The Changing Praxis of the 19th-century Malay Manuscript Economy (A06)

• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 181924784

The advent of lithographic printing and the ongoing monetization of the indigenous society in the Malay world in the course of the 19th century had profound implications for the manuscript culture and the attitude of people towards manuscripts, their production and consumption. This research continues to map and investigate such changes by mining paratexts found in the manuscripts of a 19th-century lending library collection. It is hypothesized that manuscripts spawned new interactive networks of human agents and affected the reading habits of the recipients, thereby crossing ethnic and religious boundaries in a colonial cosmopolitan context.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 950: Collaborative Research Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
• Applicant Institution: Universität Hamburg
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Jan van der Putten