Editor's Note

Throughout southeastern Asia, outsiders have often risen to high positions in business, religion, and—as advisors to local rulers—in politics. Prominent among them are individuals and families from the Hadramaut, in modern-day Yemen, and the present issue provides a glimpse of this history in an article entitled 'Āl al-'Aṭṭās and Ḥaḍramī Arab Migration to the Malay World', by Syed Farid Alatas. Individuals from within the region have also risen to high positions in places outside their own cultural milieus, and in an article entitled 'Malays in the Indochinese Peninsula: Adventurers, Warlords and Ministers', Nicolas Weber uses Vietnamese official records and Cam historical narratives to explain how an understanding of the power dynamics of the region allowed certain Malays to play an important role in the politico-military affairs of mainland southeast Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. A third article, by Pek Wee Chuen, provides an in-depth exploration of the activities of a different outside group, Chinese tin miners in Perak, and how the conflicts known as the Larut wars shaped the future of the Malay Peninsula. Finally, an article by Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja looks at the life and career of yet another outsider who became an insider, Thamboosamy Pillai, an influential south Indian business figure who achieved prominence in late 19th-century Malaya.

Rounding out this issue are articles about female defectors from the Malayan Communist Party by Mahani Musa, and the development of Malaysia's national oil company, PETRONAS, by Shakila Yacob, a portfolio of drawings of Penang by the artist Bryn Barnard, and a roundtable in which four scholars discuss Juno Parreñas' book Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, with responses from the author.

Finally, a translation of an article by Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias published in the early 1880s gives a first-hand account of Perak as seen by a French explorer, and a translation of an article by a Japanese doctor who practiced medicine in Malaya during the first half of the 20th century provides his understanding of the country as he explained it to a Japanese audience in a 1943 magazine article.