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As historical anniversaries go, the main event in Sweden in 2024 is the commemoration of ABBA’s victory in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo. For globally minded historians, however, another anniversary seems at least as important: the bicentennial of the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, also known as the Treaty of London.
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The first international conference organized by the research program Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia under the auspices of Stefan Eklöf Amirell and Ariel Lopez, financed by the Swedish Research Council, was held at the College of Law at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Manila between 29 February and 2 March 2024.
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For several hundred years after 1498, seafaring European powers developed and co-opted a complicated network of commercial relations along the coastlands of the Indian Ocean World and Asia. For the most part, they did not open up new waterways but took advantage of existing systems of trade and exchange. European commerce was often established by brute force but also through negotiations and treaties, often in combination with violence or threats of violence.
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Originating from an initiative at the third conference of the Global Diplomacy Network, Birgit Tremml-Werner and Lisa Hellman launched a blog series together International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). Nowadays known as "The Blog", it has emerged as a popular guest blogging initiative hosted, maintained, and promoted by the IIAS.
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Treaties with indigenous rulers formed the legal backbone underneath many empires, and the Dutch colonial empire in Indonesia was no exception. Hundreds and hundreds of treaties between the Dutch and numerous polities in Southeast Asia preserved in the colonial archives of the Dutch colonial state and its predecessor, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; VOC) testify to a long history of treaty-making. This year, I spend two months tracing these treaties in the national archives of Indonesia in Jakarta.
