Turbulent Waters: Sea Raiding in Early Modern South East Asia

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Between 1500 and 1860 piracy in South East Asia was a multinational enterprise, involving European, American, Chinese, Japanese, and indigenous sea raiders. Although Western pirates occasionally made their way into South East Asian waters, they never posed as much of a threat to the prosperity and stability of the area as the buccaneers had done in the Caribbean. Their presence virtually disappeared in the archipelagos by the early eighteenth century. Chinese and Japanese pirates also sporadically infiltrated the area during the entire period, and indigenous forms of piracy continued and expanded throughout the whole region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.