The Gender Politics of Confucian Family Law: Contracts, Credit, and Creole Chinese Bilateral Kinship in Dutch Colonial Java (1850s–1900)

Abstract How did colonial family law reshape the ethnic and gender norms of a creolized entrepreneurial minority? While the literature on colonial Indonesia has tended to view the Dutch colonial preservation of adat (customary) law as helping to preserve Indonesian women's autonomy and property rights, this essay shows how, in the case of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneurial minority, the colonial government's institutionalization of Confucian “Chinese” family law gradually introduced more patriarchal norms for creole Chinese families. The Dutch colonial state's legal regulation of credit an... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Seng, Guo-Quan
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
Reihe/Periodikum: Comparative Studies in Society and History ; volume 60, issue 2, page 390-414 ; ISSN 0010-4175 1475-2999
Verlag/Hrsg.: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Schlagwörter: Sociology and Political Science / History
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26685297
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417518000099

Abstract How did colonial family law reshape the ethnic and gender norms of a creolized entrepreneurial minority? While the literature on colonial Indonesia has tended to view the Dutch colonial preservation of adat (customary) law as helping to preserve Indonesian women's autonomy and property rights, this essay shows how, in the case of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneurial minority, the colonial government's institutionalization of Confucian “Chinese” family law gradually introduced more patriarchal norms for creole Chinese families. The Dutch colonial state's legal regulation of credit and commerce in Java took a moralistic turn in the mid-nineteenth century, giving shape to a more patriarchal and “Chinese” form of the family in Java by the century's end. This legal-moralistic turn took the form of a critique of creole Chinese women on one hand, and the Sinological construction of a body of Confucian “Chinese” private law on the other. For almost half a century, this encroaching colonial ethno-moral critique of creole Chinese credit manipulations and marriage arrangements came up against resistance from Peranakan Chinese matriarchs and patriarchs. In this article, I show how colonial Confucian family law eventually ended creole Chinese women's contract-making and credit-manipulating autonomies by subjecting the “Chinese” household to the civil law authority of the “housefather.”