Translation, Religion, and Law
Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan (Australian National University), From Palm Leaf to Bark Cloth: Manuscript Cultures and Religious Transformation in Early Modern Southeast Asia

The early modern period was characterised by intensifying global entanglements, in part precipitated by the attempts of European powers to control Southeast Asian trade. Just as Portuguese and Spanish sailors sought access to the spice-producing islands of eastern Indonesia, the whole of Southeast Asia was undergoing an unprecedented religious transformation. The regional hegemony of Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, which had lasted over a millennium, was rapidly overturned by widespread conversions to Islam and Christianity in the archipelago. This seminar explores the relationships between globalisation and religious change in early modern Southeast Asia, with particular attention to the unique Indonesian manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It draws on newly discovered textual sources to develop a more integrated model for theorising religious transformation. It unpacks conventional dichotomies, such as global versus local agency, and delves into the complexities of conversion, reformation, and religious accommodation in this region. It thereby seeks to highlight the often-overlooked role of Southeast Asia within global history, by drawing attention to the far-reaching impacts of religious change in this period.

Itamar Toussia Cohen (University of Oxford), “Lost in Translation”: Extraterritoriality, Subjecthood, and Subjectivity in the Anglo–Yemeni Treaty of 1821

In 1821, an expeditionary force of the Bombay Marine imposed an unequal treaty upon the imam of Sana‘a, sovereign of the Yemeni port of Mocha. Previous accounts, depicting the incident as a standard rehearsal of British gunboat diplomacy, have overlooked an important legal innovation enfolded in the treaty wherein the East India Company’s claim for extraterritorial jurisdiction over British subjects in Mocha was expanded to include not only British European subjects of the Crown but also the entire Indian merchant population of the port. Prosaically enough, the intervention was foiled by an inaccurate translation of the treaty from English to Arabic, demonstrating the extent to which Company officials were at the mercy of non-Western middlemen and translators who brokered between them and local rulers and administrators. Alongside a case study of an early attempt at legal imperialism, a second line of inquiry in this talk looks at its structural vulnerabilities, reflecting upon the potential of contradictions and untranslatabilities between British-imperial and Arab-Islamic legal and epistemological assumptions in shaping the outcomes of the imperial encounter in the western Indian Ocean.
Date: 5 November 2025, 14:00
Venue: Room 20.421, Faculty of History, The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Speakers: Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan (Australian National University), Itamar Toussia Cohen (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Faculty of History
Organisers: Asma Shakeel (Oxford), Asmita Sarkar (Oxford), Sana Shah (Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: admin@oxfordtghs.com
Part of: Transnational & Global History Seminar
Booking required?: Recommended
Booking url: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Euv5jFkYT9SCM4wJ3e9M2w
Audience: Public
Editors: Adrita Mitra, Suchintan Das, Asmita Sarkar