Editor’s Note

At the end of 2014 Dr Cheah Boon Kheng stepped down as editor of the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) after serving in that position for nearly 17 years. Largely as a result of the high professional standards he maintained for the journal, JMBRAS has been accepted for inclusion in Elsevier’s Scopus citation index starting in 2015. Scopus will track citations of JMBRAS articles in other publications and is used both by the Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds in calculating world university rankings.

In recent years JMBRAS has made strides in adjusting to modern standards of scholarly communication. Since 2010 university libraries have been able to offer electronic access to current issues of JMBRAS through Project MUSE, a digital distribution service operated by Johns Hopkins University Press. In addition, all back numbers of the journal, starting with the first issue of the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1878, are now available in digital format through JSTOR. Readers from 112 countries in every continent except Antarctica downloaded JMBRAS articles through JSTOR in 2014, and Project MUSE reported 1,749 article downloads for the year.

Every scholarly journal has a distinct personality. While editors set parameters that position them in terms of time, place and subject matter, journals are shaped by the authors who write for them and the people who read them. Those that survive over long periods of time pass through several generations of readers, writers and editors, and their character inevitably changes. JMBRAS is now in its 138th year of publication.

British officials posted to outlying districts of Malaya in the early years of British intervention, a process that began in 1874, entered a world that was little known in Europe. They explored the physical environment of Malaya and the history, society and culture of the people among whom they worked, and reported their discoveries in official correspondence, talks delivered before learned societies, and in some cases in articles submitted to the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The way they approached their material has a distinctly old-fashioned air about it and their work is burdened by the opprobrium now attached to colonial rule, but much of the information they gathered would otherwise be irretrievably lost, and this material remains of considerable value to scholars and local residents alike. The journal dealt primarily with the parts of the Malay world that were in one way or another under British colonial administration: the Straits Settlements (basically Penang, Melaka and Singapore), the nine Malay states in the peninsula (Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Negri Sembilan, Pahang, Perak, Perlis, Selangor and Trengganu), Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo (now Sabah). These territories remain the focus of JMBRAS today.

Elsewhere in Asia, branches of the Royal Asiatic Society were set up in Korea (1900), Hong Kong (1847–59; revived in 1959), Shanghai (the North China Branch, 1847–1952; revived in 2006), India (where there were branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore, Madras, and Bihar), Sri Lanka (1845) and Japan (the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1872). Many of these organizations published journals, and several maintained libraries with significant collections of books and manuscripts.

In Britain’s other major Southeast Asian colony, Burma, a Research Society was formed in 1910 and began publishing a journal the following year. The society was dissolved in 1980, and the journal ceased publication. Similar organizations, and comparable publications, appeared elsewhere in the region. The Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (presently called in English the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) was established in 1851 and published the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia] until 2013, when the journal and the Institute’s monographs were taken over by the Dutch commercial publisher Brill. The École française d’Extrême-Orient was founded in 1900 and had its base in Hanoi until Vietnam became independent, when it shifted to France. The first issue of its Bulletin appeared in 1901. The Siam Society and its journal were born in...