's Musandam Peninsula, a fissured mass of black rock. Deep fiords cut into the land, their sheer sides rising out of the water as high as 5,000 feet. Largely devoid of shrubs or trees, the peninsula's interior consists of rows of wind-worn ridges, interrupted only by jagged peaks.
Sovereignty over the Musandam, barren as it may be, has made Oman a nation of paramount importance. On a clear day, the peninsu- la's Shihuh tribesmen, herding goats near their stone huts, can gaze across the Strait of...
Thirty years ago, two new nations achieved independence from Brit- ain.One was prosperous Ghana in West Africa; it has since become a textbook case of Third World economic folly, official corruption, and chronic repression. The other, in Southeast Asia, was Malaysia (born as Malaya), which had just weathered a bitter communist guerrilla war. Largely ignored American headline writers, Malaysia's politi- cians quietly found ways to overcome deep-seated antipathies among its Malay, Chinese, and Indian...
"The people of Muscat seemed to me to be the cleanest, neatest, best-dressed, and most gentlemanly of all the Arabs that I had ever yet seen," recalled J. S. Buckingham, a British traveler, after a visit in 1816.
Buckingham's observations are pre- served in historian J. B. Kelly's Britain and the Persian Gulf (Oxford, 1968), a survey of British involvement in the region from 1795 to 1880. As Kelly makes clear, Britain's ever-growing commercial and political interests in the Gulf ensured t...
J. W. W. Birch was an odd choice to be the first British adviser in Perak. An imperious colonial bureaucrat with 30 years of service, mostly in Ceylon, he had little knowledge of Malaya's customs or its language. But he exemplified the patriotism and starchy self-confidence of the Victorian Englishman, convinced, as historian Joseph Kennedy put it, that "if one Mr. Birch died, another would take his place."
Upon his arrival in Perak in 1874, Birch, along with his deputy, Captain T....
"What went wrong?"
Those were the first words of The Malay Dilemma (1970), by Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a young, up-and-coming Malaysian politician and future prime minister. Little more than a decade after their nation had achieved independence from Britain, many Malaysians were asking themselves the same question.
On May 13, 1969, a dozen years of relative harmony among Ma- lays, Chinese, and Indians had ended abruptly in bloody street riots that racked Kuala Lumpur. The cause of...
have been written Europeans. And, until recently, argues Syed Hussein Alatas of the University of Singapore, most have perpetuated The Myth of the Lazy Native (Cass, 1977).
In a colorful tour of earlier historical writings, Alatas cites dozens of examples of this stereotype. In 1927, for example, Hugh Clifford flatly stated that the Ma- lay "never works if he can help it, and often will not suffer himself to be in- duced or tempted into doing so by offers of the most extravagant wages."
But,...