Session details
Organizer(s)
Archa Neelakandan Girija (The University of British Columbia), Isabel dos Guimarães Sá (Universidade de Minho) and Maarten Van Dijck (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Keywords
Institutional Inequality, Social Order, Colonial Port Cities
Abstract
Early modern port cities across the globe had to deal with permanent colonization from the outside. Historians have shown that some of these cities were deliberate attempts to re-create the institutional framework of the metropole on other continents, while other literature has foregrounded that European imperial powers used the existing colonial contexts to construct new utopian societies. However, ultimately all of them were somehow forced to adapt their original set-up to local social circumstances in overseas port cities. This often resulted in highly glocalized colonial institutions, serving clients all across the social, religious, and ethnic spectrum.
This session aims to study the effects of social and cultural inequality on institutional inequality in global port cities. What role did wealth, religion, ethnicity, or status play in access to colonial institutions? A conscious trans-imperial approach allows us to gauge the specificity of various local settings with which European colonizers had to cope in embedding their institutions in local urban settings. However, institutional inequality did not only exist between and within empires, but institutional rules could also vary within port cities, with different rules for different social groups.
Papers
Negotiating Family Life through Colonial Institutions in VOC-Asia, 1700-1800
Author(s)
Sophie Rose (Leiden University)
Keywords
Dutch East India Company, Colonial Court, Domestic Lives
Abstract
This paper will examine how people living in port cities governed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) gave shape to their domestic lives using institutions such as the colonial court and the notary in the eighteenth century. While the VOC managed to establish considerable economic, political, and institutional power in South and Southeast Asian port cities such as Cochin (Kochi) and Batavia (Jakarta), company servants and affiliated Europeans only made up a minority urban residents, living alongside free and unfree populations of various ethnic origins and religious backgrounds. The legal framework VOC-dominance imposed resulted in a paradox of exclusion: On the one hand, a combination of legal, political, and economic factors converged to exclude specific groups from institutions governing family life; on the other hand, the limited reach of colonial government and judicial arrangements that can best be described in the language of legal pluralism simultaneously left religiously and ethnically defined communities relatively free to use colonial institutions creatively, giving shape to marriage, divorce, and child-rearing through norms and practices that transcended ethnic boundaries and defied any notion of a top-down-enforced hierarchy.
Plaintiffs and Their Civil Suits in Colonial Colombo, Galle, and Matara, ca. 1760-1790
Author(s)
Dries Lyna (Radboud University) and Wouter Raaijmakers (Radboud University)
Keywords
Dutch East India Company, Legal Institution, Indigenous Social Structure
Abstract
During the Dutch period in Sri Lanka (1658-1796), the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Dutch, or VOC for short) tried to both socially and legally control local populations on the coastal region of the island. To this end, the Company manipulated existing socio-cultural relations such as the caste system, registering and categorising them as it saw fit. At the same time, the VOC introduced legal courts in the urbanised port cities of Colombo, Galle and Matara, and Jaffna, intertwining political and legal powers and curbing existing common laws with Roman-Dutch law. The major port cities received a threefold legal system, headed by a Council of Justice (Raad van Justitie in Dutch) that was competent in civil and criminal matters, and followed by a lower Civil Council and Land Council (Stadsraad and Landraad in Dutch, respectively) that focussed solely on civil matters. For the purpose of this research, a compilation of plaintiffs and their civil suits from all three Councils of Colombo, and Galle and Matara during the second half of the eighteenth century is employed to construct a partial legal map of Dutch Sri Lanka. These archival findings ultimately help to answer the question of how different local communities made use of these courts, and, in turn, gave meaning to the practices of Roman-Dutch Law in a colonial context. This research relies on secondary literature to contextualise its findings and guide its delineation. As such, the South-Western coastal region of Sri Lanka was selected due to its more consistent social composition. Literature furthermore suggests that the use of the VOC’s Councils by the local populations normalised from the 1760s onwards. Additionally, civil matters, rather than criminal cases, were engaged in by plaintiffs actively seeking jurisdiction offered by the Company. Preliminary findings of this research suggest that the use of these courts heavily depended on social origin and pedigree. Supportive arguments that point towards this premature conclusion are the number of appeals to higher Councils, the phasing of the judicial process, the length of the civil suits, categories and objects of litigation, as well as social classifications.
Changing Urban Spaces; A Study about the Craftsmen Community of Coromandel Coast
Author(s)
Akhil A R (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Keywords
Colonial Port Cities, Craftsmen Community, European Mercantile Institutions
Abstract
The eighteenth century witnessed a slew of changes in the south Asian region. The academicians observed and contested each other on the changes happened on the eighteenth century as continuity or transition. This paper does not intend to fall into the trope of change or continuity, rather attempts to locate the changes happened in the social structure during the given period. The craftsmen community of south India, which were vital in making and unmaking of urban centres of the region, were subject to the change of wind that occurred with the entry of European merchandise in the south Indian economy. The European mercantile corporations created new urban spaces which redefined the existing social relations and changed the status of many social groups in terms of power and access. The artisan groups, which remarked their presence in the urban spaces from ancient times with the flourishing trade ties, had to face a new reality with the market being confined into hands of few European merchants. This paper examines the Fort St. George records to analyse the changes happened to these social groups in accessing the corridors of power in the new ‘European’ conceived urban spaces.