The Amfioen Societëit (1745–1794): Opium, intra-Asian trade and the commercial world of Batavia in the eighteenth century

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This article analyses the emergence of the Amfioen Societëit (1745–1794) and its impact on the market for opium in eighteenth-century Java. It engages with a limited body of historiography to challenge assumptions that the Societëit was a wholly colonial institution designed to serve an elite – namely, European – set of interests. In reassessing how the Societëit worked in theory and in practice, it is argued that this institution was born from the necessary collaborative engagement of a European and a local commercial class with different but vested interests in the opium trade. Moreover, the article situates the Societëit among other finance institutions that existed in eighteenth-century Java to serve the credit needs of the local commercial milieu. In doing so, it lays the foundations for a deeper and more nuanced history of the opium trade and the local economy of early modern Java in a period about which very little is known.