The “Perfect Map” of Widow Hiamtse: A Micro-Spatial History of Sugar Plantations in Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1685–1710
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Not all early modern sugar plantations were in the Atlantic World. Indeed, far away from it, in the rural space surrounding the Dutch headquarters in Asia (the Ommelanden of Batavia (Jakarta)), over a hundred of them were thriving by the end of the seventeenth century. Together, they constituted a unique plantation society that followed Dutch land law, was operated by Javanese rural labour, and was managed by Chinese sugar entrepreneurs. Through archival work on a certain “perfect map” that belonged to a Chinese widow, this article explores how that plantation society took shape on the ground.
Author: Guanmian Xu
Institution: Peking University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Universiteit Leiden
OpenAlex ID: W4200119023