Bank van Lening en Courant in Batavia (1746-1814)? The First Modern Bank in Asia?
Cátia Antunes Leiden University Emerging research demonstrates that the premise that the Dutch empire was a national enterprise with the Dutch state and trading companies being engines of colonial/imperial exploitation, is partially flawed. For Asia, the focus on the Dutch East India Company (VOC) has overshadowed the relevance of private partnerships and firms in the […]
Intersectional interactions: Women as brokers and go-betweens in the Portuguese State of India
Amélia Polónia University of Porto This contribution starts from the assumption that cooperation between the Europeans and the societies and cultures of contact during the Early Modern process of overseas empire-building depended on the agency of women as brokers and go-betweens in all territories where Europeans settled. This seems particularly apparent in the Portuguese case. […]
The Amphioen Sociëteit (1746-1794): opium, intra-Asian trade, and the elite commercial world of Batavia in the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries
Noelle Richardson Leiden University This paper aims to shed greater light on the importance of opium for the local economy of Java and intra-Asian trade in the early modern period through a close analysis of the Amphioen Sociëteit (1745-1808) (‘Opium Society’). Established in 1745, the Sociëteit was a privileged, chartered, joint-stock company, that, together with […]
Muddy Waters: Port Environments and Terraqueous Legalities
Bhavani Raman University of Toronto The idea that that the coast can be legally occupied by large ports and other infrastructure is surprisingly recent in the Indian Ocean world. Indeed, the Indian Ocean littoral offers an important site to understand how modern imperialism propelled property-making rather paradoxically through the extension of coastal “protection.” Whereas in […]
Melding Technologies: Shipbuilding around the Indian Ocean after the Arrival of European Ships
Richard Unger University of British Columbia Interchange between shipbuilding methods and design long preceded the arrival of European sea-going vessels at the end of the fifteenth centuries. Malay ships dominated the Indian Ocean though they evolved too following contact with Arab and Chinese practices. By 1500 the junk was a hybrid of north Chinese trading […]
Mapping East Africa: Dutch East India Company maps of the gateway to the Indian Ocean world
Michiel van Groesen Leiden University When historians write about the Dutch East India Company (VOC), they typically discuss the Company’s administration or labour force in Batavia and Ceylon, the genocide that took place in the Moluccas to secure the fine spice trade, the exclusive access to Tokugawa Japan through the carefully controlled settlement in the […]
The Dutch Oceanic Empire in the Indian Ocean: the emergence of a “system”
Eric Tagliacozzo Cornell University The Dutch as an oceanic empire arrived mid-stream in the history of Europeans sailing the Indian Ocean — after the Portuguese, but before the English and French had taken hold as forces to be reckoned with on a systemic scale. Although the Portuguese presence was earlier, by the middle decades of […]
Export Led Growth in Arabia from the Middle Ages to WWI: Trading dates, pearls, and slaves with Africa to India
Bob Allen New York University – Abu Dhabi Three instances of export led growth in Arabia involved the export of a primary product and the import of slaves to provide the labour force to produce it. In the Middle Ages the boom in date production centred in al-Hasa, portentous for the future of Saudi. In […]
Slavery and Slave trading Scholarship in the Indian Ocean: Some Lessons from the Atlantic
David Eltis Emory University Only in the last five years has a significant scholarly effort gotten off the ground to pull together systematic information on the age-old traffic in people in the Indian Ocean World. By contrast, usable databases on slave trafficking in the Atlantic date at least from Philip Curtin’s foundational work, The Atlantic […]
Tracing “la Traite” in the Indian Ocean
Margaret Schotte York University “Sailing with the French”, a SSHRC-funded, traces more than 1200 voyages of the Compagnie des Indes, both the movements of ships to and within the Indian Ocean, and the movements of individuals from port to port. The goal is to uncover previously anonymous individuals and to map their lives. The rich […]