Papers

• Marginal Europeans and the Transimperial Entanglement of Southeast Asia: A Biographical Approach Tomasz Ewertowski Shanghai International Studies University

  The paper uses a biographical approach to illustrate how Southeast Asia formed part of transimperial networks by tracing the careers of two individuals involved in the Dutch East Indies who also participated in imperial ventures elsewhere. It also examines how some participants in colonial mobility did not originate from traditional colonial powers but from subjugated European societies.
  One case is the Polish mercenary soldier Henryk Sienkiewicz (1852–1936), a relative of the famous writer of the same name. Born as a subject of the Russian Empire, he served in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria and later in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army in Java and Sumatra, fighting in the Aceh War. Sienkiewicz thus represents one of the “colonial mercenaries” who acted as agents of colonial entanglement (Krauer, Schaar).
  The second case is Pavel Durdík (1843–1903), a Czech physician born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After practising medicine in the Russian Empire, he spent five years in the Dutch East Indies, serving, among other roles, as a doctor during the Aceh War. His profession exemplifies one of the typical “transimperial occupational roles” (Hennessey). Both individuals illustrate nineteenth-century transimperial mobility: although born as subjects of one imperial regime, they served other empires outside Europe.
  By examining testimonies left by these figures, the paper explores their perceptions of imperialism, their self-identification, and their views on the entanglement of Southeast Asia in wider imperial networks. It also considers how Southeast Asian imperial adventures resonated in East-Central Europe (for example through bringing collections of artefacts and publishing narratives to achieve particular localised goals). Analysing these sources from East-Central Europe—a region seemingly uninvolved in colonialism—also allows the paper to test concepts such as “colonial complicity” (Vuorela) and the “imperial cloud” (Kamissek and Kreienbaum).

• Testing Transimperial Approaches from the Margins: Gendered Abolition and Colonial Classification in Portuguese Timor Yingguihang Tian National University of Singapore

  This paper examines how abolition reshaped the visibility of women’s dependence in Portuguese Timor. In the nineteenth century, antislavery reforms in the Portuguese empire did not simply end bondage in Timor; they also generated new efforts to identify, register, and classify populations whose legal status had become unstable. Drawing on population tables, slave registries, administrative reports, and ecclesiastical records, I argue that abolition in Timor was not only a legal transformation but also a classificatory one. As colonial authorities sought to reconcile metropolitan reform with continued reliance on coerced labor, women became newly visible through practices of registration and surveillance, yet later receded from formal labor categories as colonial administration increasingly organized taxation and compulsory labor around men.
  Focusing on Portuguese Timor also offers a way to reflect on the possibilities and limits of transimperial history in Southeast Asia. A transimperial lens helps situate Timor within wider regional and imperial debates on slavery, labor, and colonial governance. At the same time, the Timorese case shows that gendered dependency cannot be understood through inter-imperial pressure alone. Women’s labor remained embedded in domestic, agricultural, and informal spheres that were only unevenly captured by colonial archives. Portuguese Timor thus offers not simply a marginal case of abolition, but a productive site for assessing what transimperial approaches can reveal, and what they may obscure when writing Southeast Asian history.

• Transimperial Knowledge: Colonial Learned Societies and the Institutionalisation of Science in Asia, 1778–1830 Maria Florutau University of Cambridge

  This paper presents a project investigating the transimperial dimensions of colonial learned societies in Asia as sites of knowledge production and institutional entanglement. Examining three learned societies, the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (established by Dutch VOC officials in Batavia in 1778), the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country (founded by Spanish and local intellectuals in Manila in 1781), and the Asiatic Society (founded by EIC members in Calcutta in 1784), the project argues that these institutions cannot be understood in isolation from one another, or from the wider Asian contexts in which they operated. The central question animating the project is what kind of knowledge colonial learned societies produced when crossing epistemic transimperial spaces.
  The paper will investigate three interplays that are illuminated by transimperial methodology through three short case studies. The first is competition in non-colonial spaces: the Batavian Society’s bid to become the primary node for knowledge from Tokugawa Japan prompted the Asiatic Society to seek to coopt these networks, transforming Dejima into a site of inter-imperial epistemic rivalry. The second is takeover: when Stamford Raffles assumed the presidency of the Batavian Society in 1813, he repurposed a nominally Dutch institution for British colonial ends, a process whose fruits are most visible in the History of Java (1817). The third is concurrence: Manila-based botanists who visited and corresponded with the Batavian Society at the turn of the century effectively created a Southeast Asian network for colonial botany. The paper, therefore, will argue that the three case studies suggest the colonial Southeast Asian transimperial landscape generated entanglements that were not merely economic or political, but also epistemological: spaces in which European institutional frameworks and local knowledge systems competed and combined to produce colonial knowledge that could not be attributed to just one imperial tradition.

Abstract

Keywords

• Aceh War
• Portuguese Timor
• Southeast Asian history
• abolition
• colonial classification
• colonial mercenaries
• colonial mobility
• colonial science
• institutions
• knowledge
• transimperial biographies
• transimperial history
• women's labor