British imperialism profoundly influenced the development of the modern world order. This same imperialism created modern Singapore, shaping its colonial development, influencing its post-colonial reorientation. Winston Churchill was British imperialism's most significant 20th-century statesman. Churchill never visited Singapore, yet their two stories heavily influenced each other. Singapore became a symbol of British imperial power in Asia to Churchill, while Singaporeans later came to see him as symbolising that power. The fall of Singapore to Japanese conquest in 1942 was a low point in Churchill's war leadership, one he forever labelled by calling it "the worst disaster in British military history". It was also a tragedy for Singapore, ushering in three cruel years of occupation. But the interplay between these three historical forces -- Churchill, empire, and Singapore -- extended well beyond this most dramatic conjuncture. No single volume critically examines that longer interplay. This collection of essays does so by analysing Churchill's understanding of empire, his perceptions of Singapore and its imperial role, his direction of affairs regarding Singapore and the Empire, and his influence on the subsequent relationship between them.

Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered eveents in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders. The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, contestation, or revision in the ever-evolving politics of the present. The searching and close-grained analyses of contemporary issues found in the volume vividly illustrate the essentially plural and multivocal nature of social memories, and demonstrate the intricate connection between transnational, national and sub-national politics. Readers seeking a more nuanced and complex understanding of the past and of its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.

De Jiao ("Teaching of Virtue") is a China-born religious movement, based on spirit-writing and rooted in a tradition of "halls for good deeds", that emerged in Chaozhou during the Sino-Japanese war. This book relates the fascinating process of its spread throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s, and, more recently, from Thailand and Malaysia back to post-Maoist China and elsewhere. Through a richly-documented multi-site ethnography of De Jiao congregations in the PRC, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, Bernard Formoso examines the adaptation of Overseas Chinese to sharply contrasted national polities, and the projective identity they build in relation to China. De Jiao is of special interest because its organization and strategies strongly reflect the managerial habits and entrepreneurial ethos of Overseas Chinese businessmen. It also utilizes symbols of the Chinese civilisation whose greatness it claims to champion from the periphery. A central theme of the study is the role that such a religious movement may play to promote new forms of identification to the motherland as substitutes for loosened genealogical links. The book also offers a comprehensive interpretation of the contemporary practice of fu ji spirit-writing, and reconsiders the relation between unity and diversity in Chinese religion.

The city-state of Singapore has, for decades, been an international anomaly, combining an advanced and open economy with reduced civil liberties and press freedom. This book analyses the country's media system, showing how ithas been structured -- like the rest of the political framework -- to provide maximum freedom of manoeuvre for the People's Action Party (PAP) government. Going beyond critique, the author explains how the PAP's "freedom form the press" model has achieved its extraordinary resilience and stability. One key factor was the PAP's early recognition that capitalism and the profit motive could be harnessed as a way to tame journalism. Second, the PAP exercised strategic self-restraint in the use of force, progressively turning to subtler means of control that are less prone to backfire on the state. Third, unlike many authoritarian regimes, the PAP remained open to ideas and change, even as it insulated itself from political competition. These strategies, while subject to strain and failure, have helped the PAP consolidate its authoritarian form of electoral democracy. Freedom form the Press is essential reading for those who are interested in Singapore's media and political system. Singapore's unique place on the world map of press freedom and democracy makes the book an important contribution to the comparative study of journalism and politics.

The idea of "Asian space" is undergoing a transformation as a result of rapid techological, economic, social and cultural changes. Following the shift to a global economy and an urban population explosion, Asian cities have projected as one of the mainstays of progress, national pride, identity, and positioning on the global stage. The extraordinary pace and intensity of the changes have created a situation unique in the history of urban development. Despite the immense of diversity of Asian countries, "Asia-ness" is often treated as a distinctive quality that has emerged from unique recent circumstances affecting Asian urbanizations as a whole. In Future Asian Space, 15 authors explore broad concepts relating to the creation and re-creation of "Asian space" and contemporary Asian identity, and their examination of different sites and research approaches illustrates the difficulty of pinpointing what "Asia-ness" is, or might become. Appropriate design and planning of cities is a critical elementin building a sustainable future and coping with environmental, social and cultural problems. Future Asian Space is designed to stimulate interests and engagement in discussions of the Asian city, and its trajectories in architecture and urbanism.

The development of medicine in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries has not been a simple imposition of European scientific medicine, but a complex and negotiated process that drew on Southeast Asian health experts, local medical traditions, and changing national and popular expectations. 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. Their findings call into question many of the claims based on medicalization and biopolitics that treat change as a process of rupture. While governments, both colonial and national, used their powers to institute policies that affected large numbers of people, much healthcare remained rooted in a more interactive and locally-mediated experience, in which tradition, adaptation and hybridization is as important as innovation and conflict. "Semi-subaltern" Western-trained doctors adn varied traditional healers, many of them women, were among the cultural brokers involved in the building of healthcare systems, and helped circulate mixed practices and ideas about medicine and health even as they found their place in new professional and social hierarchies in an era of globalization.

On the eve of the war against the South Vietnamese regime in 1964, the communist party strove to carve out a new productivist and political elite from the towns and villages of the country. According to a categorization of patriotic exemplarity devised by Ho Chi Minh, "avant-garde workers", "exemplary soldiers" and "new heroes" would fill the ranks of a "new model society", one in which political virtue would serve as the principle to mobilize the masses. This study present and analyzes the process by which "new heroes" were invented. It first develops a picture of what constituted heroes in Vietnamese tradition and history, and then shows how the new model, effectively a Sino-Soviet import, was imposed, only to be slowly distorted by its own cultural rationale and by specific objectives. Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than half a century to the reconstruction of the national imagination and the development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam.

Korean science is closely related to traditional Chinese technology, but Jeon Sang-woon's A History of Science and Technology in Koreafollows a different course of development. Building on Chinese foundations, Korean scientists, engineers and technicians developed technologies that were adapted to the natural elements, seasons and climate of the Korean peninsula. the writer develops this thesis by considering the creative legacy of Korean practitioners in a number of different areas: astronomy and meteorology ("the sciences of the heavens"), metal, glass and gunpowder ("the sciences of earth and fire"), printing, geography and carography. He concludes with a comparison of science and technology in Korea and Japan, and with a discussion of important scientists active in the Choson Period. The book is filled with new information and arguments, and frequently with deep insights. Much of what the author says will be useful for professional scholars in the history of science and technology and for general historians as well, as it provides topics for academic debate and fruitful research subjects for young scholars. the lavish illustrations support the writer's thesis and are themselves part of Korea's rich artistic heritage.

Singapore experiences substantial changes during the 14-year tenure of the country's second Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong (1990-2004). Coming after a long period of growth and stability, the period brought to office a new generation of political leaders who faced the task of sustaining and building the policies of their predecessors. There were social and cultural initiatives and significant challenges to the economy arising from the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the SARS outbreak in 2003. This volume examines the changes that took place during the Goh premiership and assesses its legacy. The 45 essays collected in this volume review a range of issues from domestic politics and foreign policy to economic development, society, culture, the arts and media.

At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration setting out a series of Millennium Development Goals. "MDG 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability" included the target of reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. This volume looks at access in terms of five key components and integrates them into the Index of Drinking Water Adequacy — IDWA for short. The substantive papers comprise international and intranational explorations based on IDWA estimates. Globally, IDWA estimates for 144 economies, have strong correlations with Human Development and Human Poverty Indexes and thus affirms the importance of investment in safe drinking water.