’ of the so-called Ramkhamhaeng inscription.Footnote ⁵³

Second, the picture of the Chao Phraya delta that ten Brummelhuis's rigorous scholarship makes so vivid both raises questions about and suggests the existence of archival material on innumerable matters of concern to the economic historian.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is, for example, impossible to read King of the waters without astonishment that that delta could emerge as a major producer of rice for world markets, so chaotic was its canal ‘system’ and so unreliable the access to water of much of its territory. In addition, ten Brummelhuis's accounts of Homan van der Heide's travels across, penetrating study of, and work in the central Thai countryside and of Bangkok's reactions to his findings call for a re-examination of the effective reach of the Siamese state of the day. King of the waters will surely provoke a basic re-thinking of the connection between the so-called Chakkri reforms and their economic basis. This re-thinking has, in turn, important implications for understandings of Thai agricultural and rural development policy in the post-1945 and post-1957 eras. Not least, it was in the mid-1950s that Bangkok, with the help of a World Bank loan extended in the context of American eagerness to win Thai backing in the Korean War, finally paid Homan van der Heide the long overdue compliment of building the dam at Chainat that he had proposed in the General report half a century before.Footnote ⁵⁵King of the waters ought to prod scholars to trace changing ideas about the state's role in water control in Thailand from the second decade of the twentieth century to the sixth and even up to today; for issues such as irrigation fees for farmers continue to surface in the country's politics.

Third, institutions and institutional change matter in economic history. As a central theme of his book, ten Brummelhuis demonstrates that they mattered very much in the case of Homan van der Heide's failure to achieve in Siam what its government had hired him to accomplish. He makes clear that what framed the clash of personalities, priorities, and above all economic and social visions contributing to that failure was the institutional setting. Bureaucratic norms at the highest levels of the Siamese state defeated Homan van der Heide; this clash of cultures – between a can-do irrigation engineer and over-cautious, by-the-book functionaries – is the important one in King of the waters.Footnote ⁵⁶ But, ten Brummelhuis's suggestion of continuities between those norms and older Siamese ideals of orderFootnote ⁵⁷ notwithstanding, that state in its then current incarnation and its bureaucratic structures were at most three decades and in most respects but a single decade old at the time of the Dutch engineer's arrival in Bangkok. It is startling to consider their strength, at least at the highest levels, as reflected in this book.

Fourth, King of the waters underlines the neglect in the historiography of Thailand and Southeast Asia of the work of Siam Land, Canals and Irrigation Company from the late 1880s to develop the Rangsit area to the north and east of Bangkok.Footnote ⁵⁸ Both the circumstances that led the Siamese state to endorse and then sour on such an aberrational undertaking and the history and performance of the firm as a firm offer fertile territory for further research and for a fresh understanding of approaches to the ‘development’ of the three mainland deltas.

And, then, there is a fifth matter: the evident desirability of re-publication – ideally with Thai translationFootnote ⁵⁹ – of Homan van der Heide's General report for today's scholars and readers.

IV

The appearance of two such substantive, significant, stimulating works of scholarship as A colonial economy in crisis and King of the waters erases doubt about the continued interest of the great rice deltas of mainland Southeast Asia as fields for further historical research. While very different books, the foregoing discussion makes clear that they highlight a common concern for the economic historian of the region. This concern relates to data, to sources.

For all its sophistication and for the occasional value of its results, the cliometric turn in economic history will never supersede more interpretive approaches to the study of Southeast Asia's economic past. The reason is very simple. The statistical power of cliometric approaches may enable their practitioners to ‘prove’ their case, but too few topics in the region's economic history offer up the requisite quantitative data-sets. Interpretive approaches to that history will remain the core of the endeavour.

What, then, do Brown's and ten Brummelhuis' books tell us about possibilities and priorities for the further study of the deltas and of other topics in the economic history of the region through interpretive approaches? As for objectives, the books have very little in common. Brown would tackle a topic of pure economic history; he has a clear case to argue. Ten Brummelhuis, despite his stated interest in the political economy of Siam at the turn of the last century, is ultimately focused on bureaucratic machinations in a fascinating institutional context.

As noted above, that context is hardly irrelevant to the concerns of the economic historian. And the remarkable wealth of the sources that ten Brummelhuis uses with such evident skill will undoubtedly lead researchers back to those sources and to comparable sources for later decades in Thai history. Those sources will permit investigation of and argument-building about topics in economic history per se. Brown, in contrast, would make an economic-historical argument too heavy for the empirical basis that he constructs. If fundamentally a consequence of his historiographical taste, this weakness in his book nevertheless has exemplary value in its own right. For the arguments of A colonial economy in crisis, arguments well beyond the reach of cliometricians, are imaginative and important. Buttressed with more extensive research, research like that on display in King of the waters, Brown's arguments might well carry the day. The effective marriage of sources and argument toward which the two works thus point the way must be the basis of an interpretive approach to robust, successful future scholarship on Southeast Asia's economic history.

With the exhaustion of the post-modern, post-colonial, post-structural conceits so attractive to young Southeast Asianists in recent decades,Footnote ⁶⁰ one finds reason to hope for a renaissance in the study of economic topics among coming generations of historians of the region. Such a development will undoubtedly result in new paradigms in, new approaches to, and still unforeseen interpretive frameworks for Southeast Asian economic history. If neither A colonial economy in crisis nor King of the waters makes clear what these paradigms, approaches or frameworks might be, the value of these two excellent books in encouraging that renaissance is nevertheless very great.