This essay focuses on the Sulu-Mindanao-Borneo region in the 1830s and zooms in on the Capitulaciones (Spanish) and the Kapiturasyun (Tausug) of a treaty concluded between the Spanish Crown and the Sultanate of Sulu of 1836/37. It compares the different versions of the treaty texts from the perspective of a system of treaties across the region. Uneven historiographical attention has led to myth-building and a controversy over whether the treaty would have established Spanish sovereignty over the Sulu sultanate. To add nuance to this claim, the study examines the specificities of the treaties together with a large set of complementary sources. A deep, comparative reading sheds light on the motivations, and strategies that accompanied the entire process of planning, negotiating, and ratifying of the treaty and the consequences it had both for directly and indirectly participating parties.

This article explores the dynamics behind global diplomacy and knowledge in Asian maritime empires in the late eighteenth century. The short-lived diplomatic exchange between the Kingdom of Mysore and the Spanish Philippines in 1776-7 provides a rich resource for an analysis of how global diplomatic agents coproduced material objects, images, and written records which in turn impacted politics and trade relations. The article makes at least four important interventions in the burgeoning field of new diplomatic history. First, it sheds light on certain aspects of growing research on Asian diplomatic encounters connecting the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia; second, it offers insights into the manifold actors involved in creating and negotiating knowledge; third, it highlights the epistemological importance of the visual and material archives for the study of global diplomacy in the early modern period; and fourth, it challenges narratives of cross-cultural foreign relations which tend to overemphasise asymmetrical and confessional explanations.

Blog posts from 2021-2022 about the following topics: Diplomacy and the circulation of knowledge, Indigenous agency, Gender and power,  Eurasian connections and the transformations of diplomatical processes, The construction of borders and sovereignty, Universality and specificity, Religion and diplomacy, Diplomatic influences from abroad, The role of economy, Tradition and local-foreign policies, Terminology, New avenues for the study of Southeast Asian relations during the colonial period.

The article explores translation processes behind diplomatic negotiations between Japan and the Spanish overseas empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It applies a multi-layered approach that integrates the translations of original diplomatic documents with their re-translation as historiographical source compilations in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Analyzing the different connotations and nuances of friendship as a diplomatic concept, it highlights the impact of translation, both linguistic and cultural, as well as the strategies behind terminological choices, on intercultural encounters. 

This article argues that Taiwan's distinctive historical position-at the centre of multiple overlapping colonial jurisdictions and historiographical traditions-furnishes an important opportunity to consider how indigenous pasts and experiences themselves played a role in disrupting or redirecting historical narratives of global connection. It examines texts by Ming travellers Chen Di (Dongfan ji, 1603) and Zhang Xie (Dong Xi yang kao, 1603); Dominican writers, including Jacinto Esquivel (1632); and later histories of early modern Japanese expansion and the dissemination of the Sinkan Manuscripts (Murakami, 1897, 1933). What all these foreign observers of Taiwan had in common was their struggle to integrate Taiwanese indigenous pasts into their existing grids of historical knowledge. By focusing on this 'historiography of the other', the article challenges commonplace assumptions regarding pre-modern foreign relations and indigenous forms of social organisation, showing how Taiwan can play a role in challenging operating foci of global history.

This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.

In the early seventeenth century people of Mindanao apparently “helped those of Sulu in their piratical excursions, frequently invading the beaches of our islands, destroying their fields and forests, burning their villages, forcing them into a fortress or to flee into the mountainous region of the interior.” These lines were not recorded by contemporaries, however, rather they were penned by a nineteenth-century Spanish historian of military background, Pio de Pazos y Vela Hidalgo (1841−1913), who personally participated in an expedition against Mindanao rebels in 1866. They were part of a chronological account of what he called a Military History of Jolo. It is an apt introductory quote reflecting both the key topoi and muddled chronologies of the history of piracy in the Spanish Philippines.

The main goal of this chapter is to highlight the discursive power of piracy and coastal raids in Spanish colonial reports produced in the Philippines between 1570 and 1800, with the key focus on roughly the first hundred years. The chapter focuses on the margins of the South China Sea or the waters and coasts of what is nowadays referred to as the Philippine, Sulu, and Indonesian seas. Discourses of external threat played an important role in both establishing sovereignty and in creating a sense of common political interest among different subordinate groups. For maritime Southeast Asia, non-European understandings of maritime violence and the relationship between those who talked and wrote about it and those who were accused of committing it are essential yet remain understudied. Approaching the theme through the lens of concurrent concepts of piracy can contribute to nuance long-held misconceptions of either religiously motivated raiding or spontaneous acts by opportunist seafarers.