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Description: Only in the last two decades has the economic performance of Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia attracted much international attention, and even then primarily in the derivative terminology of NICs. Southeast Asia's fragmentation into multiple states--heirs of diverse empires--long obscured, even from itself, that it was a coherent economic region characterized by: tropical rice agriculture
relatively low rates (for Asia) of population density, urbanization and capital accumulation
and plural societies in which people of Chinese origin undertook many of the key commercial roles. As the colonial era and its bitter revolutionary aftermath faded, the region gradually refound itself. Its economic history has remained, however, a very patchy affair. Southeast Asian studies have been preoccupied with anti-colonial nationalism, national and ethnic identity, and political conflict. The traumatic revolutionary watershed of the 1940s (prolonged to 1975 in Vietnam) divided economics from history and interrupted not only all the data series but also most of the scholarly agendas. <i>Exploring Southeast Asia's Economic Past</i>, which is a special issue of the <i>Australian Economic History Review (AEHR)</i> examines some of the issues involved in writing a modern economic history of Southeast Asia. The special issue of the <i>AEHR</i> is a cooperative venture between the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand and the ASEAN Economic Research Unit of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.
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