Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat

In 1982, Eric Wolf published Europe and the People Without History to identify and begin rectifying large gaps in anthropological knowledge. That project remains unfinished. In the past year,This essay was substantially completed in September 2002. Revisions in preparation for publication a year later were kept to a minimum, in order to preserve for the reader a sense of temporal location and orientation. since September 11, 2001, the necessity of filling in some of these gaps has become urgent. The history of relations between Western powers and transnational Muslim societies in the Indian Ocean is one of them.Of the European traditions, Dutch scholarship has retained the greatest awareness of this issue over the past century, and a number of individual Dutch scholars continue to be proficient in the regional languages, such as both Arabic and Malay, today (van den Berg 1886; Hurgronje 1906; 1931; van der Meulen and von Wissman 1932; van Leur 1955; Schrieke 1960; Meilink-Roelofsz 1962; van Bruinessen 1995; Kaptein 1997). An anthropologically nuanced understanding of such societies as diasporas, thought in tandem with their continued relations with Western empires over five hundred years, lends a useful perspective on a set of conflicts which is massively unfolding. Threatening to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1993) in popular discourse and political decision-making, a phenomenon on this horrendous scale remains within the purview of anthropologists if one sees it as an instance of culture contact under conditions of global imperialism, unmitigated by colonial administration.In his book which elaborated on the provocative thesis of his original 1993 essay, Huntington noted that the question mark in the essay title had been generally ignored (1997:13).