Another influential paradigm was that of pluralism or plural society presented by J.S. Furnivall, a British scholar and administrator, who produce detailed and insightful studies of the political economy of British Burma and the Netherlands East Indies (1939, 1956). He drew attention to the significance of the overseas Chinese and Indian trading communities in South-East Asian colonial society which functioned as economic intermediaries between the European and native populations. In particular, the developing urban areas or colonial entrepots of the region like Singapore, Batavia (akarta), Rangoon and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) came to be increasingly dominated by Asian immigrants and Europeans. Furnivall's conception of a distinctive type of colonial system in which different ethnic groups comprise distinct 'economic castes' and keep to their own socio-cultural worlds, meeting only in the market place, has been subject to detailed scrutiny, criticism and refinement in later studies of ethnicity in South East Asia. Yet he, like Boeke, saw colonial society as sharply divided, although for Fumivall 'the conflict between rival economic interests tends to be exacerbated by racial diversity' (in Evers, 1980a: 88). We shall return to concepts of pluralism and ethnicity in Chapters 2 and 6