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Europeans, Mestizos and Slaves: The Population of Colombo At The End Of The Seventeenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Gerrit Knaap
Gerrit Knaap
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht, as translated by Robert Ross.
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Extract

In India under the English East India Company, it was said: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian”. This saying is based on the widespread belief that, during the first centuries of their presence in Asia, European men were to a large extent dependent on “non-white” women for their sexual contacts. The character of these early colonial settlements is therefore often described as non-European. Their population is characterised as a melting-pot of ethnic groups, dependent on the uneuropean institution of slavery. The cultural values this entailed were far from those of the mother countries, certainly not those of the (Calvinist) Netherlands.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 1981 , pp. 84 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1981

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References

Annotations

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