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 exploitation of multiple empires in Asia. Little is known about the way partnerships and firms managed their gains, preserved accumulated capital or reinvested it. The Bank van Lening en Courant, created in Batavia in 1746, was probably the first institutional bank in Asia, if not in the world. Why the VOC issued a charter for a bank and what reasons informed the decision. The weight of capital gains by private partnerships and firms, on the one hand, and the need for state/company/public liquidity may well have influenced the decision. Once in full operation it provided unique services to Batavia’s colonial elite and to the VOC in the Indies that influenced the way private partnerships and firms expanded their businesses and may have impacted the way the company governed the Dutch empire in Asia.
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. Even if a great majority of those interactions were imposed, women were crucial actors in the dynamics and the outcomes of European colonization. This affected Portuguese and autochthone women alike, even if on different scales and levels. Between resistance, conflict, cheating, defection, intermingling and assimilation, those women performed as intermediaries between worlds. Their presence and agency were vital to economic flows between worlds, as they were essential in negotiations processes. They were influential in social organization dynamics through their roles in the family and in the reconfiguration of colonial environments.
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 the VOC, exercised the monopoly of the import and retail trade in opium in Java. Whilst the objectives and institutional framework of the Sociëteit are clear, little is known about how and why it contributed to the interests of autochthonous Dutch firms and entrepreneurs, as well as the mixed mercantile community of Batavia. How, for example, did the Sociëteit sustain the formation of a mercantile elite in Batavia, and the emergence of cross-cultural commercial partnerships? In analysing these questions, this paper contributes diverse insights to our understanding of the critical importance of opium to private traders engaged in intra-Asian trade during the early modern period.
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 the early modern era, the Indian Ocean’s littoral societies enjoyed a privileged status as coastal guardians, from the turn of the nineteenth century, ideas of public good and public trust vested the protection of the shores and seas in states. Drawing on case studies from the early modern and colonial period, I explore how littoral societies slowly yielded their jurisdiction over terraqueous landscapes to the modern state. This change coincided with the imperial age of the steam ship. It was also marked by the legal transformation of the littoral as property. My paper will conclude by reflecting on the legacy of these developments in the present.