An Anatomy of Commerce and Consumption: Opium and Merchants at Batavia over the Long Eighteenth Century
Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This essay is an anatomy of the commerce and consumption of opium at Batavia (modern Jakarta), on Java, and throughout the modern Indonesian Archipelago, from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It is a preliminary examination of the lesser known history of those merchants (indigenous, Muslim, Dutch, and Chinese)—their lives, businesses, interests, positions in local and communal societies—who made their livelihoods from re-distributing and trafficking, and of the consumers that inhumed opium. 1 I differentiate merchants from traders here because, unlike traders, merchants act as intermediaries between producers and consumers. 2 Non-Dutch merchant groups are categorised according to the identifiers used in the historical records, although those categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. My work is empirically driven. It employs multi-disciplinary approaches and methodologies from anthropology, archaeology, economics, history, and, to a lesser degree, from the sociology that focuses on the social lives of things 3 —of opium, in this case—and its commodity chain(s), 4 and merchants, guarantors and their networks. My research questions, hypotheses, arguments, and analysis are firmly anchored in the evidence and articulated, initially, on the basis of what can be observed and statistically measured. At present this permits fewer but better informed qualitative observations.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: George Bryan Souza
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2182129760