need to be read Imaginative leap that has to be en may be more athlet no The purpose of writing it was in some part the res of an ideological interest, in some part the result of developments in the discipline. In an anted to show that the common people e not simply problems vern ments to 'handle, but themselves historical 'actors. But that might not suffice History from below would indeed have lost much of its social purpo well a its historiographical value, if it were not integrated in some y into what Sharpe calls mainstream history, and if it did not alter the perspectives of"mainstream his torians."An equal and opposite danger is that it would assert itself by denying others and come to regard itself as the mainstream, if not the whole river system. The roles of those above and those below would simply have been reversed, rather s a nationalist history might have altered the role of the colonialist. In Indonesia Sartono was at once pushing ahead with Sejarah Nasional, and writ ing his major book on the peasantry, Protest Movements in Rural Java." and he clearly found these endeavours complementary rather than contradictory. He saw his bo a contribution to the reconstruction of Indonesian history from an id-centric point of view. An analytical approach, he hoped, would shed more light on the whole matrix of social, economic and political structures forming the background of the great events of national history. This approach will in part eliminate the Neerlandocratic bias of Indonesian history on the one hand, and will make possible the reconstruction of historical patterns within an Indonesia-centric frame of reference on the other Li any other Filipino historians, Reynaldo Ileto studied the revolution of the 1890s, but, in his Payon and Revolution,» he studied it in a new light. How did the 'masses--to borrow a word from the title of Teodoro Agoncillo's earlier account of the revolution-perceive the ideas of nationalism brought from the West by the ilustrado elite? Their concept of"freedom was in fact not the same. For them the re olution was associated with a this-worldly version of the redemptive message of Christ, so often received through the passion plays of the Tagalog Easter Week. Ileto was influenced by a contemporary clash between the police and a militant sect in anila, and by reading Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels well as Benda and Sturtevant. The most novel feature of his work was its juxtaposition of Spanish sources with Tagalog ones. "To write history "from below" requires the proper use of and other sources "from below. Some of the documents Ileto used have proved unreliable, Glenn May has argued," but that does not destroy his basic argument: the peasants and the revolution are connected through the millenarian tradition, and not through an alien one, such as the use of the word"masses, implies It seems incredible to present a history of Singapore without the coolie, James E Wa eclared in the introduction to Rickshaw Coolie: A People's Histor re (1880-1940)." Supported, too, by oral evidence, his account of the rick shaw coolies was largely based on the coroner's records, several hundred volumes of urn