Sailors,Zielverkopers, and the Dutch East India Company: The maritime labour market in eighteenth-century Surat

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-364
Author(s):  
GHULAM A. NADRI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Political Economic

AbstractIn the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. TheMoorse zeevarenden(Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance ofzielverkopers(labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

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.

Calamitous Voyages: the social space of shipwreck and mutiny narratives in the Dutch East India Company

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Guy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Social

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.

scholarly journals The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras

1999 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Ahuja
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Labour Policy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English East India Company

This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

Order in the “Arbitrary”: The Distribution, Content, and Temporal Cycles of English Merchant Tribute in Eighteenth-Century Yemen

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-253
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
Coffee Beans ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company

Abstract Drawing on the documents of the English East India Company, along with comparative material from the Dutch East India Company and sources in Arabic, this article looks closely at the distribution, content, and timing of merchant tribute in relation to the practices of trade in eighteenth-century Yemen. The goal is to uncover the patterns surrounding English commercial gift practices at a time when European merchants were flocking to the southern Arabian Peninsula to procure coffee beans. This study casts gifts as central and regularized parts of the cycle of exchange, rather than as non-transactional or incidental social accessories of the Indian Ocean trade, thereby allocating an important place for gifts within early modern cross-cultural commercial interactions.

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.

From Europe as a model to Europe as austerity

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hermes Augusto Costa
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Eu Accession ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Social Europe

Twenty five years after Portuguese EU accession, the labour market in general and the trade unions in particular are faced with severely regressive social measures that undermine past expectations of progress towards the achievement of the Social Europe project in Portugal. Thus, on the one hand, this article identifies some of the ambitions and possibilities earlier opened up for the Portuguese labour market, as well as trade union attitudes to European integration. It is argued, on the other hand, that, in the context of the economic crisis and the austerity measures to which Portugal is subjected, the sense of Portugal’s backwardness in relation to the ‘European project’ has become more acute. The article accordingly focuses on and examines some of the austerity measures and certain controversial issues associated with them. In a final section, the impact of austerity on labour relations and the reactions of social partners, in particular the trade unions, are analysed.

Banias and the British: the Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Senior Member ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Trade And Exchange ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Service Groups

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

On the Run: Runaway Slaves and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century Cochin

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
Alexander Geelen ◽  
Bram van den Hout ◽  
Merve Tosun ◽  
Mike de Windt ◽  
Matthias van Rossum
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
And Control

Abstract Despite growing attention to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, the debate on the nature or characteristics of slavery in these regions has been left largely unsettled. Whereas some scholars emphasize the existence of harsh forms of hereditary slavery similar to those found in the Americas, others argue that the nature of slavery in Asia was urban, status-based, and milder than in the Atlantic world. This article explores case studies of slaves escaping in and around the Dutch East India Company (VOC) city of Cochin. Studying court records that bring to light the strategies and social networks of enslaved runaways provides new insights into the characteristics of slavery and the conditions of slaves in and around VOC-Cochin. The findings indicate that the social and everyday conditions under which slaves lived were highly diverse and shaped by the direct relations between slave and master, influenced by elements of trust, skill, and control. Relations of slavery nevertheless remained engrained by the recurrence of physical punishments and verbal threats, despite sometimes relatively open situations. This reminds us that easy dichotomies of “benign,” “Asian,” “household,” or “urban” versus “European,” “Atlantic,” or “plantation” slavery obscure as much as they reveal.

Fast and slow ships from China: The speed of Dutch East Indiamen reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322
Author(s):  
Johan de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ship Design ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Inland Waterways ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slow Adaptation ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Research

This article questions the commonly held assumption that the ships of the Dutch East India Company VOC were slower than those of other East India companies. Recently, Solar and De Zwart showed that Dutch ships were slower on outward voyages to a number of Asian destinations during the periods 1770–1775 and 1783–1792. They cited as plausible explanations differences in ship design resulting from constraints imposed by the Dutch shallow inland waterways and the slow adaptation of copper sheathing in the late eighteenth century. Research by the author of this article leads to a critical assessment of these explanations. Moreover, additional new research into homebound voyages from China undertaken by ships of four East India companies, for the periods 1730–1740, 1750–1755, 1770–1775 and 1783–1792, leads to the outcome that – concerning speed – Dutch ships could compete very well with those of the English, Swedish and Danish companies.

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