Submerged Histories: Remembering Histories of the Spice Trade and the Banda Massacres in Indonesia 

Inspired by renewed Chinese attention to the history of the Silk Road the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Research and Technology began from the year 2021 to research and promote new maritime histories of Indonesia including long histories of Indonesian trade in spices which sought to challenge Western narratives of the discovery and trade of spices. This included the large project entitled Jalur Rempah (the Spice Route) which focused on promoting Indonesian transnational connections to the world as well as regional histories of growing and trading particular spices with strong attention to Indonesia's Eastern Islands, the origin of many spices. The project led to new museum displays, a tv series, an active Instagram page promoting tourism and the health benefits of spices as well as a sea voyage recreating aspects of the spice route involving young Indonesians. It was well funded and had broad scope but also received some criticisms. The year 2021 also marked the 400 year anniversary of the Banda Island massacres, perpetrated by the Dutch army upon leaders of the Banda Islands who opposed a Dutch monopoly on the trade of nutmeg. This anniversary stimulated new ways of remembering the massacres including the independent photographic project, the Banda Journal which drew attention to the diverse legacies of the massacres and the resultant nutmeg monopoly. While the Spice Route project emphasised new pride in Indonesian maritime history and less Javanese centric versions of history, the Banda Journal included attention to the continuous reproduction of coloniality in patterns of economic and environmental exploitation in Indonesia up until the present. In this paper I discuss these two projects as examples of complex new forms of engagement with histories of colonialism in Indonesia that have emerged in the last two years in particular asking to what extent they represent shifts in remembrance of colonial history in Indonesia.  The paper also examines the particular “memory activists” behind these projects and their motivations.

 

 

Katharine McGregor is Professor of Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Kate has researched many topics related to Indonesian history and struggles with memory and violence from the colonial period through to the present. Her most recent book Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Critical Human Rights Series, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) which focuses on memory activism in relation to Indonesian survivors of the system of the Japanese army’s “comfort women” system (1942-1945) won the 2024 NSW Premier's General History Prize. Kate is currently working on the research project Submerged Histories: Collaborative Memory Activism Indonesia and the Netherlands. She is also a research co- lead for the University of Melbourne's History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

 

Nhung Tuyet Tran is Associate Professor in History at the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, religion, and the law in eary modern Southeast Asia.