Abstract
In contemporary ethnohistorical studies of Southeast Asia, the 'zone' and/or 'border' have recently become chosen metaphors for theorising the historically complex and contradictory ways in which cultural difference and ethnic diversity have been articulated in social relations and in political and economic practise across time. This paper aims to explore global cultural interconnections and interdependencies in the Southeast Asian world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular reference to the 'Sulu Zone' [Dick 1993: 6; Warren 1981]. The paper also aims to enhance critical understanding and discussion of historiographical methods and models used in problematizing of economic and cultural 'border zones' in a changing global-local context. My emphasis is on a 'zone' created through the intersections of geography, culture and history centered around the Sulu and Celebes seas, as well as China's and the West's complicated place within it…