Public lecture: Coercion and accommodation in the Malay World during the long nineteenth century

This guest lecture presents some of the recent results of the research programme Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia, which investigates treaty-making and cross-cultural diplomacy between indigenous Southeast Asian polities and colonial powers in Southeast Asia from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Image: Conclusion of the so-called Treaty of Laubuan between Brunei and the United Kingdom, 18 December 1846. From R. Mundy, Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebes, Vol. II (London: John Murray 1848), face p. 295. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Treaty_of_Labuan1846.jpg.

The lecture features four short presentations by members of the project, followed by comments by Dr Mulaika Hijas, SOAS.

· Prof. Stefan Amirell, Linnaeus University: ’Unequal treaties’ and historical agency: A view from eighteenth-century Kedah

· Dr. Maarten Manse, Linnaeus University: Recasting the terms of empire: Treaty-making in Java in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries

· Assoc. prof. Birgit Tremml-Werner, Stockholm University: Coercion and accommodation in treaty making practices viewed from Zamboanga

· Dr. Ariel Lopez, University of the Philippines: New Alliances, Old System: Chiefly negotiations along the margins of the Sulu Sultanate and the Spanish colonial empire, c. 1870−1890