R. Raben

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the archival grain; Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense.

In this new feature we highlight a recently launched book. We invite specialists in the field to comment on the book, and we invite the author to respond to their comments.In this issue we focus on Ann Stoler’s Along the archival grain; Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Those invited to comment on the book are Frances Gouda, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Registered readers may participate in the debate.

Cities and the slave trade in early-modern Southeast Asia

Slave raiding and slave trading were common features of the insular Southeast Asian world throughout pre-modern times. The importance of slavery and bonded labour in Southeast Asian societies can hardly be overrated. Manpower was attached to fellow-countrymen in various forms of dependency. The causes of bondage and enslavement could be very different, be it debts, punishment, starvation and war captivity, or slave raiding and trade. This chapter offers a few arguments for reconsidering several idees recues on Southeast Asian urbanism and slavery. In the first place, cities were probably much smaller than has been assumed by contemporary visitors and later historians. Secondly, the part of slaves, in the sense of human saleable property imported from abroad, in the demographic make-up of these cities are similarly exaggerated. The available information points to a shift in the streams of forced migrations in Southeast Asia since the sixteenth century. Keywords: Batavia; forced migrations; slave trade; Southeast Asia

On genocide and mass violence in colonial Indonesia

This article discusses many topics that appear in this issue of the Journal of Genocide Research. It concentrates on the issues of colonial violence, the killings during the decolonization war and on the memories of violence in Indonesia and the Netherlands. It emphasizes the genocidal quality of colonial murderousness. It is argued that many colonial wars had strong genocidal overtones. The colonial situation was favourable to the deployment of extreme violence against indigenous people. Despite emerging humanitarian concerns in Western societies, colonial violence remained by and large free of their influence. This stretched as far as the war of decolonization, an extremely violent episode that defies clear characterization, but which fomented genocidal and other kinds of extreme violence from various contenders. Lastly, the article argues that the neglect of colonial violence in postwar memories in Indonesia and the Netherlands was stimulated by the special character of colonial cultural memory.

Beyond Empire and Nation; The Decolonization of African and Asian societies, 1930s-1960s

The decolonization of countries in Asia and Africa is one of the momentous events in the twentieth century. But did the shift to independence indeed affect the lives of the people in such a dramatic way as the political events suggest? The authors in this volume look beyond the political interpretations of decolonization and address the issue of social and economic reorientations which were necessitated or caused by the end of colonial rule. The book covers three major issues: public security; the changes in the urban environment, and the reorientation of the economies. Most articles search for comparisons transcending the colonial and national borders and adopt a time frame extending from the late colonial period to the early decades of independence in Asia and Africa (1930s-1970s).