A Trust in the Family: Wealth and inheritance under colonial legal regimes in the Arab-Southeast Asian diaspora.
Hadhrami Arab migrations of merchants, traders, seamen, teachers, sojourners and settlers across the Indian Ocean rim began in the 1870s. Many travelled from southwestern Arabia to Singapore (under the British), the Netherlands East Indies (later Indonesia) and Malaya (now Malaysia). My lecture analyzes the histories of individuals, ‘families’ and wider social groups in Singapore regarding changing colonial property law and ‘personal law’, and changing conceptions of Shari’a as it became ‘Islamic law’ in British codifications. I focus on the inheritance and the transmission of goods through gifts, wills and trusts to highlight certain strategies, dilemmas and conflicts of inheritance that over many decades confronted a diasporic population in the high Imperial Age. The legalization of family, descent and the significance of ever elaborating documentation over many decades are at the heart of my current book project.