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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 Tale of Tea is the saga of globalisation. Tea gave birth to paper money, the Opium Wars and Hong Kong, triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars and the American war of independence, shaped the economies and military history of Táng and Sòng China and moulded Chinese art and culture. Whilst black tea dominates the global market today, such tea is a recent invention. No tea plantations existed in the world’s largest black tea producing countries, India, Kenya and Sri Lanka, when the Dutch and the English went to war about tea in the 17th century. This book replaces popular myths about tea with recondite knowledge on the hidden origins and detailed history of today’s globalised beverage in its many modern guises.
Being Dutch in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a Creole empire. Most of colonial society, up to the highest levels, consisted of people of mixed Dutch and Asian descent who were born in the Indies and considered it their home, but were legally Dutch.
In this detailed, image-rich reference first published in 1935, William Ukers describes the history, cultivation method and etymology of the world's teas. His research led him to Brazil, Sumatra, Colombia, India, China, Japan, and the ports of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This edition includes Books I, II and III, which cover the historical, technical and scientific aspects of tea.
Wives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period—changes that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company's Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of eigh...
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
This book recounts the little-known history of Cornelis Chastelein, a high-ranking official of the Dutch East India Company and the 150-200 slaves he purchased from slave markets around South-East Asia, to work his landed estates in the Batavian (Jakarta) hinterlands. It traces the making and unravelling of his dream to create a self-sustaining Christian community of freed slaves in the midst of a Muslim stronghold. To this end, on his death on 28 June 1714, he freed most of his slaves, and bequeathed those who had embraced Christianity, his 1244-hectare Depok estate in ‘collective ownership.’ The book isolates behaviours and events that influenced these Depokkers’ lives after Chastele...
Muslims and Matriarchs is a history of an unusual, probably heretical, and ultimately resilient cultural system. The Minangkabau culture of West Sumatra, Indonesia, is well known as the world's largest matrilineal culture; Minangkabau people are also Muslim and famous for their piety. In this book, Jeffrey Hadler examines the changing ideas of home and family in Minangkabau from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. Minangkabau has experienced a sustained and sometimes violent debate between Muslim reformists and preservers of indigenous culture. During a protracted and bloody civil war of the early nineteenth century, neo-Wahhabi reformists sought to replace the matriarchate with a soci...
The Zheng family of merchants and militarists emerged from the tumultuous seventeenth century amid a severe economic depression, a harrowing dynastic transition from the ethnic Chinese Ming to the Manchu Qing, and the first wave of European expansion into East Asia. Under four generations of leaders over six decades, the Zheng had come to dominate trade across the China Seas. Their average annual earnings matched, and at times exceeded, those of their fiercest rivals: the Dutch East India Company. Although nominally loyal to the Ming in its doomed struggle against the Manchus, the Zheng eventually forged an autonomous territorial state based on Taiwan with the potential to encompass the family's entire economic sphere of influence. Through the story of the Zheng, Xing Hang provides a fresh perspective on the economic divergence of early modern China from western Europe, its twenty-first-century resurgence, and the meaning of a Chinese identity outside China.
In The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast, Laurie Margot Ross situates masks and masked dancing in the Cirebon region of Java (Indonesia) as an original expression of Islam. This is a different view from that of many scholars, who argue that canonical prohibitions on fashioning idols and imagery prove that masks are mere relics of indigenous beliefs that Muslim travelers could not eradicate. Making use of archives, oral histories, and the performing objects themselves, Ross traces the mask’s trajectory from a popular entertainment in Cirebon—once a portal of global exchange—to a stimulus for establishing a deeper connection to God in late colonial Java, and eventual links to nationalism in post-independence Indonesia.