This monograph heeds Wright’s advice and explains how class analysis can help in understanding economic and geopolitical developments in Southeast Asian societies. The argument is not that class analysis comprehensively explains all matters of social reality, but that class analysis can expose the relations of economic exploitation in society and how they underpin social, political, and ideological structures. The aim is to understand economic exploitation across the region by emphasizing the ways in which production has been organized during the periods of the emergence, development, and growth of capitalist production.