The Amfioen Societëit (1745–1794): Opium, intra-Asian trade and the commercial world of Batavia in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This article analyses the emergence of the Amfioen Societëit (1745–1794) and its impact on the market for opium in eighteenth-century Java. It engages with a limited body of historiography to challenge assumptions that the Societëit was a wholly colonial institution designed to serve an elite – namely, European – set of interests. In reassessing how the Societëit worked in theory and in practice, it is argued that this institution was born from the necessary collaborative engagement of a European and a local commercial class with different but vested interests in the opium trade. Moreover, the article situates the Societëit among other finance institutions that existed in eighteenth-century Java to serve the credit needs of the local commercial milieu. In doing so, it lays the foundations for a deeper and more nuanced history of the opium trade and the local economy of early modern Java in a period about which very little is known.