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...

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,...

John Stuart Mill has held the attention of the reading public of the Western world longer than any other 19th-century philosopher, with the notable exception of Karl Marx.
Each man is known as theorist of one central idea. Marx is read by his admirers as a champion of equality. Mill is read for his words on liberty, words that have contributed much to the debates of our own time about the freedom of dissenters, minorities, and women. He was always controversial. William Gladstone, the great Liberal...

Not since the 1920s has the United States experienced such topsy- turvy economic change.

Steven Lagerfeld and Robert W. Hodge take a look at socialism in the U.S.

Middletown, published in 1929 by Robert and Helen Lynd, was the nation's first sociological bestseller. Together with a sequel, Middletown in Transition (1937), written during the Great Depression, it secured a reputation for Muncie, Indiana, as the archetypal middle American city. Muncie, rhapsodized the editors of Life in 1937, was "every small U.S. city from Maine to California," a place where pollsters and market re- searchers could flock to take the pulse of America.
Life claimed...

Unlike. many European writers, the American novelist rarely speaks of class. As Lionel Trilling once observed, "the great characters of American fiction, such, say, as Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo, tend to be mythic.. .and their very freedom from class gives them a large and glowing generality." In the United States, he believed, "the real ba- sis of the [English] novel has never ex- isted-that is, the tension between a middle class and an aristocracy."
American novelists...