Pearls and Colonial State-Making in the Aru Islands, Southern Maluku (1824 – 1905)

Abstract

The historical traces of the Netherlands Indies in engaging with pearl oysters have been overlooked in terms of the state’s attitudes toward this specific practice of marine exploitation. Meanwhile, the physical presence of these bivalves in the shallow benthic environment of the eastern coast of the Aru Islands, in Southern Maluku, has hold a unidirectional story of the colonial state-imposed regulations on the far-distant archipelago. Going against this linear progression of events, this thesis aims to disturb the colonial epistemology of pearls and the Aru Islands, one in which a constant fiction was invoked by the state to facilitate violence in the colonial frontier. By close-reading colonial journals, newspapers, and archives against and along the grain, this research indicates that the years 1824 – 1905 reveal a reverberation of coloniality within the archipelago’s history. Through the history of Dutch surveyors who came to the Aru Islands, this study shows how fiction and reality collided in the display and (mis)perceptions of power in the archipelago. Reading along the grain of such accounts locates the traces of attitudes or mentalities within the colonial state. This then reveals the contours of ironies at play within colonial state's epistemology. To unpack these mentalities, this study examines various moments in which colonial fantasies were managed and enacted through the political and economic encounter in the archipelago.