2 - Primitive, Peregrinate, Piratical : Framing Southeast Asian Sea-Nomads in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Discourse and Imperial Practice

Summary

Abstract This chapter examines the epistemic and violent processes through which Southeast Asian non-sedentary communities on sea, land, and along the littoral were assessed, criminalised, and rendered governable by colonial regimes during the nineteenth century. It hypothesises that the concept of territoriality proved pivotal in defining the subjects of colonial rule. Territoriality determined the status of members of these itinerant cultures, notwithstanding whether they were potentially “domesticable” within a capitalist world system, or decried as pirates, dacoits, or bandits. The chapter juxtaposes attitudes towards maritime and terrestrial nomads, exposing how physical spatiality influenced how territoriality was conceptualised, laws and legal procedures implemented, and how this affected the governmental strategies of othering the inhabitants inhabiting and of bringing order to them.

Keywords: Malay; Non-Sedentary; British Empire; Territoriality; Frontier; Piracy; Law

The entry on “Piracy and Pirate” in John Crawfurd's (1783–1868) “A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries” (1856) opened with these words:

There is no name in Malay and Javanese, or indeed in any other native language for piracy or robbery on the high seas. There is, in fact, no word to distinguish the element on which the act of plunder is committed, a thing natural enough with a people who live as much on the sea as on the land.

According to Crawfurd—who by then was broadly recognised as the authority on Southeast Asia in a British context—the notion, if not the actual practices, of piracy was an unknown phenomenon in Southeast Asia before Europeans entered its waters and introduced this category as a potent politico-legal signifier. During the nineteenth century, piracy came to constitute a key category in the ideological idiom that underwrote the imperial projects carried out by European colonial regimes in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region with the ostensible aim at bringing (their) trade, order, and, in their own optics, progress in the broadest sense of the word to these seas and their adjacent terrestrial regions.

Despite this an alleged semantic absence of what Europeans called piracy, acts normally associated with this category were, nonetheless, deemed to be rampant in the region.