On the Threshold of Modernity

Remembering 2005. I am not deleting my old emails exactly. I am trapped my thinking that everything is important. :(.

Flash Flood in Singapore

Sent: 13 January 2005 16:17
To: [singaporeheritage]
Subject: [singaporeheritage] [Fwd: Seminar by Asia Research Institute and Department of Historyon Tuesday, 25 Jan 2005, 2 - 3.30 pm]

Asia Research Institute (ARI) and Department of History

National University of Singapore jointly present

On the Threshold of Modernity: Fifty Years of Regime Change in

Insular Southeast Asia 1780-1830

A seminar by

Leonard Blusse

Professor of History of Asian-European Relations

History Department, Leiden University, Holland

Professor of Southeast Asian History

National Research Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Xiamen University, China

Day, Date, Time, Venue

Tuesday, 25 January 2005

2.00 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.

ARI Seminar Room AS7 #04-09

Abstract

On this occasion, I should like to draw your attention to a crucial period in Southeast Asian history, which I believe, deserves further study by an international team of historian in the years to come. In this regard my exposé should perhaps be regarded as a feeler put out to perceive whether there is enthusiasm towards participation in such a project among historians in Singapore, who as I see it, should be part of the vanguard in carrying out its execution. I confess that it may seem somewhat out of tune in an age, in which post modernity reigns supreme, to propose a research project with the title On the Threshold of Modernity, yet I do so because I feel that the origins of the present political situation in maritime Southeast Asia should be pinpointed in the 1780-1830 period. These fifty years witnessed the demise of the Dutch East India Company shortly after the fourth Anglo-Dutch war (1780-84) and a series of no less than four changes of colonial regime, all aimed at coming to terms with the local situation through reforms of colonial exploitation. The most obvious outcome of this Western interference in the area was, of course, the establishment of the free transit port of Singapore and a division of spheres of interests between the dominant colonial powers in the region. All this ultimately resulted in the emergence of the Indonesian and Malaysian nation states, not to speak of such unfinished business as the contested political identity of Aceh. 

I would like to advocate such research because it will enable us to address as a whole the maritime region, which comprises present dayMalaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. It will also allow historians to transgress the borders of the present day nation states and integrate the region within the larger sphere of the adjacent policies of East andSoutheast Asia two hundred years ago. As a matter of fact, because of the historical position that this cross roads region has been traditionally enjoying in the flow of religion, ideas and international trade we inevitably are also forced to cast our net even wider and pay close attention to such contemporary players on the scene as the Indians, Chinese and the Dutch, English, French and American traders.

Until fifteen years ago the writings of Nicholas Tarling, David Bassett and John Bastin, well researched monographs based on primarily English archival records, seemed to be safe beacons for historians studying the expansion of British power in the Southeast Asian archipelago. Since then various studies and collections of articles have questioned that unilinear narrative. I am thinking of Jim Warren’s pioneering works on the Sulu zone and the Iranun, Reinout Vos’ Gentle Janus, merchant prince and Diana Lewis writings on the developments in the Straits of Melaka, the collection of articles edited by Tony Read under the title The last Stand of Asian Autonomies, Response to Modernity in Diverse states in Southeast Asia and the volume edited by Femme Gaastra and myself on the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History to name just a few. These studies in one way or another have brought the autonomous history of the region to the fore, and even questioned to some extent, as the Reid volume does, the impact of Western modernization by pointing out an undertow based on traditional policies.

Yet it cannot be denied that two phenomena, that marked the demise of ancien régime and the birth of modern society in the West, effected a profound impact on insular Southeast Asia. The years 1780-1830 witnessed two revolutions with a global impact: the French revolution, which shook ancien regime Europe and dramatically changed its socio-political landscape, and the industrial revolution, which reshaped inter continental trade by changing European trade with Asia from a ‘bullion for goods’ into a ‘commodities for goods affair’, dramatically changing the rules of the game. In maritime Asia this same period witnessed the rise of the China market, and led a scramble by all coastal and maritime people in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea to connect to this aorta of Asian trade. Country traders started bartering opium for local products throughout the archipelago, raiders and freebooters such as the Illanos, destabilizing local traffic.

Within this general context, I would like to look, in more detail at the various ways in which four successive (colonial) regimes in the Indonesian archipelago have attempted to grasp with the quickly changing situation in insular Southeast Asia.

Speaker

Leonard Blusse is Professor of History of Asian-European Relations at the History Department of Leiden University, Professor of Southeast Asian History at the National Research Institute of Southeast Asian Studies of XiamenUniversity in China and Co-director of the Towards a New Age of Partnership (TANAP) Program.  He is the author and (co) editor of 39 books and 77 published academic articles.  They include: Companies and Trade, Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Regime  (The Hague 1981),Strange Company, Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht 1986), Zhong-he jiaowang shi or A History of Sino-Dutch Rela­ti­ons (Xiamen 1989),  Pilgrims to the Past, Private Con­versati­ons with historians of European Expansion (Leiden 1996),  On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History, Van Leur in Retrospect (Aldershot 1998), Bridging the Divide, 400 years of Dutch-Japanese Relations (Amsterdam 2000),  Bitter Bonds (Princeton 2002), Shiba shiji-mo Badaweiya Tangrenshihui or The Chinese Community of Batavia at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Xiamen University Press 2002)

For more information, please consult this website: http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/events.htm