No Boats to China. The Dutch East India Company and the Changing Pattern of the China Sea Trade, 1635–1690

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Blussé
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
China Sea ◽  
China Trade ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Direct Trade

By 1690 the Supreme Government of the Indies in Batavia agreed that, financially speaking, it was no longer wise to continue the direct trade between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and China. It was argued that the vessels so far used for the China trade could be better deployed in the Indian Ocean.

The Long Road to Livorno: The Overland Messenger Services of the Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
René J. Barendse
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
Thin Thread ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company

The overland communications between Asia and Europe were of crucial importance to the economic and military survival of the East India companies. This applies equally to the English, French and Dutch East India companies - and even to the Portuguese empire.At some of the most crucial moments of its history, the very survival of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) depended on the thin thread connecting it overland to Europe. One of these crises occurred in the mid-seventeenth century when during the first Anglo-Dutch war, English fleets challenged Dutch naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Reflecting on the defeat of the British fleets and the near eradication of the English East India Company or EIC's naval presence there in 1654, the Dutch director of Surat commented: ‘We would never have gained such an easy victory if the English had reacted more promptly or had we not received warnings so promptly [tijdig].’ Similarly, the catastrophic defeat suffered at a later date by the French admiral De la Haye is normally attributed to De la Haye's hesitations. Yet is is doubtful whether the VOC would have been able ot assemble a fleet quickly enough to destroy De la Haye's fleet had the VOC not received messages overland.

European wives and local concubines: Women on board English country trader vessels in the Malay Archipelago and beyond, from the 1770s to the 1830s, with some reference to life on board other contemporary sailing vessels

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 596-615
Author(s):  
W.G. Miller ◽  
Ann G. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South China Sea ◽  
Social Status ◽  
South China ◽  
The South China Sea ◽  
East India Company ◽  
China Sea ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company

Though the officers and crews of the British ‘country’ ships that operated in association with the English East India Company in the waters of the Malay Archipelago, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea were all men, there are occasional references to women on board. These women fall into two categories: European wives and local concubines. This article provides examples of these elusive women, examines the reasons for their presence on board, assesses their social status and makes some comparisons between the two categories.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

scholarly journals The Dimensions of the US-China Trade War

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Mohamad Zreik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bilateral Agreements ◽  
China Trade ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trade War

AbstractThe Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a statement Friday morning, July 6, 2018, confirming the outbreak of a trade war between the United States and China. The statement came after the United States imposed tariffs on many Chinese goods, in violation of international and bilateral agreements, and the destruction of the concept of free trade which the United States calls for following it. It is a war of opposite directions, especially the contradiction between the new Trump policy and the Chinese approach. The proof is what US Defense Secretary James Matisse announced in Singapore in early June 2018 of “the full strategy of the new United States, in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,” where China was the “sole enemy of the United States” in China’s geostrategic region. Intentions have become publicized, and trade war between the two economic giants is turning into a reality. This paper will give an overview of the US-China scenario of trade war, then a focused analysis on the Trump’s administration economic decision regarding China, and the consequences of this decision.

TSUNAMI HAZARD AND CASUALTY ESTIMATION IN A COASTAL AREA THAT NEIGHBORS THE INDIAN OCEAN AND SOUTH CHINA SEA

2012 ◽  
Vol 06 (02) ◽  
pp. 1250010 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANAWAT SUPPASRI ◽  
FUMIHIKO IMAMURA ◽  
SHUNICHI KOSHIMURA
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South China Sea ◽  
South China ◽  
The South China Sea ◽  
The South ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
China Sea ◽  
Coastal Population ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Hazard Level

In the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, many hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to tsunami events, and almost half of the lives lost occurred following the 2004 Indian Ocean event. Potential tsunami case scenarios have been simulated in these regions by a number of researchers to calculate the hazard level. The hazard level is based on a variety of conditions, such as the tsunami height, the inundation area, and the arrival time. However, the current assessments of the hazard levels do not focus on the tsunami risk to a coastal population. This study proposes a new method to quantify the risk to the coastal population in the region that includes the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The method is simple and combines the use of readily available tsunami data, far-field tsunami simulation models to determine the regional risk and global population data. An earthquake-generated tsunami was simulated, following an earthquake that had a magnitude larger than 8.5 Mw and occurred along a potential subduction zone. The 2004 Indian Ocean event seemed to be a "worst case scenario"; however, it has been estimated that a potential tsunami, occurring in a coastal region with a high population density, could cause significantly greater casualties.

Navigating Pluralities Reluctantly: The Marriage Contract in Dutch Galle

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-237
Author(s):  
Nadeera Rupesinghe
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Marriage Contract ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Customary Practices

This article examines diverse practices in the establishment of marriage partnerships in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka,1 parts of which were controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Family law was an area in which the attempt to transform local practices was conspicuously present, but not fully achieved. Lawful marriage was linked to conversion to Dutch Protestantism and to inheritance of property. In the authoritative space of the provincial board that heard the matrimonial disputes examined in this article, the Company did not proactively attempt to reform family life, an area where it could not easily dictate terms. It made a significant dent as the requirement for marriage registration was recognised by natives. But the limited reach of the introduced law is evident in the Company’s reluctant recognition that its two-step process of reading the banns and subsequent marriage ceremony created confusion and that locals still followed customary practices for forging unions. The VOC faced a normative order in the villages that was characterised by ritual underpinnings. Such local features went unrecognised in official law rules, but their perseverance is testimony to the pluralities in practice in an early colonial encounter in the Indian Ocean world.

France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Marvin ◽  
Blake Smith
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
French Military ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The 19Th Century

France was a latecomer to the Indian Ocean among European powers. After some tentative and short-lived initiatives by private merchants, the first French East India Company was founded in 1664 by a French monarchy eager to catch up with England and the Netherlands, which had founded companies of their own at the beginning of the 17th century. Competing with the English and Dutch to replace the Portuguese as the preeminent European power in the Indian Ocean, France gradually established a network of colonial holdings that included the island colonies of the Mascarenes in the southwestern Indian Ocean (Réunion and Mauritius) as well as a network of trading posts along the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Plans to expand this colonial empire to Madagascar, however, met with repeated failure. Established as a regional power by the middle of the 18th century, France would be reduced by the century’s end to the role of a spectator of Britain’s rising hegemony. Nevertheless, France held on to some of its Indian Ocean territories, including Réunion and Pondicherry in South Asia. These outposts of French imperialism would inspire nostalgia, regret, and new colonial ambitions among metropolitan observers, and they would become sites of cultural hybridity and exchange. Indeed, while France’s empire in the Indian Ocean is often overshadowed by the emergence of British dominance in the 19th century, or by the intensity of French investment in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a key area of French military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural interest in the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond.

The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Weiss Muller
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Government ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Chapter 5 moves to the Indian Ocean and centers on the vibrant trading community of Calcutta. The East India Company’s assumption of the diwani for Bengal in 1765 and its accelerating territorial expansion in the Indian subcontinent provoked concerns about subject status and jurisdiction over those residing in Company territories. These concerns were never fully resolved by the 1773 Regulating Act and were intimately connected to struggles over authority between the British government and the East India Company. This chapter identifies the range of individuals actually subject to the Supreme Court of Judicature, founded in 1774, at the same time as it focuses on the political and jurisdictional repercussions of subject status. It underlines why the judiciary became a central site for negotiations over subjecthood and how subject status became a malleable tool in the hands of judges.

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