What makes the chapters on Monsoon Asia unique is the analysis of the Dutch Empire from the point of view of Asian societies. First of all, it is stressed that, from a global point of view, the rise of the Dutch seaborne empire is part of a much wider and earlier coastal turn, which in Asia has been described as an Age of Commerce. It is not only European, but also Chinese and Islamic, expansion that characterises this phase of increasing maritime globalisation. Those Eurasian empires that continued to exploit the nomadic horsepower of the Eurasian Arid Zone were soon able to incorporate this maritime dynamic. In these empires, the Dutch retained a marginal presence as meek merchants subject to the whims of indigenous brokers and local governments. In other, more tropical parts of Asia, the aggressive operations of the Dutch prevented indigenous states such as Mataram and Kandy from incorporating the booming coastal regions of Java and Ceylon, respectively. In these insular areas, the Dutch were able to create territorial power and impose their monopoly on the production and sale of cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In Maluku we can even speak of a Dutch ‘heart of darkness’ as much of its population was decimated, to be replaced by colonists and slaves. In almost all cases, the Dutch could sustain territorial power only with the help of overseas Chinese communities which offered both a vital urban middle class (primarily in the Dutch colonial headquarters of Batavia) and access to extensive commercial networks. So far completely ignored is the case of Ceylon. In this early-modern laboratory of colonial rule, the reformist policies of enlightened Dutch governors had a deep impact on the local society through mapping, law and education. One of the first revolutionaries in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands was a Tamil intellectual raised in Dutch schools in Ceylon.

Calvin’s theology and ecclesiastical practices reached the shores of Asia by way of the Dutch and their efforts to monopolize spice trading in the South and Southeast Asia regions starting from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Following the Union of Utrecht of January 1579,1 the two northern provinces of the Netherlands, Holland and Zeeland, acknowledged only one branch of Protestantism, namely Calvinism, as the accepted form of religion. While the other five provinces declared that people were free to choose their own form of religion, in practice, the Reformed church became the privileged church in the Dutch Republic. When the Dutch under the leadership of Cornelis de Houtman arrived in Banten (or Bantam) in the northwest corner of Java in 1596 to begin their exploration of monopoly of spice trading, they paved the way for Calvinism to be introduced to the majority of the Southeast Asian regions.