Abstract
Abstract This article investigates Dutch colonial practices on the Moluccan island of Seram in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seram’s mountainous interior was the domain of ungoverned, peripatetic Alfurs who engaged in headhunting. For a long time, they were rendered untouched by colonialism and administered through coastal intermediaries. After 1900, renewed imperial-civilizational vigour demanded the direct incorporation and ‘civilization’ of Seram’s stateless spaces. A series of expeditions subjected the Alfurs to registration, categorization, and taxation, which this article argues were seen as pivotal, moralizing tools of colonial social-engineering, used to inscribe subjected people into the state and instil compliant and ‘productive’ behaviour. However, rather than a replacement of indigenous orders with European modernity, colonization produced a hybrid fusion of colonial strategies of domination with indigenous cultural practices of state-evasion. This article demonstrates that colonial governance was a site of interaction, in which colonial developmentalism and modernity were actively negotiated and challenged.
Highlights
Colonial statecraft is seen as intimately tied to processes of knowledge accumulation and data-gathering
It discusses the case of the Moluccan island of Seram, by examining the introduction of taxes, which I argue played a crucial role in colonial processes of expansion, subjection, and development
Whereas across Indonesia Dutch officials located various societal aspects to tie their systems of taxation and governance into, Seram was among the ‘stateless spaces’ considered devoid of economic resources or opportunities for state-building and taxation (Boulan-Smit 1998:43, 63; Tichelman 1925:690– 2; Rutten 1920)
Summary
In Indonesia, a fully fledged colonial tax system emerged between 1870 and 1920, following the rapid expansion and consolidation of the Dutch modern colonial state and empire. Sachse (in office 1903–1905) described Seram as a place where murder and manslaughter were daily business [...] the mountain Alfurs reigned with terror over others [...] The governing strategy at the time was one of continuous peacemaking among the tribes [...] while the mountain inhabitants were appeased with gifts [...] He claimed the kakean provided fertile ground for a dangerous religious, sociopolitical, and ritual fusion. He allowed for another saniri to be organized in an attempt to regain grip over interior politics and resettle relations with local chiefs.35 He believed the conceptualized opposition between coast and mountain no longer offered a fruitful basis for policy, since coastal people engaged in headhunting.. Resident van Ambon to gg, 14-2-1890, na MinKol 1850–1900, 4675, Verbaal 25-2-1893 no. 44
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