Alicia Schrikker to map the role of gifts in colonial Asia

Professor Alicia Schrikker will research how gift exchanges functioned in colonial Asia from 1600 to 1950.

She received an NWO L-beurs to lead this project alongside a team of student assistants and three postdoctoral researchers including Lennart Bes, Pichayapat (Toh) Naisupap, and Melinda Susanto. Schrikker aims to create a typology of gifts to understand the relationships they symbolized and how those dynamics changed over centuries.

While her work with the Commissie Koloniale Collecties focuses on whether specific objects in Dutch museums should be returned to their countries of origin, this new project focuses on archival data rather than current museum pieces. The team will use digitized archives and handwriting recognition to process large amounts of data from local sultanates and kingdoms, such as those in Java and the Molukken. The research explores how gifts acted as intermediaries between trade and politics.

For example, the VOC and later the colonial government recorded exchanges ranging from sugar and rosewater to animals and enslaved people. Schrikker notes that gifts sometimes functioned as tribute to demonstrate submission to the Chinese emperor or Japanese shogun, while at other times the VOC forced gift-giving through peace contracts. The project also examines the movement of objects, such as elephants gifted in Sri Lanka that traveled to Batavia and were subsequently gifted to the Japanese shogun.

Schrikker also investigates the underlying meanings of these exchanges, including instances of cultural misunderstandings and deliberate acts of resistance. Some gifts were intentionally inappropriate or were used to undermine authorities. The study seeks to uncover how these exchanges functioned during the late colonial period, an area that currently lacks detailed historical research.