Description
Book SynopsisWives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial periodchanges that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company''s Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of eighteenth-century Batavia-Jakarta. Southeast Asian women played an inordinately important role in the functioning of the early modern Asia Trade and in the short- and long-term operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Southeast Asia was a place where most individuals operated within an
Trade Review
A lively, readable work. Recommended for its originality, its use of primary sources that are not easily accessible, its contribution to the study of women in South East Asia, and because it closed a gap in the literature on Indonesian and Dutch colonial history.
-- Carol G.S. Tan, School of Law, SOAS, University of London
Wonderfully written... makes it points clearly and with a minimal use of verbiage. A truly solid piece of research that will make a genuine contribution to the field.
-- Paul Rodell, Georgia Southern University
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Gender, Bondage, and the Law in Early Dutch Asia
2: Asia Trade and Limits of the Possible
3: Courts and Courtship: Legal Practice in Dutch Asia
4: Batavia and Its Runaway Slavinnen
5: Gender, Abuse, and the Modern World System: Female Violence in Eighteenth-century Jakarta
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
