Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Paul Kratoska In this issue, Danny Wong Tze Ken discusses the transition in the study of Malaysian history from a focus on the activities of Europeans to an Asian focus, and the recent emergence of amateur historians doing research and publishing online. Anthony Milner considers the timing of conversion to Islam in the Malay Peninsula. F. Andrew Smith details the life of a successful Penang merchant in the early 1800s and gives an idea of the complexity and risk associated with mercantile activity at the time. Bonny Tan’s article looks at the life of a young man who began his career as a library clerk in Singapore in 1895 at the age of 16, and at the time of his death from smallpox 20 years later was a translator and librarian for the President of the Chinese Republic. In ‘Constructing Colonial Benevolence’, Por Heong Hong considers the significance of photographs of leprosy patients in colonial Malaya. Finally, Jonathan Chan examines the way three novelists (Jin Zhimang, Anthony Burgess, and Han Suyin) who witnessed the Malayan Emergency first hand dealt with the conflict in their works of fiction. The cover illustration comes from a new publication in the MBRAS Monograph series. Knowing Singapore: The Evolution of Published Information in Europe, c.1500–1819, by Benjamin Khoo and Peter Borschberg, explores the numerous references to Singapore in European publications between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how European understandings of the region changed during this period. The book conclusively puts to rest the idea that Singapore was an obscure location with no history before the British East India Company created a trading station on the island in 1819. [End Page vi] Paul Kratoska Hon. Editor, JMBRAS Copyright © 2023 Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society