SYNOPSIS

This talk analyses the twentieth-century Dutch empire from an oceanic perspective, highlighting the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of colonial Indonesia during the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, Kobe, and Batavia became important centers of opposition to Dutch imperialism due to global circulations of nationalist, communist, pan-Islamic, and pan-Asian ideologies amongst passengers, laborers, and religious pilgrims traveling on board Dutch ships. In response to these growing maritime threats, the Dutch government and shipping companies—working together as bilateral monopolies—attempted to secure oceanic spaces and maintain hegemony abroad through maritime policing networks, close collaborations with British and French surveillance entities ashore, and spatial segregation on ships meant to “teach” proper behaviour within imperial hierarchies. In other words, the maritime world was not a liminal space but an active political arena during the late-colonial period, when ships served simultaneously as colonial classrooms and politicized stages of resistance for global audiences. By identifying mechanisms of imperial oversight and anticolonial opposition outside the contiguous waters of colonial Indonesia, this paper reveals how the end of Dutch rule in Southeast Asia was shaped not only within the terrestrial confines of metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kris Alexanderson is Associate Professor of History at University of the Pacific (USA). Her first book, Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is at once a history of global maritime networks connecting colonial Indonesia to port cities in Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and a ship-level history of the everyday lives and political struggles of colonial subjects traveling across the world’s oceans.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you register by clicking the Register button above and we will email you prior to the event for the webinar link.