Maritime history Books

Book SynopsisOn 16 June 2021 the National Heritage Board announced the successful conclusion of the archaeological excavation of two shipwrecks at the eastern approach to Singapore. This maritime archaeology excavation, the largest in Singapore's waters, was conducted by the Archaeology Unit of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute over a six-year period. This book documents these two shipwrecks, complemented by essays on Singapore's maritime history, from Temasek in the fourteenth century through the emergence of country trade in the late eighteenth century. These two shipwrecks challenge us to rethink Singapore's history as globally connected, determined by what was happening on the seas in and around the island.

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Book SynopsisThe aim of this book is to explore ethnic, cultural and material changes in the transformative history(s) of oceans and seas, commodities and populations, mariners and ships and raiders and refugees in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to the Sulu-Mindanao region, or the ""Sulu Zone"".

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1981, ""The Sulu Zone"" has become a classic in the field of Southeast Asian History. The book deals with a fascinating geographical, cultural and historical ""border zone"" centred on the Sulu and Celebes Seas between 1768 and 1898, and its complex interactions with China and the West. The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system.How entangled commodities, trajectories of tastes, and patterns of consumption and desire that span continents linked to slavery and slave raiding, the manipulation of diverse ethnic groups, the meaning and constitution of ""culture,"" and state formation? James Warren responds to this question by reconstructing the social, economic, and political relationships of diverse peoples in a multi-ethnic zone of which the Sulu Sultanate was the centre, and by problematizing important categories like ""piracy"", ""slavery"", ""culture"", ""ethnicity"", and the ""state"". His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid ""forward movement"" of colonialism and modernity.It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers or traders. Often neglected by historians, the response of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia.

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Book SynopsisLo Jung-pang, a renowned professor at the University of California, Davis, completed a 600-page typed manuscript entitled China as a Sea Power, 1127-1368 in 1957, but he died without arranging for the book to be published. Bruce Elleman, who found the manuscript in the UC Davis archives in 2004, has digitized the manuscript and edited it for length and accuracy. Lo Jung-pang argued that during each of the three occasions when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and Tang dynasties, and Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), the beginning was made by coastal states when China was divided, the height was reached when China was strong and unified, and the decline took place when China weakened, the people became absorbed by internal affairs, and the policy of the state became directed to the north and the west. These cycles of maritime interest, lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction. Today a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang's book suggests questions that can be raised for study as events unfold in the years and decades to come.

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Book SynopsisAdmiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge, a Director in the Rotterdam chamber of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) for three decades during the early 17th century, set sail from the Dutch Republic in 1605. He launched an attack on Portuguese Melaka in 1606 and signed landmark treaties with the rulers of Johor (1606) and Ternate (1607). After his return to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1608 he wrote a series of epistolary reports and memoranda that were carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic, among them the renowned jurist Hugo Grotius, and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.These materials contributed to the formulation of early VOC policy for the Southeast Asian region in the period 1605?20, and they yield candid insights into key issues of trade, security and the diplomacy of regional polities and their relations with Spain and Portugal. Here translated into English for the first time, and presented with 70 illustrations and maps from the period, this collection of treaties, reports and excerpts from Matelieff's travelogue will be of great interest to students of Southeast Asian and early colonial history and of the history of international law.

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