Selected Publications
Books
- Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2020)
- Forgotten Wars: the End of the Britain's Asian Empire (Allen Lane/Penguin: London, 2007), with Christopher Bayly
- Forgotten Armies: the Fall of British Asia, 1941-45 (Allen Lane/Penguin: London, 2004), with Christopher Bayly
- The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999 [Paperback edn., 2001])
- Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), ed. With Sunil S. Amrith
- Histories of Health in Southeast Asia: Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century (University of Indiana Press: Bloomington, 2014), ed. with Sunil S. Amrith
Articles and chapters
- 'Singapore, 1915, and the birth of the Asian underground', Modern Asian Studies, 47 (2013), pp. 1782-1811
- 'The Malay World, besides empire and nation', Indonesia and the Malay World 42, 120 (2013), pp. 273-90
- ‘Sites of Asian interaction’, Special Issue, Modern Asian Studies, 46, 2 (2012), ed. with Sunil Amrith, including 'Sites of Asian Interaction: An Introduction’, pp. 249-56
- ‘The tools of transition: education and development in modern Southeast Asian history’, in Michael Woolcock, et al eds., History and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 193-211
- ‘The British “Malayans”’, in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers and expatriates: Britons over the seas (Oxford History of the British Empire companion series: Oxford, 2010), pp. 233-268
- ‘Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914’, in A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History ( London, 2002), pp. 141-166
- ‘The State and Information in Modern Southeast Asian History’, in Yao Souchou, ed., House of Glass: Culture, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia (ISEAS: Singapore, 2001), pp. 213-240
- ‘Lim Chin Siong and “the Singapore Story”’, in Jomo K.S. and Tan Jing Quee, eds., Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History (Forum: Kuala Lumpur, 2001), pp. 1-56. New edition, ed. Poh Soo Kai (SIRD & Pusat Sejarah Rakyat: Kuala Lumpur, 2015).
- 'Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: the Making of a Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore’, Sojourn, 12, 2 (1997), pp. 261-92
- ‘“Asian values” and Southeast Asian histories,’ Historical Journal, 40, 2 (1997), pp. 507-17
- ‘The Politics of the Forest in Colonial Malaya’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 1 (1997), pp. 1-29
- ‘New Malays, New Malaysians: Nationalism, Society and History’, Southeast Asian Affairs 1996 (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: Singapore, 1996), pp. 238-55
Other Publications
- ‘Japan's gigantic second world war gamble’, The Guardian, 7 September 2009