Residing Across an Ocean: Property, Gender and Community between the Coromandel Coast and the Strait of Malacca, c. 1740-1940

Research in long-distance trade across Asian regions has often focused on the activities of male traders as the primary agents of mercantile activity. Questions of the organization and technologies of transport, the sourcing and demands of merchandize, the encounter between traders and states, and the generation of trust across distances have attracted a great deal of attention. In contrast, the supposedly ‘static’ elements in this trade—landed property, inheritance, and the role of women—have received less attention, and have often been underpinned by the Orientalist notion of the patriarchal Asian ’family firm’ as the prime social unit of trade. But the social organization of trade and traders in different parts of Asia have been far more diverse.

In this presentation, Torsten Tschacher, Ph.D.,  will draw on three colonial archives ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Focusing on Muslim traders between the Coromandel Coast and the Straits of Malacca, I argue that these archives suggest that women’s control of landed property was a central element in the organization of trade between these regions, as well as the formation and transformation of mercantile communities and their trade patterns in the longue durée.