Connected Conquests: Scaling the South China Sea, 1870–1910

Historian David Bell has written that “military conquest…is the most direct form of global connection imaginable.”  This underappreciated insight applies not only to land, but also to seascapes, where war catalyzed commerce and religious exchanges, migration and communication.  Long before the South China Sea emerged as a flashpoint for competing powers in the twenty-first century, colonial conflagrations engulfed islands, archipelagos, and kingdoms in the nineteenth.  Notable among these were two protracted conflicts between colonial navies and Muslim rebels: the Dutch-Aceh War (1873-1904) and the Spanish-American Moro Wars (1851-1914).  Although often regarded by historians as discrete events at the Philippine and Indonesian peripheries, when viewed from a maritime perspective, it becomes clear that these violent engagements articulated multiple scales of time and space.  Pacification thrust centuries-old sultanates into contact with nascent port cities, driving multidirectional flows of weapons, capital, and people from commercial hubs to warzones.  Similarly, Muslim rebellions relied on far-flung Chinese traders and Arab scholars just as they depended on local highland peoples and sea nomads. 

This paper will focus on two specific developments: first, the intensification of contact between the sultanate of Sulu and Aceh and new nodes of commerce such as British Singapore and Penang; and second, the deepening entanglements between local or trans-regional Muslim networks and diasporic flows of Chinese migrants.  This paper argues these violent intersections of sultanate and colonial port city, Muslim rebels and Chinese traders, proved mutually transformative in re-shaping the regional political economy and amplifying encounters between the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds. In sum, this analysis of maritime warfare and spatiotemporal scale will historicize the uneven geography of gleaming ports, massive wealth disparity, and contested sovereignty that today comprises the South China Sea region.