James Francis WARREN is Professor of Southeast Asian Modern History at Murdoch University, having previously held positions at the Australian National University and Yale University. He has also been a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has been awarded grants by the Social Science Research Council and the Australia Research Council and is a Fellow of The Australian Academy of Humanities. In 2003, he was awarded the Centenary Medal of Australia for service to Australian society and the Humanities in the study of Ethnohistory. Professor Warren's other major publications include Rickshaw Coolie: A People's History of Singapore, 1880-1940 (1986); At the Edge of Southeast History (1987); Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution and Singapore Society, 1870-1940 (1993); The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy and the Historical Imagination (1998); and Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity (2001). He lives in Perth, Western Australia with his wife Carol, an anthropologist, and daughter Kristin, a wildlife medicine veterinarian and conservationist.

First 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.