Tools of imperialism or sources of international law? Treaties and diplomatic relations in early modern and colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

The history of treaty-making, diplomacy, and international law has traditionally been written from Eurocentric perspectives, but since the middle of the 20th century, Southeast Asia has attracted relatively much attention because of the region's importance for the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. More recently, however, the interest in Southeast Asia's role in the history of international law and diplomacy in the early modern period has become more oriented toward understanding the dynamics of international relations and cross-cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia itself, rather than focusing on the region's role in European legal and intellectual history. The prolific treaty-making and other diplomatic activities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the 17th and 18th centuries have been the object of several studies, highlighting how the company adopted Asian practices of statecraft and at times functioned as a traditional ruler, tributary or stranger-king, rather than as an omnipotent colonial power. Moreover, several recent studies have expanded the study of diplomacy and treaty-making in Southeast Asia to imperial powers other than the VOC and into the 19th century. With regard to the practice of treaty-making during the colonial era, three main themes in the current state-of-the-art are identified: 1) Southeast Asian and inter-cultural perspectives on treaties and treaty-making; 2) the question of mutual consent or coercion and violence in treaty-making; and 3) discrepancies between Asian and European treaty texts and biases in printed and digitised compilations of treaties.