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In Encounters of the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European chartered companies, and Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict'. Drawing extensively on archival materials, Markus Vink covers a topic neglected by both Company historians and their Indian counterparts and sheds important light on a 'black hole in South Indian history'.
In 1724-1726, the Dutch clergyman François Valentyn published a 5,000-page account of the Dutch East India Company’s empire. It was the first and, for a long time, the only survey of the Dutch establishments in Asia and South Africa. Shaping a Dutch East Indies analyses how Valentyn composed this work and how it largely determined the Dutch perspective on the colonies in Asia until the 1850s. It seeks to highlight both the great diversity of knowledge gathered in Valentyn’s book and its geographical spread, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, with a focus on the Indonesian archipelago. Huigen’s book is the first in-depth study of Valentyn’s work, which is a foundational text in the history of Dutch colonialism.
The George Hicks Collection at the National Library, Singapore, comprises about 6,900 books and materials donated between 200 and 2015 by Mr George Lyndon Hicks. The Collection focuses on four main subject areas – Southeast Asia, China, Japan and overseas Chinese – spanning the disciplines of history, sociology, economics, political science and anthropology. The body of works in the Collection reveals Mr Hicks’ profound interest in Asia and his scholarly pursuits over the decades. This volume, written and compiled by Eunice Low, presents an annotated bibliography of selected works from the Collection and highlights significant titles. Also included are an overview of the life and career of Mr Hicks, a list of his authored and edited works, as well as essays introducing the chapters.
The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) is one of the most intriguing conflicts of modern history. It has been labeled many things: the first media war, a precursor of the First and Second World Wars, the originator of apartheid. The difference in status and resources between the superpower Great Britain and two insignificant Boer republics in southern Africa was enormous. But, against all expectation, it took the British every effort and a huge sum of money to win the war, not least by unleashing a campaign of systematic terror against the civilian population. In The Boer War, winner of the Netherland's 2013 Libris History Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 AKO Literature Prize, the author brings a ...
Dynastic Colonialism analyses how women and men employed objects in particular places across the world during the early modern period in order to achieve the remarkable expansion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent explore how the House emerged as a leading force during a period in which the Dutch accrued one of the greatest seaborne empires. Using the concept of dynastic colonialism, they explore strategic behaviours undertaken on behalf of the House of Orange-Nassau, through material culture in a variety of sites of interpretation from palaces and gardens to prints and teapots, in Europe and beyond. Using over 140 carefully selected images, the authors co...
Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ‘honour’ in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged into and through these regions are not usually associated with ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of flux, concepts of honour and status were radic...
This book explores the introduction and transplantation of Calvinism to the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century through close analysis of the earliest Malay translations of Reformed catechisms and printed sermons written by Dutch ministers working in the archipelago. This book shows how these ministers introduced, taught, and explained the main teachings of Calvinism to the people of the Dutch East Indies in a language they could understand, as well as the challenges these ministers encountered as they moved forward in their efforts to spread the gospel to the people.
A comprehensive study of the connection between Calvinist missions and Dutch imperial expansion during the early modern period “A tour de force offering the reader the best study of global Calvinism in the realms of the Dutch East India Company.”—Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, editor, Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age Calvinism went global in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as close to a thousand Dutch Reformed ministers, along with hundreds of lay chaplains, attached themselves to the Dutch East India and West India companies. Across Asia, Africa, and the Americas where the trading companies set up operation, Dutch ministers sought to convert “pagans,” “...
Were the Dutch-Africans in southern Africa a brother nation to the Dutch or did they simply represent a lost colony? Connecting primary sources in Dutch and Afrikaans, this work tells the story of the Dutch stamverwantschap (kinship) movement between 1847 and 1900. The white Dutch-Africans were imagined to be the bridgehead to a broader Dutch identity – a ‘second Netherlands’ in the south. This study explores how the 19th century Dutch identified with and idealised a pastoral community operating within a racially segregated society on the edge of European civilisation. When the stamverwantschap dream collided with British military and economic power, the belief that race, language and religion could sustain a broader Dutch identity proved to be an illusion.