PUBLICATIONS

When he arrived back from his first voyage, Columbus reported that he had taken possession of lands and people beyond count. This typically confident statement encapsulates the key act of European expansion: the claim to possession over distant territories. This article considers European claims to possession in early modern Asia and in particular a string of territorial acquisitions made by the Dutch East India Company in the first half of the seventeenth century.

My focus is on legal claims, how the Company justified its hold over territory, and the counterclaims that these prompted. The process of looking for counterclaims is, I suggest, a productive one, revealing connections between otherwise neglected events or actions that cohere to form patterns of legal opposition.

Put together, these patterns reveal that legal resistance was the pervasive byproduct of expansion and that different groups were able to mobilize arguments that struck at the heart of the Company’s claims to territory.

Beginning in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the effective ruler of Japan, sent dozens of letters to Cochinchina, Cambodia, Patani, the Philippines, and other states and colonies scattered across Southeast Asia. The dispatch of these documents marked a significant shift in Japanese diplomatic patterns. For the first time, Japan broke decisively from the confines of East Asia to connect with wider networks of trade and diplomacy. Dispatched in response to a string of incidents in ports across the region, these letters provide clear evidence of the frequent violence that accompanied the Japanese push into Southeast Asia. In their willingness to shift easily between trade and violence, Japanese merchants bear a striking resemblance to their European rivals who appeared in the region at roughly the same time, and the last section of this article focuses on what these letters can tell us both about the similarities but also the key differences between these groups. In particular, it argues that these documents reveal a divergent attitude toward the relationship between state and subject that accounts in part for the relative success that Europeans enjoyed in early modern Asia.

The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers’ power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory’s history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order.