Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia: 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.  

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

Registration 

This event free, open to the public, and held in-person only. 

Organiser 

Organised by the SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies. 

South East Asian Studies Seminar Series 

This semester’s theme foregrounds how communities across Southeast Asia have sought to live, believe, and flourish through the practices of everyday life. From ritual and governance to kinship and sport, the seminars explore how ordinary practices are imagined and enacted across different times and places. The series brings historical and ethnographic perspectives into conversation to illuminate the ethical, political, and creative dimensions of daily life in the region.

Header image credit: 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.