Wounding Our Customs: Law, Gender, and Pluralism in Chinese Batavia, 1740–1811

Abstract:Mass migration of male Chinese merchants and laborers to maritime Southeast Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries fundamentally reshaped world trade networks and colonial state-building. However, it also catalyzed social and cultural interactions between Chinese migrants and the Europeans and Southeast Asians they encountered overseas. Chinese migrantsconstructed and adjusted their own group identity in response to the multilateral cultural interactions that were an inescapable part of life in overseas port cities. This study examines a central tension in the social and political lives of Chinese migrants in late 18th century Batavia (modern Jakarta). On one hand, elite Chinese merchants carved out a political and legal constituency that was premised on the self-evident existence of well-defined “Chinese households” and “Chinese customary law.” On the other hand, the daily lives of their constituents regularly transgressed these ethnic categories through cultural hybridization, driven by marriage practices that ensured that most nominally “Chinese” women were in fact of Indonesian descent. In response, the Chinese elite and their subjects turned various aspects of the Batavian legal system into a forum for the negotiation of what constituted proper Chinese behavior. Elite men on the Chinese council attempted to use Dutch legal codification projects to impose a Confucianized vision of proper gendered behavior within those households. At the same time, the minutes of the law court administered by the Chinese council reveal how ordinary male and female litigants articulated their own notions of justice, and how the judges of the Chinese council used their privileged position as judges to intervene in the lives of their subjects. The courts thus functioned as sites for the negotiation of gender norms, the production of a tenuous ideological hegemony about the duties of husbands and wives, and, in extremis, the use of coercion and spectacular punishment to discipline an unruly populace.