Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:20:21.921Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

X. The Run to the Coast: Comparative Notes on Early Dutch and English Expansion and State Formation in Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Leonard Blussé
Leonard Blussé
Affiliation:
(University of Leiden)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 12 , Special Issue 1: The Ancien Regime in India and Indonesia , March 1988 , pp. 195 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Braudel, Fernand, Civilisation matérielle, Economic el Capitalisme (3 vols.; Paris 1979) 111, 459.Google Scholar

2 ‘On the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Indonesian History’ in: van Leur, J.C., Indonesian Trade and Society. Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague 1967) 268–289.Google Scholar

3 Chaudhuri, K.N., The English East India Company (London 1965)Google Scholar; Glamann, K., Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620–1640 (The Hague 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaastra, F.S., De Geschiedenis van de VOC (Haarlem 1982).Google Scholar

4 Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P., ‘Een vergelijkend onderzoek van bestuur en handel der Nederlandse en Engelse handelscompagnieën op Azië in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 91 (1976) 196–217.Google Scholar

5 Blussé, L. and Gaastra, F.S. eds., Companies and Trade (Leiden 1981) 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Furber, Holden, John Company at Work (Cambridge Mass. 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Furber, Holden, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis 1976).Google Scholar

7 Schama, Simon, The Embarrasment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London 1987) 6.Google Scholar

8 van Goor, J. ed., Trading Companies in Asia, 1600–1830 (Utrecht 1986) 10.Google Scholar

9 Wolpert, S., India (Englewood Cliffs 1965) 77.Google Scholar

10 Marshall, Peter, Britain and India 1757–1813 (London 1968) 17.Google Scholar

11 Betts, Raymond F., Europe Overseas: Phases of Imperialism (New York 1968) 33.Google Scholar

12 Seeley, J.R., The Expansion of England (London 1920) 21.Google Scholar

13 J.S. Mill cited in Seeley, The Expansion of England, 223.

14 See Blussé, Leonard and Winius, George, ‘The Origins and Rhythm of Dutch Aggression against the Estado da India 1601–1661’ in: de Souza, T.R. ed., Indo-Portuguese Trade (New Delhi 1985) 73–83.Google Scholar

15 These different state formation processes varied, of course, considerably according to the cultural sphere in which they occurred. For the Far East we may refer to Wakeman, Frederic, The Great Enterprise. The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China (2 vols.; Berkeley 1985)Google Scholar; Toby, Ronald P., State and Diplomacy in Early Modem Japan (Princeton 1984)Google Scholar; for Southeast Asia, R. Heine-Geldern, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia; for South Asia, Habib, Irfan, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1787 (London 1963)Google Scholar; Stein, Burton, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi 1980)Google Scholar; Pearson, M.N., Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: the Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley 1976).Google Scholar

16 Chin-keong, Ng, Trade and Society. The Amoy Network on the China Coast 1683–1735 (Singapore 1983) 184.Google Scholar

17 Blussé, Leonard, Strange Company. Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht and Riverton 1986) 127.Google Scholar

18 Bassett, D.K., ‘The Trade of the English East India Company in the Far East. 1623–84’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1960) 32–47, 145–157.Google Scholar

19 Prakash, Om, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 (Princeton 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Attman, Artur, American Bullion in the European World Trade 1600–1800 (Göteborg 1986) 76.Google Scholar

21 Gaastra, De Geschiedenis van de VOC, 124–125.

22 van Goor, J., ‘Handel, koningschap en religie in Zuidoost Azie’ in: Claessen, H.J.M. ed., Macht en Majesteit. Idee en Werkelijkheid in het vroege koningschap (Amsterdam 1984) 113–128.Google Scholar

23 Blussé, Leonard, ‘Labour Takes Root. Mobilization and Immobilization of Javanese Rural Society under the Cultivation System’, Itinerario 8 (1984) 77–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Taylor, Jean Gelman, The Social World of Batavia. European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Wisconsin 1983).Google Scholar

25 Terpstra, W., De Nederlanders in Voor-Indië (Amsterdam 1947) 40.Google Scholar

26 Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 22.

27 Ibidem, 137.

28 Furber John Company at Work, 162.

29 Das Gupta, Ashin, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden 1979).Google Scholar

30 This paper was later published under a different title, ‘The Middle East and Asia during the Age of Revolutions, 1760–1830’, Itinerario 10(1986) 69–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Gupta, Ashin Das, ‘De VOC en de Malabarkust in de 18e eeuw’ in: Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P. ed., De VOC in Azië (Bussum 1976) 100–106.Google Scholar

32 Watson, I.B., Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659–1760 (New Delhi 1980).Google Scholar

33 This subject would seem to be a ‘sadly neglected one’ indeed. As an outsider to Indian trade history I am unable to account for this curious lacuna in the existing historical literature.

34 Winius, George, ‘The “Shadow Empire” of Goa in the Bay of Bengal’, Itinerario 7 (1983) 83–101.Google Scholar

35 Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 313.

36 Seeley, The Expansion of England, 234.

37 Ibidem, 242.

38 Furber John Company at Work, 21.

39 Ibidem, 313. Of course the annual loans issued by the EIC to the British government in aid of war expenditure also contributed to this insolvency.

40 Ibidem, 302–303.

41 In 1830 T.C. Melville, the Company's Auditor-General, declared: ‘I am prepared to say that India does entirely depend upon the profits of the China trade.’ Greenberg, Michael, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–42 (Cambridge 1951) 14–15.Google Scholar

42 De Somogyi, Joseph, A Short History of Oriental Trade (Hildesheim 1968) 172.Google Scholar