Piracy and surreptitious activities in the Malay Archipelago and adjacent seas, 1600-1840 Edited by Y.H. TEDDY SIM Singapore: Springer, 2014. Pp. 189. Maps, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. This provocatively titled volume is timely given that piracy and associated maritime violence is an ongoing concern in Asian waters. This edited volume sets out two key aims: first, to explore the phenomenon of piracy and surreptitious activities (such as smuggling or raiding) and the linkages between these activities and war and the economy; the second aim is to examine piracy and surreptitious activities with direct reference to subregions of the Malay Archipelago and the adjacent seas. In the introductory chapter, editor Y.H. Teddy Sim provides a good overview of existing scholarship relating to piracy, and more broadly, to violence and lawlessness at sea in Asia, and this helps to situate this volume within existing scholarly discourse on maritime violence in Asian waters. The pre-nineteenth-century focus of this volume is valuable as each chapter makes the case that the local and regional forces at play are just as significant as the interplay with external forces (such as the Iberians and East India companies). What is particularly commendable is that multiple perspectives on piracy are presented, with European sources often interplayed against indigenous sources (such as the Hikayat Siak and letters from Sultan Bayan of Maguindanao to Dutch officials) to great effect, bringing new voices to the fore, hence developing our understanding of the history and context of piracy in the archipelago. Several chapters explore the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) and the Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia. In a chapter on early modern Malay warfare, Timothy Barnard includes the VOC as part of the Siak and Johor sultanates' statecraft and regional rivalries. Here is a tightly framed study of the power play between the rival Malay states, culminating in an attack on the Siak capital of Mempura (p. 19). In a chapter on Dutch privateering, Peter Borschberg explores why this practice quickly became essential to the VOC's survival. Borschberg describes the VOC as behaving 'like a drug addict' (p. 48) in its compulsion for privateering. His analogy aptly captures the intensity of the VOC's connection to revenues gained from privateering as well as its dependency on these revenues. This observation is provocative but also insightful as too often scholars tend to generalise that the lure of profits drove the East India companies without examining the juncture at which the decision to embark on privateering took place. …