Southeast Asia contains some of the world's busiest shipping waters, particularly the Indonesian archipelago, the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. The natural geography and human ecology of maritime Southeast Asia makes the area particularly apt for piracy, which has a long history in the region. In several instances during the last 250 years, pirates have disrupted peaceful trade and communications. Pirates in Paradisetraces the shifting character and development of Southeast Asian piracy from the eighteenth century to the present day, demonstrating how political, economic,...

The most pressing economic challenges facing the Tibetan areas of western China relate to the marginalization of the majority of Tibetans from rapid state-led growth. The urban-rural divide plays an important role in this polarized dynamic but alone only partially explains differences with other Chinese regions, all of which generally exhibit strong spatial inequalities. This book therefore focuses on several further factors that determine the ethnically exclusionary character of current peripheral growth in the Tibetan areas. These include processes of urbanization, immigration, employment,...

The most comprehensive glossary to date of Hui Muslim terms and the first to fully match the Chinese term (stated in Chinese script and pinyin) to its Arabic or Persian counterpart (stated in Arabic script with Latin transcription).