A Madman in the City of Ghosts: Nicolaas Kloek in Pontianak

Itinerario ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.J. van Goor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political Power ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Formal Relationship ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

In the many letters written by princes in the Indonesian archipelago to the Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia, the relative status.is expressed in the address. Titles that are used range from “friend and ally” to “father” and “grandfather,” reflecting the formal relationship that had been laid down in the contracts. The address shows the position of the VOC occupied during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Dutch East India Company, though a large bureaucratic apparatus, was approached in a personified way. The formal distance to the Governor-General was expressed in terms derived from daily social life. It also makes one realize that a trading company had become an Asian ruler. In the Indonesian archipelago the VOC constituted an important political power.

Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE BRYAN SOUZA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Over Time

AbstractWhile trade in opium was of limited financial significance in the eighteenth century to the larger accounts of the Dutch East India Company as a whole, this article shows its critical importance to the Company's comptoir accounts at Batavia. The article examines the VOC's commercial operations at Batavia in the eighteenth century and places opium trade and opium revenues within that larger context. It examines how the trade in Bengal opium through Batavia changed over time, based on a statistical analysis of the Company's accounts. These results show that opium dwarfed all other individual or groups of commodities that were available to the Company to sell profitably on Java and in the Indonesian Archipelago over the long eighteenth century.

Drezno w relacjach polskich osiemnastowiecznych peregrynantów. Rekonesans .

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Marcin Pliszka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

The article analyses descriptions, memories, and notes on Dresden found in eighteenth-century accounts of Polish travellers. The overarching research objective is to capture the specificity of the way of presenting the city. The ways that Dresden is described are determined by genological diversity of texts, different ways of narration, the use of rhetorical repertoire, and the time of their creation. There are two dominant ways of presenting the city: the first one foregrounds the architectural and historical values, the second one revolves around social life and various kinds of games (redoubts, performances).

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 London 1600–1800: communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-196
Author(s):  
JIM BENNETT ◽  
REBEKAH HIGGITT
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Public ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Culture ◽  
Collective Activity ◽  
Technical Culture ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

AbstractThis essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court. In this introduction, we outline the types of group and institution within our view and acknowledge the many locations that might be explored further. Above all, we introduce a particular vision of London's potential as a city of knowledge and practice, arising from its commercial and mercantile activity and fostered within its range of corporations, institutions and associations. This was recognized and promoted by contemporary authors, including natural and experimental philosophers, practical mathematicians, artisans and others, who sought to establish a place for and recognition of their individual and collective skills and knowledge within the metropolis.

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.

The Factory and the People of Nagasaki: Otona, Tolk, Compradoor

Itinerario ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Matsui Yoko
Keyword(s):  
Family Business ◽  
Public Service ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
The People ◽  
City System ◽  
The City ◽  
Two Sides

The Dutch East India Company was forced to move its factory in Japan from Hirado to Nagasaki by the order of the bakufu in 1641. Following that move, the Dutch were no longer allowed to freely go out into the city or to trade with city people. In order to have any contact with the people outside Deshima, they needed proper mediation of the Japanese officials. The interpreters (tolken, Oranda-tsūji, ) are well known as the intermediaries between the Japanese authorities and the Dutch residents of Deshima, but they were not the only ones who worked between the two sides. In this paper, I would like to deal with the Deshima Otona as the official responsible for the Dutch compound, and the compradoors, suppliers of the daily necessities for the Dutch factory, and to consider these officials within the context of the Nagasaki city system in order to compare this situation with that prevailing in Canton.Otona literally means “head” or “chief” and indicates a prominent member who is in charge of a certain group. In the cities of Edo-period Japan, the townspeople were controlled through their organisation in groups, which were given a considerable amount of autonomy. These groups consisted, in their turn, of members who were officially recognised by both the group organisation itself and the lord of the domain in which the city was located, because they owned a house, ran a family business, and performed some kind of public service (kuyaku, ).

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