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CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Even during the modern period, sovereignty was established through co-optation of persons rather than through actual conquest of geographical territory. Contrary to most accounts, co-optation of persons remained crucial than actual conquest for political rulers to control new populations and generate jurisdictions. Limits of extraditions, highly mobile populations, uncertainty of maritime regions, and non-contiguous territories presented jurisdictional puzzles that compelled political rulers to continue underscoring personal identities rather than territorial conquest. For example for most of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company courts attempted to assert authority over as many local inhabitants and vessels by granting them British legal identities, such that even local rulers willingly entered the legal orbit of EIC courts. By looking at case studies in the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya, this paper demonstrates how legal sovereignty remained indeterminate even as some legal forums increasingly provided the only avenues for redress for people whose personalized sovereignty had been superseded by the depersonalized collective of certain institutions by the early twentieth century.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nurfadzilah Yahaya is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. She specializes in legal history, history of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. Her forthcoming book, Fluid Jurisdictions of Arab Diaspora under Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia will be published by Cornell University Press. She has published in journals such as Law and History Review, Journal of Women’s History, and Muslim World. She is also a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Jurisdiction in International Law.

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