Leonard Blussé – författare

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Leonard Blussé chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities. Canton was the port of call for foreign merchants in the Qing empire. Nagasaki was the official port of Tokugawa Japan. Batavia served as the connection site between the Indian Ocean and China seas for ships of the Dutch East India Company.The effects of global change were wrenching. The monopolies suffered challenges, trade corridors shifted, and new players appeared. Yankee traders in their fast clipper ships made great inroads. As Dutch control declined, Batavia lost its premier position. Nagasaki became a shadow of its former self. Canton, however, surged to become the foremost port of East Asia. But on the horizon were new kinds of port cities, not controlled from above and more attuned to the needs of the overseas trading network. With the establishment of the free port of Singapore and the rise of the treaty ports—Hong Kong, Shanghai, Yokohama—the nature of the China seas trade, and relations between East Asia and the West, changed forever.

The starting point of this volume is the scathing attack, far-reaching in its consequences, launched in 1942 by J.C. van Leur on the views then current on the character and significance of the 18th century as a category in Asian history. His denial of European pre-eminence in Asian waters represented a direct attack on colonial historiography. The essays here derive from an international conference held 50 years later, to assess the impact of van Leur’s work. In part historiographic, in part drawing on new research, they aim to delimit the boundaries of European-Asian interaction, and to provide case studies of what this period actually meant for the history of South and East Aia.

The archive of the Kong Koan constitutes the only relatively complete archive of a “diaspora” Chinese urban community in Southeast Asia. The essays in the present volume offer important and new insights into many different aspects of Overseas Chinese life between 1780-1965.The Kong Koan of colonial Batavia was a semi-autonomous organization, in which the local elite of Jakarta’s Chinese community supervised and coordinated its social and religious matters. During its long existence as a semi-official colonial institution, the Kong Koan collected sizeable Chinese archival holdings with demographic data on marriages and funerals, account books of the religious organisations and temples, documents connected with educational institutions, and the meetings of the board itself.

In The Chinese Annals of Batavia, the Kai Ba Lidai Shiji and Other Stories (1610-1795) Leonard Blussé and Nie Dening open up a veritable treasure trove of Chinese archival sources about the autonomous history of Chinese Batavia. The main part of this study is devoted to the annotated translation of a unique historical study of the Chinese community of Batavia (Jakarta) written by an anonymous Chinese author at the end of the 18th century, the Kai Ba Lidai Shiji. This historical document and a selection of other Chinese contemporary sources throw new light on a tragic event in the history of Southeast Asia’s overseas Chinese: the massacre of Batavia’s Chinese community in 1740.