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Retrospect on J.C. van Leur's Essay on the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Asian History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

P.J. Marshall
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Extract

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 45 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1993

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References

Notes

1 ‘Evenals er tijdens den groei van alle levende wezens overgangsvormen bestaan, is de achttiende eeuw er een in de wordingsgeschiedenis van Nederland als koloniaal rijk, verschillend in samenleving, staatsordening, moraal, verantwoordelijkheidsgevoel […] De compagniesgeschiedenis in de achttiende eeuw is het spiegelbeeld van die van het vaderland, ja van het Europa dier dagen […]‘Molsbergen, E.C. Godée, Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, edited by Stapel, F.W. (Amsterdam 1938) 7Google Scholar.

2 All quotations are from Van Leur, J.C., Indonesian Trade and Society. Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (2nd ed.; Bandung 1960) 268–290Google Scholar.

3 Chaudhuri, K.N., Asia before Europe (Cambridge 1990) 98Google Scholar.

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14 For a strong statement, see Washbrook, David, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988) 5796CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Perlin, F., ‘Proto-industrialisation and pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present 98 (1983) 30–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Eg. Arasaratnam, S., Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast (Delhi 1986) 164–165Google Scholar. Bayly, C.A., Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge 1988) 32–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Wallerstein, The Modern World System III, chap. 3

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20 Bayly, C.A., Imperial Meridian (London 1989) chaps. 1 and 2Google Scholar.

21 Bayly, C.A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge 1983) chap. 1Google Scholar.

22 Wink, André, ‘“Al Hind”, India and Indonesia in the Islamic World-Economy, c. 700–1800 AD’, Itinerario 12 (1988) 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialisation’, 64.

24 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, chap. 6.