THE SETUPATIS, THE DUTCH, AND OTHER BANDITS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RAMNAD (SOUTH INDIA)

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lennart Bes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
South India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Marginal Power ◽  
Culture Politique

AbstractIn Ramnad, bandits could be king. The open-ended political culture of this South Indian kingdom presented even people on the margins of society with opportunities to attain political power. Likewise, the VOC (Dutch East India Company), operating from the coastal frontier of the kingdom, played a significant role in the political arena of Ramnad. Given this similarity, it may be asked whether the Dutch were regarded as neutral outsiders (as they themselves thought they were) or rather as an indigenous marginal power. By comparing the internal and regional relations of Ramnad with its contacts with the VOC, this article attempts to determine the kingdom's perception of the Company. In Ramnad, could the Dutch be bandits? En Ramnad, un royaume dans l'Inde méridional, il arrive que le bandit se fait roi. La culture politique, ainsi que les avenues du pouvoir y furent en principe ouvertes à tous; aux marginaux indigènes, vivants dans les terres sèches périphériques, autant qu'aux fonctionnaires de la compagnie néerlandaise des Indes Orientales, la VOC, qui avait un comptoir sur le littoral. Elle se considerait neutre. Toutefois elle allait jouer un rôle important dans l'arène politique de Ramnad. Or, au niveau conceptuel la question se pose si la perspective indigène différenciait entre le roturier indigène d'au-delà de la terre de grande culture, et l'aventurier étranger, ou par contre les confondait l'un l'autre. Cet article se propose d'y voir plus clair par l'étude des liens internes et régionals entretenus par le centre politique de Ramnad, en comparant ceux-ci avec les relations vis-à-vis la VOC pour en déduire le statut social des Hollandais dans la société indigène.

Sultan among Dutchmen? Royal dress at court audiences in South India, as portrayed in local works of art and Dutch embassy reports, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1792-1845 ◽  
Author(s):  
LENNART BES
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Dress Codes ◽  
Islamic Courts

AbstractFrom the fourteenth century CE onwards, South Indian states ruled by Hindu kings were strongly influenced by politico-cultural conventions from Muslim-governed areas. This development was, for instance, manifest in the dress and titles of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire. As has been argued, they bore the title of sultan and on public occasions they appeared in garments fashioned on Persian and Arab clothing. Both adaptations exemplified efforts to connect to the dominant Indo-Islamic world. From Vijayanagara's fragmentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Hindu-ruled kingdoms arose. We may wonder to what extent those succeeding polities continued practices adopted from Islamic courts. With that question in mind, this article discusses royal dress at court audiences in four Vijayanagara successor states, chiefly on the basis of embassy reports of the Dutch East India Company and South Indian works of art. It appears that kings could wear a variety of clothing styles at audiences and that influences on these styles now came from multiple backgrounds, comprising diverse Islamic and other elements. Further, not all successor states followed the same dress codes, as their dynasties modified earlier conventions in different ways, depending on varying political developments.

Civilization on Loan: The Making of an Upstart Polity: Mataram and its Successors, 1600–1830

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Carey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Islamic Schools ◽  
North East ◽  
Central Java ◽  
South Central

This paper focuses on the south-central Javanese state of Mataram and its late seventeenth- and mid-eighteenth-century successors—Kartasura (1680–1746), and Surakarta (founded 1746) and Yogyakarta (founded 1749). It concentrates principally on the administrative, military and cultural trends of the period, looking at the ways in which Mataram and its heirs imported their cultural styles from the defeated east Javanese and pasisir (north-east coast) kingdoms, while developing a Spartan polity dominated by the exigencies of war and military expansion. The disastrous reign of Sultan Agung's successor, Sunan Amangkurat I (r. 1646–77), and the emergence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as a major political force in Java led to the rapid eclipse of Mataram/Kartasura's military influence duringJava's ‘Eighty Years War’ (1675–1755) when the heritage of the great early Mataram rulers was squandered. This period of turmoil ended in the permanent division (paliyan) of south-central Java between the courts of Surakarta (Kasunanan, founded 1746, and Mangkunegaran, founded 1757) and Sultan Mangkubumi's new kingdom of Yogyakarta, which, in terms of its martial traditions, was the principal inheritor of the early Mataram polity. At the same time, the political authority of the courts continued to face challenges from regional power centres, not least the powerful administrators of Yogyakarta's eastern outlying provinces (mancanagara)based in Madiun and Maospati, and the networks of Islamic schools (pesantrèn) and tax-free religious villages (perdikan), which drew their strength both from court patronage and the piety of local communities.

Hundreds of Rosetta Stones and Other Patient Papers: The Dutch Records at the Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai (Madras)

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lennart Bes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Andhra Pradesh ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Dutch Hospital ◽  
British Rule ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Indian City ◽  
Set Up

Plans of eighteenth-century Indian houses, papers concerning the Dutch hospital at Cochin, Tamil texts inscribed on palm leaves, documents of Dutch institutions in India functioning under British rule, and numerous proclamations each drawn up in Dutch, Portuguese as well as Malayalam, reminding one of hundreds of Rosetta Stones, these are just a few examples of the largely unique documents that are referred to as the Dutch Records and are kept at the Tamil Nadu Archives in the South Indian city of Chennai (formerly known as Madras). These materials seem to comprise virtually all that remains of the archives that were left by the Dutch in India to be taken over by the British. (A large part of the original archives must have been lost in the course of time.) They consist of about 1,800 volumes and a couple of bundles (numbered 1 to 1763), stretch 64 metres, and date from the period between 1643 and 1852. The Dutch Records at Chennai in fact encompass the remnants of the archives of four factories set up by the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company), which all functioned as the headquarters of a kantoor (regional establishment): Cochin (headquarters of Malabar, modern-day Kerala), Nagapatnam and later Pulicat (Coromandel, present-day Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), Surat (Surat, modern-day Gujarat), and Chinsura or Hooghly (Bengal). These four archives have different custodial histories and were apparently put together just because they were all created by VOC institutions and their legal successors.

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.

THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS FROM CULLODEN TO WATERLOO

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW MACKILLOP
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Supportive Relationship ◽  
British State

This article highlights the present lacuna in the study of politics and political culture in the Scottish Highlands between the battles of Culloden and Waterloo. It argues that this neglect is symptomatic of the contentious historiography that surrounds the Highland Clearances. Yet politics remained a crucial factor shaping landlord attitudes to improvements and their estates in general. Moreover, in contrast to their well-known failure to manage the region's economic and social development, Highland landlords exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the British ‘fiscal-military’ state. The region's elites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the British state. Scottish Highland political culture thus offers a useful corrective to recent debates on the ‘fiscal-military’ state that stress either the centre's overwhelming power or the ability of local elites to resist that power. Although the Highlands is remembered primarily for its hostile relationship with the political centre, the region in fact constituted a prime example of the process of mutual accommodation that underpinned the domestic authority of the eighteenth-century British state.

From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
The Revolution

The absolute monarchy was a personal monarchy and during the reign of Louis XIV, the king established a tradition that the king should act as his ‘own first minister’, coordinating the work of his ministerial servants. In the course of the eighteenth century that tradition was undermined by a series of social, administrative, and cultural changes to such an extent that by the 1780s ministers were increasingly behaving as independent political figures, courting public opinion and claiming to act in the name of public welfare or even the nation. By examining these changes, this chapter argues that the political culture of the absolute monarchy was in constant transition and that the failure of Louis XVI, in particular, to manage its effects was one of the principal causes of his loss of authority in the period preceding the Revolution of 1789.

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.

Performing and Politicizing “Ladyhood”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Road ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
Aesthetic Politics

This chapter explores the suffrage activism of black women in Washington. As one of the most pressing political issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fight for universal suffrage was an important part of black women’s political activism throughout the New Negro era. The road to suffrage ended in Washington and black women suffragists in the nation’s capital were keenly aware the unique role they could play in advocating for universal suffrage. To understand the political culture of black women’s suffrage activism in Washington, the chapter centers on the March 1913 suffrage march in the nation’s capital to uncover the various dynamics of the suffrage movement and to specifically engage how black women thought about and enacted distinct political identities. For black suffragists, performative and aesthetic politics were resistive strategies for contesting their subordinate status in the political arena.

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