1 Intimacy, Norms, and Empire-Building
This book set out to explore the formation of norms around intimate life in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial expansion through, on the one hand, the imposition of norms by colonial authorities and institutions and, on the other, the normative practices of colonial populations and the agency of individuals of varying social positions. Viewing this negotiation of norms through the lens of social differentiation, it becomes clear that a primary factor in accounting for differences in the ways sex and marriage became subject of conflict and scrutiny is ‘order’ in the broad sense of the word. In its primary sense – the maintenance of ‘the common peace’ and absence of violent uproar or revolt – order was a constantly pressing concern for VOC and WIC officials who saw themselves surrounded by populations whom they considered (potential) enemies or untrustworthy allies at best, and who relied on the peaceful compliance of free and enslaved laborers for successful profit extraction. Any sexual or conjugal conflict that threatened this order – whether it be the dissolution of families, an outbreak of violence, or a disruptive sexual scandal – could thus become a problem.
In a secondary (if related) sense, ‘order’ can also refer to the social order of hierarchically segregated groups that characterized most if not all early modern colonial societies, with European colonizers eager to establish and maintain their own social pre-eminence. Here, sex and marriage could be problematized in a more explicitly moralistic sense, because sexual mores often became cultural markers of particular (elite) group identities.1 In addition, sex and marriage themselves are constitutive of group identities and distinctions in a physical rather than merely symbolic sense, because biological reproduction and family formation formed a primary locus of group formation and reproduction, and inter-group contact thus had the potential to blur the boundaries on which this ‘pluralist order’ rested. This constitutive role of sex and marriage was woven into institutional frameworks, in laws governing the ability of legitimate and illegitimate children to inherit, the transfer of enslaved status from mother to child, prohibitions on inter-religious (and sometimes inter-racial) marriage, the convention of wives taking on their husband’s ethnic and social
As the preceding chapters have shown, however, colonial authorities did not – and could not – simply impose a social and sexual order by unilaterally introducing institutional frameworks into colonial societies. The actions and expectations of affected communities, both indigenous and resulting from (forced) migration, profoundly influenced what rules authorities considered enforceable, what actions prompted new intervention, and how regulatory systems actually functioned in daily life, as people of various statuses and backgrounds turned to Dutch courts and other institutions to arrange their affairs and settle disputes. Company authorities as well as ethnically or religiously specific communal authorities and colonial subjects each instrumentalized formal norms (e.g. the illegality of adultery) in strategic and selective ways to pursue pressing political and social ends, such as public order, securing inheritances, and safeguarding personal, family, or communal status. Thus they contributed to an inconsistently applied set of expectations for what constituted ‘honorable’ and legitimate conduct, strongly shaped by socio-economic concerns as well as by locally formed practices over which company officials had little control.
In exploring these intricacies, this book makes the case for a look at empire that is simultaneously intimate and global. The men and women who have made their appearance, trying to get married or divorced, engaging in unsanctioned sex, coercing sexual relations or trying to escape, live with, or avenge unwanted intimacies, and trying to navigate what it meant to be born from unauthorized sexual unions, did more than simply put a human face on history. Through their struggles, agreements, wins, and sometimes devastating losses – both in- and outside the courtroom – they took part, willingly or unwillingly, in the production of a social order that was dynamic and everchanging, but also marked by profoundly impactful inequalities. It is in this process that the construction of what we might call ‘empire’ can be observed: while the settings in which our many intimate conflicts took place were widely divergent, the common factor to all was the presence of colonists and colonial officials who consistently approached these encounters with the more-or-less explicit aim of promoting the interests, prestige, or outright dominance of Europeans. I use ‘Europeans’ here because, while national origin was certainly a meaningful category and while the Dutch were politically dominant within the Dutch empire, many non-Dutch (German, French, Scandinavian, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish) Europeans participated in it, and the racialized world that emerged out of it favored those of European background and descent more broadly. This is evidenced by the relative ease with which, after the Dutch East and
Morality formed a central feature of this political project. The seductive view of the early modern Dutch world as characterized by a business-oriented, tolerant proto-liberalism and the eighteenth century as a time in which Christian moralism and its strict demands on sexual virtue faded to the background should be met with caution, if not skepticism. Although eighteenth-century colonial administrators may have taken a less puritan approach to matters such as pre-marital sex, inter-racial concubinage, and natural children than the likes of Jan Pieterszoon Coen a century prior, it is certainly not the case that Dutch authorities, even in the more ‘permissive’ eighteenth century, ceased to care about moral-religious questions regarding sexuality. Key tenets of Dutch-Reformed (and more broadly Christian) sexual morality – an emphasis on female chastity as a marker of virtue, condemnations of non-marital sex, and horror at forms of sexuality that defied hetero-patriarchal arrangements – continued to shape the worldview of the empire’s administrators. But these questions were always informed and mediated by political calculations, so that outrage was levied selectively, where it supported authorities’ interests and reinforced the hierarchies making up colonies’ socio-economic structure.
Moral-political and pragmatic-commercial considerations, it should be noted, were not necessarily opposing forces, nor could they be easily disentangled. The fundamentally antagonistic nature of the VOC and WIC’s business models – reliant as they were on maritime domination, territorial control and the large-scale exploitation of (coerced) labor – meant that company administrators were acutely aware of the looming threat posed by disaffected populations. Time and again, colonizing authorities turned to moral-sexual politics as a key instrument in preserving the fragile social order they presided over, albeit one that had to be handled with care. From marriage policies aimed at ensuring a steadily reproducing loyal population base and efforts to legitimize colonial rule through complex jurisdictional dances around non-Christian modes of regulating private life to discriminately wielded sexual morals meant to project order, safeguard European prestige, and ward off divine wrath, norms of intimacy were of existential importance to the companies’ bottom line.
A closer look at the specific Dutch-colonial societies in South(east) Asia, West-Africa, and the Caribbean reveals that this politically informed approach to morality in pursuit of colonial power and control, on the part of European
Combining a micro-historical and global perspective, by looking at deeply personal conflicts with an eye on larger constellations of power, thus reveals the formation of a colonial order, and, on a larger scale, empire-building, as a non-linear and continuously contested process. By de-centering the metropole, while moving beyond the framing of any singular colonial settlement, we can look at empire not as a centralized design that is rolled out over the world, but as the product of thousands of conflicts over status, property, propriety, and belonging – sometimes seemingly petty, sometimes explosive – inside living, dynamic societies.
Adopting a fluid conception of normative pluralism is instructive in observing how this actually happened on the ground. Legal pluralism, while a useful conceptual tool for understanding the layers and complexities of ‘law’ in the early modern world, is limited by its privileging of distinct legal regimes as ordering mechanisms for discrete communities, at the expense of disorder within and at the blurry boundaries between communities. Unsanctioned behavior, from concubinage to violence to desertion, is not just the object of institutional intervention, but itself an active part in the formation of norms. We thus need to move beyond a straightforward conception of clearly delineated moral and legal communities with their own self-evident rules: individuals’ communal membership (whether it was religious, ethnic, corporate, or otherwise defined) was rarely a given, nor were people’s ideas of which norms ought to apply.
An intersectional perspective, taking into account the interactions between categories such as class, religion, gender, enslavement, and race, is therefore essential. Taking a bird’s-eye view, it is clear that foundational to colonial hierarchies in the Dutch empire, from Berbice to Elmina to Ceylon, were property and enslavement. Consistently, enslaved people were kept at the bottom of the social hierarchy in a way that had considerable implications for their intimate lives: they were, by and large, excluded from formal marriage and the legal rights and privileges that this granted, had no legal rights to custody over their children (with fathers especially not being recognized as such), and were among the least likely to successfully use the court system to settle domestic disputes or find justice for sexual misconduct, while enslaved men were consistently punished most rigorously where they formed sexual relationships with higher-status women. Beyond this bottom tier, social stratification was more context-dependent and involved a range of intersecting factors, although wealth, unsurprisingly, formed a major vertical differentiator. Property, both monetary and in the form of mastery over enslaved people, was a key factor in the outcome of legal battles over marriage and sexuality, affecting the legal procedures litigants could afford, witnesses that could be produced and whether their testimony was accepted or not, and extra-judicial means available to get
At the same time, company authorities used legislation – including, crucially, that concerning marriage and sexuality – to exclude these groups and individuals from the (political) elite, which remained dominated by Christian, European men, mostly in Company employment, and to promote the social pre-eminence of the company’s ‘own’ privileged demographic core. Who or what exactly constituted this privileged group, however, was not fixed, not the same everywhere, and rarely unambiguously defined. ‘Christian’, ‘European’ and ‘White’ were all used, but did not mean exactly the same thing. In the Caribbean, ‘Christian’ was initially used to differentiate the free, un-enslaveable, slave-owning settler population from (enslaved) Africans and Amerindians, but as colonial society became more complex, with Jewish settlers forming an important faction of the slave-owning community and (formerly) enslaved people occasionally converting to Christianity, white (in Dutch: blank) came to be used increasingly as a marker of distinction, in opposition to black or ‘negro’ (Dutch: neeger) which gained considerable conceptual overlap with ‘slave’ (slaaf) as neighboring indigenous groups were recognized as un-enslaveable and enslaved populations increasingly came to be made up of Africans and Afro-descendants. In Berbice, where Jews were excluded from settlement and where the free, Christian non-white population was extremely small, ‘Christian’ continued to be used as a designator of whiteness and mastery alongside ‘white’ well into the eighteenth century, unlike in its larger, more religiously diverse neighbor Suriname, where blank was a standard feature in the colonial vocabulary of difference by the early 1700s, and unlike Curaçao, where ‘Reformed’ or ‘Protestant’ remained somewhat (if not fully) synonymous with white, but ‘Christian’ certainly did not.
In the East Indies, ‘European’ and ‘Christian’ were both meaningful categories throughout the VOC’s tenure, but did not mean exactly the same thing. Their use, moreover, was strongly gendered: ‘European’ was almost always used for men, while women would be designated through their legal status and religious affiliation (‘free Christian woman’) or their relation to a husband or father. Whiteness was a meaningful factor of social life in VOC Asia, but was less explicitly inscribed in official discourse: in seventeenth-century company correspondence, blank is occasionally used as a synonym for European, while in the eighteenth century it also came to be used to designate light-skinned individuals of mixed descent and, quite frequently in places with significant Luso-Asian populations such as coastal South Asia and the Moluccas, to
Gender, it is clear, was an operative factor in the formation and transformation of colonial hierarchies: on the one hand, women were strongly restricted in their access to independent wealth and largely excluded from company employment (midwives being a notable exception). On the other hand, poor and enslaved women, while being particularly exposed to violence and exploitation, also arguably had more opportunities for social mobility, through sexual and conjugal relationships, than their male counterparts. Similarly, while elite women (married or born to company servants, planters, and prominent burghers) were more protected from (sexual) violence, economic hardship, and the social ramifications of not being seen as honorable than subaltern women, they were also more restricted and anxiously policed in their sexuality and marriage choices. For many married women among the propertied classes, both in Asia and in the Caribbean, slave ownership was one of the few available avenues of wealth acquisition and, especially, of wielding power, which may explain, in part, the relative frequency of reports depicting female slave owners as particularly despotic.2 Gender, furthermore, functioned as a key qualifier in the processes of creolization and mesticisation, due to the greater mobility of European men compared to women: already by the early eighteenth century, port cities such as Batavia, Cochin, and Willemstad (and later in the eighteenth century more ‘settled’ colonies such as Suriname, too) were marked by a considerable degree of what me might call ‘gender-segregated creolization’, with a key demographic of locally-born-and-raised women marrying or forming non-marital relationships with a constant influx of male newcomers whose sons, more than daughters, were likely to leave again and go through a European enculturation.3 This dynamic was particularly prevalent
While the specific dynamics of the meaning and formation of diversity in the early modern Dutch empire were thus highly context-dependent, broad and consistent patterns can be identified in the regulation of family life and sexuality and how practices and conflicts around it shaped colonial society – patterns which transcend divisions between East and West and, arguably, between empires, for many of the conflicts and conundrums around inter-racial sex and marriage, slavery, and religious diversity were not unique to Dutch colonies. Where there were variations in the ways religion, color, class, ethnicity and status featured in the regulation of sex and marriage, they are differences of degree, more than nature, and primarily caused by variances in local configurations of power, not differences in philosophy of rule. Although meaningful differences between empires exist, such as between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ approaches to religious diversity and imperial subjecthood, the histories of European overseas empires overlap to such a degree that future research into conflicts around sex and family in relation to colonial power and racialization which looks across the confines of specific empires is warranted. Alternatively, putting intimate conflicts being fought out in colonial courts in conjunction with those in non-European-controlled settings, or those centering primarily non-European parties, is bound to reveal yet a different perspective on the workings of power in socially diverse settings. This book, with its emphasis on company-centered colonial conflict, highlights only a small part of what a connective analysis of intimate conflicts can reveal.
Far from accessories to world history, the intimate relationships of everyday people are primary sites in which social fault lines and constellations of power are contested, and thus are formed and re-formed. Within the context of the early modern Dutch empire, as the many conflicts and inconsistencies of norms discussed in this book attest, this contestation involved a protracted and far from straightforward process of empire-building. Chartered companies and the colonial governments affiliated with them did whatever they could to expand their influence and assert their dominance in areas where they held tenuous or at least limited control, and this meant adjusting to local circumstance, accommodating deviations from norms where politically expedient, and working with and alongside diverse groups of people who in turn made
See, for example, Ben-Ur and Roitman, “Adultery Here and There,” 193.
For Suriname, see: Neus, Susanna du Plessis; For Batavia, see: Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). A gendered bias of the (overwhelmingly male) authors of such reports may of course also be a factor.
Notably, a similar pattern can be observed among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, as Chinese women were generally not permitted to leave the mainland, and evidence exists of Chinese Batavians (and no doubt those living elsewhere) sending particularly their sons to China for their education.