The Making of Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (1701): Text, Author, Context

Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (1701) is an important text in Dutch colonial history. Its creation on the micro-level has been studied, but this thesis gives for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the text and the historic (political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual) context of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The first chapter highlights different ways in which Van Dam used his agency to shape the outcome of the Beschryvinge, while at the same time presenting him as a product of his environment. The second chapter re-examines the relationship between the Beschryvinge and the Dutch East India Company’s reform (redress) period at the end of the seventeenth century from a contextual perspective. It tries to explain Van Dam’s conservative views on Company reform by relating them to the political-economic thinking in the Republic during this time, and argues that the more reformist tendencies of his colleagues...Show morePieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (1701) is an important text in Dutch colonial history. Its creation on the micro-level has been studied, but this thesis gives for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the text and the historic (political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual) context of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The first chapter highlights different ways in which Van Dam used his agency to shape the outcome of the Beschryvinge, while at the same time presenting him as a product of his environment. The second chapter re-examines the relationship between the Beschryvinge and the Dutch East India Company’s reform (redress) period at the end of the seventeenth century from a contextual perspective. It tries to explain Van Dam’s conservative views on Company reform by relating them to the political-economic thinking in the Republic during this time, and argues that the more reformist tendencies of his colleagues Coenraad van Beuningen and Johannes Hudde can be explained by their adherence to new naturalistic political-economic theories. Although Van Dam’s view on the VOC seems influenced instead by older political theories rooted in the classics, the third chapter shows that the Beschryvinge was in other ways influenced by the intellectual developments of the seventeenth-century Republic—and underscores how these developments were shaped by the country’s growing engagement with the non-European world. It presents the Beschryvinge as the product of a long tradition of gathering and managing information for commercial and administrative purposes within the VOC, and argues that although the VOC’s information system shared similarities with those of other early modern European colonial administrations, the Beschryvinge was a reflection of the specific way in which the VOC responded to the problems it faced at the end of the seventeenth-century. Influenced by New Imperial History and engaging with global intellectual history and the ‘early modern archival turn’, this thesis moves at the intersection of textual and contextual analysis with the goal of providing a better understanding of the interplay between the Beschryvinge, Van Dam and the historic context. This is especially useful for the many historians consulting the work as a source.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

The Making of Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (1701): Text, Author, Context