Contestation or Collaboration? Southeast Asian actors and ideas in building colonial empires, c. 1700-1942

The project investigates indigenous perspectives on colonial domination in Maritime Southeast Asia, c. 1700-1942. Here, centuries of British and Dutch colonialism rendered enormous archival collections.

However, historians have been prone to use abundantly available transcripts and copies of archival materials stored in Europe, rather than local sources housed in Asia.

Asian ideas present in these archives have been overlooked, leading to prejudiced Eurocentric history writing.This three-year project, hosted at Linnaeus University, departs from Asian rulers and elites and their ideas on the political legitimacy of colonialism.

It uses digitized colonial archives and innovative automatic Text and Entity Recognition to compare and recognize such ideas within copies and transcripts of treaties, contracts and surrounding documentation in colonial archives and Asian manuscripts, in ongoing cooperation with the Dutch and Indonesian National Archives and the GLOBALISE-research project in Amsterdam.

This discloses hitherto unrecognized patterns of indigenous views on colonialism within the structures of colonial archives, which helps transcending the often-replicated Eurocentric biases of the archives.

The project elucidates how indigenous political elites–male and female sultans, princes, grandees and advisors–made sense of colonization processes and the legalisation of empire, spurring more polyphonic histories of colonial empire, globalization, and international relations.