NAMING THE LOCAL COSMOPOLITANS: HADHRAMI ARABS AND ASIATIC OTTOMANS OF DUTCH INDONESIA The Dutch colonial state imposed a system of law and government, which divided the subject population into three broad racial categories in its attempt to render "the fluid and confusing relationships" of Indonesia into sufficiently static and useful categories of control . According to the State Regulation passed in 1854, the Chinese, Arabs and the Indians were considered as "foreign easterners" (vreemde oosterlingen) and exempt from the rights that were granted to the Europeans and natives. The anomaly of the Dutch case was further strengthened as the Japanese, unlike the Arabs, Chinese and Indians, were entitled to European status. My paper aims to analyze how the Hadhrami Arabs challenged the already established categories of rule in Dutch colonial government by appealing to Ottoman consuls for obtaining Ottoman citizenship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Claiming Ottoman citizenship by virtue of birth or descent, the Hadhramis of Indonesia alleged for European status against the Dutch colonial authorities, who initially categorized them under the status of foreign easterners. Trying to carve for themselves an alternative space within the fluid boundaries of rule imposed by the colonial government, the Hadhramis presented themselves as Ottoman citizens and efficaciously challenged the Dutch colonial authorities. As the Hadhramis legitimated their claims for European status upon the idea of citizenship, the Dutch government introduced yet another distinction between "Asiatic" and "European" Ottomans and asserted that the Hadhramis were not entitled to European status for they fell into the former category. Studying the asymmetrical relationship between this one transregional community with the Dutch and Ottoman Empires, I'll complicate the ways in which notions of subjecthood and citizenship were deployed to contest/legitimize the already established categories of rule in Indonesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By making a thorough analysis of the correspondences between Ottoman consuls in Batavia and the imperial center, I aim to demonstrate the rapidly changing vocabularies and discourses on both sides and argue that the Ottoman local agents did in fact efficaciously challenge the colonial government and created an alternative lacuna to articulate the claims of the Hadramis for Ottoman citizenship.