Among historians, Southeast Asia's Overseas Chinese have never enjoyed much popularity. They are in many respects a “People without a History,” having left behind no substantial deposit of experience and having failed to produce a school of historians to write their own history from an insider's perspective. Apart from their ethnic and cultural background, what distinguishes the hua-chiao from the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia is the intermediary role that these immigrants have continued to play within the different territories, colonies or states of the area over the last few centuries. Acting as middlemen and brokers – and therefore necessarily discreet in the handling of personal relations – they have traditionally hidden their own aims and motives from the “outer world”, and thus eluded the understanding of their contemporaries.

When on the morning of 4 May 1616, after having been received in state by cavalry, noblemen and citizens, Pieter van den Broecke descends from the splendidly caparisoned mount with which he has been presented; when his feet sink into the carpets of the audience-hall of the Castle of Sana's, then he realizes, striding along between two rows of dignitaries standing with crossed arms, that a crucial moment in his voyage to the court of the “Governor-General” of the Ottoman province of Yemen has come. Djacfar Bāshā is sitting enthroned on a platform, dressed as if he were “the monarch of the entire world”. The Dutch opperkoopman (”upper-merchant”), in his black suit, greets him with reverence, whereupon the beglerbegi commands him to sit down. What! Sit down, on the carpet, on the floor, he, Captain of the Dutch? What else could that mean, in this formal entourage, but his submitting to the wālī? Then his interpreter retrieves the situation: “Sir, may Allāh bless You! The Dutch captain cannot sit in the way we are accustomed to do …”

There is a certain irony in including a picture of an intriguing but officially respected ‘black sheep’ (in terms of the VOC monopoly game) in a series of articles on more or less purely VOC personalities and VOC matters. As we shall see, the vermaarde reijsiger Samuel van. de Putte, who never was a Compagnies dienaar, travelled widely, mainly over land, in (Central) Asia occasionally arriving in and leaving VOC territory under the mighty auspices of official Company's backing, despite the formal regulation of the VOC that no Dutchman was allowed to set out for the East if he was not under contract of the Company.

The organization of the Dutch Wast India Company (Verenigde Oostinische Compagnie, VOC) is in many respects comparable with the government bureaucracies of the 17th and 18th century. Like the officials in the administration of the state, the servants of the Company used their position to enrich themselves in a way that nowadays would be called corrupt. But it has been stressed that it would be incorrect to apply modern moral standards on the bureaucracy of the ancien regime. It is in fact impossible to draw a sharp line between what was allowed to the Company's servants overseas and what was forbidden to them. The directors or bewindhebbers of the VOC themselves were not very consistent in these matters. On the one hand, they appointed members of their families and their clients to honourable positions in order to provide them with a moderate salary and a well-spread “free” table during their stay in Asia. On the other hand, the directors tried to keep the monopoly of the VOC intact, which meant that no other Dutch merchants, not even Company's officials, were allowed to carry any trade in Asia on their own account.

In the accounts of the Dutch voyage to the court of the Shogun in Edo, 1661, when Hendrik Indijck was chief-merchant is the item: “a palankin for Gerrit.” When I found this, I could not at first explain it since none of the travelling Dutchmen bore this name. The Deshima diary brought the solution. The review of the new personnel of the Dutch factory mentioned 19 Dutchmen, including “my son and daughter.” No mention of a mother was made, but only women of a specific type were allowed to visit the island.

In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.

The Konkani Brahmin Babba Prabhu served the Dutch in Kerala as a merchant, broker and envoy for many years. Nevertheless, the Dutch were divided in their opinion of him. Rijcklof van Goens trusted him in 1663 as a competent merchant, but a year later Hustaert called him a roguish Brahmin. He was alternately praised and blamed, until in 1691, when Hendrik Adriaan van Reede visited Malabar as a commissioner, he was charged with several difficult tasks and was granted rather exceptional privileges. However, after Van Reede's departure pressure was put on him to repay his debts to the Company. Admittedly we can only trace the changing Dutch opinions of Babba and not his opinion of them. No sources other than the Dutch archives are available to us. But they contain a mass of factual information. From these we will reconstruct Babba's relations with the Dutch.

The subject of this article is the fight for the throne in the kingdom of Gowa at the end of the 18th century, during the decline of the Dutch East India Company, a period which also saw the downfall of Gowa and the supremacy of Bone. The sources for the history of this period are twofold: on one hand the indigenous sources, “lontara-bilang” (diaries) and other records in Buginese and Makassarese; secondly, the European writings, principally the archival materials from the Dutch government at Makassar, supplemented by travel accounts and reports of the English. My primary sources are almost exclusively Dutch, namely the papers of the VOC, as they are preserved in the General State Archives in The Hague. To be more precise, these sources may be in Dutch, but in addition to the letters etc. written by Company officials, they also contain translations from documents drawn up by the rulers of Bone and Gowa or other of Asians. Moreover, the governors of Makassar often made use of indigenous sources, both oral and written, in preparing their lengthy memoirs about the state of affairs in their district. In 1736, the High Government in Batavia decided that two accurate genealogical tables must be prepared of the royal houses of Bone and Gowa.

In 1773 the director of the VOC factory in Canton, A.F. l'Heureux, requested permission from Gentlemen Seventeen to return home. He was already seventy years old and wrote: ‘It is hard and discouraging for an honest and faithful servant to find that Divine Providence had afflicted him with illnesses incurable in these parts… It is hard and discouraging for such a one to find himself deprived of his reward, perhaps the last reward for all his labour And may there not be other reasons that force us, however unwillingly, to quit these lands and the service of Your Excellencies? Are there no ties with our society, no ties forged by nature, or are we tied wholly and solely to the Company?’!.

In the many letters written by princes in the Indonesian archipelago to the Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia, the relative status.is expressed in the address. Titles that are used range from “friend and ally” to “father” and “grandfather,” reflecting the formal relationship that had been laid down in the contracts. The address shows the position of the VOC occupied during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Dutch East India Company, though a large bureaucratic apparatus, was approached in a personified way. The formal distance to the Governor-General was expressed in terms derived from daily social life. It also makes one realize that a trading company had become an Asian ruler. In the Indonesian archipelago the VOC constituted an important political power.

In 1790 the Dutch East India Company was in a bad way. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch war had had disastrous consequences for the Company, and it had not been able to recover from them. At the end of the accounting year 1789–90 debts in the Netherlands amounted already to f 91.1 million. The deficit in that year alone had been f 11.3 million. In Asia the capital was still f 23.5 million, but the losses nevertheless amounted to nearly f 13 million.1 In 1788 the States of Holland had given f 21 million in aid, on the basis of a plan for reform, but it was clear to everyone that this situation could not continue.