The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy and the Historical Imagination: Problematizing Global-Local Interconnections and Interdependencies
Type: article
Abstract: I Introduction: Problems of Definition 1. Space In contemporary ethnohistorical studies of Southeast Asia, the 'zone' and!or 'border' have recently become chosen metaphors for theorising the historically complex and contradictory ways in which cultural difference and ethnic diversity have been articulated in social relations and in political and economic practise across time. This paper aims to explore global cultural interconnections and interdependencies in the Southeast Asian world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular reference to the 'Sulu Zone' [Dick 1993: 6; Warren 1981]. The paper also aims to enhance critical understanding and discussion of historiographical methods and models used in problematizing of economic and cultural 'border zones' in a changing global-local context. My emphasis is on a 'zone' created through the intersections of geography, culture and history cen tered around the Sulu and Celebes seas, as well as China's and the West's complicated place within it. As cross-cultural flows of trade goods, technology, people and information intensified in speed and volume in late eighteenth century Southeast Asia, the localised borders of states and economic regions were becoming ever more porous. Did the world capitalist economy at that time create 'borderless worlds'? Or did borders - cultural, national or otherwise prove to be more resistant and tenacious orvulnerable to the European presence and economic expansion? As some borders broke down, others were erected, both between and within nations, states and empires. For ex ample, while Sulu desperately wanted to become a part of the East Asian global-regional economy and Britain's 'push into Asia', Chinese exclusivism and xenophobia were on the rise in the region. The southern Chinese border was forced open to the west in the 1840s, but new 'borders' had already been forged or imposed in the Sulu region and elsewhere in eastern Indonesia because of the China connection and economic conditions in that particular area. While captive labour power from all across Southeast Asia was introduced into the 'Zone's' space, comprising the Sultanate's
Author: Warren, J.F.
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W573271424