Details Loten's personal history and his professional career as a servant of the Dutch East Indies Company. It contains an inventory of his natural history drawings in the London Natural History Museum and Teylers Museum at Haarlem -- a valuable treasure of eighteenth-century natural history of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Loten's writings, quoted extensively in this biography, cover early-eighteenth-century narrow-minded, provincial Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, the exotic Dutch East Indies, and cosmopolitan London in the latter part of the century.
This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.
This book is an attempt to assess the part played by philosophy in the eighteenth-century Dutch Enlightenment. Following Bayle’s death and the demise of the radical Enlightenment, Dutch philosophers soon embraced Newtonianism and by the second half of the century Wolffianism also started to spread among Dutch academics. Once the Republic started to crumble, Dutch enlightened discourse took a political turn, but with the exception of Frans Hemsterhuis, who chose to ignore the political crisis, it failed to produce original philosophers. By the end of the century, the majority of Dutch philosophers typically refused to embrace Kant’s transcendental project as well as his cosmopolitanism. Instead, early nineteenth-century Dutch professors of philosophy preferred to cultivate their joint admiration for the Ancients.
James Cook’s voyages of exploration are a turning point not only in the history of the British Empire, but also in the history of science and exploration of the Pacific. The last decades have seen a wide-ranging scholarly interest in Cook’s voyages, focusing on their impact on European and Polynesian societies, their scientific results, and their protagonists, such as Cook himself or the nobleman Joseph Banks who took part in Cook’s first voyage of exploration. This book examines the hitherto underestimated role of the German scholar Johann Reinhold Forster who, together with his son Georg Forster, accompanied Cook on his second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) as a principal naturalist. For a long time, the German traveler has remained a rather shadowy figure of Cook’s voyages of exploration and has only attracted scholarly attention occasionally. Focusing on the making of knowledge onboard the ship and the islands where it made landfall, the study provides a historical reappraisal of Forster’s scientific performance as a leading naturalist of his time. By examining Forster’s Resolution Journal, Anne Mariss takes a microhistorical approach toward the making of natural history knowledge during the expedition to the Pacific. Mariss unveils the difficulties the traveling naturalists encountered while collecting, describing, classifying, and painting the natural world. Her study brings to light the contribution of the various actors who were involved in this undertaking, such as the scientific assistants, sailors, officers, and the local actors of the Pacific world.
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
In 1724-1726, the Dutch clergyman François Valentyn published a 5,000-page account of the Dutch East India Company’s empire. It was the first and, for a long time, the only survey of the Dutch establishments in Asia and South Africa. Shaping a Dutch East Indies analyses how Valentyn composed this work and how it largely determined the Dutch perspective on the colonies in Asia until the 1850s. It seeks to highlight both the great diversity of knowledge gathered in Valentyn’s book and its geographical spread, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, with a focus on the Indonesian archipelago. Huigen’s book is the first in-depth study of Valentyn’s work, which is a foundational text in the history of Dutch colonialism.
For over 50 years between the 1760s and the early 19th century, the pioneers who sailed from Europe to explore the Pacific brought back glimpses of a new world in the form of oil paintings, watercolors and drawings--a sensational view of a part of the world few would ever see. Today these works represent a fascinating and inspiring perspective from the frontier of discovery. It was Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who popularized the placement of professional artists on British ships of exploration. They captured striking and memorable images of everything they encountered: exotic landscapes, beautiful flora and fauna, as well as remarkable portraits of indigenous peoples. These earliest views of the Pacific were designed to promote the new world as enticing, to make it seem familiar, to encourage further exploration and, ultimately, British settlement. Drawing on both private and public collections from around the world, this lavish book collects oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints and other documents from those voyages, and presents a unique glimpse into an age where science and art became irrevocably entwined.
Drawing on extensive new research, and bringing much new scholarship before English readers for the first time, this wide-ranging volume examines how knowledge was created and circulated throughout the Dutch Empire, and how these processes compared with those of the Imperial Britain, Spain, and Russia.
A new, revised edition will be published in 2024. === Biography of Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort, 1712 - 1761. Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort was a learned Jewish-Christian man born in Holland in 1712. He converted in 1745 in Aachen from Judaism to Christianity, and went to Sri Lanka in 1754 to work as a preceptor of Oriental Languages at the Seminary in Colombo for the Dutch East India Company. He wrote three books in German about conversion. However he is most famous as the translator of the excerpts of the Chronicles of the Jews from Cochin, India, and the Hebrew translation of the Quran, which resides in the Library of Congress in Washington. He also allegedly possessed a manuscript called the Iggeret Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, now in possession of The Royal Danish Library. Until now information about his life was scarcely available. This book aims to give more insights into his life, and to provide context to the aforementioned books and the manuscript. It reveals among many other things that van Dort also translated the Hebrew New Testament, residing in the Cambridge Library. Ir. Mascha van Dort (1968) studied Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands. In her work she is inspired to learn more about what makes people tick, in different cultures and different times. She uses a fact based approach and did research in over 14 different archives across the globe to find out everything there is to know about Leopold, while analyzing it afterwards in a framework which connects historical context and environment, personal needs and attitudes to actions and behavior. The book offers unique insights into Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort’s character and uncovers new facts about the background of his works. With contributions of professor Hanne Trautner-Kromann and colorful images of 18th century drawings and paintings of Dordrecht, Aachen, Colombo and Cochin. Hebrew translations and explanations by professor Meir Bar-Ilan.
