Political Periodicals in Poland
| Author | Zbigniew Pelczynski |
| Published date | 01 September 1959 |
| Date | 01 September 1959 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1959.tb01940.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
298
NOTES AND REVIEW ARTICLES
believes that the classic accounts
of
Malay society given by early British scholar officials,
like Swettenham and Clifford, are often misleading. Though they were excellent Malay
scholars, they were only amateur sociologists. With an eye to literary effect, they tended to
dramatize the more sensational but unrepresentative aspects of Malay society. Moreover,
they wrote their books many years after the events they described. Mr. Gullick seems to
think they got nearest
to
the heart of the matter in the unpublished administrative reports
and diaries they wrote during their early careers. It is mainly this material that he has used.
Mr. Gullick presents a fascinating picture of Malay indigenous political institutions as
a working system of social control and leadership.
He
has chapters on the Malay village
community, the sultanate, the ruling class, the chief in his district, law and war, economic
aspects of political leadership, and the cohesion of the state. Yet, from the point of view
of
method, one is left with a suspicion that Mr. Gullick may be trying to perform a conjuring
trick. Though he states his case with the utmost modesty, he seems to imply that a modern
historian, using anthropological techniques, may succeed in giving a more accurate descrip-
tion of Malay political structure as it was ninety years
ago
than the authors of the very
works which provide him with most of his material. Though Mr. Gullick has sifted a
lot
of data, it is all second-hand.
Is
it the kind of data which he, as an anthropologist, would
have collected had he been in Malaya in the
1870’s?
Finally, we come to Professor Lennox Mills’s disappointing book on modern Malayan
politics. The author
of
two authoritative historical works on that country, he has now
completed what amounts to the third volume of a trilogy, devoted to the political ferment
in between the Japanese Occupation and the recent transfer of power. With his usual
industry and eye for detail Professor Mills has ransacked the printed sources. His facts, as
far as they
go,
are always accurate. Yet as a ‘political appraisal’ the book never succeeds
in
coming to life. The author is discreetly silent
as
to when he was last in Malaya, but there
is
good reason to believe that it was at least twenty years ago. He has relied too much on his
own recollections of a colonial Malaya which is as dead as the dodo, on the outmoded
views of British ex-officials who retired many years ago, and on the soothing official ‘hand-
outs’ of the organization men
of
the Malayan Information Department. Moreover, when
he draws on the writings
of
others better informed than he is on recent events, he often does
so
without proper acknowledgement. His best sections are
on
the place
of
rubber in the
Malayan economy; his worst are on the political behaviour of the Chinese.
Because of the ground it covers, the book will
no
doubt commend itself to the general
reader in search
of
an up-to-date book on modern Malaya, but one cannot escape the con-
clusion that Professor Mills would have done well either to stick to history or else to get
out of his library in Minnesota and
go
and see for himself.
POLITICAL PERIODICALS
IN
POLAND’
ZBIGNIEW PELCZYNSKI
Pembroke College, Oxford
THE
state
of
political studies in Poland reflects the country’s mixed allegiance, culturally
to the West, politically to the East. Traditionally, the Poles tend
to
approach political
1
Political
Studies
has recently received two samples of Polish politics periodicals-
Section
G
(Law) of the
Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska
of Lublin; and
Zeszyty
Teoretyczno-Polityczne
(Ksiazka i Wiedza, Warsaw). Mr. Pelczynski’s note is
designed to indicate the place of these publications in relation to other politics periodicals
in Poland.
(Ed.)
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