Professor in History, Dept. of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University

The Making of the Timor Border and its Modern Afterlife

Timor was one of rather few places in what is now Indonesia that was the scene of longstanding rivalry between two colonial powers – the Netherlands and Portugal. The division of the island into two spheres of influence was a long process that started in the 17th century and was only concluded in 1916-17. Due to a complex series of events, the border ran through the ethnic territories of the Atoni, Bunak and Tetun and was therefore highly artificial and potentially problematic. The paper discusses how the border was finalized as a result of both European dispositions and local responses, how the delimitation was perceived and partly questioned by East and West Timorese in the postcolonial era, and how all this fed into the Indonesian ambitions that ushered in the ill-fated occupation of East Timor

Biography:

Hans Hägerdal is a Professor in History at Linnaeus University, Växjö and Kalmar, Sweden. He is affiliated with the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He has done work on historiographical problems, contact zones, slavery, and colonial processes in East and Southeast Asia, often focusing on eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste in about 1500-1900. Among his monographs are Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600-1800 (2012) and Savu. The History and Oral Tradition on an Island of Indonesia (with Geneviève Duggan, 2018). He is also the author of several articles about the history of slaving in Timor and Maluku. Moreover, he is the editor for the Asian History book series at Amsterdam University Press (since 2014), and the editor of the online journal HumaNetten. Hans is presently involved in a project about colonial diplomacy in Southeast Asia 1700-1920. Hans is also the co-editor, with Dr Nathan Franklin (CDU), of the special edition journal “Indonesian Heroes and Villains: National Identity, Politics, Law, and Security” (2024), published with Politics and Governance, available at: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/issue/view/380