Research project Encountering Diplomacy in Early Modern Southeast Asia: Actors, Practices, Translation
Encountering diplomacy in early modern Southeast Asia is a study in global history. It explores how diplomatic practices and foreign relations were shaped in maritime Southeast Asia's pluralistic, multi-centric, open geography during the 17th and 18th centuries. In this period, exchange between local polities and aspiring European colonial powers flourished.
Project description
The project uses the rich history of negotiations and cross-cultural communication between local Southeast Asian polities and various actors from Europe to integrate practices of balancing power relations into a nuanced global history of diplomacy. Although foreign relations are widely regarded as an important vector for cultural exchange, little is known about how transregional interactions shaped the very principles and practices of diplomatic dealings throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period of heightened political and economic transformations in the “Spanish” Philippines and its surroundings, various Indonesian islands, and coastal regions on the Malay Peninsula.
The diplomatic encounter
The project applies the concept of the diplomatic encounter, which approaches relevant processes and practices in their own time and under consideration of their specific diplomatic culture. Broadening the definition of diplomacy from official negotiation or formal exchange of envoys and letters to asymmetrical power bargaining and their often highly symbolic ceremonials and ad hoc actions by non-established parties are regarded as equally important stages of foreign relations. It compares different diplomatic episodes including the foreign relations of insular Muslim chiefdoms, colonial rivalries, the diplomatic strategies of small city-states, and the impact of expanding empires in the region including understudied political dimensions of commercial links to the greater Sinosphere and the Indian Ocean world.
The key aim of the study is to sharpen our understanding of indigenous participation in diplomatic processes. While taking colonial agendas into account, the study explicitly goes beyond stereotypical narratives of rivalry and conflict as dominant forces in colonial Asia. It addresses the use of diplomatic exchange and forging alliances of local stakeholders with each other and with European actors, to look for examples of how local Southeast Asian agencies and indigenous traditions shaped diplomatic practices. Complex alliances based on kinship and military prowress as well as maritime tributary ties were core to power relations. Transregional interactions shaped the very principles of cross-cultural political communication necessary to forge alliances and set up lasting collaborations between different interest groups. Polities operated and existed alongside the logics of permanent negotiation of power and shifting alliances: Diverse actors including local chiefs (datu), Bugis, Chinese seagoing merchants, representatives of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, merchants of the Dutch and English East India companies were affected by internal strives over revenues, power, prestige, and decision-making, while negotiating their political position within the larger political framework.
With a bottom-up reading of practices of foreign relations, the project both nuances conventional chronologies and expands archives of diplomatic history. Problematizing the asymmetry of the archive, non-written sources represent an important aspect of the project which primarily focuses on multi-layered translation processes of negotiations between European and Asian actors from a local, Southeast Asian vantage point. In addition, a systematic collection of terms and phrases from Asian and European documents will help to deconstruct notions of vertical and horizontal relations, of tribute and vassalage, and of reciprocity mistaken for equality. In re-addressing such binaries in early modern diplomatic history, the project contributes to a new narration of foreign relations in Southeast Asia, challenges conventional periodization, and does justice to multiple modernities and epistemic asymmetries
Project members
Project managers
Birgit Tremml-Werner
Universitetslektor
