Amity and its discontents: Empires, nations, and internationalism, 16th to 20th centuries

Panel Convenor(s)

• JB

  Jorge Bayona

  El Colegio de México, COLMEX, Mexico
• KN

  Kelvin Ng

  Yale University, United States

Panel Chair(s)

• JB

  Jorge Bayona

  El Colegio de México, COLMEX, Mexico

Presenter(s)

• BM

  Benjamin Moseley

  University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States
• HL

  Hongxuan Lin

  National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
• JB

  Jorge Bayona

  El Colegio de México, COLMEX, Mexico
• KN

  Kelvin Ng

  Yale University, United States

This panel highlights a dimension that is often overlooked in historical discussions of empire and internationalism: friendship, or amity. Overshadowed by the study of coercion and collaboration, amity provides another lens through which to analyse empire- or nation-building in Southeast Asia, allowing us to examine how the negotiations inherent to friendship inflect larger historical processes. The panel takes a wide chronological perspective stretching from the 16th century to the 20th, which demonstrates the pervasive importance of amity over time. Benjamin Moseley studies eastern Indonesia, where Portuguese and Dutch sailors wrestled with the necessity of engaging with local Muslim communities using the language of amity in order to further their imperial plans, even if declamations of friendship clashed with intentions of spreading Christianity. Lin Hongxuan turns the spotlight on Indonesian Marxists sojourning abroad, sojourners who had complex relationships with their “fellow believers” back in Indonesia, inasmuch as their absence interrupted their everyday relations of comradeship and solidarity, but whose eventual returns pollinated Marxist thought and pushed it in new directions. Jorge Bayona studies how the looming threat of American-ordered partition of the Philippines into Christian and Muslim sections induced Christian Filipinos to promote a language of friendship with the Moros of the south. Lastly, Kelvin Ng studies how the incipient Chinese and Tamil press in British Malaya struggled to translate and vernacularize new analytical categories like “labour” or “capital,” germane to Chinese and Tamil migrant workers’ experiences in tin mines and rubber plantations; in doing so, they deployed narratives of amity to articulate novel ethical ideals like equality.

Presentations:

• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Father Company or Husband Company: Language of Kinship in VOC-Malukan Correspondences in the Early Modern Period
  

  Presenter: Benjamin Moseley – University of Hawaii at Manoa
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  The Minor Key: Indonesian Marxists Sojourning Abroad
  

  Presenter: Hongxuan Lin – National University of Singapore (NUS)
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Re-inscribing amity: American Empire and Christian-Muslim relations in the southern Philippines in the 1920s
  

  Presenter: Jorge Bayona – El Colegio de México, COLMEX
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Vernacular Equality: The Labor Question in Colonial Malaya, 1920–1940
  

  Presenter: Kelvin Ng – Yale University