This lecture discusses how treaties concluded between the rulers of two Javanese polities, Mataram and Banten, and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were translated, understood and appropriated within the local political and intellectual traditions of these polities' courts. Scholarship has typically treated such treaties as legal instruments through which European powers established authority overseas based on European assumptions and understandings of law, sovereignty, and the binding nature of written agreements. By contrast, this article shifts the perspective to the Javanese rulers and courts and analyses the treaties alongside Javanese historical narratives produced at these courts, to elucidate how the treaties were interpreted within Javanese political and historiographical frameworks.  It argues that whereas the treaties were used retrospectively by Europeans as constitutional deeds to retroactively support colonial claims of sovereignty over (parts of) Java, at the Javanese courts they were interpreted and domesticated (through practices of translation and by incorporating fragments of the treaties into existing political and cultural frameworks), as important rhetorical instruments supporting the cosmological legitimation of kingship in the face of internal disputes, external pressure and confrontation with the Dutch.

This lecture will also be hybrid, please contact Zhonghua Du (z.du@uva.nl) for more information. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Maarten Manse lectures at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and conducts postdoctoral research at Linnaeus University. He obtained his PhD at Leiden University in 2021. His research interests include the political mechanisms and legal dimensions of imperialism and the global circulation of colonial knowledge and in early-modern and modern Southeast Asia. He is the author of the research article "Two Sides of the Same Coin: Direct Taxation and Negotiated Governance in Colonial Indonesia" (Journal of Social History, 56:2 (2022): 411-438).