scholarly journals In search of sepoys: Indian soldiers and the Dutch East India Company in India and Sri Lanka, 1760–1795

2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452110303
Author(s):  
Erik Odegard
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
French And English

Unlike the French and English India, the Dutch East India Company did not shift to recruiting predominantly Indian soldier personnel for service in India, sepoys, from the 1740s onwards. Although Dutch Company (VOC) remained much more reliant on European recruitment, it did in fact also recruit sepoys in India. These soldiers remain little noted in the sources and the historical record. This article will explain why the VOC did not follow the French and English lead. The VOC’s late acceptance of sepoys as full-time soldiers meant it could not effectively compete with either French or English companies in India.

EVA'S MEN: GENDER AND POWER IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1652–74

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA C. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
East India Company ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Feeding Station ◽  
Wide Range

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (03) ◽  
pp. 497-519
Author(s):  
Nira Wickramasinghe ◽  
Alicia Schrikker
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Local Practice ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

Gold-Leaf Flattery, Calcuttan Dust, and a Brand New Flagpole: Five Little-Known VOC Collections in Asia on India and Ceylon

Itinerario ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Lennart Bes
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Gold Leaf ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Hague

Beside the records of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC) stored at the Netherlands National Archives in The Hague, there are various VOC collections kept in Asia that pertain to India and Ceylon. Some of these are relatively well-known: the “Dutch Records” in the Tamil Nadu Archives (Chennai); the records of the VOC government of Ceylon in the Sri Lanka National Archives (Colombo); the records of the Dutch Reformed Church of Ceylon at the Wolvendaal Church (Colombo); and the records of the Asian VOC headquarters at Batavia in the National Archives of Indonesia (Jakarta).

scholarly journals Construction at Cochin: Building ships at the VOC-yard in Cochin

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-494
Author(s):  
Erik Odegard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Relative Cost ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Malabar Coast ◽  
Relative Decline

The port of Cochin on the Malabar Coast of India had always been a centre of shipbuilding. After the Dutch conquest in the port in 1663, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), too, established a shipyard there. At this yard, the VOC experimented with building ocean-going ships until the management of the company decreed that these were to be built solely in the Dutch Republic itself. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the yard focused on the repair of passing Indiamen and the construction of smaller vessels for use in and between the VOC commands in Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal and Sri Lanka. For most of the vessels built during the 1720s and 1730s, detailed accounts exist, allowing for a reconstruction of the costs of the various shipbuilding materials in Malabar, as well as the relative cost of labour. From the 1750s onwards, operations at the yard again become more difficult to discern. Likely, the relative decline of the VOC’s presence in Malabar caused a reduction in operations at the yard, but the shipyard was still in existence when Cochin was captured by British forces in 1795. However, this did not mean the end of Cochin as a shipbuilding centre, as a number or Royal Navy frigates were built at Cochin during the early nineteenth century.

MIDWIVES AND MEDICAL MEN IN THE CAPE COLONY BEFORE 1860

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARRIET DEACON
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Social History Of Medicine

Relatively little research has been done on the history of midwifery at the Cape, although there has lately been increasing interest in the social history of medicine, as well as in the history of abortion, rape, infanticide and motherhood in South Africa. One of the reasons for the dearth of research is the relative absence of women, especially black women, from the historical record. The archival record of what was called the Cape Colony during the early nineteenth century is rich enough to reveal something about women's history, however. The Cape was first settled by Europeans in 1652 under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), and was captured by the British in 1795 and again in 1806. During the first half-century of British rule at the Cape, urban midwives came under greater professional and official scrutiny and left some traces in the historical archive. The remaining absences tell their own stories, too, and in this paper these silences will be made to speak, if only softly and tentatively, of the role of women in colonial African medical care.

Corvée Capitalism: The Dutch East India Company, Colonial Expansion, and Labor Regimes in Early Modern Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Matthias van Rossum ◽  
Merve Tosun
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
South And Southeast Asia ◽  
And Control ◽  
Labor Regimes

Abstract This article revisits our understanding of corvée labor regimes and their role and impact in the early expansion of colonialism and capitalism. Rather than remnants of feudal pasts, or in-kind taxation or revenue instruments of weak colonial powers, corvée regimes should be viewed as refined methods of colonial exploitation that provided colonial actors with more direct access to and control over the production of commercially interesting global commodities. This article explores and compares the corvée labor regimes employed and shaped by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Moluccas, Sri Lanka, and Java. The article first addresses how to understand corvée and tributary relations as labor, production, and (political-)social regimes. Second, it explores and compares the organization and development of corvée labor relations in the context of the VOC in South and Southeast Asia. These corvée labor regimes reappear as crucial instruments in the expansion of (early) modern colonialism and capitalism, which could explain their widespread recurrence across the globe in the last few centuries.

scholarly journals Esaias Boursse’s ‘Tijkenboeck’

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 312-331
Author(s):  
Lodewijk Wagenaar ◽  
Mieke Beumer
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Standard Contract ◽  
Successful Career ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Important Evidence

We do not know who trained Esaias Boursse (1631-1672) to be a painter, but we do know that he became a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke around 1651. He certainly did not have a successful career because he joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1661. He travelled to Colombo, the capital of the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1972), captured six years earlier by the Portuguese, by way of Batavia (now Jakarta). In 1663 he was back in Amsterdam – remarkable, as the standard contract with the VOC was for five years. In financial straits again, he re-joined the VOC in 1671 and left for Asia. Shortly after leaving he died at sea. In 1996 an album containing 116 drawings came to light, most of them made by Boursse during his time in Ceylon; he made only a small number during his outward or return journeys to the Cape of Good Hope. The drawings are completely different from his earlier known oeuvre of genre paintings and prints with religious themes. The pages in his ‘Tijkenboeck’ provide a unique picture of what Boursse saw in and around Colombo. They are important evidence of the early days of the VOC in its conquered colony of Ceylon.

A famine in Surat in 1631 and Dodos on Mauritius: a long lost manuscript rediscovered

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Winters ◽  
J. P. Hume ◽  
M. Leenstra
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into

In 1887 Dutch archivist A. J. Servaas van Rooijen published a transcript of a hand-written copy of an anonymous missive or letter, dated 1631, about a horrific famine and epidemic in Surat, India, and also an important description of the fauna of Mauritius. The missive may have been written by a lawyer acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). It not only gives details about the famine, but also provides a unique insight into the status of endemic and introduced Mauritius species, at a time when the island was mostly uninhabited and used only as a replenishment station by visiting ships. Reports from this period are very rare. Unfortunately, Servaas van Rooijen failed to mention the location of the missive, so its whereabouts remained unknown; as a result, it has only been available as a secondary source. Our recent rediscovery of the original hand-written copy provides details about the events that took place in Surat and Mauritius in 1631–1632. A full English translation of the missive is appended.

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