Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor by Douglas Kammen (review)

Travelers to the town of Maubara tend to be weekend visitors from Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste (East Timor), or foreigners in search of dive sites. Even if they wander into the old Dutch fort, few visitors know much about the days when Maubara was a strong Timorese kingdom, about its historic alliance with the Netherlands, or about the violence that runs like a blooded thread through Maubara’s history under Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, and Timorese governments.

Douglas Kammen, whose previous work addresses mass violence in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation (1975–99), picks up the thread of violence in this book and traces if back through three hundred years with a micro-history of the kingdom (and, subsequently, a sub-district) of Maubara, for much of its history “a very small place in a remote colony at the furthest edge of a vagabond empire” (119). His story of Maubara and its leading families, at the same time, has larger ambitions, aiming at learning lessons about mass violence in general and at stitching together evidence from colonial archives and from local memory.

The historic kingdom, of course, is not the same as today’s seaside village, with its beach café, marketplace, and local NGO selling handicrafts and cold drinks from the courtyard of the old fort. The kingdom’s centers lay higher up Mount Maubara, with authority often dispersed among different settlements and families.

Kammen examines the longue durée in a limited locale. “Stranger kings” established a kingdom in Maubara that is there in the archival records, but almost entirely absent from local memory. Kammen reconstructs this early history based on archival records, without oral history to help him. (Despite hundreds of interviews on which Kammen relied, discussed later, the people in Maubara simply didn’t talk about this aspect of the past.)

Local memory does recall the coming of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to Maubara and the kingdom’s alliance with the Dutch, though in hazy fashion. Again, Kammen’s careful reconstruction of the surprising alliance between Maubara and the VOC (whose empire eventually became the Dutch East Indies) relies on archival documentation. The VOC and the ruling houses of Maubara were allied from the 1750s to the 1850s. This century of mutual benefit saw VOC rulers in Kupang, West Timor, extend their influence into the central part of the island, advancing their contest with the Portuguese who claimed the alliance or allegiance of most of this area. Maubara became “the centerpiece of VOC expansion into north-central Timor” (47) while benefiting from the VOC alliance by seemingly strengthening itself relative to neighboring kingdoms. Kammen’s account reveals Maubara as an autonomous actor in wider regional currents, not a mere pawn in a battle between colonial powers. It was only in 1859 that Portuguese control started to arrive in Maubara, which local rulers resisted because they did not want to surrender access to overseas trading networks or ties (represented in the symbolic realm through gifts of Dutch flags and other items) with the VOC in Kupang.

To Kammen, the symbolic realm matters more. People in Maubara know that the imposing seaside fort is a colonial construction. Its physicality should serve as a reminder of the Dutch presence and of the days of Maubara’s glory. Yet Kammen’s interviews show local memory dwelling more on division between lineages and on origin stories than on past greatness; on individuals, not on statecraft. The motives of Maubara’s rulers cannot be made visible in colonial archives or in oral history, and Kammen thus follows the thread of local memory, seeking meaning and finding continuities.

From a colonial viewpoint, the story of Maubara coming under Portuguese rule is typical. European power increased in pace with economic change. Portugal’s desire for ever-greater coffee production transformed Maubara’s local economy and social structure as it became a major center of coffee production. Some individuals in Maubara opposed increasing colonial political control, while...