The dynamics and ambiguities of ‘Chineseness’: Interethnic marriage practices in the Dutch Batavia before 1850

Abstract This article explores how interethnic marriage produces and governs ambiguous identities within legally pluralist port-city settings. Taking the construction of ‘Chineseness’ in the Dutch Batavia before 1850 as a case study, this article analyses how identity was contested, negotiated, and reconfigured in a colonial legal landscape. Drawing on archival records from the Batavia Kong Koan (the Chinese Council), this article argues that normative orders from the homeland, such as Confucian ethical distinctions between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ and gendered prescriptions governing family life and female conduct, were not merely adapted to local conditions but were frequently disrupted by diasporic realities. Through case studies of interethnic marriages and female-initiated divorces, the article highlights how female agency within the Kong Koan’s hybrid legal regime fractured the ideological coherence of the Confucian moral order and exposed the instability of ‘Chineseness’ under colonial rule. Situated at the intersection of claimed Chinese custom, Dutch colonial statutes, and the everyday realities of interethnic co-residence, the Kong Koan did not preserve tradition so much as mediate and fragment it. Rather than reinforcing a fixed notion of identity, the institution became a mechanism for its continuous remaking. By locating identity within everyday social practice and the institutional logics of colonial governance, this article challenges essentialist conceptions of diaspora. It offers a historically grounded account of how an ethnic identity like ‘Chineseness’ was continuously unmade and remade at the intersection of multiple legal and cultural systems within colonial jurisdictions.