Discusses the Asian luxury goods that were imported into the Netherlands during the 17th century and demonstrates the overwhelming impact these works of art had on Dutch life and art during the Golden Age
Scholars have extensively documented the historical and socioeconomic impact of the Dutch East India Company. They have paid much less attention to the company's significant influence on Asian art and visual culture. Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia addresses this imbalance with a wide range of contributions covering such topics as Dutch and Chinese art in colonial and indigenous households; the rise of Hollandmania in Japan; and the Dutch painters who worked at the court of the Persian shahs. Together, the contributors shed new light on seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture--and the company that spread it across Asia.--Amazon.com.
The end of the 16th century saw Dutch expansion in Asia, as The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) was fast becoming an Asian power, both political and economic. By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen. This landmark study looks at perhaps the most important tool in the Company' trading - its ships. In order to reconstruct the complete shipping activities of the VOC, the author created a unique database of the ships' movements, including frigates and other, hitherto ingored, smaller vessels. Parthesius's research into the routes and the types of ships in the service of the VOC proves that it was precisely the wide range of types and sizes of vessels that gave the Company the ability to sail - and continue its profitable trade - the year round. Furthermore, it appears that the VOC commanded at least twice the number of ships than earlier historians have ascertained. Combining the best of maritime and social history, this book will change our understanding of the commercial dynamics of the most successful economic organization of the period.
A ground-breaking collection of essays that explores the place of the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia and the nature of their interactions with Asian rulers, officials, merchants, soldiers and brokers.
International expositions or "world's fairs" are the largest and most important stage on which millions routinely gather to directly experience, express, and respond to cultural difference. Rather than looking at Asian representation at the hands of colonizing powers, something already much examined, Asian Self-Representation at World's Fairs instead focuses on expressions of an empowered Asian self-representation at world's fairs in the West after the so-called golden age of the exhibition. New modes of representation became possible as the older "exhibitionary order" of earlier fairs gave way to a dominant "performative order," one increasingly preoccupied with generating experience and affect. Using case studies of national representation at selected fairs over the hundred-year period from 1915-2015, this book considers both the politics of representation as well as what happens within the imaginative worlds of Asian country pavilions, where the performative has become the dominant mode for imprinting directly on human bodies.
This book examines performative interventions that can generate a re-imagining of local publics -- both spatially grounded and mediatized -- and help to renegotiate the connection between the local and the global.
This book examines the active role of urban citizens in constructing alternative urban spaces as tangible resistance towards capitalist production of urban spaces that continue to encroach various neighborhoods. The collection of narratives presented here brings together research from ten different Asian cities and re-theorises the city from the perspective of ordinary people facing moments of crisis, contestations, and cooperative quests to create alternative spaces to those being produced under prevailing urban processes. The chapters accent the exercise of human agency through daily practices in the production of urban space and the intention is not one of creating a romantic or utopian vision of what a city "by and for the people" ought to be. Rather, it is to place people in the centre as mediators of city-making with discontents about current conditions and desires for a better life.
How is it possible that three playwrights in the early modern Dutch Republic wrote dramas based on contemporary political events in Asia? Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, 'Staging Asia' traces the passage of the stories surrounding three political revolutions from seventeenth-century Asia through to the Dutch Republic and their ultimate manifestation as dramas. This book explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these plays and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels that these dramatists relied on to gather information for their works. As these dramas exhibit strong connections to the Dutch East India Company, this work additionally examines the role of that enterprise in disseminating information on Asia and producing imagery about the Orient. 00Manjusha Kuruppath received her PhD from the Department of History, University of Leiden. Her research interests include literary history, history of the Dutch East India Company and early modern Asian history.
"The early years of the seventeenth century saw a great flourishing of Dutch culture. In the arts, this was the era of Vermeer and Rembrandt, as well as the development of a local art market. Commerce extended around the world, with state-sponsored trading companies importing foreign goods. Politically, the Netherlands became the first nation-state in Europe, in 1648. In this book, Claudia Swan considers all these aspects together, examining the material culture of the period-the designed, manufactured, and hand-crafted materials and wares-to show how the Dutch encounter with so-called "exotic" goods played a fundamental role in the country's political formation"--