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The first international conference organized by the research program Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia under the auspices of Stefan Eklöf Amirell and Ariel Lopez, financed by the Swedish Research Council, was held at the College of Law at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Manila between 29 February and 2 March 2024.
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For several hundred years after 1498, seafaring European powers developed and co-opted a complicated network of commercial relations along the coastlands of the Indian Ocean World and Asia. For the most part, they did not open up new waterways but took advantage of existing systems of trade and exchange. European commerce was often established by brute force but also through negotiations and treaties, often in combination with violence or threats of violence.
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Originating from an initiative at the third conference of the Global Diplomacy Network, Birgit Tremml-Werner and Lisa Hellman launched a blog series together International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). Nowadays known as "The Blog", it has emerged as a popular guest blogging initiative hosted, maintained, and promoted by the IIAS.
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Treaties with indigenous rulers formed the legal backbone underneath many empires, and the Dutch colonial empire in Indonesia was no exception. Hundreds and hundreds of treaties between the Dutch and numerous polities in Southeast Asia preserved in the colonial archives of the Dutch colonial state and its predecessor, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; VOC) testify to a long history of treaty-making. This year, I spend two months tracing these treaties in the national archives of Indonesia in Jakarta.
Communicating Diplomacy: Global comparisons of oral, written, and material early modern negotiations
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On 1-2 December 2022 the Global Diplomacy Network held its fourth biannual conference (after Tokyo 2016, Venice 2018, all-online in 2020) at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. It was held as a hybrid conference with participants from fifteen countries in Asia, Europe, and America, joining either on-site or online. Moreover, the conference tested an unconventional format of one-hour sessions per paper presentation, designed as conversations between a presenter who provided an impulse, a discussant, and ample time for discussion. Combining local, regional, and international perspectives, the conference discussed the strategic use–and misuse–of communication within early modern global history.
