Preliminary Programme

Legislation, city planning, and minutes of meetings of VOC-officials reveal a fixation on the regulation and control of mobility. Though the primary objective of the trading company was to make a profit, to do so effectively it had to establish a maritime empire. By establishing forts and cities and claiming sovereignty over lands surrounding these nodes of empire, the VOC came to rule a diverse population. As rulers, the Company became concerned with safety, order and taxation. The regulation of spatial and social mobility was a tool to ensure these priorities were met. Segregation was one of these tools. This paper will examine the regulation of spatial and social mobility through segregation in one particular node of this empire: Batavia. How did the VOC regulate mobility in this city and how did one’s social background or categorization determine his or her mobility? Already in the seventeenth-century, Batavia became a highly segregated city. This was achieved through laws that made the city core exclusive to certain categories of people, enforced a system of identification and forced people of various ethnic backgrounds to live in separate kampongs (neighbourhood). This paper will examine these laws, but, importantly, rather than exclusively examining this process through a top-down perspective, this paper will reflect on how those people on the ground interacted with, challenged and sometimes broke these boundaries to their mobility. These interactions are revealed in court cases, which, uniquely, reveal the voices of those that otherwise remain silent, such as enslaved people. By examining court cases, legislation and minutes of meeting, this paper will reflect on the theory and practice of mobility regulation in seventeenth- and eighteenth century Batavia. (Show less)

Much scholarship on urban diversity and segregation in early modern empires focuses on the creation of new urban centres. But what happened to diverse urban populations in moments of waning imperial power and the often attendant political, economic and social instability? In the case of the Mughal Empire, declining imperial power often shifted the relative power of urban Muslim and Hindu communities in both financial and political terms. Increased armed conflicts also led to temporary displacements of local populations. These factors contributed to disputes over property ownership and efforts to redraw neighbourhood boundaries and promote segregation. In response, local kings and chiefs regulated urban space through the legal rulings resulting in petitions and orders becoming the site of negotiation over urban segregation. In this paper, I examine how urban segregation was (re)created and community boundaries (re)envisioned through legal processes in Rajasthan in the second half of the eighteenth century. This work draws on a close reading of royal orders issued in response to property disputes and considers how these documents related to other state acts and documents, such as patronage deeds. (Show less)

After capturing Malacca in 164, the Dutch East India Company imposed religious segregation. They persecuted and forced around 200-250 Portuguese Catholics to migrate to Negapatam on the Coromandel Coast, Batavia, Makassar, and Kedah (Teixeira, 1961). However, the Portuguese or Luso-Malayans were still the biggest population in Malacca (Schouten, 1641). During the Portuguese period, the Luso-Malayans or Albuquerque’s children (Sarkissian, 2000) dominated the Malaccan population and played a pivotal role. They became soldiers in wartime and competitors of Keling Merchants in peacetime (Pinto, 2011; Subrahmanyam, 2011). Despite religious suffering, the half-blood Portuguese seemed to be free agents and embraced Protestantism, as recorded in Baptismal Records 1642-88 (ANM (Arkib Negara Malaysia) 2007/0056189). The Portuguese, therefore, served the Dutch and held a pivotal position as harbor-masters in the Dutch political administration (Abdullah, 1849).The Portuguese, besides becoming officials for the Dutch East India company, became brokers of Portuguese commerce. They kept maintaining their trade route from Macau to Makassar and the Eastern islands via Malacca (Boxer, 1967; Borges, 2005; Andaya, 2010). Both European (Portuguese deeds and chronicles; Dutch reports and chronicles) and local sources (Dutch baptismal records, Malay chronicles, and Makasarese chronicles) are available to reconstruct the Portuguese presence during the Dutch period in Malacca. To organize those sources systematically, the theories of cooperation and self-organized networks (Robinson, 1972; Antunes, 2012; Polonia, 2017) are going to be used in order to explain how the Portuguese could survive under the Dutch hegemony. This paper will explain how Luso-Malayans or Portuguese were able to obtain a dominant position as free agents within the Dutch East India Company despite forced migration and religious segregation.

Keywords: empire building, self-organized networks, social segregation, Protestantism (Show less)