BOOK: Stefan EKLÖF AMIRELL, Pirates of Empire. Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN: 9781108594516, £ 75.00

  

(Source: CUP)

ABOUT THE BOOK

The suppression of piracy and other forms of maritime violence was a keystone in the colonisation of Southeast Asia. Focusing on what was seen in the nineteenth century as the three most pirate-infested areas in the region - the Sulu Sea, the Strait of Malacca and Indochina - this comparative study in colonial history explores how piracy was defined, contested and used to resist or justify colonial expansion, particularly during the most intense phase of imperial expansion in Southeast Asia from c.1850 to c.1920. In doing so, it demonstrates that piratical activity continued to occur in many parts of Southeast Asia well beyond the mid-nineteenth century, when most existing studies of piracy in the region end their period of investigation. It also points to the changes over time in how piracy was conceptualised and dealt with by each of the major colonial powers in the region - Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stefan Eklöf Amirell is Associate Professor in History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is also the President of the Swedish Historical Association and Sweden's delegate to the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS/CISH). Among his previous works are Pirates in Paradise: A Modern History of Southeast Asia's Maritime Marauders (2006) and several articles on piracy in Southeast Asia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Maps page vi

Preface vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Piracy in Global and Southeast Asian History 21

2 The Sulu Sea 42

3 The Strait of Malacca 96

4 Indochina 161

Conclusion 209

Epilogue: Piracy and the End of Empire 232

Bibliography 236

Index 257

More information with the publisher.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

SSRN PAPER: Timothy Louis SCHROER, Multinormativity in Western Arguments Regarding Punishment of the Boxers and their Patrons, 1900-1901 [Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series No. 2018-07]

(image source: Github)

Abstract:

Westerners applied multiple normative frameworks in debating policy toward China in the wake of the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and 1901. They variously claimed that treatment of China should be governed by the rules of international law, a code of honor, Christian teachings, the judgment of history, or ill-defined norms of civilization. At other times, however, Westerners called for violence against the Chinese without any meaningful normative basis. The law and the legal discipline have an imperializing character, as the law conceptually tends to subordinate other normative frameworks to itself and integrate them into its own normative order, dubbed law. The debate concerning China in 1900 illustrates that legal norms were inextricably and complexly entangled with other norms. It suggests that legal historians, if they are to grasp the past in its full richness, should attend to multiple normative frameworks beyond the law, since legal history cannot be divorced from its wider context. Moreover, scholars applying the lens of multinormativity should recognize that, at some point, norms end and a-normative arguments begin.

Read the full paper here.