Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Michelle Miller and Dr Marco Garrido, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This presentation examines the ways in which Euro-American powers attempted to enclose the maritime Muslim kingdoms of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In earlier periods, the principle target of containment in this region had been mobile, but socially marginal nomads of the sea such as the Bajau. By the 1800s, however, growing global demand for commodities such as pepper and pearl powered the rise of Islamic sultanates deeply entwined with wider commercial networks. The florescence of Sulu in the Philippines and the recrudescence of Aceh in current-day Indonesia were noteworthy examples of this. Inward flows of capital allowed local rulers to consolidate their Islamic legitimacy and accelerate the acquisition of weapons and laborers, thereby transforming these two kingdoms into formidable indigenous powers.

This symbiosis between international trade, Islam, and the rise of sultanates posed acute challenges to would-be colonizers. How could invading armies unwind and unravel the external connections that sustained Sulu and Aceh? How could they extricate these regions from wider networks, while simultaneously inscribing them in bounded colonial spaces? From 1850 through 1940, colonial regimes deployed a variety of measures designed to address precisely this dilemma, including blockades, invasions, customs regulations, and land tenure rules. Drawing from a range of Dutch, Spanish, and American archival sources, this paper will examine such campaigns of enclosure. Specifically, it will argue that in spite of the fact that enclosure efforts failed to erase local mobilities, they did render them illegitimate and played a key role in the marginalization of once powerful kingdoms within the emergent national spaces of the Philippines and Indonesia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Joshua Gedacht  received his M.A and PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December 2013. His research examines the relationship between colonial era war-making, Islamic networks, and the reconfiguration of religious connections in Indonesia and the Philippines. His dissertation , Islamic-Imperial Encounters: Colonial Enclosure and Muslim Cosmopolitans in Island Southeast Asia, 1800-1940, considers the ways in which colonial wars of conquest in Sumatra and Mindanao engendered paradoxical dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, disconnection and reconnection, that contributed to the remaking of Southeast Asian Islamic networks. Dr Gedacht has written a book chapter on colonial massacres and Muslims in the Southern Philippines, and he plans to publish articles on discourses of perang sabil (holy war), the role of nodal port cities in colonial war-making, and the value of comparison to understanding Islamic-imperial encounters.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg