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Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 35, No.2, September 1997 The Sulu Zone, the World Capitalist Economy and the Historical Imagination: Problematizing Global-Local Interconnections and Interdependencies* James Francis WARREN ** I Introduction: Problems of Definition 1. Space 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 cen- tered around the Sulu and Celebes seas, as well as Chinas and the Wests complicated place within it. As cross-cultural flows of trade goods, technology, people and information intensified in speed and volume in late eighteenth century Southeast Asia, the localised borders of states and economic regions were becoming ever more porous. Did the world capitalist economy at that time create borderless worlds? Or did borders - cultural, national or otherwise prove to be more resistant and tenacious or vulnerable to the European presence and economic expansion? As some borders broke down, others were erected, bot