Colonial and Global History through Dutch Sources – serie

How is it possible that three playwrights in the early modern Dutch Republic wrote dramas based on contemporary political events in Asia? Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the passage of the stories surrounding three political revolutions from seventeenth-century Asia through to the Dutch Republic and their ultimate manifestation as dramas. This book explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these plays and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels that these dramatists relied on to gather information for their works. As these dramas exhibit strong connections to the Dutch East India Company, this work additionally examines the role of that enterprise in disseminating information on Asia and producing imagery about the Orient.

Pieter Albert Bik (1798-1855) was a Dutch colonial official whose work took him all over the world, including travels throughout Europe, the Dutch East Indies, and Japan. This book presents for the first time in English his autobiographical writings about those travels, which Bik never published in his lifetime. Presented here with annotations to set his observations in context, Bik's accounts offer a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism in the first half of the nineteenth century, while editor Mikko Toivanen also draws interesting parallels between Bik's travels and the contemporary emergence of tourist travel in Europe.

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln's administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. Scores of diplomatic letters in Dutch, English, and French, dating to the period 1862 to 1866 attest to the very real possibility that such migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differences of opinion, mail delays, and ultimately a reluctance of any African Americans to migrate. Previously unpublished and unknown, these letters have been transcribed and translated here for the first time. The sources provide a rare look inside the minds of liberal government officials during the age of emancipation in the Atlantic World. They demonstrate the officials' humanitarian concerns, their racial prejudices, respect for legal order and process, and faith in governments to solve international problems.

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to Early Modern European expansion? The Company Fortress takes on this question by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single 'European school' of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century.

"This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the s outh Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research offers a captivating new analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments. In great detail, this monograph provides both new facts and fresh insights that contest existing scholarship. By highlighting their competitive, fluid, and dynamic nature, it undermines the historiography viewing these courts as harmonic, hierarchic, and static. Far from being remote, ritualised figures, we find kings and Brahmins contesting with other courtiers for power. At the same time, by stressing continuities with the past, this study questions recent scholarship that perceives a fundamentally new form of Nayaka kingship. Thus, this research has important repercussions for the way we perceive both these kingdoms and their ‘medieval’ precursors. "

Navigating Pluralities marks a break in understanding the history of Roman-Dutch law in Sri Lanka. Methodologically, it challenges socio-legal studies that concentrate on major jurisdictional conflicts alone, emphasizing the lived experience of everyday practices of judicial forums. It uncovers the navigation of plural practices in the Landraad, a judicial forum set up by the Dutch East India Company in seventeenth-century Sri Lanka. A choice of laws came into play in that forum, that choice being significant at varying degrees for different areas of the law such as evidence, inheritance, land, and marriage law. While there was inevitable conflict, the local normative order was as much a social fact for the early colonial rulers as Roman-Dutch law. This is contrary to the received wisdom of the ages that Roman-Dutch law was imposed on the Sinhalese of the maritime provinces under Dutch control. When translated into everyday lives, such adoption of plural practices could rebound on coloniser and colonised in unexpected ways, revealing the complexities of colonial law in practice.