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Exile, Mobility, and Re-territorialisation in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2021

Abstract

For centuries, trading companies and colonial officials have sought to manipulate indigenous Asian kingdoms by banishing recalcitrant elites, thereby discouraging resistance and ensuring compliance. Less examined by scholars is how colonial officials adapted this tool in their efforts to manage mobility and achieve territorialisation at the turn of the twentieth century. Applying Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell's framework of “re-territorialisation” to make sense of how states harness mobile flows for the purpose of redrawing boundaries and producing new political spaces, this article will examine Dutch strategies for incorporating the sultanate of Aceh into the Netherlands East Indies. Site of an infamous multi-decade war of insurgency and pacification between 1873 and the early 1900s, this Sumatran kingdom had long resisted imperial subjugation. Dutch authorities eventually moved to complete its elusive ambition of conquest by leveraging distance and forcibly sending Acehnese elites to “training schools” in Java. By fusing exile with pedagogy, colonial officials hoped to transform Acehnese elites into loyal servants of the colonial centre. Rancorous debates about the deposed Acehnese sultan, however, illustrated the limitations of such re-territorialisation schemes and the resiliency of alternative Asian geographies.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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References

Bibliography

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Kloos, David. Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Rai, Rajesh. “‘Race’ and the Construction of the North–South Divide amongst Indians in Colonial Malaya and Singapore,South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 27:2 (2004): 245–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reid, Anthony. The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands, and Britain 1858–1898. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. “Habib Abdur-Rahman Az-Zahir.” Indonesia 13 (April 1972): 3659.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese & Other Histories of Sumatra. Singapore: NUS Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Rep, Jelte. Atjeh, Atjeh. Baarn: De Prom, 1996.Google Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. “From Java to Jaffna: Exile and Return in Dutch Asia in the Eighteenth Century.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 94116. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. “Introduction: Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 119. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossum, Matthias van. “The Carceral Colony: Colonial Exploitation, Coercion, and Control in the Dutch East Indies, 1810s–1940s,International Review of Social History 63:S26 (2018): 6588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulte Nordholt, Henk. “A Genealogy of Violence.” In Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective, vol. 194, edited by Colombijn, Freek & Lindblad, J. Thomas, 3361. Leiden: Brill, 2002.Google Scholar
Schulten, C. M. “Tactics of the Dutch Colonial Army in the Netherlands East Indies,Revue International d'Histoire Militaire 70 (1988): 5967.Google Scholar
Siegel, James. Rope of God. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Streets-Salter, Heather. “Consuls, Colonies and the World: Low-level Bureaucrats and the Machinery of Empire, c. 1880-1914,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 20:3 (Winter 2019), doi: 10.1353/cch.2019.0037Google Scholar
Tagliacozzo, Eric. Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Wieringa, Edwin. “The Dream of the King and the Holy War against the Dutch: The Kôteubah of the Acehnese Epic, Hikayat Prang Gômpeuni,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61:2 (June 1998): 298308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Anand. Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Leiden University Library Special Collection, Leiden (LULSC):Google Scholar
Collection Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, ub1085 (Coll Snouck Hurgronje).Google Scholar
Archief Godard Arend Johannes Hazeu, ub1240 (Archief Hazeu).Google Scholar
National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague (NA):Google Scholar
Ministerie van Koloniën 1850–1900 (1932). Access Number: 2.10.02 (MK).Google Scholar
Ministerie van Koloniën, 1900–1963: Geheime Mailrapporten, 1914–1952, Access Number: 2.10.36.06 (MK Geheime Mailrapporten)Google Scholar
Geheim Archief van het Ministerie van Koloniën, 1901–1940. Access Number: 2.10.36.51 (MK Geheim Archief).Google Scholar
National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia (ANRI)Google Scholar
Arsip Algemeene Secretarie Serie Grote Bundel Missive Governements Secretaris. K100 (Algemeene Secretarie).Google Scholar
Damsté, H. T.Mémoires van een Atjèhschen Balling door H. T. Damsté.” De Indische Gids 28:1 (1916): 322–35, 426–42, 751–65.Google Scholar
“De Pretendant Sultan van Atjeh verbannen.” De Indische Gids 30:1 (1908).Google Scholar
Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan. The Acehnese. Trans. O'Sullivan, A. W. S.. Vol. 1. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1906.Google Scholar
Aldrich, Robert. Banished Potentates: Dethroning and Exiling Indigenous Monarchs under British and French Colonial Rule, 1815–1955. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfian, Teuku Ibrahim. “Acheh Sultanate under Sultan Mohammad Daud Syah and the Dutch War.” In Profiles of Malay Culture: Historiography, Religion and Politics, edited by Kartodirdjo, Sartono, 147–66. Jakarta: Ministry of Education and Culture, Directorate General of Culture, 1976.Google Scholar
Amrith, Sunil. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Anderson, Clare. “A Global History of Exile in Asia, c. 1700–1900.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 2047. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Clare. Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aspinall, Edward. Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Bijl, Paul. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Colonial Remembrance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, Francis R. “Women, Violence, and Gender Dynamics during and after the Five Patani-Siam Wars, 1785–1838.” Itinerario 45:3 (2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coté, Joost J. “Colonial Education: Colonials and the Colonized in ‘Colonies of Settlement’ and ‘Colonies of Exploitation.’” In Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, edited by Fitzgerald, Tanya, 259–76. Singapore: Springer, 2020.Google Scholar
Duke Bryant, Kelly M. Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s–1914. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Feener, R. Michael. Shari'a and Social Engineering: The Implementation of Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh, Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Formichi, Chiara. “Displacing Political Islam in Indonesia.” Itinerario 45:3 (2021).10.1017/S0165115321000267CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujimoto, Helen. The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolution of the Jawa Peranakan in Penang up to 1948. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo Gaikokugo, 1989.Google Scholar
Gedacht, Joshua, and Malhi, Amrita, ‘‘Introduction to Coercing Mobility: Territory and Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asia.’’, Itinerario 45:3 (2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyman, Josiah, and Campbell, Howard. “The Anthropology of Global Flows: A Critical Reading of Apparadurai's ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.’Anthropological Theory 9:2 (2009): 131–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho, Engseng. “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46:2 (April 2004): 210–46.Google Scholar
Ho, Engseng. “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies.” Journal of Asian Studies 76:4 (November 2017): 907–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaartinen, Timo. “Exile, Colonial Space, and Deterritorialized People in Eastern Indonesian History.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 139–64. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khoo, Salma Nasution. The Chulia in Penang: patronage and place-making around the Kapitan Kling Mosque 1786–1957. Penang: Areca Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Kloos, David. Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kloos, David. “Dis/connection: Violence, Religion, and Geographic Imaginings in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia, 1890s–1920s.” Itinerario 45:3 (2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laffan, Michael Francis. The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Leirissa, R. Z. “The Bugis-Makassarese in the Port Towns: Ambon and Ternate through the Nineteenth Century.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 156:3 (2000): 619–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malhi, Amrita. “Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya's Racial State, 1945–1954.” Itinerario 45:3 (2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagtegaal, Luc. Riding the Dutch Tiger: The Dutch East Indies Company and the Northeast Coast of Java, 1680–1743. Translated by Jackson, Beverly. Verhandelingen van Het Koninklijk Instituut van Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 171. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Prager, Michael. “From Volkenkunde to Djurusan Antropologi: The Emergence of Indonesian Anthropology in Postwar Indonesia.” In Asian Anthropology, edited by Bremen, Jan van, Ben-Ari, Eyal, and Alatas, Syed Farid, 179200. London: Routledge, 2005.Google Scholar
Raben, Remco. “The Asian Foundations of the Dutch Thalassocracy: Creative Absorption and the Company Empire in Asia.” In Empires of the Sea: Maritime Power Networks in World History, edited by Strootman, Rolf, van den Eijnde, Floris, and van Wijk, Roy, 312–37. Leiden: Brill, 2019.Google Scholar
Rai, Rajesh. “‘Race’ and the Construction of the North–South Divide amongst Indians in Colonial Malaya and Singapore,South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 27:2 (2004): 245–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reid, Anthony. The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands, and Britain 1858–1898. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. “Habib Abdur-Rahman Az-Zahir.” Indonesia 13 (April 1972): 3659.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Reid, Anthony. An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese & Other Histories of Sumatra. Singapore: NUS Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Rep, Jelte. Atjeh, Atjeh. Baarn: De Prom, 1996.Google Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. “From Java to Jaffna: Exile and Return in Dutch Asia in the Eighteenth Century.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 94116. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. “Introduction: Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration.” In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ricci, Ronit, 119. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossum, Matthias van. “The Carceral Colony: Colonial Exploitation, Coercion, and Control in the Dutch East Indies, 1810s–1940s,International Review of Social History 63:S26 (2018): 6588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulte Nordholt, Henk. “A Genealogy of Violence.” In Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective, vol. 194, edited by Colombijn, Freek & Lindblad, J. Thomas, 3361. Leiden: Brill, 2002.Google Scholar
Schulten, C. M. “Tactics of the Dutch Colonial Army in the Netherlands East Indies,Revue International d'Histoire Militaire 70 (1988): 5967.Google Scholar
Siegel, James. Rope of God. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Streets-Salter, Heather. “Consuls, Colonies and the World: Low-level Bureaucrats and the Machinery of Empire, c. 1880-1914,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 20:3 (Winter 2019), doi: 10.1353/cch.2019.0037Google Scholar
Tagliacozzo, Eric. Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Wieringa, Edwin. “The Dream of the King and the Holy War against the Dutch: The Kôteubah of the Acehnese Epic, Hikayat Prang Gômpeuni,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61:2 (June 1998): 298308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Anand. Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.Google Scholar