Vicente Rafael – författare

The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium, and natural resources, such as copper. At the edges of three empires (the Qing empire in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and, eventually, French Colonial Vietnam), the Black Flags and their rivals sustained networks of power and dominance through the framework of political regimes. This lively history demonstrates the plasticity of borderlines, the limits of imposed boundaries, and the flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam.Imperial Bandits contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries.

Drawing on ethnographic research, Living Sharia examines the role of sharia in the sociopolitical processes of contemporary Malaysia. The book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims. Timothy Daniels explores how the way people think about sharia is often entangled with notions about race, gender equality, nationhood, liberal pluralism, citizenship, and universal human rights. He reveals that Malaysians’ ideas about sharia are not isolated from—nor always opposed to—liberal pluralism and secularism.Living Sharia will be of interest to scholars as well as to policy makers, consultants, and professionals working with global NGOs.

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress—or lack thereof—toward Western-style liberal democracy at the center of Thailand's narrative, but that view underestimates the importance of the colonial context. In particular, a long-standing relationship with China and the existence of a large and important Chinese diaspora within Thailand have shaped development at every stage.As the emerging nation struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were neither a colonial force against whom Thainess was identified, nor had they been able to fully assimilate into Thai society. Wasana Wongsurawat demonstrates that the Kingdom of Thailand's transformation into a modern nation-state required the creation of a national identity that justified not only the hegemonic rule of monarchy but also the involvement of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class upon whom it depended. Her revisionist view traces the evolution of this codependent relationship through the twentieth century, as Thailand struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, found itself an ally of Japan in World War II, and reconsidered its relationship with China in the postwar era.

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent historiography has placed progress—or lack thereof—toward Western-style liberal democracy at the center of Thailand’s narrative, but that view underestimates the importance of the colonial context. In particular, a long-standing relationship with China and the existence of a large and important Chinese diaspora within Thailand have shaped development at every stage.As the emerging nation struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were neither a colonial force against whom Thainess was identified, nor had they been able to fully assimilate into Thai society. Wasana Wongsurawat demonstrates that the Kingdom of Thailand’s transformation into a modern nation-state required the creation of a national identity that justified not only the hegemonic rule of monarchy but also the involvement of the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class upon whom it depended. Her revisionist view traces the evolution of this codependent relationship through the twentieth century, as Thailand struggled against colonial forces in Southeast Asia, found itself an ally of Japan in World War II, and reconsidered its relationship with China in the postwar era.

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but aware of the social and economic possibilities in this gray zone between two oppressive regimes.For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have settled in the city—Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka—and conflate this diverse population with the state actions of the People’s Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network. In this first English-language study of the Sino-Burmese, Mapping Chinese Rangoon examines the concepts of ethnicity, territory, and nation in an area where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence.