Blood Ties: Exile, Family, and Inheritance across the Indian Ocean in the Early Nineteenth Century

Beginning with an 1813 report by British officials in Java concerning a letter from three Madurese princes in the service of the East India Company in Benkulen who laid claim to the throne of Madura, this article traces family ties across the Indian Ocean over several generations. It explores the personal ties of loyalty and enmity in Dutch and British early modern empires in their relationships with local rulers and their families and how individuals sought to further their own best interest in these imperial networks. The article uses a “momentary drama” to shed light on the practices of exile in the Dutch East India Company empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the creation of Indian Ocean familial networks that developed as a result of families being forcibly separated. The fluidity of ethnicity in Southeast Asia was particularly apparent in diasporic communities that formed as a result of displacement through warfare. The article examines the strategy employed by European merchant companies in recruiting Asian men into militias to further their own interests in trade, settlement, and warfare in the region. In this case the Madurese princes were officers in the English East India Company’s Bugis Corp who were stationed in Sumatra. They developed kinship relationships with local elites through marriage and ties of mutual obligation with locally stationed English officials who put forward their case. In return, English officials used these relationships to acquire and assert expertise in the production of knowledge about Asian societies.