Colonial urban governance and ethnicized commercial rivalry: Arab-Chinese socio-economic relations in Surabaya, 1906-1919
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15642/jihr.2026.1.1.18-36Keywords:
Arab-Chinese relations, colonial Surabaya, commercial rivalry, ethnicized violenceAbstract
This article examines Arab-Chinese socio-economic relations in colonial Surabaya between 1906 and 1919 by asking how urban governance and commercial competition shaped ethnicized tension. Rather than treating the 1912 violence as an isolated ethnic clash, it argues that rivalry emerged from the everyday workings of a racialized port city. Drawing on colonial newspapers, municipal regulations, and historical scholarship, the article shows how Surabaya’s transformation into a Gemeente, the persistence of ethnic residential regulation, and unequal access to colonial legal protection structured relations between Arab and Chinese trading communities. Bumiputra consumers occupied the center of this field as buyers, debtors, neighbors, and sources of commercial trust. Competition over credit, textiles, batik, schooling, legal status, and recognition made economic life politically charged. The 1912 unrest in Tuban and Surabaya exposed, rather than created, this fragile order. The article contributes to colonial Indonesian historiography by reading intercommunal conflict as a product of colonial mediation within racially ordered urban everyday life, not primordial hostility.
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