"First published in 1981, ""The Sulu Zone"" has become a classic in the field of Southeast Asian History. The book deals with a fascinating geographical, cultural and historical ""border zone"" centred on the Sulu and Celebes Seas between 1768 and 1898, and its complex interactions with China and the West. The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system. How entangled commodities, trajectories of tastes, and patterns of consumption and desire that span continents linked to slavery and slave raiding, the manipulation of diverse ethnic groups, the meaning and constitution of ""culture, "" and state formation? James Warren responds to this question by reconstructing the social, economic, and political relationships of diverse peoples in a multi-ethnic zone of which the Sulu Sultanate was the centre, and by problematizing important categories like ""piracy"", ""slavery"", ""culture"", ""ethnicity"", and the ""state"". His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid ""forward movement"" of colonialism and modernity. It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers or traders. Often neglected by historians, the response of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia."--

Among the groups of workers whose labour built Singapore in the 20th century were women who travelled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as prostitutes. This study explores the trade in women and children in Asia, and looks at the daily lives of prostitutes in the colonial city.

This comparative study of piracy and maritime violence provides a fresh understanding of European overseas expansion and colonisation in Asia. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A unique volume that addresses how a thalassographic frame opens up new and important questions for the study of history

Places for Happiness explores two of the most important performance-based activities in the Philippines: the processions and Passion Plays associated with Easter and the mass-dance phenomenon known as “street dancing.” The scale of these handcrafted performances in terms of duration, time commitment, and productive labor marks the Philippines as one of the world’s most significant and undervalued performance-centered cultures. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, William Peterson examines how people come together in the streets or on temporary stages, celebrating a shared sense of community and creating places for happiness. The first half of the book focuses on localized and often highly idiosyncratic versions of the Passion of Christ. Peterson considers not only what people do in these events, but what it feels like to participate. The book’s second half provides a window into the many expressions of “street dancing.” Street dancing is inflected by localized indigenous and folk dance traditions that are reinforced at school and practiced in conjunction with religious civic festivals. Peterson identifies key frames that shape and contain the individual in the Philippines, while tracking how the local expands its expressive home by engaging in a dialogue with regional, national, and diasporic Filipino imaginaries. Ultimately Places for Happiness explores how community-based performance responds to and fulfills basic human needs. Many Filipinos rely on family members and immediate neighbors for support and sustenance, and community-based performance assumes a unique and leading role in defining, reinforcing, and celebrating shared belief systems. By bringing forth the internal, phenomenological, and embodied aspects of a range of community-based practices contributing to human happiness, the book offers a cultural framework that interweaves the individual experience with that of the collective, plotting out what resides inside the body through the coordinates of culture.