Siegfried Huigen is professor of Dutch Literature at Wrocław University (Poland) and visiting professor of Dutch Literature and Cultural History at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has published extensively on the history of colonial knowledge in Asia, Southern Africa and East Central Europe. He recently published East Central Europe between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century (2023) with Palgrave as co-editor.

"Shaping a Dutch East Indies serves as a masterful and incisive literary analysis of a seminal work in the history and construction of Dutch colonial knowledge and administrative discourse. Huigen is to be congratulated with revisiting the “thorny issue” of Valentyn’s “Great Work,” complicating and challenging the modern scholarly communis opinio."- Markus Vink, The State University of New York at Fredonia in International Journal of Asian Studies (2024)."Huigens boek is verrassend van inhoud en methodiek" (Huigen’s book is refreshing in both content and methodology).- Coen van ’t Veer, Leiden University, in BMGN Low Countries Historical Review (2024)."Huigen’s book can be recommended to anyone interested in the history of colonial knowledge production and the transnational world of the VOC."- Hans Hägerdal, Linnaeus University, in South East Asia Research (2024).

• Preface and AcknowledgementsList of Figures and TablesAbbreviationsIntroductionPart 11 Describing Imperial Space1 Advertising Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën2 Chorographies of Imperial Space3 Text Formats3.1 Dagregister3.2 Chronicle3.3 List3.4 Anecdote4 Coherence through Authorial Voice5 Alternative Entries2 Lobbying for a Bible Translation in ‘Low’ Malay1 Varieties of Malay2 The Controversy over the Malay Bible Translation3 Lobbying4 The Question of the Malay Translation of the Bible in Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën5 Epilogue3 The Valentyn Case Scholarly Authorship at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century1 The Location of Ophir as an Antiquarian Question2 Valentyn’s Use of Rumphius’s Kruid-boek3 A Stricter Scholarly Decorum4 Collaborators5 Valentyn’s AuthorshipPart 24 Natural History for liefhebbers in Valentyn’s Description of Animals from Amboina1 An Audience of Liefhebbers2 Images of Tropical Fish3 Shells4 A Rhetoric of Probability4.1 Birds of Paradise4.2 Sea-People5 Herpetological Knowledge and Indigenous Collaborators6 Repackaging East Indies Natural History5 ‘Dutch Power in Those Territories’ Historical Representation in Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën1 Chronicles of Conquest2 Asian Histories2.1 Sinhalese Histories2.2 Malay Histories2.3 Mughal Histories3 Framing Dutch Hegemony3.1 Ancients and Moderns3.2 Martial Batavians3.3 Staging Jan Pieterszoon Coen as a Hero4 The Circulation of Valentyn’s Master Narrative6 Antiquarian Ambonese Valentyn’s Comparative Ethnography and Ethnology1 A Comparative Methodology2 ‘Foolish Thoughts’3 ‘Any That Pisseth against the Wall’4 Pelimao’s Defence7 ‘This Business of Our Nation’ The Questionable Conduct of the Dutch in Japan1 Japan, Christianity and the Dutch2 Valentyn’s Representation of Japan3 New Information about Japan4 The Abject Behaviour of the Dutch in Japan5 Onno Zwier van Haren’s Recherches8 ‘Waste Land’ into ‘Earthly Paradise’ The Geography of the Cape of Good Hope1 The Cape Colony around 17002 Employing a Dutch Landscape Discourse3 Expeditions into the Interior4 Two Geographies of the CapePart 39 A Paper Empire Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën as a Reference Work1 A Tool for voc Bewindhebbers in the Netherlands2 A Resource for voc Administrators in the East Indies3 The Restoration of Dutch Rule in 18164 New Policies for Amboina5 ‘Valentyn’ Becomes ‘Valentijn’6 A New Edition of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën7 A Paper EmpireConclusionAppendix The Text Organisation of Oud en Nieuw Oost-IndiënReferencesIndex