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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.
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- Article
- Information
- Itinerario , Volume 45 , Special Issue 3: Coercing Mobility: Territory and Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asian Muslim Movements , December 2021 , pp. 364 - 388
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University
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