Merchant in Asia- The Trade of the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century

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About the Book For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago.

Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 859% of the total turnover.

This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the mer chants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

Prior to her present position as secretary-general of the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, Els M. Jacobs (PhD. Leiden 2000) taught maritime and Dutch national history at Leiden University for almost twenty years. As guest cura tor at the maritime museums in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, she has been in charge of several major projects, including the National Anniversary Exhibition The Colour ful World of the VOC 1602-2002, as well as a well received television series on the history of the VOC for Teleac/NOT, the Dutch educational broadcasting company. Among her earlier works is In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company (1991).

Preface The history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) has enjoyed immense popularity in the past decades. In 2002, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of its foundation. both the remarkable and the negative aspects of the Company's actions received much attention in the Netherlands. But there is also great interest among foreign scholars. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, VOC servants provided detailed accounts of local events and develop ments in Asia. This information is unique. Comparable source material written by indigenous eye witnesses either never existed or has been lost. The Company records are thus an indispen sable source for the history of Asia. For this reason, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has included the VOC archives in the Memory of the World Register, a kind of World Heritage List for documentary sources. The Towards A New Age of Partnership (TANAP) program has also given the historical research a strong impetus Since 1998 Leiden University and the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, in close cooperation with local counterparts, have been training young Asian and South African archivists and re searchers to catalogue, conserve and study the VOC archives, both in the Netherlands and in Sri Lanka, India. Indonesia, and South Africa. The program has already led to impressive results.

Merchant in Ana is part of this tradition too. As a young researcher at Leiden University. I was given the chance to write this study in the form of a doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2000. I am very grateful to my alma mater for creating these opportunities. In that same year, the thesis was published in Dutch under the title Koopman in Azië. De handel van de Verenigde Oen-Indische Compagnie tijdens de 18de eeuw This work occupies a specific niche within VOC historiography. It does not limit itself to one sertlement or region, but encompasses all of Asia. It does not concentrate on a few years or decades, but sketches the developments during a "long" eighteenth century. For the first time, the fifteen main trade goods of the Company (together making up 85 percent of the total purchase value) were studied as an interdependent group. This interdependence, which was immediately accepted as a matter of course, also determined the structure of the book, which revolves around four groups of main products and their specific by-products. The thread of the argument is the notion that the VOC in Asia operated as a mer chant, although it must be stressed that the commercial activities nearly always required a role on the diplomatic and political stage and often participation in the military arena as well. The Company could not control the Asian world. It had far less power than is often assumed. The Dutch were always forced to adapt to local traditions and circumstances.

**Contents and Sample Pages**