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Rearview Mirror Chronicles

Keith Hockton

Keith Hockton, FRAS, is a writer, publisher, and award-winning podcaster based in Penang, Malaysia, with a deep passion for uncovering the stories that shaped our world. As the Southeast Asia Editor for International Living magazine, Keith explores the intersections of history, culture, and modern life across the region.

A dynamic lecturer and storyteller, he speaks internationally on Southeast Asian politics, economics, and history—bringing the past to life with clarity, wit, and insight. Keith is also a proud Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and is on a mission to make history not only accessible but genuinely entertaining for everyone.


His published books include:

• Atlas of Australian Dive Sites - Travellers Edition (Harper Collins Australia, 2003).

• Penang - An inside guide to its historic homes, buildings, monuments and parks (MPH Publishing, 2012; 2nd Edition 2014; 3rd Edition 2017).

• Festivals of Malaysia (Trafalgar Publishing, 2015).

• The Habitat Penang Hill: A pocket history (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)

• Alana and the Secret Life of Trees at Night (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)

• Penang Then & Now: A Century of Change in Pictures (Entrepot Publishing, 2019; 2nd Edition 2021
• Bersama Lima - Five Together (Entrepot Publishing, 2022)


www.entrepotpublishing.com





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  • 25 episodes
  • Avg 39 min
  • English

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Episodes 25

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  • S1 · E166
    June 27 · 8 min

    History’s Strangest Questions: Where does the name America come from?

    Send us Fan Mail Everyone knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Italian explorer. The New World. The map. Case closed. Except it isn't. Current research points to someone else entirely. Someone hiding in plain sight for five hundred years. Someone the history books never mention. The answer, when it comes, is not what you'd expect. And once you hear it — you won't easily unhear it. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

  • S1 · E165
    June 27 · 52 min

    The Dutch East India Company — Every Port Has a Price (Part Three)

    Send us Fan Mail The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind. In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang, Bali, Lombok, Malacca were not merely trading posts. They were the architecture of a system. A system designed to extract, to control, and to profit at any human cost necessary. What does that legacy look like today? Who inherited the model the Dutch pioneered? And what does it mean to stand in these harbours, two centuries later, knowing what happened here? From the ruins of Batavia to the rise of the modern corporation, from the islands where nutmeg once cost more than gold to the city-state that turned colonial infrastructure into a miracle of self-invention — this is the story of what the VOC left behind. Every port has a price. The question is — who paid it? Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

  • S1 · E162
    June 21 · 49 min

    The Dutch East India Company — Spies, Spices and the Birth of the Stock Market (Part One)

    Send us Fan Mail One man. A stolen map. The birth of modern capitalism. In 1583, a young Dutchman talked his way into the heart of Portugal's Asian empire — and spent six years quietly copying its most jealously guarded secrets. Routes. Charts. The knowledge that underpinned a century of Portuguese dominance over the world's most lucrative trade. When he sailed home, everything changed. Within two decades, the Dutch had smashed the Portuguese monopoly, invented the tradeable share, built the world's first stock exchange — and accidentally created the world's first financial scandal in the process. The Dutch East India Company didn't just dominate global trade. It rewrote the rules of money itself. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

  • S1 · E163
    June 21 · 1 hr 4 min

    The Dutch East India Company —Nutmeg: The Spice They Traded Manhattan For (Part Two)

    Send us Fan Mail What if the most valuable commodity on earth — more precious than gold, more coveted than silk — grew in just one place? Six tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Indonesian sea, surrounded by reefs, monsoons, and men willing to kill to keep it that way. This is the story of nutmeg. The spice in your kitchen cupboard that once drove empires to war, sent Samuel Pepys to the docks at midnight to buy from black-market sailors, and inspired the Dutch East India Company to commit atrocities so complete they nearly wiped an entire people from the earth. And at the end of it all? The English walked away with one small island. The Dutch handed them something else in return — a modest patch of land on the eastern seaboard of North America. You may have heard of it. They called it Manhattan. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

  • S1 · E164
    June 20 · 27 min

    The Flying Tigers, CAT, Air America — An Unbroken Thread: The Legacy (Part Three)

    Send us Fan Mail They flew wars that officially never happened. They built a nation that might not exist without them. They were civilians on paper and combat veterans in reality — and most of them came home to silence. This is the final chapter of the trilogy that began with the Flying Tigers and the Hump crews, and continued through the collapse of Nationalist China, the birth of Civil Air Transport, and the long secret war stretching from Korea to the fall of Saigon. Now we ask the question those two episodes were always building toward: what is the legacy? From the Taiwan economic miracle that CAT helped make possible, to the veterans and families still fighting for recognition decades later. From the wreckage still emerging from Himalayan glaciers, to the Civil Air Transport Association — the organisation that refused to let this history disappear, and who honoured me with Honorary Membership to help tell their story. Nearly forty years. One unbroken thread. Men who kept going when everything argued for stopping. This is what they left behind. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

Showing 21–25 of 25 episodes