Southeast Asian History: Primary Sources

Images taken from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographic collection (CO 1069). The full collection can be seen on Flickr, and includes scenes from across the Asian continent, including China, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

Collection of more than 40,000 mostly 19th c. natural history works.

Comprises biodiversity materials and literature on Southeast Asia from Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM) and the NUS Libraries.

Included digital manuscripts, archives, sounds, maps and more. Some content only available at the British Library.

Moving Images of the British Empire. This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online.

Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV) / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) aims to be a world-class research institute for the study of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, with a focus on Indonesia and the ‘Dutch’ Caribbean.

Go to the advanced search function and limit your results to "photographs & pictorial works" and/or "visual material."

These late-19th- and early-20th-century trade cards and illustrations offer insight into European perspectives on the colonial experience.

The Malaysia Institute acts as a key coordination point for Malaysia-related activities across the ANU campus.

Includes some online archival materials such as photographs, press releases, audiovisual/sound recordings, maps, posters, government records and more.

The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a subset of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP). SAOA creates and maintains a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia.

Gateway for electronic resources on Southeast Asia, including photographs, interviews and video.

This collection contains digitized images, including photographs and slides, that librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists have deemed important to these fields of study will be added to the collection on an ongoing basis.

Identifies all of the references to Southeast Asia contained within the Ming Shi-lu, the annals of the emperors of Ming China (1368-1644), and provides them to readers in English-language translation.

Posters from South East Asia countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, The Philippines, and many more. The collection houses various types of posters, from socio-political, environmental, to radio and TV promotion.

A collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern Southeast Asia from Cornell University Library's John M. Echols Collection. The site provides online access to more than 350 books written in English and French.

UNESCO's World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

A collection of archival resources related to Commonwealth Studies.

Search for targeted topics such as: Correspondence between UK and Malaysia/Singapore; Index to British Colonial Office files pertaining to British Malaya; Sessional Papers, Acts, Govt Gazettes and misc. of the Malayan Region.

Photographs spanning over 100 years of history from around the world, taken from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographic collection of the United Kingdom's National Archives.

Archive focused on sharing and exploring the elements that make up Sarawak’s unique history and heritage through study of James Brooke's papers, artifacts, records, and more, along with connection to related collections.

Portal to multimedia collections about Africa.

SOAS holds archives and manuscripts relating to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific--primarily documenting major British missionary societies.

Assembled by the British collector Humphrey Winterton over about 30 years, the collection depicts the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape.

Pictures of objects collected in the Netherlands East Indies between 1870 and 1940.

Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV) / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) aims to be a world-class research institute for the study of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, with a focus on Indonesia and the ‘Dutch’ Caribbean.

The collection consists of some 3000 photographs from the period between 1860 and 1940. Most of them were taken by professional photographers who took pictures of landscapes and street life, in addition to photographing houses and factories and taking portrait and group photo.

In 1951, circa 12,500 Moluccans were transported from Java to the Netherlands. The photo collection of Museum Maluku provides an image of the Moluccans' history in the Netherlands and of the developments in the Moluccan community from 1951 up to the present.

The collection contains 4500 photographs pertaining to the former Dutch Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

22,200 images from 19th and 20th-century photo albums. The subject of all albums is travel, both within the Netherlands and abroad: to countries in Europe, as well as to the Middle East, the Far East and America.