Much of the history of the people of the Straits of Malacca in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is still unknown and perhaps unknowable, given the lack of source material. However, some aspects of political history are becoming clearer. It has become apparent that this period witnessed a fundamental change in the political structure of the area; able in the past to support empires and cultures of no small renown, the Malay world by the nineteenth century had disintegrated into a mass of petty states, leaderless and disorientated, a power vacuum that the British Empire was eventually forced to fill. Symptoms of this change first became discernable in the early eighteenth century, during the reign of the last Malay Raja Muda of the Johor Empire (1708–18). Johor was then still a powerful force in the Malay world, ruling a widespread area from Siak in Sumatra, through the coastal areas of the Malay peninsula (roughly, in modern terms, from Selangor south, then north again as far as Trengganu), plus the islands of the Riau–Lingga archipelago and Siantan. The sea was still a connecting, rather than a dividing force in Malay politics. In 1708 the administration of this empire fell to Tun Mahmud, who was to be the last Malay to hold the office of Raja Muda in Johor. He was by all accounts a remarkable ruler, under whose guidance Johor attained, for a while, great power and prestige.

Within the plural society of Malaysia, Indians reflect a pluralism every bit as complex and resulting in problems that are a smaller version of those faced by the nation. Indian society is segmented on a variety of grounds, each segment operating with its own autonomy and yet entering into a competitive coexistence with others to impose its interests as the dominant ones of “the Indian community” of Malaysia. These inner strains and stresses among groups struggling to assert community leadership have a long history and proceed from a background of economic, social, and cultural factors that have characterized Indian migration and settlement in peninsular Malaya. It is the aim of this paper to look at these segments of Indian society, the kinds of leadership they produced, the interactions of that leadership among each other for a period of about fifteen years after 1945. An attempt is made to isolate a number of the major groups and segments of society, to categorize the types of leaders emerging among them, to note the links between these leadership types and thus provide a profile of the society's leaders in this period.

Many historians have accepted the view that the two prominent Filipino leaders — Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmena — were not really in favour of immediate Philippine independence despite their constant open advocacy of such an aspiration. For instance, Roy W. Curry wrote that “… the eloquent Quezon was playing independence as a necessary political expedience while privately fearing that it might be granted”, whereas Bonifacio S. Salamanca suggested “… at least the two foremost leaders of the Filipino elite — Quezon and Osmena — did not really desire immediate independence, or even want to have a date fixed for the future recognition of Philippine independence”.

Like most developing countries, the Philippines before the imposition of martial law towards the end of 1972 was characterized by the fact that the majority of her population, living in the small towns and the countryside, were actually peripheral to the national polity. The political process was largely concerned with the intra-elite conflicts and manoeuvrings. As the government did not derive the bulk of its revenue from the income and resources of the mass of the citizenry, the political system functioned mainly as a giant system of patronage.

The sudden collapse of France in June 1940 presented Japan with a golden opportunity to exploit French discomfiture and remove several obstacles to its New Order in East Asia. Indeed, the military extremists, who had been temporarily held in check since the humiliation caused by the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, could no longer be restrained. By seizing Indochina, Japan would be in a strong position to force an end to its interminable struggle with China on its own terms. The large quantity of supplies that had flowed through Indochina to Chinese forces — a situation that had greatly embittered the Japanese and had slowly poisoned Franco–Japanese relations during the past three years — could be brought to a halt. Chiang Kai-shek, further isolated and confronted with the loss of one of his few remaining channels of supply, might be finally forced to give up the fight. Moreover, Indochina could provide Japan with significant supplies of rubber, tin, coal, and rice and thus go a long way toward ending its dependence upon foreign sources for these strategic raw materials. Finally, the strategic location of Indochina meant that it could serve admirably as an advanced base from which the Japanese could strike out against the Far Eastern possessions of the other Western colonial powers — the East Indies, Malaya, Burma, and the Philippines.

John Fairbank wrote of China that “the missionary movement … was a profound stimulus to China's modernization”, and he cited missionary medical, educational, and humanitarian work, including extensive rural contacts, as the basis for his conclusion. And George Antonius in his classic study of Arab nationalism noted that in the Arab revival of the last century, the American Presbyterian Mission in Syria played an important role in the rebirth of Arab literature and education. The Presbyterian missionaries were one important source of the emergence of the Arabs into the modern world. A reading of Thai history suggests that the missionaries in Siam might well have had a similarly important impact. However, the role of the missionaries after the decades of the 1830s to the 1850s has been little studied and is hardly understood. This has been especially true because the historical study of Thai modernization has focused primarily on national policies and strategies where the missionaries had less influence after the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68).

British planning for post-war Burma had been set back by the Cabinet's decision in April 1943 not to adopt the proposals put forward by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. Designed also to meet the need for wartime propaganda, the proposals had envisaged a programme of reconstruction aided by the British, carried forward during a period of direct rule, to be followed by advance towards self-government. There were doubts about the amount of aid Britain could promise. There were also doubts as to the wisdom of the concept of direct rule, though in fact the Cabinet accepted the principle without setting a limit to the period. Above all, the Prime Minister opposed further policy declarations on Burma. The war, Churchill believed, was not the time for them. Amery and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, thought that he really believed that no time would be right for them. They were not without hope that he would “come round”. Meanwhile, it was decided that the Burma Government, in exile in Simla, would remain in existence. “I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would [be] a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma.…”

This study is intended to give a short survey on the development of shipping and trade between two main German ports and the Indian Ocean from the early years of the Bismarck period to the beginning of the First World War. The study deals with the area from East Africa to East India and from Indochina to Indonesia. China, the Philippines, and Australia will not be considered. It is based on an analysis of published material.