Transimperial Trajectories: Vernacular Legal Culture in the Chinese Nanyang Diaspora, 1780–1880

Chinese migration into the Nanyang in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries intersected with colonial and indigenous strategies of governance to mobilize Qing legal culture beyond the borders of the empire itself. In the Dutch East Indies, as well as most Malay principalities, legal pluralism created autonomous jurisdictional spaces presided over by state-recognized diasporic elites, the Chinese Kapitans. The Chinese-language archives of the Chinese Council of Batavia (modern Jakarta) reveal how diasporic jurists and litigants, including large numbers of women, borrowed from Confucian moral discourse and Qing legal practice to seek, or enforce, justice within these fora. When the British Empire began establishing a foothold in the Straits of Malacca, they initially experimented with legal pluralism. However, an emerging discourse of liberal legal modernity among British colonial administrators and conflict between diasporic elites led to the abandonment of pluralism in favor of a legal order where only English law and Anglophone lawyers had official status. One of the long-term effects was the creation of an English-educated Straits Chinese elite which litigated its disputes in colonial courts. However, the short- and medium-term consequence was not the elimination of Sinophone legal fora, but rather their explosive proliferation. Close reading of colonial archives shows how temple societies, clan organizations, and sworn brotherhoods functioned as juridical institutions, settling disputes, guaranteeing transactions, and enforcing norms without the sanction of the British colonial state. However, this unregulated jurisdictional marketplace was highly volatile due to the ad-hoc nature of systems for resolving inter-jurisdictional disputes. This produced recurring physical violence, especially between secret society organizations, prompting colonial interventions in diasporic society.