The Dutch Trading Companies As Knowledge Networks

by Huigen, Siegfried; De Jong, Jan L.; Kolfin, Elmer

• ISBN13: 9789004186590
• ISBN10: 900418659X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-01
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks at a time when the Dutch dominated world trade (17th-18th centuries).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Notes on the Editors	p. xi
Notes on the Contributors	p. xiii
List of Illustrations	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
The Americas
Elias Herckmans. A poet at the borders of Dutch Brazil	p. 19
Officers of the West India Company, their networks, and their personal memories of Dutch Brazil	p. 39
The butterfly effect. Embodied cognition and perceptual knowledge in Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium	p. 59
Picturing New Netherland and New York. Dutch-Anglo transfer of new world information	p. 103
Asia
Piracy and play: Two Catholic appropriations of Nieuhof's gezantschap	p. 129
Knowledge transfer and cultural appropriation: Georg Everhard Rumphius's 'D'amboinsche rariteitkamer' (1705)	p. 145
Antiquarian Ambonese: Francois Valentyn's comparative ethnography (1724)	p. 171
Engelbert Kaempfer, Imamura Gen'emon and Arai Hakuseki. An early exchange of knowledge between Japan and the Netherlands	p. 201
Witsen's Studies of Inner Eurasia	p. 211
South Africa
(Ex)changing knowledge and nature at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652-1700	p. 243
A badly harvested field: The growth of linguistic knowledge and the Dutch Cape colony until 1796	p. 267
Europe
Writing history in the age of discovery, according to La Popelinière, 16th-17th centuries	p. 297
The model of the VOC in early seventeenth-century France	p. 319
'Aus den furnembsten indianischen Reisebeschreibungen zusammengezogen'. Knowledge about India in Early Modern Germany	p. 337
The VOC and Swedish natural history: The transmission of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century	p. 361
Unknown unknowns. Ignorance of the Indies among late seventeenth-century Scots	p. 393
Colonial objects and the display of power. The curious case of the cabinet of William V and the Dutch India Companies	p. 415
Index Nominum	p. 437
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Excerpts

INTRODUCTIONIn 1638 the city fathers of Amsterdam received Maria de' Medici (1575-1642), the former queen of France. As part of her glorious entry, she was welcomed at the Oost-Indisch Huis (East India House), the local headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Here Maria de' Medici was given a taste of the overseas world which the VOC controlled. In the boardroom of the directors she could look at Chinese and Japanese paintings and views of the overseas territories of the VOC in Asia, hanging alongside weapons of conquered peoples. She was even given a taste of exotic foods and spices served on imported porcelain. According to Caspar Barlaeus, '[t]he eyes of Medici went astray; and she imagined herself to be a guest of Indians, Moluccans, Persians, Japanese and Chinese, when she saw this exotic and unusual banquet.' For her Amsterdam hosts the banquet was probably less exotic. They presented de' Medici with goods which were imported from the East Indies on a yearly basis.For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies, i.e. the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) and West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, WIC), provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. In some cases, such as in the relationship between the VOC and the Japanese, this interest developed into an almost structural exchange of knowledge on an exceptionally large scale. Via the Dutch trading post Deshima (1641-1859), an artificial island in the harbour of Nagasaki, employees of the VOC with an interest in the subject could collect information about Japan's geography, culture and medical practices, in particular acupuncture and moxibustion. At the same time Japanese scholars used Deshima as a window to Europe after the shoguns had closed Japan off from the rest of world (1635-1853). In various other places of the Dutch colonial world, both in the West and the East Indies, 'liefhebbers' (virtuosi; amateurs) collected specimens, made descriptions and drawings. Their 'immutable mobiles' were sent to Europe and became part of collections of curiosities or were further disseminated in print. They contributed substantially to the accumulation of European knowledge of the transoceanic worlds during the early modern period.The present collection of essays brings together a number of case studies about knowledge construction which depended on the Dutch trading networks. The knowledge that is at issue in this volume has in most cases a descriptive quality. It belonged to the encyclopaedic field of knowledge production which followed the example of Pliny's Naturalis Historia. Harold Cook's Matters of Exchange has recently pointed out that this kind of descriptive knowledge was no less important for the development of science during the time of the scientific revolution than the more abstract knowledge of physics and astronomy. Matters of Exchange also shows that researchers from the Dutch colonial world many born outside the Republic made important contributions to this field.The essays in this volume complement Cook's argument. While Matters of Exchange is mainly concerned with knowledge in the fields of natural history, medicine and geography, many essays in the current volume also address knowledge production in the orbit of the humanities. Moreover, the European reception of knowledge which was collected through the Dutch trade networks receives more attention in this volume. Current research usually overlooks the dissemination of knowledge in countries outside the Netherlands with the exception of Japan and treats scholars who were born and raised in other European countries as if they were more of less native Dutchmen. Future research should pay more attention to the European dimension, discerning in various countries different degrees of reception of knowledge generated with the assistance of the Dutch trading networks and taking the intellectual background of colonial scholars and scientists in countries outside the Netherlands into account.The Dutch Trading CompaniesTo provide some context, a rough sketch of the history of the Dutch trading companies is necessary. Compared to other seafaring nations the Dutch were relative latecomers to the global trade. Their traditional trading partners were located on the European Atlantic coast and in the Baltic Sea region. By the late sixteenth century the Dutch started developing commercial activities in the tropics. The scale of these overseas pursuits was greatly enhanced by the establishment of joint-stock trading companies in the seventeenth century, the VOC (1602-1799) and WIC (1621-1792).The VOC was established in 1602 to replace previous syndicates which were dissolved at the end of each voyage and re-established for each new voyage (the so-called pre-companies 'Voorcompagnieën'). The fleets of these earlier companies were in competition with each other. To be able to combat superior Portuguese forces in the East, the supreme governmental body in the Dutch Republic, the States General, compelled the stakeholders in the Asian trade to establish a new entity, the United East India Company. The companies which had previously been involved in trade with Asia were reorganized into 'chambers'. The chambers appointed delegates for the general board of directors, who were called the 'Heren XVII' (Gentlemen XVII). The States General gave the VOC a mandate to act as a semi-independent arm of the Dutch Republic; east of the Cape of Good Hope it could negotiate treaties, engage in warfare and act as an almost sovereign power, financing these activities with the profits from trade.The first major success of the VOC in the East was the capture in 1605 of the Portuguese fort on Ambon, which also became the first step in acquiring a monopoly in the trade of spices. The same year the VOC started trading with the east coast (Coromandel) of the Indian subcontinent. Attempts to trade with the west coast (Malabar) faltered at first, but from 1616 the Mogul Empire allowed the VOC to start operations in Surat. Westward the VOC established itself from 1624 in Persia and in East Asia it opened a factory in Japan in 1609. From 1624 onwards Taiwan was gradually conquered, but in 1662 Taiwan was lost to a general of the Ming dynasty, Zheng Chenggong (1624-1662), alias Coxinga, who had opposed the rise of the Qing Dynasty and was forced to flee from the Chinese mainland. The loss of Taiwan was the biggest defeat suffered by the VOC during the seventeenth century.In 1619 the VOC conquered Jakarta on Java and built Batavia on its ruins. Batavia, the 'Queen of the East', named after the homeland of the semi-mythical ancestors of the modern Dutch, the Germanic Batavians, became the seat of VOC administration in Asia after the example of Portuguese Goa. Further territories were conquered both on Java and on Ambon and between 1638 and 1658 the coastal regions of Ceylon were taken over from the Portuguese. With this, the VOC could lay its hands on the most important centre for the production of cinnamon. Subsequently, the VOC managed to acquire the monopoly in the trade of cloves, nutmeg and mace in eastern Indonesia after the conquest of Macassar during the period from 1666 to1669.After the establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 the VOC covered an enormous area with a vast number of settlements, fortifications and trading posts from the Cape to Japan. Most of these settleme