Asia Incognita - Here be Dragons. Law Modernization in South-East Asia: Colonial and Post-Colonial Land Tenures in Indonesia and Malaysia

[Extract] For my contribution as a friend of Derek to a work to honour his memory, I have chosen a piece, jointly w1itten in the 1970s, which draws on the work that was done by Derek, and me, and my late husband, David Allan. Between 1967 and 1981 , we three produced 12 books together with a group of individual contributors.1 This was an enterprise, sponsored and financed by the Asian Development Bank and the Ford Foundation. Our task was to consider and propose improvements to the legal regime for supplying finance to 10 of the developing countries of Asia. I have no doubt that our sponsors thought we would manufacture a silver bullet in the shape of a legislative solution, the existence of which would be a condition of any lending. Their judgment was not correct. Giving this task to a trio of commercial lawyers, who were also comparative lawyers and legal historians, meant that the depth of the inquiry was not only more interesting for the three of us, but the search took much longer than was anticipated, and led us into unexpected fields.