Introduction: Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization

Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s engraved wall map of America is used to introduce some of the potential for imaginative forms that resulted from the confrontation between early modern global forces and the mobility of materials and artisanal practices. Cartographic lines, pictorial forms, and texts comingle on the printed page, sometimes working together towards a totalizing document of lands and peoples, but also giving rise, through calligraphic inventions and ornamentation, to detours and unpredictable movements. These tensions, and concomitant social and political implications, are considered in relation to terms, notably globalization and mondialisation, and evolving historiographic questions and arguments. Through the concept of cosmopolitan spaces, we highlight the volume’s focus on connectivity. Together, the Introduction and the essays make a case for the global as an approach as much as an archive, an approach that is attentive to the migrations and heuristic value of visual and material evidence.

Labouring Transformations of Amphibious Monsters: Exploring Early Modern Globalization, Diversity, and Shifting Clusters of Labour Relations in the Context of the Dutch East India Company (1600–1800)

Early modern globalization depended on labour-intensive production and transport of global commodities. Throughout the Dutch Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries labour was mobilized through a variety of different labour relations (especially casual, contract, slave, and corvée labour). The mobilization of these workers often entailed movements over short, but more often long, distances. Port cities were crucial nodal points connecting various sites of production and circuits of distribution. Furthermore, these ports were themselves also important working environments (ranging from transport and storage, to production and security). As a result, workers from various regional, social, and cultural backgrounds worked in the same environments and were confronted with each other – as well as with the legal and disciplining regimes of early modern urban and corporate authorities. This article studies the development of labour relations in the port work of the Dutch Asian empire, looking at the mobilization and control of labour for dock work (loading and unloading of ships) and transport in its urban surroundings. It will analyse and compare the development of the need for labour, the employment of different sets of labour relations, and the mechanisms of control that developed from it. As the largest trading company active in Asia (up to the 1750s), the case of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) is crucial in understanding the impact of early imperial and capitalist development in changing global social and labour relations.