Empire and Science in the Making Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760-1830

by Boomgaard, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781137334015
• ISBN10: 1137334010
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

By the dawn of the 19th century, the Netherlands had established colonies and trading posts across Asia and the rest of the world, linking them directly to international networks of intellectual exchange and production. Drawing on extensive new research, and bringing much new scholarship before English readers for the first time, this wide-ranging volume examines how knowledge was created and circulated throughout the Dutch Empire, and how these processes compared with those of the Imperial Britain, Spain, and Russia. The results are of significant interest for historians, anthropologists, geographers, scholars of the history and philosophy of science.

Author Biography

Peter Boomgaard is Professor of Economic and Environmental History of Southeast Asia at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and a Senior Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), The Netherlands. He is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Southeast Asia: An Environmental History.

Table of Contents

Introduction: From the Mundane to the Sublime: Science, Empire, and the Enlightenment, 1760s – 1820s; Peter Boomgaard
1. Science and the Colonial War-State: British India, 1790-1820; David Arnold
2. Collecting and the Pursuit of Scientific Accuracy: The Malaspina Expedition in the Philippines, 1792; Raquel Reyes
3. Empire without Science? The Dutch Scholarly World and Colonial Science around 1800; Klaas van Berkel
4. Why Was There no Javanese Galileo?; Gerry van Klinken
5. For the Common Good: Dutch Institutions and Western Scholarship on Indonesia around 1800; Peter Boomgaard
6. "A Religion that is Extremely Easy and Unusually Light to Take On": Dutch and English Knowledge of Southeast Asian Islam, ca. 1595-1811; Michael Laffan
7. A National Obligation: Archaeological Research and Regime Change in Java and the Netherlands in the Early Nineteenth Century; Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff
8. Meeting Point Deshima: Scholarly Communication between Japan and Europe to around 1800; Peter Rietbergen
9. The First Dutch Ethnographic Monograph: De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika (1810) by Lodewyk Alberti; Siegfried Huigen
10. Intellectual Wastelands? Scholarship in and for the Dutch West Indies up to ca. 1800; Gert Oostindie