Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Yale University, will virtually present Capitalisms of the Indian Ocean, in the Global History of Capitalism Seminar of the Oxford Centre for Global History on Tuesday, November 8, at 15:00. Click here to link to the talk.
This paper explores the dark side of powers of attorney used to administer property in Yemen and Southeast Asia. I highlight how the popularity of this legal device in the early twentieth century produced a different kind of belonging beyond official ‘citizenship’ as property-owners based 4000 miles away became important stakeholders in British and Dutch colonies at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean because actions specified in the powers of attorney had no end date based the assumption that conditions such as ownership, sovereign rulers, and legal systems will remain the same over several generations. These documents constructed new temporalities. Building on my first book, I explore the subversive side of this phenomenon to shed light on the full dimension of this common practice which is normally hailed as an empowering tool. I pay attention to how death is the direct impetus for the proliferation of powers of attorney across the Indian Ocean because testators produced powers of attorney close to the end of their lives. Were they drawn up in panic? Many unprepared heirs transferred their power to another person almost immediately upon inheriting property. It took a high level of trust to invest power in others perpetually across the Indian Ocean, and to entrust them to appoint someone who would in turn appoint someone unknown down the line resulting in a chain of faceless agents whose power emanated from one single document produced once upon a time. There was much potential for dysfunction across centuries.
--Dan Ernst
