This essay presents how, during the Indochinese revolutionary wars of the 1960s and 1970s, the traditional image of rebels inspired by moral causes or socioeconomic grievances was superseded by an image of purely materialistic, rational insurgents. Economists studied revolutions from two...

The principal cause of the 1930s depression in Southeast Asia lay outside the region — through a sharp contraction in demand for the region’s major commodity exports. But it had important internal causes too: an oversupply of primary commodities and an increasing scarcity of new agricultural...