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5 results in Colonial and Global History through Dutch Sources

The Travels of Pieter Albert Bik
  • Writings from the Dutch Colonial World of the Early Nineteenth Century
  • Mikko Toivanen
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 November 2017
  • Pieter Albert Bik (1798-1855) was a Dutch colonial official whose work took him all over the world, including travels throughout Europe, the Dutch East Indies, and Japan. This book presents for the first time in English his autobiographical writings about those travels, which Bik never published in his lifetime. Presented here with annotations to set his observations in context, Bik's accounts offer a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism in the first half of the nineteenth century, while editor Mikko Toivanen also draws interesting parallels between Bik's travels and the contemporary emergence of tourist travel in Europe.

The Company Fortress
  • Military Engineering and the Dutch East India Company in South Asia, 1638-1795
  • Erik Odegard
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    11 March 2020
  • The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to Early-Modern European expansion? Was European fortification design as important for Early-Modern expansion as has been argued? This book takes on these questions by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single 'European school' of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century.

Staging Asia
  • The Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Theatre
  • Manjusha Kuruppath
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2017
  • In the early modern Dutch Republic, three playwrights wrote dramas based on political revolutions that were occurring at that same time in Asia. Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the transmission of the stories surrounding the seventeenth-century Asian events and their ultimate appearance in Europe as Dutch dramas. Manjusha Kuruppath explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these works and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels, including some connected to the Dutch East India Company, that the dramatists relied on to gather information for their plays.

Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka
  • Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society
  • Nadeera Rupesinghe
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    15 January 2023
  • Dutch and Sinhalese law coexisted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. A dual forum called the Landraad empowered colonial justices to defer to either imperial or indigenous law on issues ranging from standards of evidence to inheritance rights. So, while major judicial decisions were often skewed toward assimilation, everyday life in the colony was marked by a cultural multiplicity. In Navigating Pluralities, Nadeera Rupesinghe focuses on these day-to-day experiences of the law in colonial Sri Lanka, discovering how such plural practices affected both colonized and colonizers in surprising ways.

The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname
  • Archival Sources relating to the U. S. - Dutch Negotiations, 1860-1866
  • Michael Douma
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    11 March 2019
  • During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln's administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. Scores of diplomatic letters in Dutch, English, and French, dating to the period 1862 to 1866 attest to the very real possibility that such migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differences of opinion, mail delays, and ultimately a reluctance of any African Americans to migrate. Previously unpublished and unknown, these letters have been transcribed and translated here for the first time. The sources provide a rare look inside the minds of liberal government officials during the age of emancipation in the Atlantic World. They demonstrate the officials' humanitarian concerns, their racial prejudices, respect for legal order and process, and faith in governments to solve international problems.