Conference presentation: Southeast Asian Perspectives on Treaty-making

Treaty-making in Southeast Asia is usually understood as a European practice introduced by European colonial and commercial actors in the late sixteenth century and subsequently promoted, above all, by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The nineteenth century saw an expansion of the practice of treaty-making as a key instrument in the imperial and colonial expansion in the region, accompanied by an increasingly strong tendency for treaties to be dictated to Southeast Asian rulers by Western imperial powers, often by means of gunboat diplomacy.

Whereas the broad outlines of this narrative are not necessarily wrong they fail to capture the complexity and nuances of treaty-making as a cross-cultural diplomatic practice in Southeast Asia. Over time, the political and commercial elites of many Southeast Asian polities acquired great experience and skills in negotiating with European colonial and commercial agents. Individual polities developed institutional memories of treaty-making and diplomacy, including orally transmitted knowledge as well practices of record-keeping and diplomatic correspondence. Throughout the long history of treaty-making between Southeast Asian polities and colonial agents, many Southeast Asian rulers and diplomats were able to effectively communicate their interests and demands and to extract concessions in the treaties that they signed with the colonial powers.

Based on the work currently conducted by the research programme Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia, the present paper highlights the strategies and practices used by Southeast Asian actors in a select number of treaty negotiations with different colonial powers during the nineteenth century. By focusing on the agency, strategies and motivations of the Southeast Asian actors, the dominant, largely Eurocentric, view of so-called colonial treaties as merely unequal or coercive instruments of imperialism is challenged and nuanced.