Marriage and the Construction of Colonial Order: Jurisdiction, Gender and Class in Seventeenth-century Dutch Batavia.

Historians of early modern Dutch Asia have displayed a great deal of interest in inter-racial marriage and sex in Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlements and trading posts. Less attention has, however, been paid to other ways in which the VOC and its representatives used marriage policies and laws to maintain order in Batavia. Characterised by people of a variety of ethnicities, jurisdictional statuses, and states of unfreedom as well as tremendous economic inequality, Batavia’s Dutch authorities simultaneously looked to marriages to preserve a precarious social order while also fearing that marriages might undermine that same social order. Because marriage was so important, looking at the contests and debates over it illuminates a great deal about the workings of Batavia’s European society. A focus on marriage shows that jurisdictional conflicts were common and that class and gender are more important categories for understanding Batavian society than has previously been recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]