Ariel Lopez, Eleonora Poggio and Birgit Tremml-Werner will present a joint paper at the Austronesian Research Seminar in Hamburg

The paper entitled Revisiting Bargaining and Commercial Integration from the Balintang Channel to the Strait of Makassar, presented by Ariel Lopez, Eleonora Poggio, and Birgit Tremml-Werner at the Austronesian Research Seminar in Hamburg, proposes a reconfiguration of trans-regional trade between southern China and the Sulu-Mindanao-Borneo region from an integrative maritime Southeast Asian perspective.

It explores power bargaining motivated by economic profit, geopolitical transformations, imperial and internal rivalries through a longue durée survey of roughly a century from 1750 to 1850. To this end, we focus on a diverse group of actors, including local populations, colonial agents, military officers, sultans and datus, as well as highly mobile non-state actors, collectively known as Bugis, Sama, and Chinese, within an innovative regional framework. By focusing on a range of political strategies, including the attempted colonisation of Babuyan in the second half of the eighteenth century and the treaties between indigenous communities and the Spanish crown in the 1830s, the paper challenges notions of despotism and chaos. Its broad regional framework makes it possible to trace the patterns and practices that governed the expansion of trade and the adaptation of pluralistic legal systems. By analyzing a wide range of primary sources of different genres and languages, the paper is a collective effort to establish new ways of narrating interregional trade, the role of the colonial state, and the integration of diverse local populations.