Häns Hagerdal, will be presenting the conference: “East Timor in the late seventeenth century: New sources on society and external connections” in the joint seminar of the research groups “Identities, Cultures and vulnerabilities” [GI – Identidades, Culturas e Vulnerabilidades] and Empires Colonialism and Pos-colonial socieities” [GI – Impérios, Colonialismo e Sociedades Pós Coloniais]. The session will take place on July 6, 2020, on Zoom, at 13:30.
Abstract: The early phase of Portuguese expansion into East Timor, before the Estado da Índia established a regular governor in 1702, suffers from a dearth of written sources. The hub of Topass (Black Portuguese) power in the 17thcentury lay in the Atoni-speaking territories in the western half of the island, and we gain very few glimpses of conditions in the east from Portuguese language records. There is, however, a category of material that has hitherto been almost unused. The Dutch VOC establishment in the Banda Islands in the Moluccas gained indigenous allies in the islands to the north of East Timor, Wetar and Kisar, and dispatched expeditions to these quarters after the 1660s. The captains’ logs (dagregisters) of these travels have been preserved in Dutch archives, and provide an abundance of details about Dutch encounters with East Timorese coastal groups on the eve of the Portuguese expansion. The lecture discusses what these data may tell us of social hierarchies, slavery, agricultural economy, commercial relations with external Asian groups, and the effects of Portuguese intervention. Hopefully, this can contribute to the discussion of the evolution of East Timorese society, in conjunction with anthropological, linguistic and archaeological findings.”
Biographical note: Hans Hägerdal has a PhD in History from Lund University (1996). The title of his thesis was Väst om öst: Kinaforskning och Kinasyn under 1800- och 1900-talen, which traced the professionalization of sinology since about 1800. After the defence he held a postdoctoral research position at the IIAS, Leiden (1996-1997) and began work on Dutch colonial sources. A result of this was the monograph Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2001). He was a research assistant at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund (1998-1999) and was subsequently employed as a Senior Lecturer in History at Växjö University (subsequently Linnaeus University) in 2000. He has been a full Professor since 2018. Hägerdal has published several popular books on Asian history. An individual project about Timor, funded by the Swedish Research Council, resulted in several articles, and the monograph Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea: Conflict and adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600-1800 (2012). Later on, he has published books about the history of Sumbawa (2017) and Savu (2018, together with Geneviève Duggan). He has edited two anthologies about colonial encounters. Since 2012 Hägerdal is funded by the Linnaeus University Center for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, conducting research about colonial-indigenous interaction in eastern Indonesia. Hägerdal is the editor of the digital journal HumaNetten. He is also the editor for the Asian History book series at Amsterdam University Press (since 2014).
Zoom details for entering the Seminar:
Topic: Seminário GI Identidades – Hans Hägerdal
Time: 6 jul 2020 01:30 PM Londres
Link:
https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/93353851908?pwd=V1RpN1ZBMC9jNURUTW1ibGVDZnIyQT09