James Warren

Biography

James Warren is an ethnohistorian of modern Southeast Asia with a particular interest in the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. For the past Forty years a passion for a forgotten past of ordinary people who have stood outside history and the recovery of a whole set of cultural-ecological relations have been a central preoccupation running through my research, writing and teaching.  This approach to writing Southeast Asian History in an ethnographic grain has all been context-sensitive with a strong cultural-ecological orientation. The themes identified and addressed in his books, whether focussing on state formation, slavery, ethnicity, migration and urbanisation, prostitution, and suicide are all trans-historical and trans-cultural. His current research on the environment –human nexus concerning the impact of cyclonic storms on the Philippines over five centuries, extends my methodology and research to the history of environmental change in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world .  This interdisciplinary approach in diversity of method and objects of analyses in the writing and interpretation of Southeast Asian History has enabled me to render a portrait of Southeast Asians living in a complexly textured world of exceptional natural forces, large power constellations, intimate social relations and deep moral dilemmas.

Research Interest

The social ,economic and ethnographic history of Southeast Asia since 1750, Chinese working class history and society in Singapore 1819-1940, Slavery ,dependent labour and human traffic in Southeast Asia, Aspects of the environmental history of Southeast Asia, especially in the Philippines