Journal of World History

In Wives, Slaves, and Concubines, Eric Jones proposes to recover the experiences of an emerging "underclass" of Asian women in a Dutch trading settlement and, in doing so, to trace the "profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period, changes that helped birth the modern world order" (p. 3). Contrary to the reference in the book's subtitle to "Dutch Asia"—a realm that encompassed parts of India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Japan—its analytical focus is exclusively on Batavia. It was here, on the north coast of Java, that the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or United East India Company) established its regional headquarters. Jones's book thus provides a specific [End Page 193] case study of social relations in one (arguably the most important) of numerous Dutch settlements in Asia.

In doing so, Jones produces a book that is not without merit but also includes some considerable flaws. To begin with its strengths: in focusing on the eighteenth century, Jones examines a period that has been relatively neglected in social and women's histories of Southeast Asia. He contends that it was during this century that the position of a particular class of Asian women in Batavia—those with citizen (burger) status—was transformed by growing VOC interventions in local society. Before the arrival of Dutch traders in the late sixteenth century, Asian women had moved in and out of slavery, concubinage, and marriage according to their circumstances and opportunities. By the eighteenth century, however, the unequal yet flexible relations between Asian men and women became fixed and then codified through the rulings of Dutch institutions like the Court of Aldermen (Schepenbank). The thus-far neglected proceedings of this institution provide the empirical basis for Jones's study.

Court records provide a unique window into the declining status of Asian women in VOC territories at the end of the early modern period, shortly before the advent of plantation colonialism under formal Dutch rule. Just as the company sought to control the regional spice trade, Jones argues, so too did its citizens' court strive to convert fluid networks of Asian clients and patrons into more rigid relations between property owners and their chattels. The outcome was that relations between slaves and their mistresses became increasingly fraught. Asian and Eurasian slave-owning women used increasingly brutal measures against their subordinates to enforce what the Court of Aldermen viewed as slave owners' property rights. Interestingly, Jones's case studies reveal that the consequent violence was systematically gendered. Male slaves who tried to resist rough treatment resorted to counterviolence, whereas female slaves (for reasons that Jones does not quite explain) occasionally turned to self-harm, but more usually to absconding.

Unfortunately, readers will have to wait until chapter 4—more than halfway through the book—before they encounter Jones's case studies. The original research that Jones produces is thus confined to a surprisingly slim section of what is already a short book. His first three chapters are used primarily to synthesize extant scholarship on the status of early modern women in the region before the arrival of the VOC and the important differences between the trajectories of European expansion in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic world. In doing so, Jones demonstrates how fragile and peripheral—in a geographic, [End Page 194] demographic, and biological sense—early modern Dutch trading settlements were in maritime Southeast Asia. To survive and prosper under such conditions, Jones asserts, the VOC gained control of a small sector of the Southeast Asian economy by eliminating its rivals in the region (often with military force), controlling local sites of production, and manipulating prices and supply in Europe. At the same time, it pursued a social policy of "pragmatism, the principle without principles" (p. 69). The generations of male European employees who formed the corpus of the company endured the ravages of distance (long voyages) and disease (malaria) by reproducing their society with the aid of Asian wives, slaves, and concubines.

The case studies presented in chapter 4 examine how the Court of Alderman codified service relations between Asian men and women. Jones's noteworthy contribution here is to show how the court's proceedings reveal the early modern origins of a system of Dutch control over Asian labor that became fundamental to nineteenth-century plantation systems. However, the case studies are also where many of this book's shortcomings are concentrated. Jones's argument, for example, that Dutch laws both codified the chattel status of slaves and stimulated a rise in runaways during the eighteenth century would have been strengthened if he had presented comparative evidence from the seventeenth century that showed lower rates of abcsondence. Further, his assertion that Dutch civil law itself was to blame for the criminalization of slave abscondence is conceptually flawed. In arguing that the justice meted out by the Schepenbank was rarely "blind"—by which he presumably means it made arbitrary judgments—Jones points to the fact that the Dutch failed to develop a common law code and relied only on judges (rather than juries) to decide the outcome of criminal trials. Civil law regimes still form the basis of many European legal systems today and manage to uphold the principle of equality before the law as well as any other system. Further, common law systems (such as those developed in many British colonies) were just as likely to support the institution of slavery as their Dutch counterparts. Jones's explication of cases in which torture was used by the Court of Alderman to extract "confessions" from slave women is thus a far more convincing example of early modern perversions of justice than his critique of civil law per se.

Also problematic is Jones's treatment of historical Southeast Asian modes of slavery. In chapter 5 he contends that, before the Dutch arrived, slaves were simply part of "a prestige entourage" that inhabited "the lower rungs of their master's or mistress's extended family." "As plantations radiated outward from late eighteenth-century Batavia, [End Page 195] there became less space for the 'cozy' intimacy of pure household slavery" (p. 144). Southeast Asia specialists will no doubt be dismayed by such romanticizations of precolonial slavery.

A wider audience of readers with an interest in the comparative aspects of early modern European expansion in Asia will also be disappointed by some incorrect distinctions that Jones draws, such as: "Unlike the British who were incessantly preoccupied with racial purity and cultural contamination in their colonies" the Dutch "cohabited and intermarried with the Asian community" (p. 49). Some engagement with recent, well-known scholarly works on British Company settlements is necessary here. Lizzie Collingham's work on India, for example, conclusively demonstrates that, like their Dutch counterparts, the British ruled in a distinctly local idiom during the early modern period, one that involved establishing households with Indian women.¹ Durba Ghosh's important work on mixed families in eighteenth-century India would also have been worth discussing. Ghosh explicitly addresses the methodological dilemmas of retrieving Indian women's voices from documents that were produced by encounters with British institutions, including courts of law.² By contrast, Jones's study fails to critically examine precisely what his sources have and have not allowed him to "recuperate" on behalf of Batavian wives, slaves, and concubines.

Jones's lack of attention to key methodological issues in women's studies and in histories of colonial encounter is most striking in his use of illustrations, namely in the seventeen pages of photographs included in his book, most of them images of Asian women. Having gone to considerable effort in chapter 2 to explain the significant differences between early modern and modern forms of Dutch colonialism in Asia, Jones's decision to select photographs made a hundred years after the women whom he discusses lived is disappointing and symptomatic of the book's general theoretical weakness. Drawings or paintings of Batavian women made in the eighteenth century would surely have been more obvious and appropriate illustrations (but only if they were integrated somehow into Jones's analysis, which the photographs are not). The "visual turn" has arguably brought histories of images far enough into the mainstream of scholarship on early modern [End Page 196] Asia that it should no longer be defensible to use visual sources purely as illustrative marginalia. Numerous recent studies of early modern visual cultures demonstrate that images and objects are as complex and contingent as written sources and therefore require critical historical contextualization.³

Jones's book approaches a complex subject matter through an underutilized and interesting set of sources with manifest enthusiasm, and some of his observations will no doubt inspire future research. However, his attempt to let eighteenth-century Asian women "speak" through careful reconstruction of colonial records is not just limited by his lack of engagement with historiographical and methodological issues raised in similar extant studies; it is partly undermined by a careless approach to nontextual sources (from other periods) that may perhaps better have been left out of the book altogether.