Under Mo Tianci, The Port continued to thrive as a resource exporter, emporium, and monetary center. In fact, it expanded beyond its immediate surroundings of the water world and Cochinchina, stimulated by commercial growth, social change, and official policies within the regional powers of China, Japan, and the VOC. As a result, The Port played an essential role in the offshoring of the Chinese economy, attracting surplus laborers from China to Southeast Asia and supplying them with goods from Guangzhou. The Port’s expanded jurisdiction after the late 1750s also allowed for a greater specialization of functions. Bassac and other minor ports handled trade with maritime East Asia and received support from the Hong merchants of Guangzhou. The urban center focused more on finance, influencing the money supply of Cochinchina and becoming a center for copper and silver in Southeast Asia. The Port’s fortunes got a further boost when the fall of Ayutthaya to the Myanmar forces removed a major competitor along the Gulf of Siam littoral.

Although Mo Tianci maintained the ties of vassalage that his father had forged with the Nguyễn, Cochinchina only constituted one important foundation of his rule. He continued The Port’s traditional subordination to Cambodia and actually increased his involvement in the kingdom. He backed a ruler that leaned toward Cochinchina’s rival, Siam. After a succession struggle during the mid-1750s, Tianci emerged as the real power behind the throne. He forged a partnership with Batavia, presenting himself as an Austronesian principality within the sphere of influence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He also integrated The Port with the Chinese community of Batavia. The grandson of the city’s Chinese kapitan took charge of the Qing merchants at The Port, and a translocal justice system ensured the smooth conduct of trade across maritime East Asia The secret to Tianci’s ability to juggle simultaneous identities and allegiances lay in his understanding and manipulation of the conventions of the Sinosphere and the Southeast Asia mandala system. As a result, he achieved outside recognition of the autonomous status of his realm without the need to declare a formally independent state.

This chapter again uses data from the Bank’s ledgers, cash books, and other records to examine its policy decisions over much of the eighteenth century (1711—1791). Examination of these data indicates that the Bank’s accounting was highly focused on accurate tabulation of the total stock of Bank money. It is argued that this money stock had two functional components, de facto splitting the bank into two institutions: a passive bank whose money originated from customers’ deposits of coins under receipt, and an active bank whose money originated from open market purchases of metallic assets and credit operations. The data show that from 1727 forward, the active portion of the Bank’s money was systematically adjusted to balance out (sterilize) fluctuations in the passive portion. The chapter also discusses two crisis episodes when this policy approach broke down: (1) a financial panic in the autumn of 1763 that required a liberalization of the receipt system, leading to unbalanced expansion of the passive bank; (2) excessive lending to the Dutch East India Company during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780—1784), leading to a contraction of the passive portion and overexpansion of the active. The effects of the latter crisis were sufficiently severe that the Bank never fully recovered.

This chapter lays out the monetary, financial, and political environment in Amsterdam in the mid-eighteenth century — the high tide of the Bank. The main types of monetary assets within Amsterdam are described, along with the channels by which one monetary asset could be exchanged for another. This chapter also discusses major players in the Amsterdam money markets and their connections to the Bank. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Bank’s relationship to the City of Amsterdam and fiscal aspects of this relationship.

In the early modern period, Japan emerged as a key node in global trading networks. While a vast range of goods were traded, Japan’s position was underpinned by the silk-for-silver exchange that acted as a powerful magnet for foreign merchants. This chapter aims to situate Japan within global trade by exploring the underlying commercial dynamic that drove engagement and the crowded commercial landscape that emerged as a result. The focus is, first, on successive challengers including the Portuguese, shuinsen merchants, the Dutch, the English, and the Chinese and, second, on Tokugawa attempts to channel trade through sanctioned pathways while cutting links with any group that might inject volatility into a precariously balanced system. The chapter concludes by examining the Zheng maritime organization, which emerged to challenge the Dutch East India Company for control over trade routes in East and Southeast Asia.

Theorizations of slavery in the Indian Ocean world often draw upon analyses of enslavement in the anglophone Black Atlantic world, productively highlighting continuities between systems of unfree labor migration across oceans. This chapter, however, focuses mainly on how enslavement in the Indian Ocean diverged from Atlantic models, and the implications this has had for the literatures of slavery. If the anglophone Black Atlantic can be considered a sphere of autobiographical speech and legal silence, the Indian Ocean world of enslavement is one of autobiographical silence, but legal speech. The rich heteroglossia of Indian Ocean legal records stands in contrast to portrayals of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade as a process of silencing and erasure. The existence of these legal records affects the representation of the enslaved in later, fictional narratives of slavery, which share an interest in voice, testimony, and the law. After a brief summary of the historical contexts of slavery in the Indian Ocean world, this chapter examines depictions of enslaved voices in legal archives and fictional works. The final section turns to literatures of indenture, a more recent form of coerced labor migration, to suggest why we should not consider indenture as simply a continuation of slavery.

This contribution examines an important triangulation in the thought of Hugo Grotius, or Hugo de Groot (1583–1645): his biblically based effort to redefine private property; a Remonstrant (or Arminian) theological framework for his definition of the free-willing and rational individual who could choose good or evil, as well as punish evil in others; and his work for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which in many ways framed all that he wrote. Through these three items, Grotius developed an initial framework for international law, especially the ideology of “freedom of the seas,” or what is now called “freedom of navigation.” The question that arises through this analysis is whether the universal category of “freedom of the seas” as well as his idea of human nature are vitiated by the specific context in which they arose and the interests they served, or whether one can indeed develop universals, recognized by others, from specific contexts.

When the Dutch plunged into the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they brought with them both a new form of capitalism and fresh ways of looking at nature. Their sprawling seaborne empire turned Amsterdam and Leiden into centres for the collection of global knowledge. Colonised regions were systematically scoured for valuable natural resources and curiosities. Jan van Riebeeck, Simon van der Stel and Rijk Tulbagh, among other Cape governors, were keen amateur naturalists. The Cape’s natural diversity in plants and animals attracted literate travellers with a scientific bent and the botanical gardens served as a portal to exchange of botanical knowledge. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced a rich literature on South Africa, as scientific interest drew it into the orbit of educated Europeans. Some of the writers became scientists of consequence, including Thunberg, who became the leading botanist in Sweden; Lichtenstein, a professor of zoology in Berlin; and Barrow, a key scientific figure in the British Admiralty. These travellers often reported local knowledge and collectively created a literary tradition about the Cape that helped to define the region’s character and interest to scientists.

What makes the chapters on Monsoon Asia unique is the analysis of the Dutch Empire from the point of view of Asian societies. First of all, it is stressed that, from a global point of view, the rise of the Dutch seaborne empire is part of a much wider and earlier coastal turn, which in Asia has been described as an Age of Commerce. It is not only European, but also Chinese and Islamic, expansion that characterises this phase of increasing maritime globalisation. Those Eurasian empires that continued to exploit the nomadic horsepower of the Eurasian Arid Zone were soon able to incorporate this maritime dynamic. In these empires, the Dutch retained a marginal presence as meek merchants subject to the whims of indigenous brokers and local governments. In other, more tropical parts of Asia, the aggressive operations of the Dutch prevented indigenous states such as Mataram and Kandy from incorporating the booming coastal regions of Java and Ceylon, respectively. In these insular areas, the Dutch were able to create territorial power and impose their monopoly on the production and sale of cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In Maluku we can even speak of a Dutch ‘heart of darkness’ as much of its population was decimated, to be replaced by colonists and slaves. In almost all cases, the Dutch could sustain territorial power only with the help of overseas Chinese communities which offered both a vital urban middle class (primarily in the Dutch colonial headquarters of Batavia) and access to extensive commercial networks. So far completely ignored is the case of Ceylon. In this early-modern laboratory of colonial rule, the reformist policies of enlightened Dutch governors had a deep impact on the local society through mapping, law and education. One of the first revolutionaries in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands was a Tamil intellectual raised in Dutch schools in Ceylon.

In the first chapter of Part I the authors discuss the rise and decline of the two Dutch monopoly companies, and how they, formally and informally, operated in the Dutch Republic, Asia and the Atlantic. The histories of these two companies are very different. The Dutch West India Company, operating in the Atlantic, was always threatened by competitors such as private traders, Dutch merchants who used foreign companies to get around the monopoly, and French and English competitors. The Dutch East India Company, the largest enterprise in the world, employing at the height of its existence about 40,000 personnel, went bankrupt not because of the competition from other trading houses in the Netherlands, but because the directors of the Company were aware which products brought in profits and which did not, but had no idea about the total financial results. In order to increase its turnover, the Company switched from the trade in spices to that of Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain, which necessitated larger ships and more personnel, resulting in lower profit rates. This chapter ends with a discussion of the shrinking naval and military capacity of the Dutch Empire in comparison with its main European rivals.

This chapter depicts the failure of the English nation state to launch and sustain overseas enterprises in Asia in the early seventeenth century. It reveals that the East India Company was conceived as a mercantilist strategy of monopoly and force by the crown to acquire new markets and sources of wealth beyond the Cape of Good Hope. But a combination of fiscal–military weakness, unrealistic policies fostered on it by the state and a general economic and constitutional crises which engulfed England by the mid-century, all combined to undermine the Company’s attempt to establish itself at Bantam, Japan and on the Coromandel Coast in India. The result was the abandonment by Company servants on the spot in Asia of metropolitan policies in favour of realising their own local private interests of trade, power and transcultural immersion. As the Company teetered on the verge of collapse in England, it left a vacuum of authority and leadership within its factories in Asia, allowing Company servants to seize new opportunities to empower themselves and appropriate Company policies to suit their own interests. As investment, shipping and specie stopped flowing from Europe, Company servants insinuated themselves into pre-existing Asian networks of commerce and influence.