Among the groups of workers whose labour built Singapore in the 20th century were women who travelled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as prostitutes. This study explores the trade in women and children in Asia, and looks at the daily lives of prostitutes in the colonial city.

This history describes and analyses brothel prostitution in Singapore between 1870 and 1940. The vital role of Chinese and Japanese prostitutes in sustaining Singapore's pre-war economy and society has not been fully recognized. Starting with village backgrounds in rural China and Japan, andthe hazards of the trade in women and children, the author follows the prostitutes through their encounters with brothel life in general, and in particular explores their routines and crises of earning, spending, social relations, leisure, mobility, diseases, and death.

"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."--

This is an innovative study of how British Colonial rule and society in Malayan towns and plantations transformed immigrants into British subjects.

Explores Sino-Japanese relations through encounters that took place between each country's people living at the margins of empire.

Over the past two decades, Singapore has advanced rapidly towards becoming a both a global city-state and a key nodal point in the international economic sphere. These developments have caused us to reassess how we understand this changing nation, including its history, population, and geography, as well as its transregional and transnational experiences with the external world. This collection spans several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and draws on various theoretical approaches and methodologies in order to produce a more refined understanding of Singapore and to reconceptialize the challenges faced by the country and its peoples.

Prostitution has always fascinated the public and bewildered policy makers. Reframing Prostitution explores several aspects of this multidimensional phenomenon, examining different ways in which prostitution is and was being practised in different places and different times, best practices in the regulation of prostitution as well as wider social and psychological issues, such as the construction of prostitution as incivility or of prostitutes as a socially problematic group or as victimised individuals. The book also addresses normative questions with respect to policy making, unmasking the purposes behind certain societal reactions towards prostitution as well as proposing innovative solutions that could reconcile societal fears of exploitation and abuse while meeting the rights and needs of individuals voluntarily involved in prostitution. With contributions across social science disciplines, this international collection presents a valuable discussion on the importance of empirical studies in various segments of prostitution, highlights social contexts around it and challenges regulatory responses that frame our thinking about prostitution, promoting fresh debate about future policy directions in this area.

Listen to podcast on “Slaving Zones, Contemporary Slavery and Citizenship: Reflections from the Brazilian Case”. In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory. This theory has recently taken the field of Mediterranean slavery studies by storm, and the challenge posed by the editors was to see if the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory could be applied in the wider context of long-term global history. The results of this experiment are promising. In the Introduction, Jeff Fynn-Paul points out over a dozen ways in which the contributors have added to the concept of ‘Slaving Zones’, helping to make it one of the more dynamic theories of global slavery since the advent of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.