Beyond the Archival Grain: An Archival-Practice Inquiry into the Internal Diversity of the Chinese Population and its relationship with Inter-group interaction in Dutch East Indies Colonial Possessions Between the 17th and the 19th Century

Chinese communities have been settled in Maritime Southeast Asia since at least the beginning of the last millennium, as they began to arrive in the region as early as the 5th century CE. Before the arrival of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch colonial powers in maritime Southeast Asia, members of the diasporic Chinese community had established themselves as essential merchants, farmers, fishers, and various types of laborers. Diaspora Chinese Community maintained its significant presence throughout the three-century-long Dutch colonial era between 1596 and 1949, in what is now called Indonesia. This thesis is interested in the archival practice in the Dutch colonial rule, especially that of the VOC era between 1602 and 1799. This thesis applies the notion of the archive as an administrative instrument of intervention, based on the categorization of a population, to the VOC-Era Dutch archives. This thesis aims to investigate how the internal diversity of the diasporic Chinese community has shaped inter-group relationships through the lens of the digitized colonial Dutch archive. By combining the etic Dutch archival documents, old maps, and emic Chinese diasporic historical accounts, the thesis suggests the following inferences. The VOC recognized the internal diversity of the Chinese community and reacted to the change within and outside of the diasporic Chinese community by using intensive documentation not only as an instrument to keep track of the development, but also that enable devising measures. Meanwhile, the Chinese diasporic community under the rule of the VOC colonial possessions throughout the archipelago shared a similar vision with the Dutch authority regarding themselves and the surrounding society, but not without a certain amount of deviance. The exact nature of interaction between the diasporic Chinese community and outsiders is thus defined by the case-specific expressions of such internal diversity in different temporality and loci.