The Hague, Leiden, The Netherlands
Towards a New Age of Partnership:
The VOC records and the Study of Early Modern Asia
The first TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) meeting was held in the Netherlands, December 1998, under the auspices of UNESCO, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Professor Leonard Blussé addressed the audience explaining the importance of the TANAP Network. An edited version of his address.By Leonard Blussé
As this Millennium draws to a close, the people of the Netherlands are now witnessing an almost uninterrupted series of commemorations which help bolster our national consciousness. At the same time, these commemorations symbolize Holland's relations with its neighbours and with faraway countries with which, to a larger or lesser degree, it shares a mutual heritage. A foreign observer wonder whether the citizens of the Low Countries also keep an eye on current events or the future. Let me assure you we most certainly do. Conscious of being anchored in a mutual past, we believe we should also keep an eye on the future. Commemorations are a useful way to assess and reassess one's position in the global community, certainly in the case of a small nation.In the year 2000, both Japan and the Netherlands will celebrate the arrival of the first Dutch ship to reach Japan, a fateful visit which laid the foundation for 400 years of Dutch-Japanese relations. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Dutch trading post in Japan, the island of Deshima in Nagasaki, provided the empire of the rising sun with its only link with the overseas world, and kept it informed about political, scientific and cultural developments. The case of the Dutch-Japanese commemoration is interesting because it sheds some light on the issue of mutual heritage in Dutch-Asian relations.
Throughout the year 2000, a wide variety of celebrations will be held both in Japan and the Netherlands. For me as a member of the editorial team preparing the memorial volume, it is fascinating to witness Japanese and Dutch historians, with their different backgrounds, contributing to the book, bringing together dispersed historical data which, if skilfully combined, will fill in the gaps in their respective national memories and may help to establish a mutual memory.
How should we picture such a mutual heritage in the case of Japan? Hardly any architectural traces of the Dutch presence remain, but the original archives of the trading post of Deshima still exist. By studying the Dutch trade reports and diaries from Deshima, Japanese scholars have been able to assess the size of the foreign trade of Tokugawa Japan. Even more importantly they have grown aware of the fact that the trade in tropical consumption goods gradually changed in character and culminated in the importation of objects of western culture, such as books, and instruments. These reports and diaries deal with shared experiences, and thus constitute a mutual heritage of the Netherlands and Japan, whatever their relative importance may be.
With the advent another commemoration, I now come to the heart of this talk. Last October the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs commemorated the creation in 1798 of the Agency for Foreign Relations, which was the outcome of the proclamation of a new constitution after the Batavian revolution of 1795. The proclamation also caused many ancient institutions and organizations to be discarded. One organization, believed to have outlived its usefulness, was the United East India Company, (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), better known by its abbreviation, the VOC.
Probably because it is inappropriate to celebrate the Company's demise, the Dutch government has chosen to commemorate in 2002 the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the VOC. The history of the VOC is not merely the history of a large Dutch business conglomerate symbolized by many large architectural monuments such as warehouses, meeting halls, or ship wharves. The records of this Company deal with its operations in Asia, and thus shed considerable light on Asian history as well.
We are here to discuss how part of our VOC patrimony in the Netherlands and in Asia can be preserved and made use of not simply as Dutch heritage but as mutual, shared heritage with our Asian and South African partners. The Dutch government feels it has the obligation, if not the responsibility, to participate in any well-organized programme to make the sources in Holland better available. It is also willing to offer assistance to those countries which still house VOC records in their archives, and it is even willing to collaborate in providing copies of records to those countries which do no longer have them, like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Yemen. In Taiwan and Japan complete shadow archives have already been built up on microfilm. We do realize that archival documents are only worth preserving if they are appreciated to be of value for explaining a society's past. Any kind of mutual heritage co-operation should have broadly based support on both sides. It takes two to tango!
Due to the extensive trading network of the VOC, the Netherlands has old historical ties with many countries in Asia. By the middle of the 17th century when the VOC had spread its networks to almost every corner of maritime Asia, its Directorate was able to gather and process all political and economic information that reached them through periodical reports from Batavia, the headquarters in Asia. The letters, ship manifests, and other information received from Asia, were not only meant to inform the directors about the well-being of their affairs but also provided them with information about the social, political, and economic life of the Asian communities and polities with which the Company came into contact. This aspect makes the archives a gold-mine of mutual heritage. The 1200 meters of VOC archival holdings contain a wealth of historical material on many nations in Asia, but only a handful of archivists and rapidly aging historians in Asia are aware of this.
Together with the archives of the English East India Company, the VOC archives scattered over five different locations in Europe, Africa and Asia, constitute perhaps the sole corpus of archival documents that provide historians with an encompassing contemporary survey of most coastal regions of Asia. The bulk of the Portuguese archives were unfortunately lost during the earthquake of 1755 in Lisbon.
The TANAP programme has been designed to seek consensus between partners from Asia, South Africa and the Netherlands on how to preserve these slowly decaying records, and how to make them accessible for research through the newest information technology by a new generation of archivists and, finally, on how to put them into use by historians to be trained by us together in the next seven years. It is a unique combination of providing mutual services and making use of them in an optimal way.
It makes sense to now briefly discuss how the VOC archives have been utilized by historians since the Company became defunct. At the closing of the 18th century the English and Dutch East India Companies had carved niches for themselves in the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago respectively. The character of their regional presence changed over a period of two hundred years from purely maritime trade-oriented enterprises to well-entrenched territorial rulers with specific trading privileges with Europe. It was at this point that the metropolitan governments in Europe felt that the charters they had issued to these companies had become outdated. Because the English parliament as well as the Dutch assembly realized that they could exert little pressure on the Asian administrations of these trading companies, they finally decided to step in. The English East India Company was stripped of its sovereign powers in 1784 and the Dutch East India Company was simply disbanded a decade later.
This historic event gave rise to mixed feelings in the Netherlands. In those days of revolutionary fervour, the demise of the monopolistic VOC represented a symbolic farewell to the ancien régime. Gone were the days that an oligarchy of well-established merchants regulated all traffic with Asia, leaving little for private enterprise. Whatever the cause of the bankruptcy may be, everyone agreed that the chartered trading company with its many privileges and monopolies had outlived itself. It is important to recall this particular mentality, as it resulted in the total neglect of the archival corpus that the Company left behind.
Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when all nation states in Europe looked back into their own history searching for their political and their cultural roots, and preferably a great past, did Dutch intellectuals rediscover the splendors of the seventeenth century. With a touch of irony we may say they reinvented a heroic past: the Golden Age of painters like Rembrandt, of stubborn admirals like De Ruyter, and of redoubtable empire builders like Jan Pieterszoon Coen. A renewed interest was expressed in the VOC. The mouldy image of a bankrupt idling regent class was now replaced by the image of Jan Kompagnie, the resourceful entrepreneur and empire builder. Statesmen of the nineteenth century observed that this mercantile institution had laid the groundwork for the extended archipelago empire which they were now 'pacifying'.
With ever-greater insistence and persuasiveness the VOC records and history were put to use to as a kind of legitimization for Dutch colonial presence in nineteenth-century Asia. It should be understood that this nineteenth century presence was very different from that of the Jaman Kompeni, the Company period, not to mention the fact that the Company had been active in ports spread all over Asia, from Yemen in the west to Nagasaki in the east. This false imagery, whereby the hegemonic modern colonial state projected itself back on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has done great harm to the study that period. Not only did it saddle generations of Dutch and Asian people with a biased, Eurocentric view of their early modern history, it also caused Company records to be seen as tainted data, only of use to those who were interested in studying an endless succession of governors-general, colonial pacification, or other issues which only represented the viewpoint of the western colonial ruler.
Some fifty years after Europe's colonialism withdrew itself from Asia's shores, historians of Asia are now divesting themselves of the colonial or post-colonial rhetoric. Their students should now be able to put the contact period of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries into a proper perspective. I say should, because reality tells us that this is not yet the case. Asian universities are not in the position to provide the means and opportunities to develop the linguistic and archival skills necessary for studying the handwritten archival sources of the VOC. That is why Dutch historians are now proposing to their Asian colleagues to join arms and to muster a new generation of historians in Holland, Asia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Only if a network of historians throughout Asia is built up, and only if the archives will replace the trading network of the VOC with its trading agents from Yemen to Nagasaki, only then will a network of cultural agents be able to draw a more complete historical picture of Asian history and of the history of Asian-European relations. TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) then stands for an international brokerage in mutual heritage.
In colonial historiography, the Iberian and Dutch and English penetration in Asian waters used to be narrated from a European perspective as a story of conquest and subjugation. The traditional picture is now in the process of being replaced by a more realistic one, which clearly shows how Asian patterns of production, trade, and even rule continued to play a predominant role in the eventual inclusion of the Asian maritime world in the modern world system.
By the early 1930s, Van Leur already asserted that behind the history of the European trading companies an indigenous history remained hidden, waiting to be discovered by the historian. The search for a periodization which gives coherence to the inner history of the region and at the same time places it squarely within the larger domain of world history, is a rather recent phenomenon and has by no means come to a close.
In the late 1950s, after Van Leur's writings were translated into English, his views were immediately picked up by American historians. John Smail wrote the classical essay on The possibility of an autonomous history of Modern Southeast Asia in which he wondered whether it was possible to write a history of the Southeast Asian region from an angle different from the one the Europeans had used so far. Smail's writings acted as a catalyst for a group of young enthusiastic American authors, who set out to write an historical primer of Southeast Asia. Their handbook Search of Southeast Asia (1972) for the first time pushed the white man's presence in Asia to the background.
Smail discerned four different approaches to Asian history writing: straight colonial history, neo-colonial history, anti-colonial history and, the viewpoint he advocated, autonomous history writing, which should do justice to the history of Asian society. Smail saw in the early modernist Van Leur a pioneer in the sense that he tried to identify the right place of the European element in Asian society. While Van Leur had reached the conclusion that European and Asian powers kept each other in balance until roughly 1800, Smail took exception to this comparison between East and West and looked for an instrument to lift him above Asia and Europe centrism. He felt that there had always been an autonomous history of Asia in which continuities were not disturbed and where foreign elements were absorbed. Smail felt that a form of history writing could be developed making use of a universally valid methodology surpassing the cultural restraints of Western or Asian historians. As I survey the harvest of historical literature, it has proven very difficult to do away with these culturally-bound moral limitations.
Because of the region's diversity and openness to outside influences, and because of its peculiar geographic setting between the Indian and Chinese culture spheres, Southeast Asia's peoples interacted with a greater variety of external cultures for a longer period of time than probably any other area in the world. These societies were continuously undergoing a process of acculturation, through which they adjusted to their changing environment and circumstances. It is this new perspective on the area where the VOC was most active, which has enabled VOC historians to look at the records anew and reassess the position of the VOC within this dynamic environment.
It has taken many years to develop a new research agenda for assessing the great changes that occurred during the early modern period. Research has dramatically changed the understanding of the period, and has provided it with a historical depth that has done away with the conventional chronological linking up of the successive kingdoms and sultanates.
But what about the place of early-modern Asia within the context of global history? The coming of the Europeans via the Cape route to Asia did not result in such epoch-making changes in Asia as it did in the Americas. Yet it did lead to a reshaping of trade connections with and within maritime Asia that had been developing for more than a millennium in Asia. The process of the emergence of a world economy has been studied by scholars as Braudel and Wallerstein. Starting from the vantage point of European expansion, they created the persuasive metaphor of a spider that has slowly and gradually spun its web around the globe. This approach has recently been questioned by André Gunder Frank in his book Reorient in which he still sees Asia in the early modern period as the motor of the global economy, but one may wonder whether he was addressing the real problem. None of the writers he attacks question the economic importance of the Asian region at that time. They simply seek to explain how European capitalism was able to make Asia's economic systems subservient to the global system.
As far as the Dutch East Company is concerned, it strikes me that historians of Southeast Asia generally feel awkward when dealing with the position of the Dutch, and the VOC in particular, within the archipelago. This is curious, because Southeast Asia, with its many small polities asked for European intervention without effectively becoming dominated by it. By far the most ambitious attempt to analyze the interaction between Company rule and local rulers has been Leonard Andaya's recent study on the history of three hundred years of European and Moluccan interaction. Andaya confronts what he terms 'the Dutch reality' with the Moluccan one and stresses the gap between the European intellectual milieu and the Moluccan frame of reference concerning historical perception, centre-periphery relations, etcetera. It is clear that the last word has not yet been said about the collective forces that made up the colonial system.
I would like to say a few words about typical VOC history. The emphasis of the research of conventional historians of the VOC as a commercial enterprise has been on those parts of the VOC archives which relate to the Company's organization and structure, its manner of operation and what this early modern 'multinational' meant to Dutch society. With respect to the VOC's role as an economic partner, colonial overseer, and intermediary in the transfer of Western science and technology, the company has already been studied for generations by Asian and South African historians.
In Japan and Taiwan, all of the VOC archival records relating to these areas have been inventoried and duplicated on microfilm. The Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan are now actually discovering through the recent source publication of the diaries of the Dutch governors on that island in the seventeenth century, what Formosa looked like even before they started to immigrate there in great numbers at the end of the seventeenth century. It is fascinating to see how each country has developed its own special interest in the VOC.
Although there are a number of Asian luminaries in the study of the early modern period, including Chaudhuri, Prakash, Lapian, Sartono, Nagazumi, and Ts'ao, these sixty and seventy-year-old scholars have scarcely had the opportunity to gather students in their countries. It is feared that in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the knowledge needed for research in the VOC records will be lost and that the younger generation of scholars will base their research entirely on foreign scholarship. Thus the Early Modern Period in Asian history is increasingly becoming the domain of Western historians who have easier access to language learning facilities and archives. This is because instruction in the study of archival documents in Dutch – a language that is presently scarcely available to young Asian historians – has disappeared since decolonization.
The main goal of the TANAP Project then is to bring the study of VOC records for the writing of Asian history back where it belongs: in Asia. The challenge is to train a new generation of scholars who, jointly advised by professors in the Netherlands and Asia, will acquire the necessary skills to use the VOC materials.
In response to the peculiar situation that European merchants faced in Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, the American historian Holden Furber has called this period 'The Age of Partnership'. This was a time in which Europeans did not yet have large territorial holdings in Asia or South Africa, but were present as trade partners all along the coastal areas. In this way the TANAP Project 'towards a new age of partnership' echoes a theme already known to Asian historians.
I already remarked that historians as cultural agents are in a way heirs to the Company servants whose records they study. May I conclude as follows. In the framework of the TANAP Project, Dutch archivists and historians and their Asian counterparts should be able to establish a United Asian Company of Mutual Heritage, a company connected by the newest information technology. This is the exciting challenge that is awaiting us.
Professor J.L. Blussé van Oud Alblas is a board member of the IIAS and is attached to the working group 'European Expansion' of the Department of History, Leiden University.