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This book focuses on the political and commercial relations between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin from 1637 until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The VOC exported silk and silk piece-goods from Tonkin to Japan. The author focuses on various aspects of the mutual relationship between the VOC and Tonkin, and how this fitted into the larger picture of the intra-Asian trade. The book reveals the vicissitudes in political relations, and the varying trends in the VOC's import (silver and copper) and export (silk, ceramics, musk, and gold). While examining a great deal of detailed archival materials, the author evaluates Dutch influence on Tonkin's feudal society and economy. The book also offers a fascinating sketch of how the Vietnamese trading elite maximized their own profits by dealing with various western tradesmen, including the English and French.
Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan presents a historical overview of vegetal ecocriticism in Taiwan. Divided into 12 chapters, it examines the human-plant entanglements on the island. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, such as the imperial plant explorations, the military casuarina afforestation, the mangrove conservation movement, the ecofeminist rooftop garden, the Indigenous millet restoration, the underground mycorrhizal network in urban Taipei, etc., it discloses the phyto-politics in the historical context of the vegetal materialist condition of the island. Intersecting the poetics and politics of plant narratives, it presents the multispecies plantscapes of the island. The first of its kind, the collection launches the historical and localized critical plant studies in Taiwan.
A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.
More than fifty years have passed since Charles Boxer wrote his major works on the Dutch-Portuguese rivalries in the Atlantic and attributed the successful takeover of North-eastern Brazil, Angola, São Tomé and the Gold Coast forts by the WIC to the superior naval power of the Dutch.This book reexamines the systems of settlement and trade of these States and their subjects in Western Africa and the Atlantic, offering a fresh insight on discussions about the success and failure of Dutch and Portuguese States, Companies and Merchants in the seventeenth-century-Atlantic.
No European country enjoyed such long-standing relations with the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya as the Netherlands. This study focuses on the perceptions of the merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) of the Thai royal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Basing herself on a wealth of Dutch primary sources, the author shows how trade, politics, and diplomacy shaped a unique relationship based on ‘partnership’ and a ‘sense of differences’. The book contributes to expanding the study of the history of Ayutthaya—known for its scarcity of sources— with the help of contemporary Dutch views.
This study shows how the the society of Banten was in a state of constant transformation in reaction to the Western presence and the shifts of the world economy during the period from 1750 to 1830.
Gunpowder studies are still in their infancy despite the long-standing civil and military importance of this explosive since its discovery in China in the mid-ninth century AD. In this second volume by contributors who meet regularly at symposia of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), the research is again rooted in the investigation of the technology of explosives manufacture, but the fact that the chapters range in scope from the Old World to the New, from sources of raw materials in south-east Asia to the complications of manufacture in the West, shows that the story is more than the simple one of how an intriguing product was made. This volume is the first...
The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.