Secret Trades, Porous Borders : Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, ‒ / Eric Tagliacozzo
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Secret Trades, Porous Borders Secret Trades, Porous Borders Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 Eric Tagliacozzo Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Portions of Section III appeared previously as “Kettle on a Slow Boil: Batavia’s Threat Perceptions in the Indies’ Outer Islands,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , (): ‒. The author is grateful to JSEAS for permission to reprint these ma- terials. Copyright © by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Garamond and Stone Sans types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tagliacozzo, Eric. Secret trades, porous borders : smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, ‒ / Eric Tagliacozzo. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) . Smuggling—Asia, Southeastern—History. Drug traffic—Asia, South- eastern—History. Counterfeits and counterfeiting—Asia, Southeastern—His- tory. Illegal arms tranfers—Asia, Southeastern—History. Asia, Southeast- ern—Commerce—History. Asia, Southeastern—Boundaries—History. Great Britain—Colonies—Asia, Southeastern—History. Netherlands—Colo- nies—Asia, Southeastern—History—th century. I. Title. HJ..ZT .Ј—dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. In memory of my father, Angelo Tagliacozzo Contents A Note on Orthography and Usage, ix Acknowledgments, xi List of Abbreviations, xv 1 Introduction, Part One Creating the Frontier: Border Formation and the State Section I Building the Frontier: Drawing Lines in Physical Space, 27 2 Mapping the Frontier, 3 Enforcing the Frontier, 4 Strengthening the Frontier, Section II Imagining the Frontier: State Visions of Danger Along the Border, 107 5 The Specter of Violence, viii Contents 6 “Foreign Asians” on the Frontier, 7 The Indigenous Threat, Part Two Crossing the Frontier: Smuggling, Profit, and Resistance Section III Secret Trades, Porous Borders, 185 8 The Smuggling of Narcotics, 9 Counterfeiters Across the Frontier, 10 Illicit Human Cargoes, Section IV The Illegal Weapons Trade Across the Anglo/Dutch Frontier, 259 11 Munitions and Borders: Arms in Context, 12 Praxis and Evasion: Arms in Motion, Section V A Frontier Story: The Sorrows of Golam Merican, 317 13 Contraband and the Junk Kim Ban An, 14 Worlds of Illegality, –, 15 Conclusion, Bibliography, Index, A Note on Orthography and Usage Tracing the intertwined histories of the many populations who lived and interacted on the Anglo/Dutch frontier of colonial Southeast Asia requires the use of many spelling systems and orthographies. Both the Dutch and the British had their own (often very imperfect) systems of rendering names, places, and concepts; many local actors (such as the Acehnese and Overseas Chinese, for example) had sys- tems as well. Applying some kind of consistency to this bewildering array of names has proved to be a difficult challenge. I have followed several conventions to simplify these diversities. In the notes, I have used original spellings of names and places, so that documents can be found directly and easily by subsequent researchers in the various archives used in this book. Therefore Malacca rather than Melaka and Billiton rather then Belitung. In my own text, I use contemporary designations when referring to places: Aceh rather than Atjeh, Bengkulu rather than Bencoolen. This is to help the modern reader navigate the history presented here through familiar, present- day geographies. I have used period spellings of names in virtually all cases. Because ix x Note on Usage almost all of the “smugglers” discussed in this book were of the middle or lower classes, their names are not preserved other than in the ways that colonial gov- ernments recorded them. Particularly with Chinese populations, this has led to the Romanization of Chinese names with Dutch and English designations side by side. These are the only renderings we have, however, so I have used names as they appear in the sources. Chinese subethnic groupings have been simpli- fied to modern usage: Hainanese rather than Hailam and Hakka rather than Keh. Chinese villages mentioned in the text are noted by period renderings, with the modern designation immediately following in parentheses so that the vil- lage can be found on modern maps. Chinese cities and ports, where well known, are kept in original forms, though with the modern spellings in paren- theses following the first mention: Amoy, not Xiamen, and Peking, not Beijing. Chinese provinces follow this same usage. Acknowledgments No book is ever written alone, and this one required more help than most, perhaps. It has been a source of considerable amazement to me how willing many colleagues have been to discuss the ideas, people, and places in this manuscript. My three former teachers among this group deserve special mention: they taught me about life and not just about scholarship, and for this and everything else they have imparted to me, I will always be grateful. Several scholars read all or most of the manuscript in one form or another over the years, and I owe them a great debt for their timely critiques and advice. Barbara Watson An- daya, Robert Cribb, Robert Elson, Ben Kiernan, Paul Kratoska, An- thony Reid, James Rush, James Scott, Jonathan Spence, Heather Sutherland, and Jean Gelman Taylor all gave of their time freely, and never asked for anything in return. Several other scholars agreed to read chapters of the manuscript related to their own work; I am in- debted to J. a Campo, Jeffrey Hadler, J. Thomas Lindblad, Mona Lo- handa, Rudolf Mrazek, Dian Murray, Curtis Renoe, Laurie Sears, Jim Siegel, John Sidel, Djuliati Suroyo, Thongchai Winichakul, G. Teitler, and Carl Trocki for doing so. xi xii Acknowledgments A much larger group of people has helped shape the way I thought about this time and place, either through my readings of their published work or through a series of fortuitous conversations over the years. In this regard, I wish to thank Leonard Andaya, Benedict Anderson, Maitrii Aung-Thwin, Greg Bankoff, Tim Barnard, Leonard Blusse, Peter Boomgaard, Raj and Ian Brown, Chris Duncan, Michael Feener, Bill Frederick, Christophe Giebel, Tom Goodman, Frances Gouda, Valerie Hansen, Lotta Hedman, Tineke Hellwig, David Hen- ley, Cathryn Houghton, Paul Hutchcroft, Noboru Ishikawa, Eric Jones, Mi- chael Laffan, Steve Lee, Li Tana, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Celia Lowe, Alfred McCoy, Ruth McVey, Audrey Kahin, Michael Montesano, Ng Chin Keong, Henk Niemeijer, Stan O’Connor, Lorraine Paterson, Nancy Peluso, Remco Raben, Merle Ricklefs, Geoff Robinson, Noelle Rodriguez, Singgih Sulisti- yono, Sun Lai Chen, Tan Tai Yong, Keith Taylor, Esther Velthoen, Reed Wad- ley, James Warren, Meredith Weiss, Charles Wheeler, Alex Woodside, David Wyatt, and Peter Zinoman. Kerry Ward, Ray Craib, and Andrew Willford have been particularly important intellectual touchstones for me; I am very grateful to all three of them. The History Department at Cornell and the Southeast Asia Program at Cor- nell have nourished me both financially and intellectually over the past five years. Colleagues and friends in both places have made learning and life, re- spectively, both interesting and fun. If I do not thank the members of both Mc- Graw and Rockefeller Halls individually here, I hope they will forgive me—it’s a very long list. Yet I’m especially grateful to my three modern Asian history col- leagues at Cornell, Sherman Cochran, J. Victor Koschmann, and Tamara Loos, each of whom read and critiqued sections of the manuscript related to their own expertise. They (more than most) have made teaching and researching Asian history at Cornell a very good experience for me. I’ve had the good for- tune to serve on the committees of many excellent graduate students at Cor- nell; they have invariably taught me more then I have taught them, both in the classroom and through their written work. Many thanks, therefore, to Andrew Abalahin, Rick Ruth, Oiyan Liu, Chie Ikeya, Jason McCluskey, Soon Keong Ong, Tai Wei Lim, Doreen Lee, Jane Ferguson, Yew-Foong Hui, Yun-Wen Sung, Jennifer Foley, Sze Wei Ang, Arsenio Nicolas, Christian Lenz, Upik Dja- lins, Jason Cons, Richard Guy, Jacco van den Heuvel, Lorling Lee, and Ling Xiang Quek. Kay Mansfield, Kris Mooseker, Nancy Loncto, Jenn Evangelista, Katie Kristof, Barb Donnell, and especially Judy Burkhard fed me local knowl- edge in New Haven and Ithaca, and I’m grateful to all of them for looking after me for the past ten years. I am very grateful to the many funding bodies at Yale, Cornell, nationally, Acknowledgments xiii and internationally who funded my work over a period of twelve years in re- searching and writing this book. The collection of additional materials and most revisions were undertaken in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Ithaca over many scattered months. The last few weeks of revisions were completed at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, where I had the good fortune to be a Vis- iting Fellow in –. I learned an enormous amount from other Fellows there. In addition to several names already mentioned, I wish to thank John Miksic, Ed McKinnon, Jamie Davidson, Mark Frost, Khoo Gaik Cheng, Vatthana Pholsena, Xiang Biao, Mika Toyota, Resil Mojares, Joel Kahn, Maila Stivins, Chee Heng Leng, Tran Ky Phuong, Momoki Shiro, K. S. Jomo, Cher- ian George, David Lim, Guillaume Rozenberg, Li Tang, Jenny Lindsay, and es- pecially Geoff Wade for their friendship and companionship.