Reordering the Imperial World: How Trepang Decolonized Grotius

In his final years, Foucault famously remarked that “it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research.” My research likewise centers on the subject, but not a human one. It focuses instead on an underwater invertebrate: the sea cucumber, also known as trepang. This project examines how trepang decolonized imperial power. Rather than being constituted as a subject of imperial rule, it transformed imperialism itself, specifically the legal imperialism jealously guarded by the Dutch Empire in the Spice Islands. This power formed the foundation of modern legal imperialism: a treaty system devised by Grotius to defend the Dutch Empire’s exclusive trading rights in the Spice Islands and to render the surrounding waters a closed sea (mare clausum), a legal order whose planetary consequences Amitav Ghosh has called as the “nutmeg’s curse.” What previous scholarship has largely overlooked, however, is how this legal–imperial order was undone from underwater. From the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, the once-fabled waters around the Spice Islands became a hotbed of trepang fisheries supplying the Chinese consumer market with cured sea cucumbers. This unanticipated transformation undermined Dutch maritime jurisdiction in eastern Indonesia and gave rise to a southern world of sea cucumbers operating beyond Dutch scrutiny, extending from Amoy through Makassar to as far as the north coast of Australia.