•  
  •  
 

Abstract

While the long history of “commerce” in Southeast Asia is well studied, less examination has been made of the histories of capitalism, particularly in terms of the encounters that took place around commodities. This article provides a translation and analysis of a description of Dobo on Aru in 1911. At the time it was a “Klondike”, on what Julia Martínez and I have termed “the pearl frontier”. The Aru islands were the site for an Australian-led pearl shell consortium that ran from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1940s, which brought in a large number of Japanese divers and other Asian and Pacific workers. Examining relations around the pearling industry provides a number of general methodological points of entry into the ways that commodity relations created encounters with modernity.

References

Appadurai Arjun (ed.). 1986. The social life of things; Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boomgaard, Peter, Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds). 2008. Linking destinies; Trade, towns and kin in Asian History. Leiden: KITLV Press.

Breman, Jan. 1990. Taming the coolie beast; Plantation society and the colonial order in Southeast Asia. Delhi/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, K.N. 1985. Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean; An economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. 1998. “The economic role of the Arab community in Maluku, 1816 to 1940”, Indonesia and the Malay World 26 (74): 32-49.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds). 2011. New materialisms; Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dick, Howard W., Vincent J.H. Houben, J. Thomas Lindblad, and Thee Kian Wie (eds). 2002. The emergence of a national economy; An economic history of Indonesia 1800-2000. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. [ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series.]

Elson, R.E. 1984. Javanese peasants and the colonial sugar industry; Impact and change in an East Java residency 1830-1940. Singapore: Oxford University Press.

Erb, Maribeth. 1991. “Construction sacrifice, rumours and kidnapping scares in Manggarai; Further comparative notes from Flores”, Oceania 62: 114-127.

Forth, Gregory. 1990. “Construction sacrifice and head-hunting rumours in Central Flores (Eastern Indonesia); A comparative note”, Oceania 61: 257-266.

Foster, Robert J. 2008. “Commodities, brands, love and kula; Comparative notes on value creation. In honor of Nancy Munn”, Anthropological Theory 8(1): 9-25. Gereffi,

G., J. Humphrey, and T. Sturgeon. 2005. “The governance of global value chains”, Review of International Political Economy 12(1): 78-104.

Havinden, Michael, and David Meredith.1993. Colonialism and development; Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850-1960. London: Routledge.

Hoskins, Janet. 1993. The play of time; Kodi perspectives on calendars, history and exchange. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Hulsbosch, Marianne. 2014. Pointy shoes and pith helmets; Dress and identity construction in Ambon from 1850 to 1942. Leiden: Brill.

Kathirithamby-Wells, Jeyamalar. 1993. “Restraints on the development of merchant capitalism in Southeast Asia before c. 1800”, in: Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the early modern era; Trade, power, and belief, pp. 123-148. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Kloos, David. 2014. “A crazy state; Violence, psychiatry, and colonialism in Aceh, Indonesia, ca.1910-1942”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 170: 25-65.

Knight, G. Roger. 2013. Commodities and colonialism; The story of big sugar in colonial Indonesia, 1880-1942. Leiden: Brill. [Verhandelingen KITLV 286.]

Lindblad, J. Thomas. 1989. “Economic aspects of the Dutch expansion in Indonesia, 1870-1914”, Modern Asian Studies 23(1): 1-24.

MacGregor, Paul. 2012. “Book review of Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011”, Asian Studies Review 36(3): 432-433.

Martínez, Julia and Adrian Vickers. 2015. The pearl frontier; Labor mobility across the Australian-Indonesian maritime zone, 1870-1970. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital, Volume 1. [Retrieved from: ; last accessed on 30-10-2014.]

Mills, Mary Beth. 1995. “Attack of the widow ghosts; Gender, death and modernity in Northeast Thailand”, in: Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (eds), Bewitching women, pious men; Gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, pp. 244-271. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Mills, Mary Beth. 1999. Thai Women in the global labor force; Consuming desires, contested selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Mullins, Steve. 1997. “From TI to Dobo; The 1905 departure of the Torres Strait Pearl-Shelling Fleets to Aru, Netherlands East Indies”, Great Circle 19(1): 30-39.

Mullins, Steve. 2002. “James Clark and the Celebes Trading Co.; Making an Australian Maritime Venture in the Netherlands East Indies”, Great Circle 24(2): 22-52.

Mullins, Steve. 2005. “To break ‘the trinity’ or ‘wipe out the smaller fry’; The Australian Pearl Shell Convention of 1913”, Journal for Maritime Research 7(1): 215-244.

Osseweijer, Manon. 2001. Taken at the flood; Marine resource use and management in the Aru Islands (Maluku, Eastern Indonesia). PhD thesis, Leiden University.

Post, Peter. 1991. Japanse bedrijvigheid in Indonesië, 1868-1942; Structurele elementen van Japan’s vooroorlogse economische expansie in Zuidoost Azië. PhD thesis, Free University of Amsterdam.

Reid, Anthony. 1988. Southeast Asia in the age of commerce; The lands below the winds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Reid, Anthony. 1993. Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, 1450-1680; Expansion and crisis. Vol. 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Reynolds, Craig J. 1990. “Review of Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, 1450-1680 Volume One”, Review of Indonesian and Malayan Studies [RIMA] 24 (Winter): 177-180.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1994. “Cosmologies of capitalism; The trans-pacific sector of ‘The world system’”, in: N.B. Dirks, G. Eley, and S.B. Ortner (eds), Culture/power/history; A reader in contemporary social theory, pp. 412-455. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shimizu, Hiroshi. 1992. “Rise and fall of the Karayuki-San in the Netherlands Indies from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs [RIMA] 26(2): 17-43.

S [Sluys, A.G.H. van]. 1916. “Dobo-ervaringen”, Koloniaal Tijdschrift 5(2): 299-317.

Shnukal, Anna. 2011. “A double exile; Filipino settlers in the outer Torres Strait Islands, 1870s-1940s”, Aboriginal History 35: 161-178.

Spyer, Patricia. 1997. “The eroticism of debt; Pearl divers, traders, and sea wives in the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia”, American Ethnologist 24/3 (August): 515-538.

Spyer, Patricia. 2000. The memory of trade; Modernity’s entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 1985. Capitalism and confrontation in Sumatra’s plantation belt, 1870-1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sutherland, Heather. 1995. “Believing is seeing; Perspectives on political power and economic activity in the Malay world 1700-1940”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26: 133-146.

Sutherland, Heather. 2005. “Contingent devices”, in: Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds), Locating Southeast Asia; Geographies of knowledge and politics of space, pp. 20-59. Singapore: NUS Press.

Tagliacozzo, Eric and Wen-Chin Chang (eds). 2011. Chinese circulations; Capital, commodities, and networks in Southeast Asia. London/Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Taselaar, Arjen. 1998. De Nederlandse koloniale lobby; Ondernemers en de Indische politiek 1914-1940. Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies.

Vickers, Adrian. 2012. “Sakti reconsidered; Power and the disenchantment of the world”, in: L. Chua, J. Cook, N. Long, and L. Wilson (eds), Southeast Asian perspectives on power, pp. 51-66. London: Routledge.

Wade, Geoff. 2009. “An early age of commerce in Southeast Asia, 900-1300 CE”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40(2): 221-265.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1858. “On the Arru Islands” (S41: 1858). [Retrieved from: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/index1.htm; accessed on 12-4-2012.]

Download

Share

COinS