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This article focuses on how political agendas and existing societal circumstances in three Southeast Asian regions impacted the early history of immigrant Hokkiens, one of the most prominent Chinese ethnic groups. The article argues that different Hokkien actions and their outcomes were shaped or highly influenced by the prevailing agenda and political struggles of local rulers and /or colonial powers, resulting in selective adaptive behaviour as 'challengers' or 'cooperators'. There were prominent immigrant Hokkien challengers to the status quo in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippine Islands, but both cooperators with the prevailing status quo and challengers to it were common in Hoi An, Vietnam. By contrast, cooperators were conspicuous in Batavia and in the colonial Dutch East Indies., The study of the overseas Chinese and their communities in early modern Southeast Asia has drawn considerable scholarly attention for some time. One area still needing further inquiry is the [...]

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border 'building' was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a 'nation', which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a 'state'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Qing China's interaction with Southeast Asia in the context of border enforcement, that is, the control of movement, and expression of sovereignty. It employs both the imperial logic and the commoners' daily logic to consider how these three topics interacted with each other in the eighteenth century. I argue that the Qing court considered these issues not in terms of population, territory, or maritime prohibition, but from a standpoint of security and stability, around which the border concerns, ways of controlling people, and sovereignty were all organized. For commoners, simply making a living was the primary concern and the court's overseas activities had little to do with identity, or an anachronistic concept of sovereignty. The Qing court forbade journeys to Luzon and Batavia, the "barbarian countries" dominated by Spanish and Dutch colonial powers, but intentionally left the door open for commoners to travel to Vietnam. However, when those Chinese people stirred up trouble in Vietnam and returned to the maritime border of China, the Qing government quickly intervened. It had its own logic for enforcing domestic sovereignty and controlling the migration of people between countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]