Stefan Eklöf Amirell. Pirates of Empire: Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia.

Abstract

Stefan Eklöf Amirell’s Pirates of Empire: Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia is a significant contribution to the understanding of piracy and predation in Southeast Asia in the age of empire. The age of empire is a protracted one, ranging from the seventeenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century, and encompassing the activities of early modern colonial empires—initially, the Dutch, English, and Spanish, and later of increasing American imperial naval presence. Intraimperial competition articulated through firepower as well as through quasi-legal notions of maritime sovereignty made for a complex and ambiguous discourse on non-European piracy, the constitutive elements of which are excellently summed up in the introduction. The spatial unit of inquiry at work comprises three areas in Southeast Asia—namely, the Sulu Sea in the Philippines; the Straits of Malacca, the shipping lanes around Singapore and the Riau Linga Archipelago; and finally, the northwest part of the South China Sea and the rivers of Indochina. These three regions shared important geographical features, peopled by skilled seafarers and small sultanates, who used maritime raiding as a political resource. The arrival of European colonists from the seventeenth century onward strained the precarious political and moral economy of the region, resulting in an escalation of maritime violence that Europeans designated as piracy.