Few historians have been as influential over the past three decades in the writing of Southeast Asian history as James Warren. Pirates, prostitutes and pullers is a collection of essays drawn principally from his major works on the region over the last 30 years: The Sulu zone (1980), Rickshaw coolie (1986), and Ah Ku and Karayuki-san (1993). The essays showcase Warren's innovations in theorising new approaches to Southeast Asia's past, as well as his knack for telling great stories. But more than just that, Pirates is also about the author's own personal and scholarly journey. Just as Warren has shaped how we imagine Southeast Asia, by his own admission Southeast Asia has irrevocably left deep impressions on him, as an historian and as a person.

In Pirates, Southeast Asia's trans-national past is brought to life through a careful, disciplined, yet creative treatment of archival sources. One of the outstanding innovations that grounded the research and arguments put forward in both Rickshaw coolie and Ah Ku and Karayuki-san was the use of photographs and coroner's records, and in this book Warren demonstrates through the use of selections from his earlier works how important it is for historians to recognise unlikely windows into pasts, lives and experiences that might have otherwise been lost forever.

The book begins with seven essays on a polity and world that Warren calls ‘the Sulu zone’. Here, his focus is on the trans-national and inter-regional connectedness that characterised the area of the Sulu and Celebes seas. His hypothesis on the importance of these interactions within the Sulu Zone is that the zone itself is a wonderful example of how ethnically and culturally diverse local forms were being concurrently shaped by extrinsic forces. This, the author argues persuasively, was due to the zone's wider connection with an emerging world economic system, and that the process could be understood as being part of the beginnings of modern economic globalisation and international integration. Yet at the same time, the story of the Sulu Zone was not one of homogenisation — far from it. As Warren establishes, the processes that were unfolding within the Sulu Zone demonstrate the links between larger economic systems and social mechanisms and the formation of localised worlds made up of small collectives.

The fact that so much of Pirates lingers on Warren's earlier works is revealing: The Sulu zone was penned by Warren during his formative years as an ethno-historian. In his imagining of Southeast Asia during this important phase of his training, the area of the Sulu and Celebes seas lose their statist affiliations. Post-colonial boundaries evaporate, and a transnational framework for understanding the complex reality of both local and large become far more potent a tool for recovering the past than the normative histories of the 1970s that were fatally obfuscated by the idea and needs of modern post-colonial nation-states. It is the honing of this wider lens, coupled with his ability to appreciate the strengths that micro-sociology offered to historians, that would inform and drive his later studies on ethno- and social history.

Pirates then shifts its attention to colonial Singapore, with a collection of essays from his books on rickshaw pullers and Japanese and Chinese prostitutes. Through a combination of coroners' records and photographs, the author expertly weaves tales of hope and tragedy, deprivation and indulgence. This is Warren at his best, and through his eloquent prose readers will find themselves transported to a past that is at once mesmerising yet repulsive, depressing yet hopeful. A lesser author might have romanticised their plight, or portrayed the prostitutes and pullers as one-dimensional victims. But Warren's greatest feat here is to recover for the reader characters that are incredibly complex, and whose stories are often told by those who knew them intimately at the time of their deaths. The reader is given the opportunity to empathise with the actions and the plight of each character. And sometimes readers are allowed to hope, that for at least one of them, there is a happy ending. Yet while each story is poignant, the analysis of what these stories tell us is even more compelling. Warren shows how recovering the lives of those who existed on the margins of society and history and understanding how they made meanings of the institutions and systems around them is intrinsic to understanding Singapore's economic and social past and present.

This book offers important research to both experts and laypersons interested in Southeast Asian history, and sections of it would be useful supplementary reading for courses on ethnography and social history. Warren's theorisation of the Sulu Zone would make an excellent case study for courses on trans-national and interdisciplinary approaches to history. As a book, however, Pirates sometimes does not segue as well as one would hope between chapters, with the clearest example of this being the transition between chapters 9 and 10. This is the understandable product of combining separate sections of different monographs together into a collection, but its impact on the flow of the book itself is nevertheless quite noticeable. Warren could also have highlighted his archival sources for his studies on the coolies and the prostitutes even more. Having read both Rickshaw coolie and Ah Ku and Karayuki-san I was quite aware of how much detail Warren went into in his appendices about the nature and detail of the coroners' records. It would have been excellent if he had used this book as an opportunity to showcase that in the primary body of text. His encounter, approach and treatment of this unlikely body of sources would have been quite informative and influential for emerging scholars, and it is a pity that only an abridged discussion of his sources remains in Pirates.

Despite these complaints, this book will certainly astonish and whet the appetite of those who have not read Warren's works on the region. For those already familiar with his studies and contributions to Southeast Asian historiography, Pirates, prostitutes and pullers is a timely reminder of the influence, skill and contributions of one of the eminent historians of the region.