This case study of the tea trade of the Dutch East India Company with China deals with the most profitable phase of the Dutch Company's China trade, focusing on the question why and how the tea trade was taken out of the hands of the High Government in Batavia and put under the supervision of the newly established China Committee in 1757. Various factors which contributed to the phenomenal rise of this trade and its sudden decline are dealt with in detail. Filling in lacunae left open by previous research and this monograph contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the VOC trade...

No European country enjoyed such long-standing relations with the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya as the Netherlands. This study focuses on the perceptions of the merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) of the Thai royal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Basing herself on a wealth of Dutch primary sources, the author shows how trade, politics, and diplomacy shaped a unique relationship based on 'partnership' and a 'sense of differences'. The book contributes to expanding the study of the history of Ayutthaya--known for its scarcity of sources-- with the help of contemporary...

Against the background of a regional crisis caused by dynastic change in China and the closure of Japan in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin rose to the fore as the major silk producing and exporting region in East Asia. Based on a wealth of so far unused primary sources from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives, this monograph explains how Dutch and Chinese maritime traders played a critical role in Tonkin's dramatic emergence as a trading power. The author examines the vicissitudes in political relations, the varying trends in the VOC-Tonkin...

This study of Dutch and British colonial intervention on Sri Lanka in the period 1780 - 1815 provides a new over-all characterisation of the functioning and growth of the colonial state in a period of transition.

This book studies the dynamic encounter between Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples (the Formosans), the Dutch VOC and Chinese settlers between 1624 and 1662. From the viewpoint of indigenous agency, the author offers a comprehensive picture of the Taiwanese colonial 'civilizing process' under Dutch rule. Using so far unexplored source materials from the VOC archives, the author shows how Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples shaped their own colonial reality while retreating from 'the Age of Aboriginal Taiwan'.

This study analyses how in early colonial times, the peasant society of Sri Lanka underwent fundamental changes in the land tenure system as it faced the arrival of the Dutch East India Company administration's merchant capitalism.

This study of the early modern fortress town of Cochin in India, based on the rarely used VOC archival deposits in the Tamilnadu State Archives in Chennai (Madras), provides an intimate portrait of a Dutch urban community of East India Company servants and their dependents living within the larger social environment of the Malabar coast. It shows how between 1750 and 1830 the population of this Dutch settlement had adapted itself to the fundamental political and economic changes that occurred as a result of local state formation processes, the demise of the Dutch East India Company, and the...

In the second half of the seventeenth century the political and ritual relationships between the various elite houses of the kingdom of Cannanore on the Malabar Coast were affected by the shifting patterns in the Indian Ocean maritime trade. This study shows how the Arackal Ali Rajas, the most prominent maritime merchants in early-modern Malabar, managed to fence off the attempts of the Dutch East India Company to gain control of the regional trade, and how they succeeded in maintaining their commercial network across the Indian Ocean intact.