An Economic History of Malaysia, c. 1800–1990. By John H. Drabble. London and New York: Macmillan Press and St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. xxiii, 320. $75 and £62.50, cloth; £20.50, paper

Malaysia is unusual even among Southeast Asia's highly open and (often) extremely rapidly growing economies. Beginning about 1905, and known as Malaya prior to independence from Britain in 1957, the country's prosperity was built on the world's greatest boom in any agricultural commodity—rubber. By 1929 Malaya's per capita income was substantially higher than Japan's. Although at independence still with so little manufacturing industry as to surprise even knowledgeable observers, Malaysia subsequently emerged as a showcase success among less developed countries. As such it figured prominently in W. W. Rostow's valedictory article in the New York Times on the Johnson administration. Through the last third of the century Malaysia continued to industrialize swiftly, with a combination of alternating export-oriented and import-substitution phases orchestrated through considerable, though not extreme, state intervention.