Michael F. Laffan, History, Princeton University

Standing assembled in Bandung in April of 1955, the newly independent leaders of South and Southeast Asia looked to their own populations as much as to their former overlords as they mapped out visions for the world of independent nation states. Yet, at the same time, plans were being finalized in London and Canberra for the transfer of authority that November of a tiny set of isles in the Indian Ocean with some four hundred Muslim inhabitants of "Malay" origin. Puzzled by what to do with this population, Canberra's first Official Representative to the Cocos Islands crossed the lagoon to see just how a modern state administered Islamic customary law. This contact would set in train an attempt by some of the islanders to seek the patronage of the Australian Government against their hereditary employee. This led to difficult conversations about how notions of citizenship would be translated. 

Michael Laffan is professor of history at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on the history of Southeast Asia and Islam across the Indian Ocean. A native of Canberra, Australia, he is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (Routledge 2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton, 2011). He is now turning his attention to South Africa and Sri Lanka in the hope of learning more about the broader history of Islam under the hardly-benevolent rule of the Dutch East India Company.

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