lt was during this period of late colonialism that we find the first real evidence of reflection and debate about the nature of South East Asian societies and political systems, both in the writings of Western observers and of indigenous scholars, especially those who led nationalist movements. These writings usually focused on a particular colonial dependency rather than the region as a whole, and they began to concentrate on the effects of the interaction between Western and Eastern socio-cultural, economic and political systems. What more there have been very few concepts which have managed to enjoy a lasting influence on the course of sociological and anthropological discussion and analysis after the Second World War (but see Evers, 1980a. 1980b). One such concept was that of social and economic dualism formulated by the Dutch scholar and colonial administrator, J.H. Boeke, in a doctoral dissertation sub- mitted in 1910 (and see Boeke, 1953). Boeke observed that the Euro- American-dominated expanding world economy had brought great material benefit to the West, but at the expense of the impoverishment of rural communities in such places as the Netherlands East Indies (Evers, 1980b: 2-3) He saw colonial capitalism as socially and economically "destructive" to native societies, though in his view there were also social and cultural reasons internal to Oriental peasant communities which contributed to their lack of capacity to respond to Western capitalism. Therefore, for Boeke colonial society was sharply divided between a modern, European-dominated capitalist sector and a traditional, Oriental subsistence sector, each characterized by a different set of economic and cultural values and features We shall examine this concept of a dual society in Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume.