The Stranger King concept offers a relatively new conceptual framework to study and understand global colonialism

Colonialism

Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...

. It helps explain the apparent ease of the process whereby many indigenous peoples subjugated themselves to an alien colonial power and places state

State (polity)

A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...

 formation by colonial powers within the continuum of earlier, similar but indigenous processes.

It highlights the imposition of colonialism not as the result of the breaking of the spirit of local communities by brute force, or as reflecting an ignorant peasantry's acquiescence in the lies of its self-interested leaders, but as a people's rational and productive acceptance of an opportunity offered.

The concept was first developed by Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins

Marshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...

 in the Pacific region and is comprehensively described by David Henley using the North Sulawesi

North Sulawesi

North Sulawesi is a province of Indonesia. It is on the island of Sulawesi, and borders the province of Gorontalo to the west . The islands of Sangihe and Talaud form the northern part of the province, which border Davao del Sur in the Philippines.The capital and largest city in North Sulawesi is...

 region in Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

 as his prime case study. The Stranger King concept helps show similarities and divergences between pre-colonial and colonial processes of state-formation enabling to build with new insight on the current historiography of the colonial transition in the Asia-Pacific part of the world.

The concept

The Stranger King concept is becoming elementary to objectively study and review the unexamined assumptions that underlie modern interpretations of the process of colonization. It challenges many of the prevailing viewpoints cast in terms of the usually binary oppositions shown in the ‘tradition versus modernity’ and ‘nationalism versus imperialism’ paradigms. Scholars find revisionist virtue in the way the Stranger King concept places state formation by colonial powers within the continuum of earlier, similar but indigenous processes.

The concept builds on the English seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...

' depiction of the so called state of 'Warre', as typifying traditional indigenous societies riven by envy and conflict. It explains how many indigenous peoples more or less readily accepted the imposition of foreign colonial influence i.e. the Stranger King, as a means of conflict resolution that transcended the local, or even familial. As such the concept clarifies how indigenous inhabitants of stateless societies were often eager to end the state of ‘Warre’ i.e. being constantly exposed to jealous and predatory neighbours.

The concept was first developed and applied by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins

Marshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...

 in his analysis of Pacific communities, such as Fiji

Fiji

Fiji , officially the Republic of Fiji , is an island nation in Melanesia in the South Pacific Ocean about northeast of New Zealand's North Island...

. He showed indigenous societies in a state of ‘Warre’ would tend to welcome the arrival of an impartial and strong Stranger King, capable of resolving conflict being both outside and above the community, and hence possessing a unique authority. The colonisation of the Pacific in fact shows many studied examples where the British empire was drawn into taking position by indigenous stakeholders to enforce order often resulting in various degrees of colonisation. Scholars such as Jim Fox and Leonard Andaya have long emphasized parallels between (east) Indonesia and the Pacific world, while David Henley has finally proven the parallel applying the Stranger King concept on North Sulawesi.

The Stranger King in Sulawesi

The Dutch East India Company

Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

 and before them the Spanish provided a Stranger King solution to the central political dilemma of northern Sulawesi's fractious and litigious indigenous communities. Old Dutch narratives often depict indigenous e.g. Minahasa

Minahasa

The Minahasa are an ethnic group located in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, formerly known as North Celebes...

stakeholders as grateful for intervention when their own political institutions were incapable of providing the security and stability necessary for the pursuit of prosperity. These historic accounts validate the Stranger King concept however are obviously controversial due to their source and have always been easily dismissed as colonial propaganda. Henley's study however provides proof (Chapter XI, 'Patterns and Parallels'), it is not just European sources that suggest recurring uncertainty and conflict within indigenous societies and the indigenous societies' strategy to embosom a Stranger King to break the status quo. Henley in fact presents abundant indigenous (e.g. Bugis and Makasarese) chronicles and accounts collected by anthropologists that explain, and legitimize, the process of pre-colonial and later colonial state formation in similar terms, and not just in the Minahassa or Southeast Asia, but worldwide.

The Stranger King concept exposes the simplicity of the myth that the centuries long colonisation process was a non stop process of indigenous resistance against aggressive military occupation. Notwithstanding the fact that the Stranger King's merchants, military, civil servants and missionaries of course had their own motives and agenda. They achieved authority not just on the basis of military power, but also through political alliances, diplomatic collaboration
and by providing a relatively impartial mechanism for arbitration. Colonial courts, rather than solely being instruments of oppression, also provided indigenous people with an access to justice,
less subject to local bribery and patronage.

Without minimizing the arrogance or self interest of colonial stakeholders Henley states:

"We will not understand the nature of those societies better if, whether out of embarrassment, disbelief, or lack of interest, we choose to ignore either the ease with which they were often brought under colonial control, or the evidence that 'Stranger-Kings' were perceived as fulfilling useful functions among them." David Henley in 'Jealousy and Justice' (P.89)

The Stranger King in Sri Lanka

In her thesis Schiller accepts the Stranger King concept as a political means to channel factions in Southeast Asian political entities in early modern times and applies it to the political situation in the Kingdom of Kandy in the eighteenth century. She shows the outsider status was essential for a Kandyan king to maintain the balance of power in the small Kingdom, and sheds a light on the political process that led to the transfer of power over the Kingdom to the British in 1815. Moreover, she shows that the Stranger King strategy applies to both European and Asian foreign entities. Within three years the nobles had come to realize that they had lost too much power under the British regime, and they intended once more to install a South Indian Stranger King named Dore Swami. Their 1818 rebellion however was crushed by the British and led to even tighter control over the Kandyan provinces and a sharp curtailment of the Kandyan nobles’ autonomy.

Academic usage

The Stranger King concept is increasingly used by scholars as an analytical tool to understand and re-construct the history of interaction between Europeans and Asians in Southeast Asia and proposes alternative frameworks of understanding colonialism. In 2007 a panel called "Re-thinking colonialism in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, 18TH to 19TH Century" chaired by the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) the concept was indispensable to gain better insight into the dynamism of the role indigenous peoples had during the process of colonialisation and the complexity of the relationship between coloniser and colonised.

Historical and social science are developing a new alternative discourse, where not only the old eurocentric, but also the later Asian-centric nationalistic revisionist views are now forced to look at history from the perspective of mutual heritage.

“Southeast Asia has come within the fold of a single world civilization with a single universal history and all that is meant by Asian-centric history is a history in which the Asian, as a host in his house, should stand in the foreground…” (Smail 1961: 76, 78).

External links

• JSTOR website with online KITLV publication. Retrieved 27 February 2011