Shaping a Dutch East Indies

Siegfried Huigen is professor of Dutch Literature at Wrocław University (Poland) and visiting professor of Dutch Literature and Cultural History at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has published extensively on the history of colonial knowledge in Asia, Southern Africa and East Central Europe. He recently published East Central Europe between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century (2023) with Palgrave as co-editor.

Preface and Acknowledgements


List of Figures and Tables


Abbreviations


Introduction


Part 1

1 Describing Imperial Space

 1 Advertising Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën


 2 Chorographies of Imperial Space


 3 Text Formats

 3.1 Dagregister


 3.2 Chronicle


 3.3 List


 3.4 Anecdote




 4 Coherence through Authorial Voice


 5 Alternative Entries




2 Lobbying for a Bible Translation in ‘Low’ Malay

 1 Varieties of Malay


 2 The Controversy over the Malay Bible Translation


 3 Lobbying


 4 The Question of the Malay Translation of the Bible in Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën


 5 Epilogue




3 The Valentyn Case Scholarly Authorship at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

 1 The Location of Ophir as an Antiquarian Question


 2 Valentyn’s Use of Rumphius’s Kruid-boek


 3 A Stricter Scholarly Decorum


 4 Collaborators


 5 Valentyn’s Authorship




Part 2

4 Natural History for liefhebbers in Valentyn’s Description of Animals from Amboina

 1 An Audience of Liefhebbers


 2 Images of Tropical Fish


 3 Shells


 4 A Rhetoric of Probability

 4.1 Birds of Paradise


 4.2 Sea-People




 5 Herpetological Knowledge and Indigenous Collaborators


 6 Repackaging East Indies Natural History




5 ‘Dutch Power in Those Territories’ Historical Representation in Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën

 1 Chronicles of Conquest


 2 Asian Histories

 2.1 Sinhalese Histories


 2.2 Malay Histories


 2.3 Mughal Histories




 3 Framing Dutch Hegemony

 3.1 Ancients and Moderns


 3.2 Martial Batavians


 3.3 Staging Jan Pieterszoon Coen as a Hero




 4 The Circulation of Valentyn’s Master Narrative




6 Antiquarian Ambonese Valentyn’s Comparative Ethnography and Ethnology

 1 A Comparative Methodology


 2 ‘Foolish Thoughts’


 3 ‘Any That Pisseth against the Wall’


 4 Pelimao’s Defence




7 ‘This Business of Our Nation’ The Questionable Conduct of the Dutch in Japan

 1 Japan, Christianity and the Dutch


 2 Valentyn’s Representation of Japan


 3 New Information about Japan


 4 The Abject Behaviour of the Dutch in Japan


 5 Onno Zwier van Haren’s Recherches




8 ‘Waste Land’ into ‘Earthly Paradise’ The Geography of the Cape of Good Hope

 1 The Cape Colony around 1700


 2 Employing a Dutch Landscape Discourse


 3 Expeditions into the Interior


 4 Two Geographies of the Cape




Part 3

9 A Paper Empire Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën as a Reference Work

 1 A Tool for voc Bewindhebbers in the Netherlands


 2 A Resource for voc Administrators in the East Indies


 3 The Restoration of Dutch Rule in 1816


 4 New Policies for Amboina


 5 ‘Valentyn’ Becomes ‘Valentijn’


 6 A New Edition of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën


 7 A Paper Empire




 Conclusion




Appendix The Text Organisation of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën


References


Index