Colonial Southeast Research Articles

Countering "Chinese Imperialism": Sinophobia and Border Protection in the Dutch East Indies

“Countering ‘Chinese Imperialism’” examines the colonial policies that the Dutch and British empires used to counter the perceived danger of “Chinese imperialism,” which was a new term that Dutch officials in the 1920s used to describe China’s intended expansion into colonial Southeast Asia. Archival sources show that colonial anxiety escalated when Guomindang-guided schools educating the overseas Chinese began to promulgate the idea that Southeast Asia should be ruled by Chinese people. This essay examines the border and educational policies that colonial authorities created to block the traffic between China and the Chinese in Dutch and British dominions.earing that imperialist thinking would end Dutch rule in Southeast Asia.

Michelle LeMaster. Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast.

Michelle LeMaster. Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast.

The Hero Legend in Colonial Southeast Asia

The Hero Legend in Colonial Southeast Asia

Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast by Michelle LeMaster (review)

Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast by Michelle LeMaster (review)

Yuchi Indian histories before the removal era

Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era. Edited by Jason Baird Jackson. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Pp. xxxiv, 246. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4041-4.) In Yuchi Indian Histories Before Removal Era, Jason Baird Jackson has brought together an impressive collection of essays to fill historiographical void on Yuchi history. Rather than depicting Yuchis as subset of Creek Indians as past historians and anthropologists have done, Jackson and other authors in this book argue that Yuchi cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy, both in past and in present, warrant recognition of Yuchis as separate people. This interdisciplinary collection, born out of 2004 panel on Yuchi history at American Society for Ethnohistory, presents theories on Yuchi history and culture from ethnologists, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Seemingly spinning gold from straw, authors use close reading, careful analysis, and comparative perspectives to draw compelling evidence from sparse historical and archaeological record that Yuchis in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were culturally distinct from their neighbors, resistant of political domination by other groups, and diplomatically connected within Southeast. Jackson argues that this investigation into the almost completely unexamined case of Yuchi people provides productive vantage point on ... broader questions of diversity in culture and political interactions in colonial Southeast, especially among native peoples (p. xv). Organized chronologically, chapters in this collection span from time in linguistic past around 4,000 B.C.E. to efforts to remove Yuchi Indians from Florida along with Seminoles during Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Building on each other's work, these scholars present synthesis of currently available on Yuchi Indians by teasing out brief references in historical documents and linking them to archaeological record to provide basis for further inquiry. By bringing together these ideas, this collection is intended to inspire what might become robust Yuchi national historiography, including monographs on Yuchi history and culture (p. xvi). As an interdisciplinary study, this book fuses together several approaches to Yuchis. While authors refer to one another and show awareness of how their ideas intersect, many of chapters retain disciplinary specificity and jargon that might not be easily accessible to readers who are not specialists in that field. Other essays make concerted effort to define terms for lay audiences. Mary S. Linn describes Yuchi as a language isolate seemingly unconnected to all other languages in Southeast and beyond (p. 1). Describing current state of efforts to detennine Yuchi's genetic relationships with other languages, Linn argues that innovative research might eventually reveal Yuchi's linguistic and deep historical roots (p. 24). Anthropologist John E. Worth notes how first historical reference to Yuchis in Juan Pardo's 1567 expedition through Southeast, when paired with later eighteenth-century sources, opens up possibilities for understanding Yuchi town locations and political standing among their neighbors before eighteenth century. …

Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast

Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast

Brothers born of one mother: British-Native American relations in the Colonial Southeast

The arrival of English settlers in the American Southeast in 1670 brought the British and the Native Americans into contact both with foreign peoples and with unfamiliar gender systems. In a region in which the balance of power between multiple players remained uncertain for many decades, British and Native leaders turned to concepts of gender and family to create new diplomatic norms to govern interactions as they sought to construct and maintain working relationships. In Brothers Born of One Mother , Michelle LeMaster addresses the question of how differing cultural attitudes toward gender influenced Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial Southeast. As one of the most fundamental aspects of culture, gender had significant implications for military and diplomatic relations. Understood differently by each side, notions of kinship and proper masculine and feminine behaviour wielded during negotiations had the power to either strengthen or disrupt alliances. The collision of different cultural expectations of masculine behaviour and men's relationships to and responsibilities for women and children became significant areas of discussion and contention. Native American and British leaders frequently discussed issues of manhood (especially in the context of warfare), the treatment of women and children, and intermarriage. Women themselves could either enhance or upset relations through their active participation in diplomacy, war, and trade. Leaders invoked gendered metaphors and fictive kinship relations in their discussions, and by evaluating their rhetoric, Brothers Born of One Mother investigates the intercultural conversations about gender that shaped Anglo-Indian diplomacy. LeMaster's study contributes importantly to historians' understanding of the role of cultural differences in inter group contact and investigates how gender became part of the ideology of European conquest in North America, providing a unique window into the process of colonisation in America.

The Hero Legend in Colonial Southeast Asia

Four legends that originated in the different religious and colonial contexts of the Tagalog and Makassar peoples are shown to conform to Edward Tylor’s classical “hero pattern.” Using structural anthropology and cognitive linguistics, this article argues that hero legends generated metaphors from concrete relationships in the domestic domain to conceptualize abstract relationships in a series of other domains. The hero pattern underwent transformations in tandem with changes in the political and economic institutions in which it was embedded. From its beginnings as a charter for rival city-states in the ancient Middle East, it became a charter for the universalistic world religions that arose within the empires that succeeded the city-states. In the Southeast Asian legends discussed here, it served as a charter for both collaboration with and resistance to colonial rule. Keywords: structuralism • shamanism • Christianity • Islam • colonialism

One Hundred Sixty-One Knots, Two Plates, and One Emperor: Creek Information Networks in the Era of the Yamasee War

Indian information networks crisscrossed the colonial Southeast. Operating outside European control and hidden from European eyes, these networks' existence and importance have been assumed but never fully explicated. This article explores some of these inter- and intra-Indian connections. Rooted in the Lower Creek town of Coweta and analyzing sources from the vantage point of Indian country, it shows some of the different ways in which Creek Indians remained informed of and connected to developments in the colonial Southeast. Exploring the networks forged by one particular Indian chief—Brims, Mico of Coweta—helps evince the breadth and extent of information channels among native people. The information networks linked, modified, and influenced by Brims show more than the movement of news; they offer insight into the power structures that shaped the colonial Southeast.

Rotary International's ‘acid test’: multi-ethnic associational life in 1930s Southeast Asia

AbstractThe social history of colonial Southeast Asia has often been narrated through the lens of ‘plural societies’, where various ethnic groups rarely mixed. This article challenges that narrative by pointing to traditions of multi-ethnic interaction, particularly in port cities, dating back to an early modern age of commerce. Although colonialism introduced new racial hierarchies that reinforced stark ethnic divides, it also created arenas where these could be transgressed. In the interwar era, international organizations, such as Rotary clubs, provided a way of breaking the colour bar of colonial society and a venue for multi-ethnic representation in a shared associational space. They converged with existing notions of civic duty, while promoting a public intellectual culture in cities for both men and women, as well as a new sense of regionalism. In ethnically divided Malaya, Asian Rotarians questioned the importance of race and debated the possibilities of a multi-ethnic future for the nation. While such cosmopolitan ideals were more vulnerable in the post-colonial era of nation-states, the organizations of the interwar era left important legacies for civil society in the region.

Besmirched with blood: an emotional history of transnational romance in colonial Singapore

In 1900, in the British colony of Singapore, a Siamese man, Manit, shot his beloved British wife, Maude, and allegedly attempted suicide. Several competing interpretations of the incident exist. In one, Manit is considered a deranged and treacherous fraud; in another, he is a pitiable cuckold; in the third, he is a respectable gentleman suffering from unrequited love. Surprisingly, given the racialized context of high imperialism in Southeast Asia, the British in Singapore came to empathize with the Asian Manit as a lovelorn gentleman and to disavow their own countrywoman. The court ultimately acquitted him of any wrongdoing. This article considers the competing interpretations and explains why a seemingly race-blind one prevailed. It reviews genealogical records, personal letters, newspaper accounts of court proceedings, and internal Thai government internal records, which provide unusually rich documentation of a romance that crossed national, cultural, and racial boundaries and created surprising transnational affiliations based on emotional empathy. Maude and Manit's relationship and court case provide a captivating glimpse into the sentimental, dramatic, and sometimes brutal details of daily life; the emotional and subjective aspects of history that are often discarded as mere embellishment to more ‘substantive’ histories focused squarely on political and economic power. However, it is precisely the emotive aspects of their relationship and their interpretation that highlight the existence of a transnational, transracial alliance between Manit and British elites in Singapore, based on shared notions of upper class masculinity, common educational experiences, and a mutual spatial and power relationship with the imperial metropole in London. The case cuts across racial divisions and highlights a transracial emotional style. Approaching history through a study of emotional discourse sheds light on a broader racial, sexual, and gendered organization of power in late colonial Southeast Asia.

Review: Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941, by Anne L. Foster

Review: <i>Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941</i>, by Anne L. Foster

Native American Taste: Re-evaluating the Gift-Commodity Debate in the British Colonial Southeast

Native American TasteRe-evaluating the Gift-Commodity Debate in the British Colonial Southeast Jessica Stern (bio) Historians have acknowledged that southeastern Native Americans were picky consumers of European goods. “Indians were eager customers, not slaves to imported fashion,” James Merrell concluded in his 1989 study of the Catawba.1 Kathleen Braund concurred, stating that the Creek were “very specific about what they needed and wanted in exchange for their deerskins.”2 But the evidence supporting these claims is episodic. In trying to systematically construct southeastern Indian taste, scholars are left with a frustrating gap in the sources. The most robust and accessible body of British sources, the South Carolina Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade (1710–1718) and the Documents Relating to Indian Affairs (1750–1765), frequently mention account books that governmental boards collected from traders working for the public Indian trade, but these account books remain missing. While scholars of the Hudson’s Bay region have been able to use the Hudson Bay Company’s copious financial records to understand the purchasing habits of the Cree, Assiniboine, Chipewyan, and other nearby Native Americans, revealing a population of savvy shoppers who understood the market system, southeastern Indians have received no similar treatment.3 In fact, partly because our source base consists largely of governmental records that discuss diplomatic encounters where gift exchanges occurred, there is a tendency to depict southeastern Indians as gifters, thus overlooking their responses to market incentives. As a recent book states, “trade with the Indians entailed more than an economic transaction—it was more akin to an exchange of gifts between allies.”4 This claim, rather than the image asserted by Merrell and Braund, has become the orthodoxy, emerging from a historiography that posits that [End Page 1] southeastern Native Americans were unfamiliar and uncomfortable with commodity exchange. Rather than approaching Europeans as commodity traders, Joseph M. Hall Jr. has argued, southeastern Native American groups saw political and economic power as intertwined and strove to draw European groups into exchanges based on their traditional ideas about reciprocity.5 Likewise, Tom Hatley concludes that unlike British merchants, the “Cherokee did not compartmentalize commercial, personal, and political relationships.”6 The Creek town Okfuskee, Josh Piker asserts, was “centered on intellectual and social constructs that did not mesh easily with market-oriented behaviors”; the market was destructive to Creek society in ways it was not for British society.7 And although Merrell regarded the Catawba as picky consumers, he also pointed out that they were “[u]nfamiliar with relationships based solely on the market.”8 In this article I argue that this view of southeastern Native Americans as commodity- and market-shy is incomplete and draws a false dichotomy between Native and European actors. It partially grows out of the practice of looking primarily at diplomatic records, which tell us plenty about how Native American leaders used gifts to cement political alliances and how traders presented themselves to officials but not how most Native American individuals viewed the exchanges that occurred outside of political realms. The depiction of Native Americans as gifters also results from scholars using a definition of gift exchange that does not accurately capture the range of exchange modalities that were practiced in early America. Most historians who describe Native Americans as unfamiliar with commodity exchange point to the fact that social relationships and rituals preceded the exchange of goods. Many white traders fully integrated themselves into the towns in which they principally traded, even marrying Native American women; this turned Indian traders into both commercial and social actors within the same community.9 This article asserts that in the early modern period, one cannot distinguish between a gift and commodity exchange by determining whether or not there was a preexisting social relationship. Historians have demonstrated that in early modern Europe, which the previously mentioned scholars would agree was a commodity market economy, commercial relationships also ran along social lines, whether familial, religious, ethnic, or national.10 Trade was built on a social foundation partly because a cash-strapped economy in both Britain and the [End Page 2] colonies required the extension of credit to complete most transactions. Most individuals were only willing...

Bioarchaeology of Ethnogenesis in the Colonial Southeast by Christopher M. Stojanowski

Bioarchaeology of Ethnogenesis in the Colonial Southeast by Christopher M. Stojanowski

Zamumo's Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

Zamumo's Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

Anne L. Foster . Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 . (American Encounters / Global Interactions.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 241. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Anne L. Foster . Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 . (American Encounters / Global Interactions.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 241. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Anglo-Spanish rivalry in Colonial south-east America, 1650-1725

Introduction: The Anglo-Spanish Rivalry and the Emergence of the Colonial South-East 1 From Europe to Charleston: Anglo-Spanish Rivalries and the Beginning of the Colonial South-East 2 A Three-Sided Struggle: The Florida-Carolina Struggle and Indian Interactions through the 1680s 3 An Uneasy Peace: Negotiations and Confrontations across the Carolina-Florida Frontier through 1700 4 Carolina's Ascendancy: The English Invasion and Destruction of Spanish Florida's Missions, 1700-3 5 Fading Power and One Last Gasp: The Waning of Spanish Influence and the Beginnings of English Ascendancy Epilogue

Sikhs and the City: Sikh history and diasporic practice in Singapore

AbstractThe historiography of South Asian diaspora in colonial Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on numerically dominant South Indian labourers at the expense of the small, but important, North Indian communities, of which the Sikhs were the most visually conspicuous and politically important. This paper will analyse the creation of various Sikh communities in one critical territory in British Asia—Singapore, and chart the development of the island's increasingly unified Sikh community into the post-colonial period. The paper will scrutinize colonial economic roles and socio-cultural formation, whilst links of Singaporean Sikhs to Punjab and their place within the post-colonial Singaporean state will preoccupy the latter portion of the paper. It will argue that more complicated notions of division relative to the social norms of Punjab must be acknowledged in this region of Sikh diaspora and indeed others. The final sections will assess the remarkable success of local Sikhs in utilizing statist policies of ‘domesticating difference’ towards altered ‘community’ ends. Such attachment to the state and the discursive parity of Singapore's Sikhs with official values, moreover, stymied the appeal of transnational Sikh militant movements that gained momentum in the West in the 1980s. The result has been the assertion of ‘model minority’ status for Singapore's Sikhs and notably successful socialization into Singaporean society.

Zamumo's Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

Zamumo's Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

Anne L. Foster. Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, xii + 241p.

Anne L. Foster.<i> Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941</i>. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, xii + 241p.