This thesis examines the motives behind the Dutch East India Company’s decision to enter a relationship with Buton sultanate, a small sultanate in the eastern Archipelago of Indonesia. The analysis...Show moreThis thesis examines the motives behind the Dutch East India Company’s decision to enter a relationship with Buton sultanate, a small sultanate in the eastern Archipelago of Indonesia. The analysis focuses on the seventeenth-century East Indonesia as this period was considered crucial for the Company’s objectives in reinforcing their power and influence in the spice-producing region. To achieve the objectives, the Company needed more than just a military excellence because at the time they also dealt with strong opponent such as Makassar. As a result, the Company designed a strategy to overcome the challenge in which Buton, together with Ternate and Bone, became a part of it although the VOC’s sources identified Buton as not profitable. To answer the research question, this thesis investigated the Butonese materials and the VOC’s materials those were found in the Netherlands. The effort to bring together these sources is an attempt to understand the Butonese and the Company’s perspectives and to see whether their perspectives aligned or distinct with one another. Regarding this issue, this study shows that the Butonese materials and the VOC materials were never in harmony. As the Butonese considered the Company as their “dear friends” throughout the seventeenth century, the Company did not seem to share the same idea.Show less
Before Tokugawa Bakufu collapsed in the 1868, the Dutch was the only European officially permitted by both Tokugawa Japan and Qing China to establish a trading post and settlement in their most...Show moreBefore Tokugawa Bakufu collapsed in the 1868, the Dutch was the only European officially permitted by both Tokugawa Japan and Qing China to establish a trading post and settlement in their most important maritime trading centre: Nagasaki and Canton. Under a series of restrictions implemented by the local authority over maritime trade with foreign countries and interactions between the Europeans and local inhabitants, merely a little amount of local civilians had the opportunity to interact with the Dutch. There were both officially permitted and secretly conducted interactions between the Dutch and local inhabitants in the two cities. The aim of this paper is to explore these seemingly minor and unimportant interactions between the two parties, with three groups of local inhabitants in Nagasaki and Canton, namely boatmen, interpreters, and women being the main focus. In doing so, we will see how both the Dutch and local inhabitants in these two East Asian cities managed to fulfil their needs and benefit from each other under restrictions of the authority and the state power.Show less
