Agrarian Studies Colloquium with Nurfadzilah Yahaya

"Oil Capture: History of Petroleum in Colonial Indonesia"

Nurfadzilah Yahaya traces how colonial institutional frameworks built enduring juridical, territorial, and extractive architectures that decisively transformed societies and still influence contemporary relations between communities, resource access, and state power.

Her first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and the Arab Diaspora in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), examines how Arab commercial elites maneuvering within British and Dutch legal frameworks helped define imperial sovereignty. Their strategies to safeguard international family estates through colonial judicial systems dissolved boundaries between private agreements and public law, creating jurisdictional spillover where subjects pursuing legal security unintentionally expanded imperial control.

Her second book, Overflow: History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire (under review) traces how legal authority materialized in physical space. Land reclamation, which transforms seabed into sovereign territory, exemplifies infrastructure’s most audacious achievement by manufacturing geography itself. From Malaya to Palestine, Hong Kong to the Caribbean, British authorities did not just conquer existing lands but created new ones from dredged sediment and legal precedent. She is currently writing two books; the first on history of petroleum in Indonesia, and the second, a global history of the Dutch empire.

She has published in Journal of Women’s History, Law and History Review, Indonesia and Malay World and Muslim World. She has also co-edited two journal special issues on Islam and colonialism, and the religious endowment known as ‘waqf.’

Yahaya received her BA (2003) and MA (2006) from the National University of Singapore, and her PhD (2012) in History from Princeton University. From 2012 to 2015, she was the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Before coming to Yale, she taught at the National University of Singapore. At Yale, she offers courses on histories of Southeast Asia, Islamic world, British Empire, Dutch Empire, and the Indian Ocean.