Ethnography and Encounter The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia 9004471693, 9789004471696

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Ethnography and Encounter

European Expansion and Indigenous Response Editor-in-Chief George Bryan Souza (University of Texas, San Antonio) Editorial Board Cátia Antunes (Leiden University) João Paulo Oliveira e Costa (Cham, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Frank Dutra (University of California, Santa Barbara) Kris Lane (Tulane University) Ghulam A. Nadri (Georgia State University) Malyn Newitt (King’s College, London) Michael Pearson (University of New South Wales) Ryuto Shimada (The University of Tokyo)

volume 35

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/euro

Ethnography and Encounter The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia

By

Guido van Meersbergen

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Ambassador Johannes Bacherus in the Mughal encampment of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan, 1689 (detail). The Dutch envoy is depicted seated in his palanquin accompanied by a large armed retinue of Indian and European attendants. Anonymous artist, Deccan, India. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, The Netherlands, TM-A-9584. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1873-8974 isbn 978-90-04-47169-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-47182-5 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. Maps: UvA Kaartenmakers, Castricum. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents General Series Editor’s Preface vii Acknowledgements x List of Maps and Figures xiii Abbreviations xv Glossary xvi Introduction 1

PART 1 Corporate Ethnography 1 Company Writing and Early Modern Ethnography 35 2 Writing Routines and the Making of Company Discourse 71

PART 2 Accommodation and Conflict 3 Trade Relations and Representations: The EIC and VOC in Gujarat 97 4 ‘No Thing but Feare Keepes a Moore in Awe’: Local Conflict and Quotidian Exchange 120

PART 3 Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange 5 Ceremonies of Submission: Diplomacy in a Mughal Register 143 6 Gratifying Mughal Tastes: Company Gift-Giving Strategies 173

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PART 4 The Birth of Company Settlements 7 ‘Safe Habitations’: Colonial Settlement in Ceylon and Madras 201 8 Governing Pluriform Populations: Company Rule in an Asian Setting 221 Conclusion 254 Bibliography 269 Index 305

General Series Editor’s Preface Over the past half millennium, from circa 1450 until the last third or so of the twentieth century, much of the world’s history has been influenced in great part by one general dynamic and complex historical process known as European expansion. Defined as the opening up, unfolding, or increasing the extent, number, volume, or scope of the space, size, or participants belonging to a certain people or group, location, or geographical region, Europe’s expansion initially emerged and emanated physically, intellectually, and politically from southern Europe—specifically from the Iberian peninsula—during the fifteenth century, expanding rapidly from that locus to include, first, all of Europe’s maritime and, later, most of its continental states and peoples. Most commonly associated with events described as the discovery of America and of a passage to the East Indies (Asia) by rounding the Cape of Good Hope (Africa) during the early modern and modern periods, European expansion and encounters with the rest of the world multiplied and morphed into several ancillary historical processes, including colonization, imperialism, capitalism, and globalization, encompassing themes, among others, relating to contacts and, to quote the EURO series’ original mission statement, “connections and exchanges; peoples, ideas and products, especially through the medium of trading companies; the exchange of religions and traditions; the transfer of technologies; and the development of new forms of political, social and economic policy, as well as identity formation.” Because of its intrinsic importance, extensive research has been performed and much has been written about the entire period of European expansion. With the first volume published in 2009, Brill launched the European Expansion and Indigenous Response book series at the initiative of well-known scholar and respected historian, Glenn J. Ames, who, prior to his untimely passing, was the founding editor and guided the first seven volumes of the series to publication. Being one of the early members of the series’ editorial board, I was then appointed as Series Editor. The series’ founding objectives are to focus on publications “that understand and deal with the process of European expansion, interchange and connectivity in a global context in the early modern and modern period” and to “provide a forum for a variety of types of scholarly work with a wider disciplinary approach that moves beyond the traditional isolated and nation bound historiographical emphases of this field, encouraging whenever possible non-European perspectives…that seek to understand this indigenous transformative process and period in autonomous as well as inter-related cultural, economic, social, and ideological terms.”

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The history of European expansion is a challenging field in which interest is likely to grow, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its polemical nature. Controversy has centered on tropes conceived and written in the past by Europeans, primarily concerning their early reflections and claims regarding the transcendental historical nature of this process and its emergence and importance in the creation of an early modern global economy and society. One of the most persistent objections is that the field has been “Eurocentric.” This complaint arises because of the difficulty in introducing and balancing different historical perspectives, when one of the actors in the process is to some degree neither European nor Europeanized—a conundrum alluded to in the African proverb: “Until the lion tells his tale, the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Another, and perhaps even more important and growing historiographical issue, is that with the re-emergence of historical millennial societies (China and India, for example) and the emergence of other non-Western European societies successfully competing politically, economically, and intellectually on the global scene vis-à-vis Europe, the seminal nature of European expansion is being subjected to greater scrutiny, debate, and comparison with other historical alternatives. Despite, or perhaps because of, these new directions and stimulating sources of existing and emerging lines of dispute regarding the history of European expansion, I and the editorial board of the series will continue with the original objectives and mission statement of the series and vigorously “… seek out studies that employ diverse forms of analysis from all scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, history (including the history of science), linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and religious studies.” In addition, we shall seek to stimulate, locate, incorporate, and publish the most important and exciting scholarship in the field. Towards that purpose, I am pleased to introduce volume 35 of Brill’s EURO series entitled: Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia. Authored by Guido van Meersbergen, it is a comparative study of early modern European overseas commercial companies, namely the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) at key locations in South Asia that also engages and contrasts them with the Portuguese precedent. It goes beyond an examination of European corporate enterprise, merchant behavior and commercial activity at several important port-cities of maritime South Asia and in the Indian Ocean to expand and advance an examination of these companies via a more “continental” approach that engages them as cross-cultural enterprises and producers of knowledge via their politics and writings. Divided into four thematic, generally geographical, and loosely chronological parts, Van Meersbergen has produced an engaging ­discourse on these companies and the eth-

General Series Editor’s Preface 

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nography of South Asia and beyond, Gujarat’s role and contribution to crosscultural trade, the Mughal court’s ritual power, and the English and Dutch colonial projects on the Coromandel Coast at Madras and the maritime and riverine littorals of Sri Lanka. Utilizing and successfully navigating an exhaustive number of optics (e.g., trust, sociability, commensurability, ethnography, epistolary communication, writing practices, and gift-giving to mention only the more prominent) to explore this topic, Van Meersbergen has produced an exciting and thought-provoking historical representation and cross-cultural vision of the English and Dutch companies in South Asia. Via its examination of their ethnic policies, writings and archival practices, Ethnography and Encounter may be a harbinger and an example of a promising avenue of approach towards researching, writing, and incorporating the activities of these European companies more fully and accurately into the early modern diplomatic, cultural, and economic history of South Asia. George Bryan Souza University of Texas, San Antonio

Acknowledgements This book has been over a decade in the making, during which time my research kept pulling me in different directions. From the outset, my aim was to understand how the ideas and assumptions which early modern Europeans held about Asia shaped the activities of the Dutch and English East India Companies (VOC and EIC). Being trained as a historian of the VOC, I was struck by the limited engagement with debates about Orientalism and cultural representations in studies of the trading companies. The ambition to better link up our understanding of European perceptions of Asia with that of the European presence in Asia remains at the core of this book. To the extent that I have succeeded, it is due to the intellectual stimulation I received from a diverse community of scholars working on travel writing, ethnography, global trade, and empire. As the project developed, I had the good fortune of working alongside colleagues at various institutions who encouraged me to conceptualise my research in broader, more comparative terms. The result, it is hoped, is a study that offers detailed analyses of seventeenth-century Company discourses and practices that are situated in relation to the wider culture of expansion from which they emerged and the colonial world they helped bring about. Whilst I have enjoyed more generous support than can be acknowledged here, I would like to single out several persons and institutions in particular. My first debt is to Lodewijk Wagenaar, who introduced me to the VOC and its archives in an undergraduate seminar in 2005. It was Lodewijk’s research interest in Sri Lanka that first set me on a course towards studying early modern South Asia. Secondly, I am deeply grateful to Ben Kaplan for expertly guiding my PhD research and inspiring the confidence needed to aim for an academic career. My examiners at UCL, Margot Finn and Leonard Blussé, offered expert feedback as well as friendly support and endorsements; whilst during my wanderings as a postdoc, I received invaluable encouragement and mentorship from Jos Gommans in Leiden and Jorge Flores, then at the European University Institute. After I joined the University of Warwick, in 2016, Giorgio Riello has gone out of his way to support me, acting as a model of mentorship and guiding the preparation of this book through multiple stages. For pushing me to think about my sources within broader frameworks, I am indebted to all colleagues at Warwick’s Global History and Culture Centre. In particular, I have benefited greatly from working and teaching alongside Anne Gerritsen and Maxine Berg, both of whom are exemplary scholars and most generous colleagues. I am grateful too for the warm support from my heads of department, first Dan Branch and now Rebecca Earle.

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The research that went into this book could not have been completed without the funding I have been privileged to receive. My PhD was made possible by a UCL Graduate Research Scholarship, whilst the award of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2016-477) enabled me to carry out additional research and substantially rework the manuscript. In the final stretch, publication has been supported by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation, in association with the Institute of Historical Research, as well as funding from the Humanities Research Fund and the Research Strategy Fund, both at the University of Warwick. Staff at numerous institutions have answered my queries and supported my research over the years, but none more than at the British Library. I also benefitted immensely from the research environment offered by the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, where besides archival finds I had the pleasure of discovering a lively community of fellow VOC researchers. Further thanks are due to the helpful staff who enabled me to consult materials in the Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai) and the National Archives of India (Delhi). Last but not least, I am grateful to the administrative staff at the various places where I worked, particularly the Global History and Culture Centre secretary, Amy Evans. In addition to the people already mentioned, numerous others have contributed to this book in a variety of ways. Callie Wilkinson, Mark Knights, and Mark Philp generously read and commented on the full manuscript in its final stages. At earlier points, Cátia Antunes, Maxine Berg, Michael Bycroft, Nandini Das, Surekha Davies, José Miguel Escribano Páez, Jos Gommans, Michiel van Groesen, Naomi Pullin, Giorgio Riello, and Charles Walton read chapters or offered ideas and suggestions. Many other friends and colleagues have shaped my thinking and brightened the journey, including Lennart Bes, Somak Biswas, Francesco Buscemi, Adrianna Catena, Guillemette Crouzet, Camila Gatica Mizala, Jaap Geraerts, Rolando de la Guardia, Meleisa Ono-George, Giada Pizzoni, Martina Salvante, Byapti Sur, Cecilia Tarruell, Kathryn Woods, and Suze Zijlstra. Various collaborations, with Lisa Hellman and Birgit Tremml-Werner, Aske Brock and Edmond Smith, and Adam Clulow, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Georgia O’Connor, have offered welcome respite from working on this book, and fresh perspectives when returning to it. At Brill, George Bryan Souza, Wendel Scholma, and Alessandra Giliberto kindly helped me guide the manuscript to press. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback, which pushed me to improve the book’s structure and clarify its argument. As usual, all remaining errors are entirely my own. Finally, my oldest debt is to my family. I thank my parents, Mieke and Erik, for being there over the years, and my siblings, Maartje, Masja, Jessie, Jochem, and Stella, for the joys of a big family. From a distance, John and my Brazilian

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relatives have shown constant encouragement. Carol has been the best guide and companion in the process that got me to this point, as in much else. This book is for her. Leamington Spa, April 2021

Maps and Figures Maps 1 2 3 4

The Indian Ocean World xviii The Western Indian Ocean 96 The Mughal Empire 142 South India and Ceylon 200

Figures 1 Inhabitants of Malabar. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario, Voyage ofte Schipvaert (Amsterdam: 1596). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-BI-7088 38 2  VOC memoir for the writing of reports [Memorie Voor de Koopluyden En Andere Officieren], printed, c. 1722–1757. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1.04.02, inv. no. 11050 76 3 VOC Memoir for the writing of reports [Memorie vant gene daer op de Commisen ende andere officieren in het stellen van haerlieden raporten ofte discoursen sullen hebben te letten], manuscript, c. 1614–1617. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1.04.02, inv. no. 313, f. 517 79 4 View of the harbour of Surat, c. 1670. Anonymous artist, the Netherlands. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-4778 99 5 The VOC’s factory in Surat, 1629. Attributed to Adriaen Matham, first printed in Pieter van den Broecke, Korte historiael ende journaelsche aenteyckeninghe (Haarlem: 1634). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-75.465 103 6 Tomb of Francis Breton (d. 1649) at English Cemetery in Surat. YashIsIn, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons 135 7 Jahangir investing a courtier with a robe of honour, c. 1616. British Museum, London, 1933, 0610,0.1 147 8 The Darbar of Cornelis van den Bogaerde, c. 1687. Anonymous artist, Deccan, India. The David Collection, Copenhagen, 43/2008. Photo credit: Pernille Klemp 169 9 The procession of Cornelis van den Bogaerde, c. 1687. Anonymous artist, Deccan, India. The David Collection, Copenhagen, 42/2008. Photo credit: Pernille Klemp 170 10 Ambassador Johannes Bacherus in the Mughal encampment of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan, 1689. Anonymous artist, Deccan, India. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. TM-A-9584 171

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Maps and Figures

11 Ambassador Johannes Bacherus in the Mughal encampment of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan, 1689 (detail). Anonymous artist, Deccan, India. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. TM-A-9584 172 12 Maharana Sangram Singh receives the embassy of Joan Josua Ketelaar, c. 1711. Anonymous artist, Udaipur, India. V&A, London, 09405(IS) 184 13 Maharana Sangram Singh receives the embassy of Joan Josua Ketelaar, c. 1711 (detail). Anonymous artist, Udaipur, India. V&A, London, 09405(IS) 185 14 View of Fort St. George at Madras, before 1754. Engraving by Jan van Ryne, published by Robert Sayer, London, 1754. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1932-439 207 15 Plan of Fort St. George and the City of Madras, before 1726. Engraving by Herman Moll, published in Thomas Salmon, Modern History: or, the Present State of all Nations (London: 1726). Public domain, via Wikipedia Commons 212 16 Portrait of a mestiza, before 1682. Engraving by Hendrik Causé, published in Johan Nieuhof, Zee en Lant-Reize, door verscheide Gewesten van Oostindien (Amsterdam: 1682). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1878-A-744 223

Abbreviations ANRI Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Jakarta BL British Library, London Dagh-Register Batavia J.A. van der Chijs, H.T. Colenbrander, F. de Haan, J.E. Heeres, and J. De Hullu (eds.), Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India (31 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1887–1931). DCB  Diary and Consultation Books EFI  William Foster and Charles Fawcett (eds.), The English Factories in India 1618–1621 [to] 1670–1684: A Calendar of Documents in the India Office, British Museum and Public Record Office (17 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1954). EIC East India Company Generale Missiven W. Ph. Coolhaas, J. van Goor, and H.K. s’Jacob (eds.), Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (14 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Leiden: Sidestone Press, 1960–2017). IOR India Office Records Letters Received Frederick Charles Danvers and William Foster (eds.), Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East. Transcribed from the ‘Original Correspondence’ Series of the India Office Records (6 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1896–1902). MSA Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai NL-HaNA Nationaal Archief, The Hague RFSG Records of Fort St. George VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie

Glossary Amir High Mughal noble; plural: umara Bania Caste label referring to a member of a range of Hindu and Jain commercial professions; also applied in Company writing to refer to Hindus and Jains in general Castiza/Castizo  Person of mixed European and Asian descent (typically someone with a European and a Eurasian parent) Chalia Member of the cinnamon peeler caste in Ceylon (also: Salagama) Choultry Town hall or court room in Madras Commandeur Commander, title of the chief official in a region where the VOC had a military presence; subordinate to a gouverneur Darbar Court, referring to the (site of the) public audiences held by rulers and other persons in positions of authority in Mughal India Dessava European official at the head of the dessavony, the largest indigenous political unit, under VOC rule in Ceylon Directeur Director, title of the chief official in a region where the VOC’s ­presence was commercial in nature Diwan-i-Am Hall of Public Audience; also Am-Khas Duriya Sinhalese official, overseer of cinnamon peelers Farman Written decree issued by the Mughal emperor Faujdar District commander in the Mughal Empire, holding a military function Generale missive General letter dispatched by the Hoge Regering to the Heren XVII with each return fleet from Batavia Ghari Unit in the Indian method of time-keeping, equating to 1/60th of a day, or 24 minutes Gouverneur Governor, title of the chief official in a region where the VOC had a territorial presence Haags Besogne Committee tasked with processing incoming letters from Asia, meeting annually in The Hague Haags Verbaal Digest of incoming letters from Asia, produced by the Haags Besogne Heren XVII The “Gentlemen Seventeen”, or executive body of seventeen directors representing the VOC’s six Kamers (Chambers) Hoge Regering “High Government” in Batavia, consisting of the VOC’s GovernorGeneral and Councillors of the Indies Husb-ul-hukm Written order issued in name of the emperor; literally, ‘according to command’

Glossary 

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Jagir Land allotment granted to Mughal nobles Kaul A lease or grant in writing, more generally a written engagement Khilʾat Robe of honour, consisting of multiple pieces (Arabic; also Persian: sarapa) Kurnish Ritual form of salutation practised in Mughal imperial culture Lascorin Sinhalese soldier Mansabdar Title for Mughal imperial officers holding rank expressed in zat (personal rank) and sawar (number of horsemen one was expected to maintain); literally, ‘rank-holder’ Mestiza/Mestizo  Person of mixed European and Asian descent (typically someone with a European and an Asian parent) Mir Bakhshi Chief paymaster of the Mughal imperial administration Muchalka A written obligation or bond Mudaliyar Senior Sinhalese official under VOC rule in Ceylon Mutasaddi Title held by the town governor of Surat Nawab Title of a high Mughal official, used for provincial governors Nayak Title used by Hindu rulers in South India; originally, a provincial governor of the Vijayanagara Empire Nazr Ceremonial gift from a social inferior to a superior consisting of gold and silver coins Nishan Written decree issued by a Mughal prince Paan Stimulant made of betel leaves and areca nut Parwana Written decree issued by a high Mughal official Pishkash Gift or tribute in cash or kind from a social inferior to a superior Sarapa Robe of honour, consisting of multiple pieces (Persian; also Arabic: khilʾat) Shahbandar Harbour master or chief customs officer in a port Sijdah Ceremonial prostration; practised by close disciples of the emperor during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir Subahdar Governor of a Mughal province (subah) Taslim Ritual form of obeisance practised in Mughal imperial culture Vidane Sinhalese official, chief of cinnamon-growing districts Voorcompagnieën Dutch trading companies founded in the period 1595–1602, precursors to the VOC; literally, “pre-companies” Wazir Chief minister; title held by the highest official in the Mughal Empire Zamindar Landholder, exercising rights of revenue collection in a district

Map 1  The Indian Ocean World

Introduction On 10 March 1701, the secretary to the board of directors of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), Pieter van Dam (1621–1706), presented his employers with an extraordinary guide to a century of Dutch trade with Asia.1 Known as the Beschryvinge, Van Dam’s magnum opus charts how, since its founding in 1602, the Company had inserted itself into Indian Ocean networks stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan. Following a survey of East and Southeast Asia in book one of volume two, the second book opens with an account of Dutch trade in Mughal India. Founded by a Timurid prince in 1526, the Mughal Empire steadily extended its sway over nearly the entire Indian subcontinent, reaching the peak of its expansion at the time when Van Dam was writing.2 Mughal authority clearly impressed the Dutchman, who described an emperor in utter command over the lives and goods of his subjects.3 Van Dam’s depiction echoed the countless reports he had read in over four decades in charge of processing incoming correspondence from Asia. Indeed, as a digest of corporate information for the use of the Company’s executive body (Heren XVII), the Beschryvinge encapsulated the kind of ideas that underpinned VOC operations throughout the Indian Ocean world. To explain the presumed effects of the Mughal imperial system on its officials and subjects, Van Dam reached for a trope about absolute rule: ‘From the latter ensue haughty regents and slavish subjects, who, moreover, are false, sly, and silver-tongued […] They honour, in order to be honoured; give, in order to receive; praise, in order to be praised; and do things only with a view to benefit’.4 1 Pieter van Dam, H.W. Stapel (ed.), Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (7 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1927–1954). Van Dam received his commission in 1693 and continued to extend his work for several years after its presentation in 1701. The manuscripts were kept locked away in the Amsterdam Chamber of the VOC, to be consulted only by the directors. On the Beschryvinge as a governance tool: Susanne Friedrich, ‘Caveat From the Archive: Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie and Crisis Management’, Journal for the History of Knowledge 1.1 (2020), Art. 12, 1–14. 2 On Babur: Stephen F. Dale, Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483–1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For a survey of Mughal expansion: John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire: The New Cambridge History of India I.5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3 Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.2, 17–18. 4 ‘hieruyt komt dan voort hooghmoedige regenten en slaefaghtige onderdanen, sijnde voort valsch, arghlistigh, ook welspreeckende’; ‘Sy eeren, om geëert te worden; geven, om te ontfangen; prysen om lof, geen dingen doende dan met insigt van baet’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_002

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Introduction

Van Dam’s ascription of collective character traits to a given group of people was part of an institutional practice and mode of discourse which I describe as corporate ethnography. The making of corporate ethnography and the ways in which Company agents’ ideas about and understandings of Asian peoples and societies informed their approaches to cross-cultural contact form the subject of this book. Focusing on the two largest commercial-cum-colonial organisations of the early modern period – the VOC and its English rival, the East India Company (EIC) – it makes three interrelated contributions. First, and foremost, it shows that Dutch and English understandings of and assumptions about Asia profoundly shaped the operations of both corporations in the areas of commerce, diplomacy, and colonial settlement. To Van Dam and many of his contemporaries, ideas about foreign peoples and societies provided keys for explaining as well as guiding cross-cultural contact. Such ideas were employed to make sense of observations and interactions, or mobilised to promote or justify particular lines of action. The latter could be aggressive as well as conciliatory, as in the pairing of Van Dam’s tacit support for periodic shows of force with his cautious advice that, given the ‘inner humours’ of Mughal governors, it was necessary ‘to try to please them as much as possible’.5 By analysing how the institutional workings of VOC and EIC writing served to enshrine, circulate, and reproduce convictions of this kind, this book uncovers the processes through which individual beliefs and prejudices fed into, and became reflective of, corporate habits of writing and thinking. Second, I examine the VOC and EIC within the same frame of analysis to demonstrate prominent similarities between the ethnographic discourses and approaches to cross-cultural encounter manifested by agents of two parallel organisations that are most often studied separately.6 Agents of both Companies perceived II.2, 18. All translations are mine. To best reflect the use of ethnographic language in the sources, the closest equivalents to the early modern Dutch terms are used in the text whilst the original quotes are provided in the footnotes. 5 ‘Dit dan sijnde het inwendigh humeur der regenten, moet men haer tragten sooveel mogelijck te complaceren’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge, II.2, 18. Compare: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 20–21. The conceptual connotations of terms such as ‘humours’ are discussed in Chapter 1. 6 Arguments for studying trading companies collectively have recently gained traction. See: Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700–1800) (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018); William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers (eds.), The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019); Felicia Gottmann and Philip Stern, ‘Introduction: Crossing Companies’, Journal of World History 31.3 (2020), 477–488; Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World ­(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen, and Edmond

Introduction

3

and adjusted to their host environments in similar ways, incorporating Asian norms and customs into their modes of social and ceremonial interaction. Yet in both cases, such apparent cosmopolitanism coexisted with hostile rhetoric in support of exclusionary and outright violent practices. Third, by revealing the prevalence of common discursive strands across space and time, this study illustrates how the lens of corporate ethnography can be used for anchoring the VOC and EIC within wider global histories, identifying both the Renaissance ethnographic traditions which the Companies built on and the modern colonial ideas and practices their agents prefigured. Taking South Asia as my principal area of focus, I detail how the ethnographic content of VOC and EIC writing was produced and disseminated, how it was used to explain or argue for given modes of cross-cultural interaction, and how it illuminates continuities across spatial and temporal boundaries. Just as importantly, I offer detailed analyses of how Company agents’ understandings of foreign environments informed the practices they adopted for acting in those environments. From the time of their first expeditions, the two Companies actively collected information about foreign peoples and societies. Directors and senior officials issued instructions prescribing conduct in given places and situations which drew on cultural assumptions embedded in institutional memory. And agents on the ground routinely cited both local norms and practices, and beliefs held about the shared “nature” of people they regarded as belonging to the same ethnic or religious group, to promote particular approaches to cross-cultural dealings. As I map out in eight chapters across four thematic parts, assumptions about a people’s inherent untrustworthiness, arrogance, or servility consistently cropped up in texts written from the earliest Dutch and English eastbound voyages in the late sixteenth century and continued to guide the Companies’ commercial, diplomatic, and colonial exploits throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ethnographic ideas and cultural stereotypes, then, held significance far beyond the spheres of scholarly debate and literary representation in which they are most often discussed. Though scholars of early modern ethnography have been accustomed to focus on other groups – cosmographers, missionaries, map-makers, artists, printers, engravers, chroniclers, and independent travellers – the forms of individual and collective commentary regarding foreign peoples contained in the records of trading companies formed an integral part of this wider cultural production.7 Unlike the non-Europeans encountered on Smith (eds.), Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022). 7 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:

4

Introduction

stage, in art, or in the projections of armchair travellers, most of the African, Asian, and Eurasian men and women described in VOC and EIC records were people with whom the authors and/or their readers interacted on a prolonged and regular basis. Consequently, the depictions created by Company agents are significant not only as testimonies to early modern global encounters and products of cross-cultural contact zones; they also actively operated in these asymmetrical sites of exchange, by conditioning expectations, framing experiences, motivating future actions, and justifying decisions taken.8 Providing a cultural perspective that complements existing economic and institutional histories of the major East India Companies, this book offers a focused exploration of how ideas influenced practices in specific sites of global encounter.

Ethnography and Encounter

Founded in 1600 and 1602, respectively, the English and Dutch East India Companies have long been recognised as central players in early modern globalisation.9 The principal historiographical intervention this book seeks to make, as represented by the pairing of “ethnography” and “encounter” in its title, is The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (2nd ed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008); Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (eds.), Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 8 For the concept of ‘contact zone’: Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4–7. 9 Foundational studies include: C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1965); K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd., 1965); Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660– 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

Introduction

5

to better integrate the still largely separate bodies of scholarship on European ideas about Asia with that on European interactions in Asia. On the one hand, historians and literary critics focusing on travel writing, theatre, and visual culture have produced invaluable work on the early modern European production of ideas and imagery about the wider world. Building on Edward Said’s seminal study of Orientalism, scholarship on representations of Others has comprehensively demonstrated the cultural power of discursive constructions of difference, whilst being less concerned with assessing how such mental constructs shaped interactions on the ground in Asia.10 On the other hand, scholars of the various European enterprises in the Indian Ocean world have produced an extensive body of literature on the socio-economic and political dimensions of Asian–European relations, yet paid relatively little attention to the cultural lenses through which merchants and administrators perceived their host environments or the textual practices by which they represented them.11 As a result, it is still unclear how ideas about and understandings of Asian people and societies affected the individual and collective behaviour of VOC and EIC agents. Given the intricate relationship that existed between European discourses about Asia and early modern Dutch and English engagements in trade, diplomacy, and colonial settlement, I argue that we should consider the cultural attitudes which Company agents manifested towards Asian societies alongside economic rationality, political opportunism, and the constraints and opportunities presented by Asian actors, as key factors defining VOC and EIC operations. Hailed as the first modern multinationals and harbingers of entrepreneurial capitalism, early accounts of the East India Companies credited these corporations with revolutionising, and all but dominating, Asian trade.12 In response 10

11 12

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 1978). See for instance: Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (eds.), Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Early Modern Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Rahul Sapra, The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011); Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). An early exception is: Jurrien van Goor, Kooplieden, Predikanten en Bestuurders Overzee: Beeldvorming en Plaatsbepaling in een Andere Wereld (Utrecht: HES Uitgevers, 1982). For instance: Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). For a critical assessment: Markus P.M. Vink, ‘Between Profit and

6

Introduction

to the inflated assessments of European power and influence in such works, a generation of mainly South Asian historians have demonstrated the resilience of pre-existing Asian trade structures and the continuing capacity of Asian merchants to outcompete the Companies in a range of routes and markets.13 Such ‘Asia-centered perspectives’, as Tonio Andrade pointed out in a recent historiographical survey, have encouraged scholars to reconceptualise European activities as part of the larger processes of state-building and commercial expansion that occurred throughout the Indian Ocean region.14 The most recent work has made further strides in rethinking the East India Companies as actors in an entangled global arena. Several scholars have emphasised the Companies’ profound reliance on Asian interlocutors and intermediaries, as well as the constitutional flexibility that enabled corporations to adjust to varying socio-political demands and conditions and become integrated into different social and political structures.15 Others have explored networks within the Companies as well as the wider networks in which the Companies were embedded and which influenced their shape, both in terms of the political

13

14

15

Power: The Dutch East India Company and Institutional Modernities in the “Age of Mercantilism”’, in: Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (eds.), Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 285–306. Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979); Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tonio Andrade, ‘The Dutch East India Company in Global History: A Historiographical Reconnaissance’, in: Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 239–256, at 248. On Asian knowledge and skills: Kapil Raj, ‘Go-Betweens, Travellers, and Cultural Translators’, in: Bernard Lightman (ed.), A Companion to the History of Science (Chichester: John Wiley, 2016), 39–57; Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Amrita Sen, ‘Searching for the Indian in the English East India Company Archives: The Case of Jadow the Broker and Early Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Mughal Trade’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.3 (2017), 37–58; Danna Agmon, A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017). On constitutional flexibility: Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Introduction

7

and commercial contexts in their home states and of the trans-imperial webs connecting Company agents to a multiplicity of traders, officials, and other European, Asian, and African actors in their areas of operation.16 This study advances such perspectives in two ways. It adopts a transnational lens to highlight the commonalities linking the EIC and VOC both to each other and to the wider tradition of early modern European ethnography. And it charts how Company agents adapted their modi operandi in response to a variety of specific local norms and relationships, even if their experiences of particular foreign environments tended to be articulated using tropes and categories that were much less localised in nature. The scaling down to size of European actors in a world dominated by Asian traders and state authorities has been palpable too in studies on cultural encounters and representations.17 As in the case of English, Dutch, French, or Venetian engagements with the Ottoman Empire, the shift of focus towards European adaptations to foreign norms has not led to a lessening of interest in mental images, but has rather inspired a flourishing of studies which read their development as expressions of anxieties and ‘imperial envy’.18 Propelled by the booming print industries of Amsterdam and London, the Dutch and English East India Companies played an integral part in European knowledge production regarding the world at large, and have regularly been considered

16

17 18

Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin (eds.), The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010); Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014); Cátia Antunes and Jos Gommans (eds.), Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks and Institutions, 1600–2000 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); Cátia Antunes and Amélia Polónia (eds.), Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016); William A. Pettigrew and Mahesh Gopalan (eds.), The East India Company, 1600–1857: Essays on Anglo-Indian Connection (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Rupali Mishra, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2018); Byapti Sur, ‘Keeping Corruption at Bay: A Study of the VOC’s Administrative Encounter with the Mughals in Seventeenth-Century Bengal’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Leiden University, 2019). See for instance: Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On ‘imperial envy’: Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). See also: Alain Grosrichard, Liz Heron (trans.), The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

8

Introduction

in that context.19 However, for the formative period between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries that forms the focus of this book, such analyses have focused chiefly on published texts such as plays and travel accounts.20 As a consequence, the vast bulk of VOC and EIC letters and reports located in archives and modern source editions continue to represent an underused resource for scholars interested in early modern ethnography and cultural representations. Bringing new insights from the literature on travel and cultural encounter to bear on the day-to-day writings of merchants and administrators employed by the English and Dutch East India Companies, this book shows how the institutional writing cultures of these organisations reflected and shaped everyday realities of cross-cultural exchange. It highlights the cultural perceptions and attitudes of two groups of actors whose numerical importance far outweighed that of the individual travellers and explorers on whom much attention has focused. And it adds corporate perspectives to a set of issues and interactions best known through the writings of individuals connected to the missionary orders and the Portuguese Estado da Índia.21 Whilst there is an extensive literature on the epistemic practices of modern colonialism, this book emphasises the central importance of corporate routines of information gathering and 19

For an encyclopaedic overview with regard to Asia: Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe (3 vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965–1993), particularly Volume 3. 20 Teltscher, India Inscribed; Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues; Barbour, Before Orientalism; Sapra, The Limits of Orientalism; Manjusha Kuruppath, Staging Asia: The Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Theatre (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2017). Other important studies have focused on naturalia, material goods, and exotica: Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Claudia Swan, Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). 21 Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers; Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jorge Flores, Unwanted Neighbours: The Mughals, the Portuguese, and their Frontier Zones (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jorge Flores, The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). The writings about India of the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales are less well studied, though see: Lakshmi Subramanian (ed.), The French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean: A Collection of Essays by Indrani Ray (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1999). For a comparative perspective, see: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, Peoples, Empires, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Introduction

9

record keeping, and institutionalised modes of description, interpretation, and classification, during the early stages of EIC and VOC history.22 In focusing on the routine writings of Company agents, I foreground a form of ethnography that is expressly distinct from the modern scientific discipline of that name. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has noted, ethnography in the sense of ‘the stereotypical representation of groups based on some empirical foundation’ is probably ‘as old as writing’.23 By 1600, in the words of Joan-Pau Rubiés, descriptions of foreign peoples had become ‘so embedded in the travel writing produced in Europe […] that one assumes ethnography to be essential to the genre’.24 Though they fed into the organised description and analysis of human difference found in early modern cosmographies, the informal, everyday reflections on foreign peoples and societies in VOC and EIC letters and reports were typically less systematic in nature.25 Several men employed by the Companies did try their hand at methodical surveys of South Asian cultures and religions – particularly the ministers Henry Lord, Abraham Rogerius, and Philippus Baldaeus – yet their accounts formed but a fraction of the total body of commentary on foreign societies generated by the VOC and EIC.26 By 22

23 24

25 26

Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the East India Company (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009); Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 14. Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Travel Writing and Ethnography’, in: Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–260, at 242. As Laura Hostetler has argued, Europe’s early modern ethnographic impulse formed part of ‘an ethnography of expansion that emerged worldwide’ during this period: Laura Hostetler, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Ethnography in Comparative Historical Perspective’, in: David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler (eds.), The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album” (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006), xvii–lxvii, at lxi. It is helpful to distinguish “ethnography”, or the description of human societies, from “ethnology”, or the theoretical and comparative study of human societies. See: Rubiés, ‘Travel Writing and Ethnography’. Henry Lord, A Display of Two Forraigne Sects in the East Indies (London: Francis Constable, 1630); Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (Leiden:

10

Introduction

directing attention to this larger corpus, the more structured descriptions of peoples’ physical features, dress, customs, ceremonies, and institutions found in some Company texts will be read as part of a wider landscape of quoti­ dian statements that purported to describe the shared character of particular groups of people. That such writings displayed little interest in learned topics such as the origins of belief systems merely underlines the generally modest educational background and limited competence in South Asian languages of the corporate actors this study focuses on, that is, merchants and administrators engaged in day-to-day cross-cultural contact. Their emphases and omissions also reflect their practical concerns and experiences. Because Company writers had most to say about those commercial and governmental actors they interacted with on a regular basis, corporate ethnography was primarily concerned with (particular groups of) Asian men. As discussed in Chapter 8, Asian and Eurasian women did feature prominently in discussions around sexuality, race, and colonisation. However, when making generic claims about groups of people, the default position of Company writers was to gender their subjects as male.27 To conceptualise how the average literate Company agent perceived and responded to the different peoples they encountered, the notion of ‘implicit ethnographies’ offers useful guidance. This term, as defined by Stuart B. Schwartz in a landmark volume, refers to the tacit ways in which people perceived themselves and others based on categories such as language, skin colour, ethnicity, and religion: ‘These understandings were often implicit in the sense of being unstated or assumed, a kind of common knowledge or common

27

François Hackes, 1651); Philippus Baldaeus, Nauwkeurige en Waarachtige Ontdekking en Wederlegginge van de Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius van Waasberge and Johannes van Someren, 1672). See also: Carolien Stolte, Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–1672 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012). The tendency of Company archives to marginalise women (and Asian women in particular) is well established. For critical re-evaluations, see: Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Amrita Sen, ‘Traveling Companions: Women, Trade, and the Early East India Company’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 48.2 (2015), 193–214; Margot Finn, ‘The Female World of Love & Empire: Women, Family & East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Gender & History 31.1 (2019), 7–24.

Introduction

11

sense that did not have to be articulated or codified but that permeated the way in which people thought and acted.’28 Rather than coalescing into ethnographic tracts, then, implicit understandings were most often expressed ‘in genres that often seem to have little overtly to do with the study of other peoples’.29 In the case of the Companies, such genres included letters, consultation minutes, and succession reports, alongside the more organised descriptions of countries and societies contained in texts such as the Remonstrantie by the Dutch merchant Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh.30 Limiting the focus to the hitherto neglected ethnographic content of the documentation compiled by merchants and administrators, the small set of better-known texts about Hinduism by Dutch or English clergymen fall outside the scope of this study. Whilst highly influential for the representation of South Asian societies in Europe, their influence on the day-to-day administrative operations of the Companies was far less evident.31 An important earlier effort ‘to make implicit ethnographies explicit’ was made by Markus Vink in relation to Dutch encounters with the South Indian state of Madurai.32 Following Ashin Das Gupta, he emphasised the need to disaggregate the blanket categories through which both Company agents and

28 29 30 31

32

Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Introduction’, in: Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–19, at 2–3. Ibid., 3. D.W. Caland (ed.), De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929). The principal concern of ministers was with the communal life and comportment of their own flock. On the role of EIC chaplains such as Henry Lord in policing religious interactions in India: Haig Z. Smith, ‘Risky Business: The Seventeenth-Century English Company Chaplain, and Policing Interaction and Knowledge Exchange’, Journal of Church and State 60.2 (2018), 226–247. In addition to numerous written descriptions, a small number of individuals employed by the VOC produced visual representations of Asian peoples. See: Lodewijk Wagenaar, Cinnamon & Elephants: Sri Lanka and the Netherlands from 1600 (Amsterdam and Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum/Vantilt Publishers, 2016); Jos Gommans, The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550 (Amsterdam and Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum/Vantilt Publishers, 2018). Markus Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 26. See Ch. 1: ‘Images and Ideologies’. Previous versions appeared as: Markus Vink, Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012), 35–124; Markus P.M. Vink, ‘Images and Ideologies of DutchSouth Asian Contact: Cross-Cultural Encounters between the Nayaka State of Madurai and the Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth Century’, Itinerario 21.2 (1997), 82–123.

12

Introduction

historians customarily organised their accounts.33 “Indian”, “Dutch”, “Mughal”, and “Company” are dangerously reductive labels unless employed with full awareness that such collective nouns lump together a variety of individuals and groups, each with their own interests and viewpoints, and that relations between these larger categories took shape through mutual interactions among their constituent parts.34 Thus, Vink drew attention to the confluence of commercial, imperialist, and Calvinist ideas and ambitions that defined the attitudes and agendas of Company representatives in South India and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), Batavia (the seat of the VOC’s Hoge Regering or High Government, consisting of the Governor-General and Council of the Indies, in modern-day Jakarta), and the Dutch Republic.35 Many of the key traits he identified in Dutch descriptions of Madurai – including ‘proto-Orientalism’, ‘a self-perception as champions of freedom […] combined with a paranoid siege mentality’, and a ‘white somatic norm image’ – also coloured VOC and EIC accounts produced in other parts of the Indian subcontinent and beyond: a clear indication that similar attitudes and understandings drove Dutch and English activities in a variety of contact zones.36 Vink rightly emphasised differentiation within Company perspectives and the latter’s interactive development in response to actual contacts, yet this is not the full story. Despite marked variations in personal viewpoints and policy recommendations, VOC as well as EIC agents routinely expressed divergent positions through similar discursive registers, and habitually employed a common set of tropes and stereotypes that remained remarkably stable across time and space. One of the most fruitful frameworks for thinking about the ways in which ethnographic representations affected, and were affected by, the shifting nexus of hostile and accommodative European–Asian relationships remains Subrahmanyam’s notion of an ‘age of contained conflict’.37 Capturing a world in which violence was ‘never far from the surface’, even if it ‘remained bounded’, 33 34

Compare: Das Gupta, Indian Merchants, 10, 15–16. As Subrahmanyam put it, ‘societies do not encounter each other in their entirety; rather, they do so as fractions or even – in the extreme case – embodied in individuals’: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 212. 35 Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast, 26–147. 36 Ibid., 86. 37 Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, Ch. 5. See also: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction: Mughals and Franks in an Age of Contained Conflict’, in: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–20; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Forcing the Doors of Heathendom: Ethnography, Violence, and the Dutch East India Company’, in: Parker and Bentley, Between the Middle Ages and Modernity, 131–153.

Introduction

13

this perspective also invites scrutiny of how antagonisms conditioned the ‘language and images’ that structure our sources.38 There have been few concrete attempts to relate corporate discourses to their respective local and institutional contexts, a notable exception being a case study by James D. Tracy that focuses on Surat.39 Tracy argued that in the writings of the local VOC trading post, Mughal emperors did not appear as the all-powerful despots known from scholarly accounts such as Johannes De Laet’s De Imperio Magni Mogolis (1631), but rather as figures incapable of compelling port-town officials to act in accordance with their farmans (imperial decrees). Whilst accurately identifying the multifaceted and situational nature of VOC reporting about the Mughal body politic (which, as Van Dam’s rendering showed, often presented arbitrary local government as the very product of absolute rule), Tracy did not acknowledge this same level of complexity when suggesting that Company agents simply could not see beyond their own anti-Islamic prejudice.40 A more rounded understanding is necessary, one which accounts for the evident anti-Muslim rhetoric permeating VOC and EIC documentation, yet which also captures how such discourses varied according to circumstances and coexisted with genuine curiosity and cordial interpersonal interactions in a variety of settings.41 Indeed, since most encounters discussed in this book took place in sites characterised by strong indigenous traditions of cultural pluralism, the ability to adapt to cultural difference was a prerequisite for any Company agent.42 The approach I follow in this book, then, is to examine the discursive content and institutional logic of Company writing in order to explain how a variety of preconceptions and experiences coloured the perceptions of 38 Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, 6–8, 254, 281. 39 James D. Tracy, ‘Asian Despotism? Mughal Government as seen from the Dutch East India Company Factory in Surat’, Journal of Early Modern History 3.3 (1999), 256–280, at 256, 260. 40 As most clearly expressed in the abstract: ‘in this age of continuing warfare between Christendom and Islamdom, a “faithless Moor” was always and everywhere the same.’ Ibid., 256. 41 See, for instance, Gijs Kruijtzer’s assertion that, in the seventeenth century, ‘Dutchmen preferred the society of Muslims over Hindus in the Deccan and the Mughal domains’: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009), 42. On open-minded attitudes, shared by Indian and Dutch actors alike, see also: Jos Gommans, ‘South Asian Cosmopolitanism and the Dutch Microcosms in ­Seventeenth-Century Cochin (Kerala)’, in: Antunes and Gommans, Exploring the Dutch Empire, 3–25. 42 On the polyglot and multi-ethnic Mughal court: Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). On Surat as a cosmopolitan centre of trade and intellectual exchange: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Hidden Face of Surat: Reflections on a Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean Centre, 1540–1750’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018), 205–255.

14

Introduction

VOC and EIC agents regarding different South Asian peoples and societies, and how such views found expression in these agents’ individual conduct and collective decision-making. This approach does not imply a binary division between internally coherent categories labelled “European” and “South Asian”. If anything, the last several decades of scholarship have demonstrated the profoundly entangled nature of early modern global encounters and the porousness of categories of belonging.43 Nor does it pretend to offer a complete account of the various encounters discussed – an ambition that would require much greater attention to the roles and perspectives of South Asian actors. Future research will need to expand our understanding of how Asian views of Europeans shaped interactions, and how Asian actors contributed to shaping European ideas.44 In a more limited sense, my aim here is to illuminate, through a focus on Company writing, how agents of the VOC and EIC perceived and responded to their South Asian environments. As the modes of writing examined in this book were current throughout these organisations as a whole; and since the stereotypes, terminologies, and moral judgements that structured Company writing about South Asia drew on repertoires with much wider application, the analysis offered here, it is hoped, also holds relevance to the study of VOC and EIC activities in other parts of Asia.45 43

44

45

A case in point is the burgeoning literature on cultural mediation. See for one example: Simon Schaffer, Linda Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). For South Asian perspectives on Europe: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Europeans and Europe, 1500–1800’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 42.1 (2005), 69–100; Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 286–325. For a later period, see also the various studies of eighteenth-century South Asian travellers to Europe: Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2004); Mona Narain, ‘Eighteenth-Century Indians’ Travel Narratives and Cross-Cultural Encounters with the West’, Literature Compass 9.2 (2012), 151–165; Humberto Garcia, England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). On Asian knowledge-brokers: Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). As discussed in Chapter 1, claims about tyrannical, greedy, arrogant, or servile characters drew on overarching stereotypes about Asia and were not limited to any particular group or region. Compare: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Slaves and Tyrants: Dutch Tribulations in Seventeenth-Century Mrauk-U’, Journal of Early Modern History 1.3 (1997), 201–254; Bhawan Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants at the Court of Ayutthaya: Dutch Perceptions of the Thai Kingdom c. 1604–1765 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007). Of course, far from being limited to European discourses about non-Europeans, stereotyping of different ethnic, religious, and social groups was prevalent within Europe too: Mark Knights,

Introduction



15

Company Writing

Managed by members of the commercial and political elites from London and the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, respectively, in their overseas settlements the EIC and VOC employed personnel from a very wide range of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. While both companies were therefore inherently pluriform organisations, their corporate cultures and partial alignment with national interests nonetheless served to demarcate recognisable communities regarded and self-defined as “English” and “Dutch”.46 This semblance of uniformity was arguably most pronounced in the sphere of corporate writing.47 Not only were the men with the most discernible imprint on EIC and VOC discourses – the directors in London or the United Provinces, and senior officials in the various Asian factories – for the most part drawn from the same close-knit networks of English and Dutch mercantile families and their clients, but the Companies’ institutional writing routines also promoted uniformity of style and expression.48 Guided by set templates and instructions and shaped by practices of collegiate writing and textual borrowing, the plurality of perspectives that entered Company records tended to be voiced through a fairly circumscribed repertoire of terms and phrases. It is in this sense that we can speak of the emergence of distinct and recognisable corporate discourses running through the full corpus of “Company writing”, a term used in this book to

46

47

48

‘Historical Stereotypes and Histories of Stereotyping’, in: Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (eds.), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 242–267; Peter Lake and Koji Yamamoto (eds.), Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England: Puritans, Papists and Projectors (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). On the role of corporate discourse in expressing notions of national identity, see Liam D. Haydon, Corporate Culture: National and Transnational Corporations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). On trading companies as transnational actors: Gottmann and Stern, ‘Introduction: Crossing Companies’. On the “Dutchness” of the Dutch empire: Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J.L. Gommans, trans. Marilyn Hedges, The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 3–5. A number of recent studies have focused on EIC and VOC writing, including: Ogborn, Indian Ink; Richmond Barbour, The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607–10 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Adrien Delmas, Les Voyages de l’Écrit: Culture Écrite et Expansion Européenne à l’Époque Moderne: Essais sur la Compagnie Hollandaise des Indes Orientales (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013). On the EIC’s leadership and its connections with the English state: Mishra, A Business of State. On the role of elite merchant-regent families in the Dutch case: Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005).

16

Introduction

denote both an institutional practice and the total sum of documentation produced by the EIC or VOC, comprising instructions, letters, reports, memoirs, journals, factory diaries, consultation minutes, proceedings, and ordinances. The production of such discourses was fully interactive: if the forms of Company writing were largely implemented from above, its ethnographic content was for the most part produced on the ground in Asia. Of crucial importance, as Emily Erikson has shown with regard to commercial information, were not just the voluminous bottom-up flows of letters and reports, but also the thick webs of horizontal communication lines connecting agents across the Indian Ocean world.49 Throughout this book, I will study the EIC and VOC in tandem to bring out similarities of discourse and practice that have hitherto gone unremarked. As noted in a recent volume of essays on the two companies, their histories ‘are intertwined in ways that make it logical to study them as a pair’.50 Both emerged out of the same juncture, pursued broadly similar goals, were active in many of the same spaces, and confronted many of the same challenges. As detailed by Andrew Ruoss, regular inter-institutional exchanges in the second half of the seventeenth century also rendered the structures, policies, and practices of both companies more alike as a result of mutual observation and emulation.51 Of course, such similarities and entanglements should be understood alongside a number of key discrepancies. The EIC and VOC experienced bitter rivalry and frequently expressed mutual resentment in internal correspondence and outward-facing statements.52 Their competition manifested itself right from the outset in parallel attempts to enter the same Southeast Asian markets for 49 Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade. 50 Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert, ‘Introduction: The Companies in Asia’, in: Clulow and Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies, 13–21, at 16. 51 Andrew Ruoss, ‘Between Companies: The Arbitration of 1654 and the Evolution of Corporate Strategy in the East Indies Trade’, Journal of World History 31.3 (2020), 511–538. See also: Andrew Van Horn Ruoss, ‘Competitive Collaboration: The Dutch and English East India Companies & The Forging of Global Corporate Political Economy (1650–1700)’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Duke University, 2017). 52 Femme S. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in: H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002), 49–68. The most infamous incident, the 1623 “Amboyna Massacre”, would become a key cultural reference called to memory throughout the period under discussion: Adam Clulow, Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Introduction

17

pepper and spices, and was the main reason behind the divergent geographical orientation of both companies’ operations after the 1620s, when the Dutch forced the English from the Moluccan Spice Islands. The VOC’s violent monopoly policies rested on the greater financial and military clout which the Dutch company enjoyed for most of the seventeenth century – itself a consequence of the permanent joint-stock form enshrined in its founding charter.53 Conceived as an instrument of war in the eighty-year conflict (1568–1648) between the emergent Dutch Republic and the Habsburg monarchy, the seventeenthcentury VOC pursued an aggressive expansionist agenda comprising imperialist schemes which had no contemporary EIC counterpart.54 Other differences are apparent in the Companies’ organisational structures. The VOC was characterised by federated management in the Netherlands (organised into six Kamers or Chambers, a fixed proportion of whose directors constituted the executive Heren XVII) and a central seat of command (Batavia, from 1619) in Asia. In contrast, the EIC had a single governing body (Governor and Court of Committees) at home but a more decentralised system (with multiple Presidencies) overseas.55 These notable variances notwithstanding, when reading EIC and VOC records alongside each other, it becomes evident that the vocabularies which English and Dutch agents employed when describing Asian peoples, the cultural attitudes they displayed, and the approaches to cross-cultural encounters they promoted all point towards the existence of largely shared mentalities. Their comparable responses to the Indian Ocean world resulted, at least in part, from the pan-European nature of their frames of reference. The book credited with kickstarting Dutch expansion in Asia, Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (1595–1596), was mostly based on information collected in Portuguese service; while a leading early adviser of the EIC, the editor of geographical accounts, Richard Hakluyt (c. 1553–1616), made use of a long list of Portuguese, 53 The VOC’s initial capital of 6,500,000 guilders (£550,000) far exceeded the £68,373 subscribed to the EIC’s First Voyage: Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 38, 65–66, 75–76. 54 On the VOC’s emergence against the backdrop of the Dutch–Habsburg conflict: Martine Julia van Ittersum, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006). Against an older tendency to stress the VOC’s commercial character, recent scholarship has emphasised the VOC’s imperialist side: Cátia Antunes, ‘Birthing Empire: The States General and the Chartering of the VOC and the WIC’, in: René Koekkoek, Anne-Isabelle Richard, and Arthur Weststeijn (eds.), The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice, 1600–2000 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 19–36; Arthur Weststeijn, ‘Empire of Riches: Visions of Dutch Commercial Imperialism, c. 1600–1750’, in: Koekkoek, Richard, and Weststeijn, The Dutch Empire, 37–65. 55 On the EIC’s organisational structure: Chaudhuri, The English East India Company. On the VOC: Femme S. Gaastra, De Geschiedenis van de VOC (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 2002).

18

Introduction

Spanish, Italian, and Dutch materials to argue for an English trading strategy.56 The popularity of publications such as Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589; 1598–1600) and Linschoten’s Itinerario ensured that ideas about Asia generated by an earlier generation of European traders, diplomats, and missionaries became readily available to Dutch and English merchants about to enter Asian trade. As the seventeenth century wore on, novel accounts about Asia, typically reaching multi-national audiences and going through multiple editions and translations, reinforced the common stock of cultural tropes and images available in England and the Dutch Republic.57 Besides drawing on a shared textual tradition, Dutch and English agents in the Indian Ocean world also engaged in broadly similar forms of cross-cultural trade and diplomacy. As I will argue, the principal disparity between the two Companies’ engagement with South Asia resulted from the VOC’s earlier and, until the mid-eighteenth century, deeper involvement with colonial settlement. As a consequence, Dutch writers reflected more extensively than their English counterparts on the nature of colonial society, including on issues related to interracial relationships and governance over Asian subjects. Yet even here it is important not to overstate such differences. As Philip Stern has reminded us, the seventeenth-century EIC consciously enacted a form of government in Asia, and when steps were taken to extend and fortify ‘ye English Dominion in India’ in the 1680s, the Dutch example was explicitly touted by the London-based directors as the model to imitate.58 Similarities between English and Dutch Company writing are starkest on a purely discursive level; that is, in the common set of concepts and categories used to describe cultural “Others”, including the quotidian use of adjectives and stereotypes. Following behavioural scientists, I understand stereotypes as traits or qualities ascribed to particular groups of people. They can result 56

Ernst van den Boogaart, Civil and Corrupt Asia: Image and Text in the Itinerario and the Icones of Jan Huygen van Linschoten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Heidi Brayman Hackel and Peter C. Mancall, ‘Richard Hakluyt the Younger’s Notes for the East India Company in 1601: A Transcription of Huntington Library Manuscript EL 2360’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67.3 (2004), 423–436. 57 Benjamin Schmidt has argued for the seminal role of Dutch-produced geography in creating a common European image of the world, particularly after 1670: Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. 58 Stern, The Company-State, 3–6. Company to Fort St. George, London, 28 September 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 87. In the same letter, the directors wrote: ‘Our designe in the whole is to sett up the Dutch Government among the English in India (than which a better cannot be invent[ed]) for the good of posterity’: Ibid., 92. Andrew Ruoss offers examples of such imitation of the VOC by the EIC dating back to the 1650s: Ruoss, ‘Competitive Collaboration’.

Introduction

19

in, but are also used to rationalise, prejudices (“prejudgements”), which consist of affective reactions towards given people on account of their “category memberships”.59 Recognised as a normal cognitive response to dealing with a complex world, stereotyping is a largely reflexive process that homogenises “out-groups” based on prior beliefs that are often resistant to change.60 The everyday nature of stereotyping is evident in VOC and EIC documentation, with the bulk of reflections on the supposed character of groups of people expressed in a seemingly off-hand manner. Negative opinion centred on what was regarded as the proud, fickle, or extortionate behaviour of Mughal officials, or the perceived tendency of Gujarati brokers to dissemble and deceive. It could take the form of maxims such as ‘No thing but feare keepes a Moore in awe’, or the habitual use of epithets such as that of ‘treacherous Gentues’ (gentiles, here referring to the Hindu population of South India’s Coromandel region).61 Such assumptions could refer to specific ethnic groups as well as much larger generic categories. For instance, one influential VOC official, Rijcklof van Goens (1619–1682), theorised in 1655 that ‘most Asian peoples are by nature not inclined to do well out of love of virtue, but will readily refrain from evil-doing out of fear of punishment’.62 The criteria by which Company agents grouped people together or drew distinctions between groups were varied and situational, with an overlapping set of identity markers based on geographical origin, religion, political allegiance, social status, and skin colour assuming relative weight according to the context of writing. Yet, in line with early modern practice in Europe as well as in much of the Indian Ocean world, two organising principles had overriding importance. The first was that of religious adherence, as expressed in broad groupings (such as “Moors” and “gentiles”, as noted above). The second concerned the concept of “nation”, which was used in a formal sense to denote a self-governing community consisting of members with a shared religious or geographical origin and/or political allegiance (as such, it corresponded to the “Dutch” and “English” nations as they were recognised and granted certain legal privileges by South Asian authorities), but could also refer more loosely 59 60 61 62

David J. Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 2005), 24–30. Knights, ‘Historical Stereotypes’; Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping. George Ball et al. to Company, Banten, 19 January 1618: BL, IOR/E/3/5, f. 254v; William Fremlen et al. to Company, Swally, 29 December 1640: EFI 1637–1641, 285. ‘sijnde de meeste Asiase volckeren van nature geneijcht geen goed uijt liefde tot de deucht te doen, maer laeten ’t quade seer lichtelijck uijt vreese van straffe’: P.A. Leupe (ed.), ‘Rapport van Van Goens (1655)’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 4.1–2 (1855), 141–180, at 178.

20

Introduction

to a group of people identifiable as sharing language, customs, dress, and a common place of origin.63 To a degree, Europeans in South Asia socialised as members of one ‘pluriform Christian nation’, and from time to time they were treated as such by local authorities. However, in a political and legal sense the practice in port towns such as Surat and other places was to differentiate between ‘the three Europian Nacons English ffrench & Dutch’.64 The social categories that appear in European sources were often far removed from the forms of social and ethnic belonging that would have mattered to the people described, and as such they should be used with extreme caution if we are seeking to comprehend the lived realities of communities across the Indian Ocean world. Yet my interest in this study lies in reading ‘along the archival grain’, to borrow Ann Laura Stoler’s phrase, that is, to identify the discursive categories that structured Company writing and to probe the ways in which they operated within the corporate archive.65 When approached from this perspective, the usage of generic labels such as “Indian”, “heathen”, and “Black” offers an entry point into the institutional logic of Company writing. By expressing complex, context-specific impressions through a common set of context-transcending categories, Company writers made local observations accessible at a distance in space and time. This process underpinned the circulation of tropes and stereotypes between contexts, while also imposing a degree of uniformity on VOC and EIC responses to cross-cultural encounters across a diverse range of commercial, diplomatic, and colonial settings. A focus on Company writing opens up multiple avenues for situating the Dutch and English trading companies more firmly within wider global 63

On the concept of “nation” in the Indian Ocean and wider early modern world: R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Vision Books, 2002), 87–93; Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 10–19. On its changing meaning in eighteenth-century Europe: Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (1996), 247–264; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003). 64 ‘Memoriall of what happned in the dispute w:th Mirza Leferla Gouernour &:ca Officers of Suratt occationed by the Publique affront they offered the three Europian Nacons English ffrench & Dutch’, 5 July–19 August 1671: BL, IOR/E/3/32, ff. 16r–23r; Gerald Aungier et al. to Company, Swally, 7 November 1671: BL, IOR/E/3/32, f. 87r. For examples of socialising between Surat’s pluriform community of Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, including the joint commemoration of marriages, baptisms, and funerals: D.H.A. Kolff and H.W. van Santen (eds.), De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 17–25. 65 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

Introduction

21

histories. First, attending to common discursive strands helps resist the compartmentalisation of narratives of European expansion along rigid national, geographical, or temporal lines, by enabling us to probe how European encounters with other parts of the globe framed understandings of Asia, and how the concepts and classificatory schemes of Renaissance scholars were applied and repurposed in the everyday writings of merchants. A deeper understanding of the content and variety of ethnographic discourses as they circulated in manuscript form within the administrative circuits of the EIC and VOC also provides tools for assessing the roles these organisations and their personnel played within the European representation of Asia in print. Finally, the textual production of the two companies throws light on the historical roots and contingent development of a cluster of ethnographic concepts and stereotypes that by the late eighteenth century coalesced into cornerstones of modern empire. Seventeenth-century reflections on the supposed character of certain peoples or the means to govern plural populations lacked the theoretical refinement and scientific veneer associated with Enlightenment concepts of race and civilization. Nevertheless, the underpinnings of modern imperial ideologies are evident in statements such as that ‘slavish natures cannot be better ruled and kept under control, than by austere sceptres’, which appeared in Johan Nieuhof’s bestselling book on China (1665) in a passage meant to justify the governing style of the VOC’s Governor-General.66 Drawing attention to the continued importance of VOC documentation as ‘containers of “truth”’ guiding nineteenth-century colonial administrators in the Dutch East Indies, Alicia Schrikker has recently argued ‘that between 1700 and 1870, colonial culture should be understood as a continuous, cumulative process’.67 As I show in this book, the origins of the institutional habits of reading, writing, and recordkeeping she discusses date back even further, to the opening decades of the seventeenth century.

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‘Te weten, slaafachtige gemoeden worden niet beter bestiert en onder dwang gehouden, dan door strenge scepters; en noit dienenze gewilliger, als wanneer zy tot verbaastheit gebracht worden door den kostelijken praal des bestierders’. The passage refers directly to ‘de volken van deze gewesten’ (the people of these parts): Johan Nieuhof, Het Gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den Grooten Tartarischen Cham, den Tegenwoordigen Keizer van China (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1665), 29. Alicia F. Schrikker, ‘Institutional Memory in the Making of Dutch Colonial Culture in Asia (1700–1870)’, in: Koekkoek, Richard, and Weststeijn (eds.), The Dutch Empire, 111–134, at 115, 125.

22

Introduction

The East India Companies in Seventeenth-Century South Asia

The seventeenth century, Timothy Brook has suggested, ‘was not so much an era of first contacts as an age of second contacts, when sites of first encounter were turning into places of repeated meeting’.68 In the Indian Ocean world this process had been well underway for centuries. Governed by the seasonal rhythms of the monsoons, a sprawling trading network stretching from East Africa to the South China Sea had flourished since the first millennium CE, bringing together Persian, Arab, Indian, Chinese, Malay, and other merchants in emporia such as Aden, Hormuz, Cambay, Calicut, Melaka, and Guangzhou.69 While this world stunned the first generation of English and Dutch merchants who entered it around 1600, the arrival of these relative latecomers was far less remarkable to the populations of port cities, who were long accustomed to the coming and going of foreign traders. More to the point, merchants and authorities in different parts of Asia had built up extensive experience in dealings with “Franks” (farangis) in the century that had lapsed since Vasco da Gama’s initial voyage (1497–1499).70 As a result, the English and Dutch arrivals quickly slotted into recognisable categories. In many of the ports where they landed in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Companies were received rather pragmatically as two more parties on a diverse and crowded scene, welcomed by those in power as groups that might push up demand and boost customs duties, supply foreign goods, skills, capital, and military resources, and provide a political counterweight to external and domestic rivals, other Europeans included.71 68 69

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Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Profile Books, 2008), 8. K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean World: An Economic History from the Rise of Islan to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). The medieval network itself expanded on prior connections. See: Philippe Beaujard, ‘The Worlds of the Indian Ocean’, in: Michael Pearson (ed.), Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15–26. Chandra Richard De Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia’, in: Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings, 295–322; Subrahmanyam, ‘Taking stock of the Franks’; Jorge Flores, ‘Floating Franks: The Portuguese and their Empire as seen from Early Modern Asia’, in: Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie (eds.), The Routledge History of Western Empires (London: Routledge, 2013), 33–45. An early example is the anti-Portuguese alliance agreed between the VOC and the Samudri Raja of Calicut on 11 November 1604: J.E. Heeres and F.W. Stapel (eds.), Corpus Diplomaticum Neerlando-Indicum: Verzameling van Politieke Contracten en verdere Verdragen door de Nederlanders in het Oosten gesloten, van Privilegiebrieven, aan hen verleend, enz. (6 vols.

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On a smaller scale, South Asia represented the diverse range of relationships that characterised the early modern European presence in the Indian Ocean world as a whole – from Europeans occupying a subordinate position as humble petitioners in Mughal India to their enactment of full-blown colonial rule in Ceylon.72 Of all the Asian regions where the VOC and EIC established a presence, their seventeenth-century trajectories were also most similar in South Asia, specifically on the Indian subcontinent. This circumstance singles out South Asia as particularly suitable for comparative treatment. While in much of Southeast Asia the more belligerent VOC outmatched and virtually excluded its English rival, in South Asia both Companies gained entry on a relatively equal footing and continued to compete on roughly even terms into the eighteenth century. The principal reasons for this level playing field had less to do with the Companies than with the political situation on the subcontinent, above all the extent of Mughal power. One of the wealthiest and most formidable polities of the early modern period, the Mughal Empire at the height of its power exerted authority from Kabul in the north to Jinji in the south, and from Sindh in the west to Bengal in the east. By the end of the long reign of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), hence still before the incorporation of much of central and southern India, the populations under Mughal control probably already exceeded 100 million people, a figure only Ming China could rival.73 Mughal political control served to connect and integrate northern India’s inland markets and centres of textile, indigo, and silk production with the caravan routes extending into Central Asia and the coastal regions facing the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. From there Indian goods fanned out across maritime Asia, including the spice-producing regions of modern-day Indonesia, whose demand for textiles first steered the Dutch and English to India. On

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The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1907–1955) I, 30–31. For the ‘traditional “open door” policy’ of Madurai: Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast, 17 and passim. See for instance: George D. Winius and Marcus P.M. Vink, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified: The VOC (The Dutch East India Company) and its Changing Political Economy in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10–11. Ceylon was successively ruled by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British: Zoltán Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Alicia Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka 1780–1815: Expansion and Reform (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007). See for a recent overview of the historical development of the Dutch presence in India: Emmer and Gommans, The Dutch Overseas Empire, Ch. 8. In comparison, the Ottoman population in the same period is estimated at around 22 million, and that of Safavid Persia at 10 million: Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 107–108, 127.

24

Introduction

arrival in Mughal domains – first in Gujarat in the 1600s and 1610s, and later in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from the 1630s – the EIC and VOC entered sophisticated export economies on terms granted by the imperial authorities. Their privileges included legal protection, the right to move throughout the empire, and limited forms of self-rule, but excluded permission to build fortifications or control territory. In other words, the Mughal government made sure to put a check on the Companies’ political clout while facilitating a trade from which both sides benefited, following a principle described by Om Prakash as ‘perceived mutual advantage’.74 In parts of South Asia where state power was weaker, however, the Companies from an early date enjoyed more substantial forms of extraterritoriality, enabling them to establish fortified settlements, levy taxes, and maintain a modest military force. Such was the case on the southeastern Coromandel Coast, where, starting with Pulicat in 1613 and Armagon in 1626, the VOC and EIC obtained leave to establish fortified trading stations in territory belonging to the much diminished Vijayanagara Empire or its former vassals.75 The most notable of these early settlements, Fort St. George, with the adjoining town of Madras, came to exercise government over tens of thousands of Indian inhabitants within decades of its establishment in 1639, a number that may have reached 100,000 by the turn of the century.76 Meanwhile in Ceylon, the VOC established one of its most extensive territorial holdings after ousting the Estado da Índia’s forces from the island between 1638 and 1658. Having entered on terms of an anti-Portuguese treaty with King Rajasinha II of Kandy (r. 1629–1687), the VOC soon turned against its Sinhalese ally in a bid to control the cinnamon-producing lowlands and their bonded labour force.77 Seizing 74 75

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Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India: The New Cambridge History of India II.5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel 1605–1690: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); Burton Stein, The New Cambridge History of India I.2: Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). John F. Richards, ‘European City-States on the Coromandel Coast’, in: P.M. Joshi and M.A. Nayeem (eds.), Studies in the Foreign Relations of India (From the earliest times to 1947): Prof. H.K. Sherwani Felicitation Volume (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1975), 507–521. K.W. Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power on Ceylon 1638–1658 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958); Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Dutch Power in Ceylon 1658–1687 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958). Estimates of the population figures brought under Dutch jurisdiction vary from 200,000–300,000 and ‘many hundreds of thousands’ to ‘(probably) over 800,000 by the end of the eighteenth century’: Emmer and Gommans, The Dutch Overseas Empire, 41; Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompenie as Schoolmaster: Dutch Education in Ceylon 1690–1795 (Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff, 1978), 9; Pim de Zwart, Globalization and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence: Intercontinental Trade and Living Standards

Introduction

25

control of some ports and commodities while vying with Asian and European competitors for access to others, and dominating small polities while being subjected to Asia’s more powerful states and empires, the simultaneous performance of different roles – merchant, privateer, landholder, subject, sovereign – by the VOC has traditionally confounded attempts to identify clear chronological breaks between commercial and colonial phases in its history. In recent years, renewed attention to the forms of political, legal, fiscal, and military power exercised by the seventeenth-century EIC has shown that facile distinctions between a mercantile English and colonial Dutch mode of operating are likewise untenable.78 Company writing further supports this view, as it brings to light significant parallels and intersections between VOC and EIC attitudes towards the Indian Ocean world despite the divergent trajectories of both Companies in large parts of it. An evocative metaphor for thinking about the ways in which seventeenthcentury Company agents experienced their position in the Indian trading world comes from a letter written by the President and Council of the English factory in Surat in January 1639, which stressed to the EIC’s directors that ‘wee cannot forgett ourselves also to bee strangers in a forraigne land’.79 The statement followed an exposition about ‘two disstressed Christian travellers’, who, ‘deluded with hopes of India’, had undertaken the land route through the Middle East, yet upon arrival in Agra in northern India had not found the dreamt-of opportunities. Being left without money and with their minds set upon returning home, the two Europeans successfully solicited the English merchants to come to their aid. Referring to one of them, Arnold Bresson, President William Fremlen and his colleagues asserted to their employers that ‘at your charge wee thus redeeme [him] from the misery which might befall him in beeing distrest amongst a perverse generation of Mahumetans and heathens’.80

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in the Dutch East India Company’s Commercial Empire, c. 1600–1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 21. The literature on the dual nature of the companies as both merchant and state is vast. The most sophisticated account is: Stern, The Company-State. See also: Philip J. Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections’, The William and Mary Quarterly 63.4 (2006), 693–712; James M. Vaughn, ‘John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690’, Britain and the World 11.1 (2018), 101–137. For the VOC: Jurrien van Goor, Prelude to Colonialism: The Dutch in Asia (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004); Arthur Weststeijn, ‘The VOC as a Company-State: Debating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Expansion’, Itinerario 38.1 (2014), 13–34. William Fremlen et al. to Company, Surat, 4 January 1639: EFI 1637–1641, 119. Ibid. Bresson’s Italian companion, whose name is given as Joseph Teigee, was admitted ‘in forma pauperis’.

26

Introduction

Besides exemplifying some of the key categories of difference through which Company agents ordered their mental worlds, this episode also reflects the apprehension with which a significant number of them regarded their place in the cultural sphere around them.81 At the same time, Company writing testifies in detail to the fact that professional and social interactions with Muslims and Hindus, despite their portrayal as ‘perverse’ on paper, were integral to the everyday life of English and Dutch agents in India, and produced a considerable degree of cross-cultural exchange. In 1636, Fremlen had been one of the agents who told the Court of Committees that ‘wee for our parts doe hold that in things indifferent it is safest for the Englishman to Indianize,’ while John Ovington noted in the 1690s that EIC agents were accustomed to ‘imitate the Customs of the East in lying round the Banquet upon the Persian Carpets which are spread upon the Ground’.82 To these examples one could add a host of quotidian contacts with Indian merchants and officials, from dealings in the marketplace to social engagements such as hunting parties, as will become clear in the chapters that follow. Of central importance when studying the Companies’ presence in seventeenth-century South Asia, then, is to address the tension that lay at the heart of English and Dutch approaches to the world around them: the everyday concurrence of accommodative stances and mutually beneficial cross-cultural partnerships with marked ethnic and religious prejudice and recurrent violence. Such contradictory tendencies speak to larger patterns across the early modern world. Throughout Europe, different confessional groups worked out localised forms of coexistence despite ongoing religious polemics, day-to-day taunts and stereotyping, and periodic atrocities.83 The extensive record of early modern global trade also attests that pragmatic arrangements and inter-group frictions commonly went hand in hand.84 In the case of the Companies, negative ethnographic assumptions and unease about unfamiliar environments 81

82

83 84

It is instructive here to compare the English perception to that of the Portuguese, who, as Jorge Flores has argued, regarded themselves as more “native” to India than the “foreign” Mughals, but likewise experienced their position on the frontier of the expanding empire with a good deal of anxiety: Flores, Unwanted Neighbours. William Methwold et al. to Company, Surat, 28 April 1636: EFI 1634–1636, 210; John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, In the Year, 1689 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1696), 401. Alongside Fremlen, William Methwold and Francis Breton were also among the signatories of both this letter and the one discussed above. The reference was to their use of Indian food and medicine. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009);

Introduction

27

generated an undercurrent of distrust which VOC and EIC agents fell back on during first encounters or in the event of disputes, and which sustained Dutch and English calls for maritime aggression, policies of spatial segregation, and a range of other actions. Yet prejudice directed at groups tended to be subdued in contacts between individuals, and did not prevent Company agents and their Asian interlocutors from reaching mutual accommodations or engaging in amicable relations. Only by assessing the relative weight of each dimension in a given contact situation can we identify under what circumstances and in which form cultural assumptions became manifested in everyday practices. In highlighting the ambiguous and multisided nature of seventeenth-century cross-cultural relations, I build on a now substantial body of scholarship that rebuts essentialised understandings of fixed cultural boundaries and inherent religious conflict, without uncritically embracing a counter-narrative of seamless connectivity and cosmopolitan cross-cultural understanding.85

Plan of the Book

Part 1 of this book maps the development of corporate ethnography in seventeenth-century VOC and EIC writing, after which Parts 2–4 explore Dutch and English engagements in cultural encounters in the realms of trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance, respectively. Mapping the roots of Company discourses, Chapter 1 analyses the points of contact between VOC and EIC writing and the wider culture of European expansion from which it emerged. When the first generation of Dutch and English merchants set sail for the Indian Ocean in the 1590s and 1600s, their expectations of this space did not arise in a vacuum. Attitudes and assumptions rooted in earlier experiences of cross-cultural contact were carried over into the initial phase of Company operations, while a rapidly expanding print industry supplied Europeans with textual and visual representations of Asian peoples. This chapter examines the legacies of Renaissance ethnography as expressed in the concepts and categories that Dutch and English writers employed when describing foreign peoples.

85

Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Cátia Antunes (eds.), Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For the argument that cosmopolitanism was the defining stance of seventeenth-century Englishmen abroad: Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Zoltán Biedermann has made a convincing case for a critical history of early modern connectedness, one that accounts more fully for the asymmetries produced by global connections and cross-cultural exchange: Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires.

28

Introduction

It identifies the principal tropes that came to define seventeenth-century corporate ethnography and underlines their pan-European origins. Moving from the wider framework of European ethnography to the specific institutional context of the Companies, Chapter 2 charts the development of the corporate writing routines devised to manage VOC and EIC operations over vast distances. It shows that the imperative to assess and describe the presumed nature of Asian peoples was integral to the epistemic practices of the Companies from the outset and rapidly became institutionalised. Whereas most of the materials analysed in this book relate to South Asia, Part 1 places these in relation to writings on other geographical regions. As such, it reflects the fact that Dutch and English approaches to cross-cultural contact in South Asia took shape in the light of interactions in other parts of the globe and were interpreted within a comparative perspective. This account of the development of Company discourses frames the analysis of the ways in which Dutch and English understandings of their South Asian environments were manifested in specific contexts of encounter, as laid out in the rest of the book. Part 2 examines the establishment of VOC and EIC trade in South Asia through a focus on early Dutch and English relations with Indian brokers, merchants, and government officials. It centres on the Mughal port city of Surat in the western province of Gujarat – the part of the Indian subcontinent where the Companies’ presence was most strictly commercial in nature. Following Gujarat’s integration into the Mughal Empire in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, Surat rose to prominence as India’s principal commercial emporium and the chief point of embarkation for the annual hajj to Mecca.86 The ‘blessed port’ (bandar-i mubarak) of the Mughals was not only the site of the first English and Dutch efforts to claim a share in the lucrative trade of the western Indian Ocean, but also the location of recurrent bouts of conflict with the local Mughal government and mercantile community. As such, Surat formed a focal point for the developing dynamics of local disputes and accommodations that characterised the Companies’ presence in Mughal India up to the mid-eighteenth century. Focusing on day-to-day interactions at the port-town level and their representations in Company writing, Chapters 3 and 4 show that cultural perceptions about Indians’ trustworthiness conditioned VOC and EIC approaches to commercial dealings and fuelled arguments for the deployment of maritime power against Indian shipping. As these chapters make clear, general theories of trust are helpful for explaining Company agents’ responses to uncertainty, though only if we account for the pervasive 86

Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, Ch. 1.

Introduction

29

influence of sentiments and preconceptions that are not reducible to purely rational assessments based on available information.87 Chapter 4 also charts how, despite the backdrop of distrust, individuals on both sides devised mutually advantageous arrangements grounded in the Mughal political framework and manifested in routines of cross-cultural sociability. First worked out in Gujarat, similar patterns of accommodation and conflict came to underpin the Companies’ presence in Bengal and other parts of Mughal India. Part 3 builds on this analysis of Mughal–European political exchanges at the local level by turning the lens to some of the most prestigious diplomatic encounters the two Companies ever engaged in, those in Mughal imperial capitals. More extensive and consequential than most other political relations the Companies entered into, the power dynamics of the Mughal-European relationship also most clearly favoured the South Asian party. As a consequence, the Companies’ conformance to foreign standards came to be most pronounced. Focusing on the ceremonial forms of submission expected from Dutch and English representatives in accordance with the norms of Mughal imperial culture, Chapter 5 charts the high degree to which the Companies’ diplomatic approaches took shape in response to Mughal conventions. Building on this analysis, Chapter 6 shows how Dutch and English gift-giving practices responded to the tastes and demands of their powerful hosts. The Companies’ incorporation into the Mughal political landscape fitted the larger pattern by which the expanding empire integrated outside groups and individuals under the umbrella of imperial authority. Regarding Indian merchants, Farhat Hasan has argued that ‘for their services, the state was constrained to incorporate them politically in imperial sovereignty, through gifts of honours and rights.’88 A similar logic was at work when Mughal emperors or leading nobles presented robes of honour (khilʾat) to VOC or EIC representatives, or granted the Companies revenue farming rights over villages in return for a set annual tribute. The various relationships of political patronage that emerged between South Asian power-holders and the two Companies demonstrate that these actors and their respective political cultures were commensurate in fundamental ways, even if their concepts and institutions were often not mutually

87

88

In the words of the sociologist Piotr Sztompka, the dominant rational-choice approach to trust ‘seems to forget that calculating rational agents are also full-fledged persons, often emotional and irrational as well’: Piotr Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66. For the rational-choice account: Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41.

30

Introduction

translatable in a straightforward manner.89 If Part 1 of this book is predominantly concerned with ethnography, Part 3 shifts the emphasis most strongly towards an analysis of encounters. Nonetheless, here too it is clear that Dutch and English approaches to diplomacy relied on presumed insight about Asian peoples and societies. Company agents adapted their conduct in line with their understanding of Mughal imperial culture, yet these understandings operated, at least in part, through notions of the kind we observed in Van Dam’s discussion of Mughal temperaments. Finally, Part 4 turns the focus to the earliest instances of Dutch and English government over South Asian people.90 Particularly in the English case, it bears reminding that the Company’s exercise of de facto territorial control prior to the mid-eighteenth century remained limited to just a small number of towns with their direct environs. Based on negotiated understandings with local communities and elites, such settlements were radically different in character from European settler colonies in the Atlantic world, even though this did not keep the English factors in Surat from citing ‘the Successfull examples of New England, Virginia Barbados & Jamaica’ in the same breath as ‘the no less Successfull examples of the Portuguese & Dutch in India’ as sources of inspiration with regard to Bombay.91 As used in this book, “colonial” refers to those situations in which the Companies exercised government over European and Asian populations, focusing specifically on the EIC’s urban settlement in Madras and the VOC’s territorial occupation of parts of Ceylon.92 Chapter 7 examines the origins and development of VOC and EIC settlements to show how anxieties about people regarded as cultural outsiders were employed to argue in favour of fortification and implement practices of spatial segrega89 90 91 92

The key discussion of cultural commensurability is: Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters. Throughout this book I use the contemporary name “Madras” to refer to the historical town that would develop into present-day Chennai. Likewise, I refer to the island of Sri Lanka by its early modern name, Ceylon. Gerald Aungier et al. to Company, Swally, 7 November 1671: BL, IOR/E/3/32, f. 96r. The proposed policy centred upon the means to bind settlers, men but particularly women, to remain in the colony for a minimum number of years. My usage aligns with contemporary uses of the term “colony” to refer to settlements such as those of Madras and Bombay, as well as usage in recent scholarship. See, for instance: Aparna Balachandran, ‘Of Corporations and Caste Heads: Urban Rule in Company Madras, 1640–1720’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9.2 (2008), unpaginated; Philip J. Stern, ‘Rethinking Institutional Transformations in the Making of Modern Empire: The East India Company in Madras’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9.2 (2008), unpaginated; David Veevers, ‘The Contested State: Political Authority and the Decentred Foundations of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia’, in: Pettigrew and Gopalan (eds.), The East India Company, 175–192.

Introduction

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tion. Subsequently, Chapter 8 argues that Dutch and English understandings of their South Asian environment also shaped their performances of colonial authority. Ethnographic assumptions pervaded a range of areas from the governance of Asian people to attitudes to mixed marriages and the upbringing of mixed-race children. As such, the concerns and practices articulated during this period foreshadow the better-known policies of the colonial era studied by scholars such as Stoler and Durba Ghosh.93 Company agents’ reflections about the plural populations of colonial societies also reveal a slow but crucial change in ethnographic thought. Though continuing to coexist with older cultural notions focused on customs and dress, ideas about heredity and classifications based on skin colour became increasingly common, particularly in VOC-ruled Ceylon. As I argue in the Conclusion, the study of Company writing is therefore well-placed to inform debates about the development of racialised thinking before the invention of the modern concept of race.94 By the early eighteenth century, the development of Company settlements and their attendant discourses testified to wider transformations. In Ceylon, the lines between VOC and Kandyan territory were drawn when several decades of hostility gave way to Dutch–Kandyan rapprochement after Rajasinha II’s death in 1687, coinciding with what is conventionally regarded as the endpoint of the VOC’s expansionist phase in Asia as a whole.95 Around the same time, a newly belligerent EIC engaged in clashes with Mughal forces in Bengal, Surat, and Bombay, and moved to strengthen its hold over Madras against possible Mughal encroachment in the wake of the Emperor Aurangzeb’s (r. 1658–1707) conquest of Bijapur and Golkonda, and ongoing campaigns against the Marathas in southern India.96 During these years, the EIC’s first 93 94

95 96

Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ghosh, Sex and the Family. Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?’, in: Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow (eds.), Ideas of ‘Race’ in the History of the Humanities (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 33–87. See for this chronology: Winius and Vink, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified; Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise; Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration’. On the so-called Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690: Margaret Hunt and Philip J. Stern, The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay with Related Documents (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016); Margaret Hunt, ‘The 1689 Mughal Siege of East India Company Bombay: Crisis and Historical Erasure’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017), 149–169; Vaughn, ‘John Company Armed’.

32

Introduction

experiment in colonial governance was consolidated with the establishment of the ­Corporation of Madras in 1688, the crystallisation of the city’s respective sectors into a “White Town” and a “Black Town”, and the foundation of the fortified settlement of Calcutta in the 1690s. This was a period that witnessed profound geopolitical changes on the Indian subcontinent, principal among which were the weakening of central imperial power and the emergence from within the carapace of Mughal authority of quasi-independent successor states in the decades following the end of Aurangzeb’s half-century-long reign.97 If not immediately perceptible, it was within this larger configuration that the trajectories of the EIC and VOC gradually parted ways, as the weakening of the Mughal polity and the rise of the EIC as a military power heralded a new chapter in the history of the East India Companies.98 Taken together, then, this book recounts the early history of the East India Companies in South Asia from the beginnings of Dutch and English trade with Asia in the 1590s to the development and maturation of VOC and EIC activities and discourses as apparent by the start of the eighteenth century. Its central claim is that, throughout this period and in a multiplicity of contexts, the attitudes and approaches of Dutch and English Company agents were profoundly shaped by their understandings of and assumptions about the South Asian peoples and societies they interacted with. This was a period that gave rise to practices and modes of thinking with long-term effects. A focus on corporate ethnography enables us to trace these continuities from their late-sixteenthcentury origins to the eighteenth century and beyond, enabling a fuller understanding of the ways in which modern colonialism built upon early modern precedents. 97

98

On Mughal decline: Meena Bhargava (ed.), The Decline of the Mughal Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). Historians nowadays tend to think of a ‘long twilight’ rather than rapid disintegration: Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Mughal State 1526–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63. P.J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765’, in: P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 487–507. See for a recent argument regarding the gradual transformation of the EIC into an imperial power in the period 1707–1757: Philip J. Stern, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British India: Antimeridian or Antemeridiem?’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 21.2 (2020), unpaginated.

PART 1 Corporate Ethnography

∵

chapter 1

Company Writing and Early Modern Ethnography Arriving in today’s Mossel Bay on South Africa’s Western Cape, on 5 August 1595, the Dutch sailor Franck van der Does recorded the apprehension he felt after his small sloop got caught in a storm. Unable to make it back to the main ship, Van der Does and his companions shuddered at the thought of making landfall. In part they were alarmed by the high and dangerous surf, yet the thirteen men also ‘feared that, upon landing, the African savages would have beaten us to death, yes eaten us’.1 A former student in Leiden, Van der Does sailed on the first Dutch voyage to Asia, organised by the oldest of the socalled voorcompagnieën (“pre-companies”) that would merge to form the VOC in March 1602.2 Lacking personal or institutional experience of contact with the South African Khoisan, the assumptions he and his colleagues held about those labelled as “savages” – above all their presumed cannibalism – must have derived from other sources. This observation also applies to most of the categories which Van der Does and other early Company writers employed when designating groups of people, including “Blacks”, “Moors”, and “gentiles”, all of which had established Iberian equivalents. In several ways, the account of this earliest Dutch venture beyond the Cape of Good Hope thus presses home the point that even so-called first encounters tended to unfold within prior frames of reference.3 As Nandini Das has argued, thinking of encounters not as singular events but as extended processes is crucial to revealing the cumulative weight of the multifaceted ‘negotiation of knowledge, memory, texts, and preconceptions’ that preceded and shaped moments of actual contact.4 Such an approach is 1 ‘dat wy vreesden aen lant commende, dat ons die Africaense wilden souden doot geslaeghen, jae opgegeeten hebben’. Journal kept on the Hollandia by Frank van der Does, 2 April 1595–13 June 1597: J.K.J. de Jonge (ed.), De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indie (13 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1862–1909), II, 299. 2 G.P. Rouffaer and J.W. IJzerman (eds.), De Eerste Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indië onder Cornelis de Houtman 1595–1597 (3 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915), II, lxxi–lxxx. 3 For the Khoisan, this meant that the appearance of Dutch mariners would have been seen in the light of regular dealings with Portuguese crews going back to the arrival of Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. The Cape region soon became a principal calling point for nearly all European fleets sailing to and from Asia. 4 Nandini Das, ‘Encounter as Process: England and Japan in the Late Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (2016), 1343–1368, at 1346. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_003

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fruitful for understanding how the corporate writing routines of the VOC and EIC emerged from the wider culture of European expansion. Focusing on the main components of Dutch and English East India Company discourses about Asian peoples, this chapter examines the Companies’ analogous uses of ethnographic concepts and stereotypes and identifies their common indebtedness to wider early modern European traditions for recording and conceptualising human difference. A concrete starting point for exploring the ways in which EIC and VOC writing practices bore the mark of existing traditions of describing foreign lands and cultures, as the account of Van der Does suggests, is the documentation produced during the formative years of Dutch and English trade with Asia.

Ethnography on Early Expeditions

From the relazioni written by Venetian ambassadors, to Humanist travel advice literature, and detailed questionnaires distributed to officials in the Spanish empire, models for observing and reporting on distant places were common across Renaissance Europe.5 While the extant instructions for the Eerste Schipvaart (1595–1597) do not include specific guidelines for writing, the ship’s journals kept by Van der Does and other participants on the maiden voyage make it clear that two of the cornerstones of Company writing were already in place. First, they followed a routine of providing detailed narrative accounts of daily occurrences. And second, these authors paid systematic attention to how foreign peoples looked and lived. By the later sixteenth century, uniform methods of recording acts performed and things witnessed had likewise become a mainstay of English overseas ventures, pioneered on voyages across the Atlantic and in search of the Northeast Passage.6 The imperative to write ‘promised both to stimulate observation and to organize it’, a dual impetus that extended in a direct line from geographical and commercial topics to matters of an ethnographic nature.7 An early English example is Sebastian Cabot’s instruction 5 Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–1800 (London: Routledge, 1995); Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See’, History and Anthropology 9.2–3 (1996), 139–190; Filippo de Vivo, ‘How to Read Venetian Relazioni’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 34.1–2 (2011), 25–59; Daniel Carey, ‘Inquiries, Heads, and Directions: Orienting Early Modern Travel’, in: Judy A. Hayden (ed.), Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 25–51. 6 Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–7; Daniel Carey, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions: The Principal Navigations and Sixteenth-Century Travel Advice’, Studies in Travel Writing 13.2 (2009), 167–185. 7 Fuller, Voyages in Print, 7.

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37

to the captains of an expedition bound for Asia in the 1550s, which ordered that ‘the names of the people of every Island, are to be taken in writing, with the commodities, and incommodities of the same, their natures, qualities, and dispositions, the site of the same, and what things they are most desirous of’.8 Slightly later instructions for English expeditions bound for China also included guidance on how accounts of foreign societies should be organised, prioritising military strength, weaponry, housing, and dress, among other categories of description.9 Brought into print by the leading Elizabethan editor of travel accounts, Richard Hakluyt, directives such as these provided prominent templates for future observation and description. The spectacular rise in European engagement in long-distance travel and the concomitant boom in print culture ensured that, by 1600, first-hand accounts of foreign lands had become available in unprecedented numbers.10 Like instructions for travellers – which increasingly began to appear in England, the Netherlands, and German-speaking regions from the mid-sixteenth century – printed descriptions of foreign societies offered orientation to first-time voyagers, as well as models for prospective writers.11 In 1595, the latest addition to this corpus was Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Reys-gheschrift, followed a year later by the companion volume from which the entire work took its name, the Itinerario. Based on information collected while in the service of the Estado da Índia, Linschoten’s navigational and commercial handbook was both a major publishing success and an indispensable guide for the earliest Dutch and English ventures into Asian waters.12 Already in Van der Does’ journal one can see how Linschoten’s intelligence was used and verified onboard, with similar occurrences on later VOC and EIC voyages recorded for decades to come.13 No 8

9 10 11 12 13

Richard Hakluyt (ed.), The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation. Made by Sea or Over-land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeeres (12 vols. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), II, 202. See also: Carey, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’, 172. Carey, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’, 176. On European publications regarding Asia: Lach and Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe. Carey, ‘Inquiries, Heads, and Directions’, 31. Arun Saldanha, ‘The Itineraries of Geography: Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario and Dutch Expeditions to the Indian Ocean, 1594–1602’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101.1 (2011), 149–177. De Jonge, Opkomst II, 297–298. Citing multiple references to the onboard usage of Linschoten on EIC voyages, Adrien Delmas argues that, ironically, the Itinerario did most to serve English, not Dutch, interests: Delmas, Les Voyages de l’Écrit, 120. The crucial figure in introducing Linschoten to English readers was Hakluyt, who ensured the translation of the Itinerario in 1598 and used the book as his main authority when preparing notes of advice for the EIC’s court of committees in 1601: E.G.R. Taylor (ed.), The Original Writings

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figure 1 Inhabitants of Malabar (Kerala). The two men on the left depict Muslims from Cannanore; the couple on the right represent inhabitants of the coastal district between Goa and Cochin. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario (Amsterdam: 1596) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-BI-7088

less remarkable than his chapters on trade and navigation was Linschoten’s textual and visual survey of African and Asian peoples (Figure 1), which set a standard that remained prevalent far into the seventeenth century.14 One of the most accomplished ethnographic records of its day, the Itinerario formed part of a wider trend manifested across early modern European geographical literature, comprising the written production of missionaries, explorers, diplomats, colonial officials, and commercial agents alike. It was precisely this overlap between different strands of writing about the non-European world that created the conditions for existing practices to spill over into VOC and EIC operations.

14

and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), II, 476–482. On the Itinerario’s visual programme: Van den Boogaart, Civil and Corrupt Asia.

Company Writing and Early Modern Ethnography

39

The earliest eastbound expeditions from England and the Dutch Republic consisted of round-trip voyages of limited duration to the spice-producing regions and emporia of Southeast Asia. As a result, most impressions recorded by Company writers during the 1590s and 1600s were based on stopovers made en route to Asia, brief stays at Indian Ocean ports, and slightly longer sojourns at their final destination, usually the Moluccas (Maluku Islands) or Banten. In several respects, these materials prefigured EIC and VOC writings on South Asia. For one, cross-cultural contacts in different parts of the Indian Ocean world, and indeed beyond, informed approaches to encounters in South Asia and coloured the frames of reference within which South Asian peoples were perceived and judged. Such comparative assessments could be very direct, as when William Methwold described the Paraiyar caste group inhabiting parts of India’s Coromandel Coast as ‘the basest, most stinking, ill favoured people that I have seene, the inhabitants of Cape bona Esperanza [Cape of Good Hope] excepted’.15 Second, the modes of writing contained in the letters, memoirs, and diaries produced in Asian factories, as Chapter 2 will show, formed the direct continuation of the writing pioneered on early expeditions. Employed to describe different environments and reflective of more durable relations and interactions, they nonetheless ensued from the same traditions of oral and written communication. As a halfway point between pre-existing practices and the corporate writing cultures that came to be developed by the two Companies, accounts from the first generation of Dutch and English voyages thus represent a crucial link between the wider European production of ethnographic writings and the discourses about specific Asian people and societies in VOC and EIC documentation. A defining feature shared between various manuscript journals kept on early Dutch and English expeditions and published geographical surveys such as the Itinerario was the inclusion under separate subheadings of brief but systematic descriptions of places and their inhabitants.16 For instance, directly 15

16

Methwold worked as an EIC factor in Masulipatnam from 1618 to 1622 and wrote his account of Golkonda and neighbouring regions on the request of Samuel Purchas, who published it in 1626. After returning to India, Methwold served as president in Surat (1633–1638): W.H. Moreland (ed.), Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 19. Examples include: Journal of Jacob van Neck, 28 June 1600–25 July 1604: H.A. van Foreest and A. De Booy (eds.), De Vierde Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indië onder Jacob Wilkens en Jacob van Neck (1599–1604) (2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980–1981), I, 167–233; Diary of Hendrik Jansz. Craen, 25 November 1603–29 April 1606: De Jonge, Opkomst III, 164–204; Account of the voyage of Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff by Johan de Moelre: M.E. van Opstall (ed.), De Reis van de Vloot van Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff naar Azië

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after the description of his frightening first experience in Mossel Bay, Van der Does inserted a detailed ethnographic vignette captioned ‘Brief account of the inhabitants of Aguada de São Brás’.17 Starting from a physical description and moving on to dress and weaponry, this synopsis further included commentary on speech (the use of click consonants typical of Khoisan languages) and eating habits (the alleged consumption of raw intestines), the latter leading the author to restate his conjecture that the Khoisan ‘had to be man-eaters’.18 Of equal interest are the topics which the diarist singled out as insufficiently known to him to comment upon, namely Khoisan women, forms of habitation, and religious beliefs or ‘superstition’. It is evident that he designed his vignettes with specific categories in mind, given that his descriptions of people encountered on Madagascar, nearby Île Sainte-Marie, Enggano Island near Sumatra, as well as Java, Madura, and Bali, all followed similar patterns. Framed by a wider survey of landscapes, vegetation, and wildlife, such ethnographic portraits focused on physique, skin colour, hair type, bodily ornamentation, degrees of nudity, and styles of female and male dress. In addition, Van der Does methodically recorded observations about religious worship, the types and use of weapons, agriculture and commerce, housing, sexual and marriage practices, personal cleanliness, and other manners and customs.19 Absent from this list, but included by many other writers, were descriptions of foreign justice systems and forms of government. Both in shipboard journals and geographical accounts in print, recordings of observable phenomena were commonly interlaced with assessments of a moral nature, dotted across most texts in an unsystematic fashion yet linked structurally to the ethnographic profile of a people as a whole. Discursive similarities between published and manuscript sources were strengthened by the widespread public consumption of early accounts, a case in point being Willem Lodewycksz’s D’Eerste Boeck (1598), whose description of Banten contained extensive ethnographic commentary. ‘The Javanese are an obstinate, faithless, wicked, and murderous people’, one chapter begins, before making further claims about their alleged ruthlessness and bravery in warfare, extraordinary skill in stealing, and experience in deceit.20 The exaggerated nature of

17 18 19 20

1607–1612 (2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), I, 191–298; Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 1608–1617, Describing his experiences in Arabia, India, and the Malay Archipelago (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1905), 13, 74, 93, 103, 162. ‘Cort verhael van de Inwoonderen Aguado de Sambras’. Van der Does referred to the bay by its Portuguese name: De Jonge, Opkomst II, 301. ‘dat het menscheneeters moeten weesen’: Ibid. Ibid., 301, 308–309, 312–314, 317–318, 321–322, 324, 333–335, 342–343, 363. ‘De Javanen zijn een hartneckigh, ontrouw, boos ende mordadigh volck’: Rouffaer and IJzerman, De Eerste Schipvaart I, 117.

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such generalisations is evident, yet they offer useful indications of the cultural attitudes and concerns of their authors and audience. For instance, trust and treachery were also central to Lodewycksz’s later chapter about Banten’s native traders (‘the merchants are very cunning, fraudulent, feigned, and unfaithful to all strangers, though among themselves they fear doing the same’), thus revealing the apprehension which many agents felt when entering unfamiliar terrain.21 No matter in how crude a manner, publications of this type communicated a set of powerful messages about the challenges of trade in maritime Asia. They highlighted the uncertainties of the commercial enterprise, in terms of the dangers of the voyage itself and of friction with European and Asian antagonists.22 And they stressed the complexity of this commercial environment, characterised by a stunning variety of places and peoples, many of whom were more than capable of outwitting unwary newcomers. Not all ethnographic content was presented in the organised manner practised by Van der Does or Lodewycksz. Writers who did not order descriptions of foreign societies in separate sections usually included impressionistic characterisations as part of the running text, in a manner similar to the everyday ethnography found in later EIC and VOC correspondence. This form was common in most journals of early English expeditions, which were on the whole less systematic in recording ethnographic observations than their Dutch counterparts. Nevertheless, the kind of things Dutch and English observers chose to describe and the language they used to describe them were strikingly similar. The fleeting nature of many encounters meant that reporting focused chiefly on the hospitality received and the exchanges occurring in different locations, with the intention of informing future voyagers about risks and benefits. Examples of this are already present in reports concerning the first English expedition to Asia, which departed in 1591 under the command of James Lancaster. When halting at the largest of the Comoro islands, Edmund Barker recounts that the crew found it ‘exceeding full of people, which are Moores, of tawnie colour and good stature, but they be very trecherous, and diligently to be taken heed of’.23 Barker conveyed this assessment after some thirty Englishmen had been killed in a surprise attack, an incident that led a fellow crewmember to describe the Comorians as ‘blacke and very com[e]ly, but very treacherous and 21 22 23

‘De Coopluyden zijn seer erglistich, frauduleus, gheveijnst ende ontrou tegen alle vremdelinghen, doch tegen elcanderen vreesen zy sulcks te doen’: Ibid., 118. See for this argument with regard to shipwreck narratives: Richard Guy, ‘Calamitous Voyages: The Social Space of Shipwreck and Mutiny Narratives in the Dutch East India Company’, Itinerario 39.1 (2015), 117–140. William Foster (ed.), The Voyages of Sir Lames Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies 1591– 1603 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 5–6. The Comoros are situated northwest of Madagascar.

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cruell’.24 Accounts of the EIC’s First Voyage (1601) amplified the need for caution, reporting a mixture of skilful commercial practices and crafty dealings as observed from Madagascar to Aceh. For instance, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1603 claimed that merchants from the latter sultanate were ‘verye subtill and cunning in bargaining, and unconstant in all their words’.25 Only a few years later, the fullest attempt at ethnographic assessment by one of the first generation of EIC agents appeared in the form of Edmund Scott’s Exact Discourse (1606), presented to the Company’s Governor at the time, Sir William Romney, as an eyewitness account of ‘that rude and dangerous region’.26 Although failing to offer the exact survey of ‘the Subtilties, Fashishions [sic], Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians’ which the title promised, Scott’s numerous assertions about Javanese and Chinese character traits – pride, villainy, effeminacy, cowardice, and craftiness among them – provide a powerful digest of the popular Orientalist tropes current in this period.27 While reflecting the anxiety-ridden reality of early factory life in Banten, which was haunted by an extreme mortality rate and the spectre of arson, Scott’s account of his two-and-a-half-year stay (1603–1605) partook in a discourse that transcended the specifics of this time and place. Take for example his claim that ‘[t]he Chyneses are very craftie people in trading, using all kind of cosoning [cozening] and deceit which may possible be devised’ – a statement which was applied with little modification to Indian and other merchants by European writers before and after him.28 It is important to recognise that the prevalence of negative stereotyping did not drown out positive assessments. In August 1613, John Jourdain described 24 25

26

27

28

Ibid., 23. Both reports were published in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600). Ibid., 85, 115, 136 (quote). For the pamphlet: Anon, A True and Large Discourse of the Voyage of the Whole Fleete of Ships set Forth the 20 of Aprill 1601 by the Governours and Assistants of the East Indian Marchants in London to the East Indies (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1603). William Foster (ed.), The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas 1604–1606 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1943), 83. See: Edmund Scott, An Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashishions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians, as well Chyneses as Javans, there abiding and dweling (London: Walter Burre, 1606). Scott’s statements include: ‘the Javans and Chyneses, from the highest to the lowest, are all villaines’; ‘The Javan are generally exceeding proud’; ‘[the Chinese] are all very lasciviously given, both men and women’; ‘all the Javans in generall are badd paymasters when they are trusted. […] Likewise they are all much given to stealing’; ‘The Javans themselves are very dull and blockish’; ‘[The Chinese] are surely the most effeminate and cowardliest people that live […] They will steale and doe any kind of villanie to get wealth’. Foster, The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton, 124, 170, 173–174, 176. Ibid., 174.

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Makassar as ‘a very pleasant and fruitfull countrye, and the kindest people in all the Indias to strangers’; while regarding a visit to Madagascar in 1614, another diarist noted that ‘[i]n barginninge with theis people we fownde them to be very honest and trew’.29 Similar statements are found in Dutch documents, for instance a 1603 report which noted about Patani on the Malay Peninsula that ‘the inhabitants are so good that one cannot wish them to be better’.30 Yet positive judgements remained fewer in number than negative tropes and were not as consistently applied. Most importantly, they rarely turned into generalisations with the same kind of staying power.31 Again, this was something that English and Dutch Company writing had in common. Agents in the two organisations expressed similar cultural biases in equivalent vocabularies, their experiences framed by the same climate of high-risk enterprise and cutthroat competition. As the nature and geographical focus of VOC and EIC activities developed over time, the subject matter of Company discourses increasingly came to reflect such changes, allowing for a more varied spectrum of representations. Nevertheless, the formative influence of the routines of writing practised on the earliest eastbound expeditions continued to be evident in the discursive structures of later letters and reports.

Instructions: Cordiality and Caution

The Companies’ nascent ethnographic discourses not only reflected consolidating corporate attitudes; they also promoted centrally endorsed approaches towards cross-cultural contact. From the very first voyages, the directors and senior officials of the EIC and VOC issued general guidelines on how to interact with foreign peoples, both stressing the need for affable conduct and promoting an outlook of a priori distrust. Integrated in commissions to merchants and ship captains, these stipulations comprised the main instrument that Company leaderships employed to manage the expectations and attitudes which their agents brought to overseas encounters. Here too, the East India 29 Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 294; William Foster (ed.), The Voyage of Nicholas Downton to the East Indies 1614–15: As Recorded in Contemporary Narratives and Letters (London: Hakluyt Society, 1939), 58. 30 ‘d’inwoonders syn soo goet, dat men se nyet beter wenschen can’. Undated memoir, probably by Stalpaert van der Wiele, provided to the fleet of Steven van der Hagen (December 1603): De Jonge, Opkomst III, 154. 31 As an example of inconsistency, in a Dutch journal of 1601 the inhabitants of Patani are characterised as ‘een seer loos en boos hartneckigh volck’: Van Foreest and De Booy, De Vierde Schipvaart I, 255.

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Companies built on existing conventions. For example, Sebastian Cabot’s 1553 instruction had already urged English voyagers to approach cultural Others ‘with al gentleness, and curtesie’, but also to ‘goe in such order of strength, that you may be stronger then they’, and ‘not to credit the faire words of the strange people, which be many times tried subtile, and false’ – maxims which the EIC gave pride of place to in a uniform set of commissions produced fifty years later.32 Dutch instructions contained very similar directives, with VOC guidelines advancing the blueprint laid down by some of the voorcompagnieën. A prime exemplar was Balthasar de Moucheron’s 1598 instruction to Cornelis de Houtman, which ordered that trade was to be conducted without bloodshed, and that the crew should not cause offence to local peoples. However, as summed up by his command that ‘whatever you can obtain through friendship, you shall not pursue with force or violence’, De Moucheron’s stance, like that of the VOC later on, was pragmatic rather than idealist.33 His warning not to ‘trust upon the inhabitants of the country, nor let them come aboard bearing arms’ underscores how the pursuit of peaceful trade was enveloped by suspicion about strangers.34 Historians and social scientists tend to agree that trust and distrust are mechanisms for dealing with risk and uncertainty, which rest upon expectations about other people’s behaviour. On the one hand, trust is recognised as essential in facilitating cooperation and exchange, and indeed social relationships more widely. As such, strong incentives exist for initiating potentially beneficial new relationships. On the other hand, distrust is held to be prudent when the available information does not support the conclusion that the other party will not act in a manner that is detrimental to one’s interests.35 ‘To trust strangers’, as three leading social scientists put it, ‘is taking a risk that may end badly’.36 Such general 32 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations II, 202–203. 33 ‘al wat ghy met vrintschap sult kunnen becommen, daer en sult geen rigeur noch gewelt toe gebruiken’: Instruction to Cornelis de Houtman by Balthasar de Moucheron, March 1598: De Jonge, Opkomst I, 224. 34 ‘dan betraut v op den innewoners des lants niet, noch laetende deselue met geen geweere aen boort commen’: Ibid. Compare James Tracy’s argument that Europeans in Asia shared ‘the psychology of an interloper’, manifesting ‘anxieties that were proportional to the fragility of their own position in a vast and alien world’: James D. Tracy, ‘Introduction’, in: Tracy (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–21, at 9, 13. 35 Sztompka, Trust; Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness; Russell Hardin (ed.), Distrust (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004); Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 36 Karen S. Cook, Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin, ‘Introduction’, in: Karen S. Cook, Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin (eds.), Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), 1–14, at 1.

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insights help explain why commissions issued during the opening decade of EIC operations show a continuous commitment to the twin principles of cordiality and caution. Early instructions focused chiefly on the vital stopovers for refreshment, when crew members were at their most exposed and vulnerable. Captains were told to order men going ashore to ‘behaue them selues peaceablie and Ciuillie towardes the People of that place’ in order to better ‘p[ro]cure their ffreindshipp, towardes the supplie of yo[u]r wantes’.37 While regarding amicable relations as a precondition for trade, the Court of Committees thought that they offered insufficient grounds for security, hence warning commanders to ‘suspect all howe freindlie soeu[e]r they seeme’.38 Indeed, to prevent the loss of lives and assets, the leaders of EIC expeditions were to rely on precaution and discipline alone, constantly ‘doubtinge the worst and standing vpon yo[u]r guarde night and day in eu[e]ry place where you shall come w[i]thout yealdinge any trust to those People’.39 What started out as directives to ensure the health and safety of crews on the ocean passage was soon channelled into the Company’s guidance regarding purely commercial contacts. In 1610, the Court of Committees appointed Lawrence Femell as its chief agent in Surat with instructions to settle EIC business in this new factory in northwest India. ‘And for that Ciuell behauior is very Requisite for the begettinge of loue and estimacon amongst those heathenishe people’, article 12 of Femell’s commission read, the orderly government of the factory’s personnel would be of the utmost importance.40 Once again, the Company’s advice for dealings with ‘heathenishe people’ had a flip side, as seen in its guidelines for purchasing goods from Indian sellers. ‘[A]lthoughe wee knowe you are not ignoraunt what yt is to deale w[i]th people of faithlesse condicon’, the directors began, they thought it ‘not amisse’ to urge Femell to take special care that he bought only top-quality products.41 The mindset which Company directors strove to impart found clear echoes in the writings and actions of their servants in Asia. During the EIC’s Tenth Voyage (1612–1614), surgeon Ralph Standish recorded how Captain Thomas Best ordered the monthly proclamation at the mainmast that ‘everie man carie himselfe with sobriettie and meeknesse towards the people of the counttrey’.42 37

38 39 40 41 42

Commission for the Third Voyage, London, 9 March 1607: George Birdwood (ed.), The Register of Letters &c. of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies: 1600–1619 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), 243. This injunction was part of commissions since at least 1604. Compare: Birdwood, Register of Letters, 55, 243, 331, 400. Commission to David Middleton, London, 14 April 1609: Ibid., 303. Commission to Alexander Sharpie, London, 28 February 1608: Ibid., 243. Instruction to Lawrence Femell, London, March 1610: Ibid., 323. Ibid., 325. William Foster (ed.), The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies 1612–14 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), 92.

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Dutch journals also tell of instances when captains ordered crews to display compliant attitudes as a means of ingratiating themselves.43 Injunctions to beware of treachery were passed on with equal vigour, and here it is clear that recommendations were steeped in group-generalised distrust.44 Acknowledging their limited grasp of local conditions, the Court of Committees delegated to its chief men on the spot the responsibility for posting factors to different locations and providing them with advice on ‘how to Carrie themselues in those places’.45 In fulfilment of this requirement, James Lancaster produced several memorandums before sailing from Banten in 1603. In one of these, he admonished the agents dispatched to Banda to ‘trust none of the Indians for their bodies & soules be whollie treason’, adding that ‘yt will be very daungerous to touch in any vnknowne place’.46 Within a matter of years a rudimentary institutional memory had taken shape based on information flowing bottom up, top down, and horizontally. In 1607, Lancaster could base his warning to ‘trust no men aland’ in the Comoros on the knowledge that ‘the Fleminges have lost men t[h]rice in theis ilaundes, and I myself once’.47 The recollection of the latter incident – dating back to 1591, as discussed above – was sufficiently well-preserved for the royal ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to refer to it when passing the island group on his outward voyage to India in 1615, noting how the inhabitants of Mohéli had since been reputed ‘a falce and an unfaythfull people’.48 Crucially, the institutional transfer of claims and assumptions meant that, long before Company representatives set foot in a place, their outlook, expectations, and approaches had already been shaped by the record of past encounters and the key inferences drawn from them. 43

Leo Akveld (ed.), Machtsstrijd om Malakka: De Reis van VOC-Admiraal Cornelis Cornelisz. Matelief naar Oost-Azië, 1605–1608 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2013), 269. 44 For this concept: Russell Hardin, ‘Terrorism and Group-Generalized Distrust’, in: Hardin, Distrust, 278–297. 45 Commission to James Lancaster, London, 10 February 1601: Birdwood, Register of Letters, 7. 46 James Lancaster’s remembrance for Mr Keche, Banten, 12 February 1603: Ibid., 33. ­Compare: Ibid., 36. 47 Foster, The Voyages of Sir Lames Lancaster, 167. 48 William Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615–1619: As Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence (2nd ed. London: Humphrey Milford, 1926), 9. Mohéli is one of the three largest islands of this Indian Ocean archipelago, the others being Grande Comore and Anjouan. In June 1614, the Dutch merchant Pieter van den Broecke characterised the inhabitants of Anjouan as a ‘seer goedtardich ende compassieus volck’, but warned against the supposedly “cruel nature” of the people on Grande Comore: ‘dit volck is boos ende seer wreedt van nature, darom idereen wil gewaerschout hebben hun niet te licht te vertrouwen’: W. Ph. Coolhaas (ed.), Pieter van den Broecke in Azië (2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962–1963), I, 18, 20.

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The leading principles structuring early Company instructions had substantial staying power, serving as templates for guidelines issued for many decades to come. A text into which institutional experience, ethnographic assumptions, and the wider European cultural memory flowed seamlessly together is the instruction delivered to Abel Tasman upon his second voyage of exploration of New Guinea and Australia. Compiled in Batavia in January 1644, this document recounted the VOC’s previous encounters in the two regions before setting up its main advice: ‘Since it has been repeatedly experienced that New Guinea is inhabited by cruel, murderous people; and because it remains unclear what sort of people inhabit the southern lands [Australia], which may be presumed are not civilised and well-administered people, but raw, wild, and ferocious barbarians, one should always be armed and on one’s guard’.49 The profound manner in which ideas based on encounters in one location shaped anticipations regarding interactions elsewhere is further exemplified in the argumentation directly following. Referencing ‘the discovery of America and the Oriental countries’ to illustrate what was by now a familiar claim, the Governor-General and Councillors of the Indies asserted that ‘experience in all corners of the globe has shown that barbarian nations are not to be trusted’.50 Their instruction to treat local inhabitants amicably and pass over small affronts without retaliation drew on equally global precedents, in this case VOC policy regarding encounters in southern Africa and the North Pacific.51 This example clearly shows how a trading company employed the ethnographic language of civility and barbarism to process information about and direct interactions in a wide range of contact zones. Like the methods of recording themselves, then, the concepts and categories used by Company agents to denote and explain their impressions highlight their indebtedness to and participation in the wider early modern European culture of describing the world. While most Company agents simply presented as facts what they regarded to 49

‘vermits (als bovengemelt) diversche maelen bevonden is, dat Nova Guinea van wreede, moordadige menschen is bewoont, en onseecker blijft, met wat soort van menschen de Zuijderlanden bevolct zijn, dat te presumeren is, geen geciviliseerde noch gepoliceerde lieden, maer rouwe, wilde, woeste barbaren sijn, waeromme altijt wel gewapent, en op hoede wesen moet’: Instruction for Abel Tasman and Frans Jacobsz. Visscher, Batavia, 29 January 1644: R. Posthumus Meyjes (ed.), De Reizen van Abel Janszoon Tasman en Franchoys Jacobszoon Visscher ter nadere ontdekking van het Zuidland in 1642/3 en 1644 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919), 177. 50 ‘bij experientie in alle gewesten des Aert cloots bevonden is, geene barbare natien te vertrouwen zijn’; ‘int ontdecken van America en d’Orientaelse landen’: Ibid. 51 Akveld, Machtsstrijd om Malakka, 269; Instruction to Mathijs Quast, Batavia, 1 June 1639: J. Verseput (ed.), De Reis van Mathijs Hendriksz. Quast en Abel Jansz. Tasman ter Ontdekking van de Goud- en Zilvereilanden (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 87.

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be the collective character of certain ethnic groups, they could do so credibly because they echoed ideas presented not just in other Company records, but in widely read works of travel and cosmography as well. To fully appreciate the significance of the often sketchy references to a people’s perceived nature in Company writing, therefore, we must turn to the scholarly paradigms from which they derived their meaning and authority. The remainder of this chapter will do so by surveying Company writing’s engagement with the framework of civility and barbarism, the concept of despotism, and the humoural language of disposition and complexion, as well as its application of ethnic and religious labels and stereotypes.

Civility and Barbarism

One of the greatest intellectual challenges early modern European thinkers confronted was how to conceptualise the human variety encountered since the Renaissance voyages of exploration. The wealth of new information about hitherto unknown peoples posed pressing questions about human nature and the relationship of all humans to one another. In their varied responses, most commentators endeavoured to explain newly observed phenomena by assimilating them into the familiar canon of knowledge.52 As the work of JoanPau Rubiés and others has made clear, late medieval and early modern commentaries on human variety were expressed in a ‘language of civility’ which ‘operated through categories of savagery, or barbarism, and rationality’.53 This language betrayed the long shadow of the Greco-Roman tradition, particularly the ­Aristotelian analytical framework, which laid the foundations of Renaissance ethnography.54 Aristotle had argued that humans are distinguished from animals because they possess reason, the capacity to tell right from wrong, and 52

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Classic studies on this topic include: John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492– 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Michael T. Ryan, ‘Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981), 519–538; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man; Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology’, in: Ibid., Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007), 157–197, at 171. Also see: Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. W.G.L. Randles, ‘“Peuples savages” et “états despotiques”: la pertinence, au XVIe siècle, de la grille aristotélicienne pour classer les nouvelles sociétés révélées par les Découvertes au Brésil, en Afrique et en Asie’, Mare Liberum 3 (1991), 299–307.

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speech. Being civil – that is, truly human – meant actualising one’s rational potential. To attain this ideal, Aristotle believed, civil people are naturally predisposed towards life in the city (polis), the urban political community in which citizens are free.55 He maintained that civilised societies possessed a specific set of cultural assets: first, an urban infrastructure, political organisation, and laws; and second, arts, crafts, and education. The opposite of the civil, rational man was the barbarian, who lived outside the political community or whose social organisation was lawless. In their failure to master their passions, barbarians were coarse, brutish, and barely different from animals. Indeed, Aristotle suggested that some barbarians were by nature slaves, destined to serve because they lacked the true reason needed to govern themselves.56 Like many Classical authors, Aristotle held that human variety was conditioned by environmental differences. According to this line of thought, the Greeks inhabited an intermediate zone between the cold North and hot Asia, and hence lived under the best conditions to thrive as a free people. In contrast, ‘the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery.’57 Aristotle’s assertion underpins a set of long-lived stereotypes about “Easterners”, namely that they are servile, cowardly, and effeminate as a result of their social and geographic environment.58 Early modern ethnography inherited the cultural images of servile Asians and brutish barbarians, at times conflating the two in explanations based on climate theories or ideas about civil government. For instance, the sixteenthcentury French cosmographer Louis Le Roy invoked Aristotle to demonstrate that moderate climates had a positive impact on people’s manners and understanding, while extreme heat or cold led to barbarism.59 Civil people, he 55

Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the Present (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 3–5; Peter Hallberg and Björn Wittrock, ‘From Koinonìa Politikè to Societas Civilis: Birth, Disappearance and First Renaissance of the Concept’, in: Peter Wagner (ed.), The Languages of Civil Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 28–51, at 31. 56 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 18–19, 67–74. On the natural slave: Aristotle, Politics, I 1254b–1255a. On the barbarian as natural slave: Politics I 1252b, 5–9. On man’s difference from animals: Politics I 1253a, 1–18. References are to: Aristotle, Stephen Everson (ed.), The Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 57 Aristotle, Politics, VII 1327b, 27–29. 58 Unsurprisingly, these ideas were developed in direct opposition to the Greek self-image. See: Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 59 Louis le Roy, De la vicissitvde ov variete des choses en l’vnivers, et concvrrence des armes et des lettres par les premieres et plus illustres nations du monde, depuis le temps où à

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­ aintained, live permanently in houses in towns, cultivate the earth, produce m crafts, have a monetary economy, and establish well-ordered social institutions such as a legal system, government, religion, institutions of learning, and a disciplined army.60 The historian and geographer Pierre d’Avity expanded on the concept of barbarism.61 The five categories he singled out for discussion comprised religion, diet, clothing, habitation, and government. D’Avity’s scheme shows that, to different degrees, barbarism was associated with idolatry, cannibalism, nudity, nomadism, and with the absence of agriculture, religious worship, and political and legal organisation. Each of these phenomena, as he saw it, ‘stray extraordinarily from right reason’, the latter being associated with the existence of laws and social institutions, from which the flourishing of arts, science, industry, and commerce were deemed to follow.62 Analyses of this kind represent concerted efforts to make sense of newly available reports about foreign societies by bringing them into agreement with the Aristotelian framework. Yet the applicability of the classification scheme went beyond works of formal cosmography. As observed in the journals kept on early Company voyages, corporate information gathering included an explicit focus on what were widely regarded as key indicators for assessing civility or barbarism: political and social organisation, religious ceremonies, housing, dress, and diet. Furthermore, instructions such as those to Abel Tasman demonstrate the tangible consequences which assessments of foreign societies carried. Batavia’s blanket warning ‘that barbarian nations are not to be trusted’ is strongly reminiscent of d’Avity’s reference to ‘the infidelity natural to barbarians’, or indeed Thomas Palmer’s piece of travel advice that ‘barbarous people are neuer good faithfull friends, but for their profit, being euer wauering and treacherous’.63 Moreover, d’Avity’s Aristotelian claim that b­ arbarous people –

60 61 62

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c­ ommencé la ciuilité, & mémoire humaine iusques à present (Paris: Pierre l’Huilier, 1575), 11. An English edition of the work appeared in 1594. Ibid., 12–13. See also: Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 199–200. Pierre d’Avity, Les Estats, Empires, et Principautez du Monde (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, 1613). This work went through numerous editions, including translations into English (1615) and Dutch (1621). ‘on doit estimer barbares ceux dont les façons & coustumes s’eloignent extraordinairement de la droite raison’: d’Avity, Les Estats, Empires, 318. To cite one example, d’Avity postulated that members of non-agricultural societies ‘mangent comme bestes ce que la terre produit d’elle mesme’, concluding that ‘il faut que la nourriture sauuage soit suiuie d’vne complexion & nature sauuage’: Ibid., 319. ‘l’infidelité naturelle aux barbares’: d’Avity, Les Estats, Empires, 986; Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes hovv to make our Trauailes, into forraine Countries, the more profitable and honourable (London: Mathew Lownes, 1606), 61. In his discussion of sixteenth-century ethnographic accounts of the Americas, Anthony Pagden notes that ‘the ill-­treatment

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like beasts – should be ‘tamed by force’ represented the same kind of thinking which underpinned the Hoge Regering’s order that lands with ‘barbaric inhabitants’ should be ‘taken possession of’.64 In contrast, this same governing body instructed captains coming upon ‘any land populated by civil people’ that they should try to establish profitable trade relations.65 Since it was in societies that appeared as civil and rational by European standards that Company leaderships expected greater security and better commercial opportunities, they promoted usage of the ‘yardstick of civility’ as a corporate tool for profit and risk assessment.66 EIC accounts confirm how deeply the theoretical language of civility pervaded eyewitness attempts at ethnographic classification. Following his stopover at the Cape of Good Hope in 1612, the surgeon Ralph Standish described this location in his journal as ‘a connttrey verie temperatt; but the people bruitt and savadg, withoutt religion, without languag, without lawes or government, without manners or humanittie, and last of all withoutt apparell’.67 Having denied the inhabitants’ humanity, it was a small step to portraying them as having ‘faces like an appe or babownne’ and as being ‘both beastlie and fillthye to behould’.68 With small variations, the same trope appeared in numerous other accounts of southern Africa. A journal kept onboard the New Year’s Gift noted that the Khoisan lived ‘without any lawe or religione, but doo live like brute beastes’,69 while Captain Jourdain in 1608 surmised that ‘the world doth not yield a more heathenish people and more beastlie’.70 Comparing a way of life to that of brute beasts was to denounce it in the strongest terms as uncivil and devoid of reason. The analogy was widely employed in early modern geographical literature, enjoying a long pedigree and pan-European appeal.71 Among of visitors’ was ‘held to be a characteristic of all barbarous people’: Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 25. 64 ‘Aristote mesme dit que tels hommes doiuent estre pris comme des bestes, & domptez par force’: d’Avity, Les Estats, Empires, 322; ‘barbare inwoonderen’; ‘possessie nemen’: Posthumus Meyjes, De Reizen van Abel Janszoon Tasman, 179. 65 ‘eenigh land gepopuleert met civile menschen’: Ibid., 177. 66 Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Colour Prejudice and the Yardstick of Civility: The Initial Dutch Confrontation with Black Africans, 1590–1635’, in: Robert Ross (ed.), Racism and Colonialism (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1982), 33–54. 67 Foster, The Voyage of Thomas Best, 100. 68 Ibid. 69 Foster, The Voyage of Nicholas Downton, 43. 70 Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 15. 71 For instance, Marco Polo described various peoples as living like wild beasts because they appeared to him as having no ruler or law, or as practising cannibalism: Ronald Latham (ed.), The Travels of Marco Polo (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958), 253, 257–258, 329.

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the classic works of Renaissance ethnography, the trope is found (amongst others) in Leo Africanus, Linschoten, and Samuel Purchas, whose uses again focused on the supposed lack of religious or secular laws for regulating social organisation.72 As for Jourdain, his ethnographic observations about the Cape of Good Hope region inspired musings about colonial policy: ‘[I]f this countrye were inhabited by a civell nation, haveinge a castle or forte for defence’, he recorded in his diary, it might within a few short years be able ‘to furnish all shipps refreshinge’.73 It was exactly such reasoning which motivated the VOC to found its Cape colony just over four decades later.74 Unequivocally employed in describing African or Pacific peoples, the concept of barbarism was used in a more ambivalent manner in relation to South Asia. Here too, Company agents might witness scarcely clad people practising what they perceived as idolatry, yet what struck observers even more were the power and riches of polities such as the Mughal Empire. Its large cities, impressive architecture, abundance of commodities, trade, and written culture, as well as its complex political structure, all conformed to European ideals of civility. In the words of one appreciative English observer, Surat’s inhabitants were ‘quiet, peaceable, very subtill; civill, and vniuersallie gouerned vnder one King’, even if ‘diuersly law’d and customed’.75 However, if in various respects the most powerful Asian states were seen as equalling or surpassing European societies, a conspicuous exception was their allegedly despotic form of rule. ‘Their government is in […] a barbarous kind’, Captain William Hawkins declared about the Mughals, singling out its ‘cruell exacting’ upon the inhabitants.76 His successor as English envoy at the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe, likewise denounced the Mughal political structure, describing it as ‘uncertayne,

72

Leo Africanus, John Pory (trans.), A Geographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie (London: George Bishop, 1600), 42; Kern, Itinerario I, 20–21, 84; Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages (London: Henrie Fetherstone, 1613), 537. 73 Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 18. 74 The founder of the Dutch fortress in Table Bay, Jan van Riebeeck, advised the Heren XVII in 1651 that the Khoisan ‘are a savage set, living without conscience, and therefore the Fort should be rendered tolerably defensible’: Donald Moodie (ed.), The Record; or, A Series of Official Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Tribes of South Africa, Part I: 1649–1720 (Cape Town: A.S. Robertson, 1838), 5. 75 C[hristoper] F[arewell], An East-India Colation; Or, A Discourse of Travels (London: B[enjamin] A[llen] and T[homas] F[awcett], 1633), 39. 76 William Foster (ed.), Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 114.

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without written law, without policye, the customes mingled with barbarism’.77 Such judgements were based in large part on the perceived status of subjects under absolute rule. In other words, at the opposite extreme of the barbarous society without any form of recognised authority, Europeans located the construct of a likewise barbarous state whose rulers wielded unlimited power.

Despotism

With their characterisations of the Mughal political system, Hawkins, Roe, and a whole range of other EIC and VOC representatives, up to and including Pieter van Dam, built upon and lent empirical support to a tradition of conceptualising what would become known as Oriental despotism.78 As part of the cluster of ideas concerning civility and barbarism, the concept of despotism was likewise anchored in Aristotelian thought. Aristotle had defined despotic rule as closely resembling tyranny, yet being both legal and hereditary – that is, as a political system enabled by the differences in human nature caused by geography: ‘For foreigners, being more servile in character than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government.’79 Put differently, despotic governments existed in a mutually sustaining relationship with their subjects because of the innate character of the ruled: ‘Such kingships have the nature of tyrannies because the people are by nature slaves’.80 This theory provided the basic components of many early modern analyses of “Oriental” states: a system of rule in which the king reigns in an absolute and arbitrary manner, as does a tyrant, yet is at no risk of being overthrown because his subjects consent to slavery. Since it was presumed natural for rational, civil men to strive for political freedom, servile natures were by definition associated with barbarism.81 Sixteenth-century theorists such as Louis Le Roy, Jean Bodin, and Giovanni Botero took up the concept of a government over slaves in order to explain 77 78

Thomas Roe to James I, Ajmer, 29 January 1616: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 102. On the history of this concept: Richard Koebner, ‘Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14.3–4 (1951), 275–302; Aslı Çırakman, ‘From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened Image of the Turks’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 33.1 (2001), 49–68; Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu’, Journal of Early Modern History 9.2 (2005), 109–180. 79 Aristotle, Politics III, 1285a, 17–22. 80 Ibid., III, 1285a, 22–24. 81 Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 18–19.

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what they saw as distinctive in a number of contemporary polities, including the Ottoman Empire, Muscovy, and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.82 In these texts, despotism was not presented in an entirely negative light. Indeed, Bodin in his Six Livres de la République (1576) emphasised that the illegitimate form of government in which monarchs oppress involuntary subjects was tyranny, not despotic rule.83 However, in seventeenth-century usage the contrast between despotic and tyrannical rule became obscured as writers started to deploy both concepts synonymously.84 The fact that the term ‘affato despotico’, which Botero used to describe the power of the Ottoman Sultan, was rendered as ‘meerely tyrannicall’ in Robert Johnson’s translation, captures this blurring of the theoretical distinction.85 Indeed, Botero’s claim that ‘the great Turk is so absolute a Lord of all things contayned within the bounds of his dominions, that the inhabitants doe account themselues his slaues, not his subiects’ would have ensured that, for English readers, the key features of despotism – absolute power and servility – were connected to the understanding of the Ottoman state as a tyranny.86 In another telling case of conflated meanings, Johnson used the phrase ‘barbarous princes’ to translate Botero’s ‘prencipi orientali’.87 As connotations belonging to despotic and tyrannical rule, and to barbarism and “the Orient”, became increasingly entangled and amalgamated, eyewitness observers were left with ample stereotypes to draw from when narrating firsthand impressions. Lucette Valensi has demonstrated that eyewitness reports by Venetian ambassadors to Istanbul played a defining role in the early modern development of the concept of despotism.88 Whilst the Ottoman Empire was the 82

Louis le Roy, Enseignements d’Isocrates et Xenophon autheurs ancien tres excellens. Pour bien regner en paix & en guerre (Paris: Vascosan, 1568), 46, 377; Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1576), book II, 234–235; Giovanni Botero, Robert Johnson (trans.), The Travellers Breviat, or An Historicall Description of the Most Famous Kingdoms in the World (London: John Jaggard, 1601). 83 Bodin, Les Six Livres, book II, 234. Bodin translated Aristotle’s adjective ‘despotikos’ – in medieval Europe rendered in Latin as ‘despoticus’ and in French as ‘despotique’ – as ‘seigneuriale’: Koebner, ‘Despot and Despotism’, 277–285. 84 Mario Turchetti, ‘’Despotism’ and ‘Tyranny’: Unmasking a Tenacious Confusion’, European Journal of Political Theory 7.2 (2008), 159–182. 85 The full passage in Italian is cited in: Lucette Valensi, Arthur Denner (trans.), The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 95. 86 Botero, The Travellers Breviat, 40. 87 Ibid., 140. See: Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 296. 88 Ambassadorial accounts attest to Venetian fascination with the grandeur of the empire and power of the sultan, which reminds us that absolute rule did not invariably meet with scorn from European observers: Valensi, Birth of the Despot, 23–40.

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foreign model most often referred to, the importance of travel accounts on India, China, Russia, and a number of other locations can hardly be overstated. Botero in particular based his comparative political and ethnological theories on travel writing about a wide range of contemporary states, including the Mughal Empire and the South Indian Vijayanagara Empire.89 Regarding the Mughal emperors, he noted that ‘[t]hey are all tyrants, and to preserue their estate, and induce submissiue awednes, they hold hard hands ouer the comminaltie, committing all gouernment into the holds of soldiers’.90 In comparable terms, he described the ruler of Vijayanagara as an ‘absolute Lord of the bodies and goods of his subiects, which he shareth to himselfe and his captaines, leauing the people nothing but their hands and labour’. The idea that Indian rulers ‘maintaine not peace and iustice’ as the foundation of their states, but relied entirely on military strength to hold sway over timorous subjects lacking private property, represented the dominant narrative frame in seventeenth-century European analyses of South Asian polities. This is seen most famously in the celebrated account of Mughal India by the French physician and traveller François Bernier.91 If the contributions of VOC and EIC representatives were more indirect, they were nonetheless of vital importance for supplying the empirical material upon which theoretical surveys drew.92 For Company writers themselves, the concept of despotism seems to have functioned partly as a filter through which they perceived South Asian governments, and partly as a cluster of stereotypes to which they turned when explaining their observations. An example of concrete policy recommendations framed by the discourse of absolute rule is found in the oldest VOC report on trade conditions in northwest India, written by Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn in 1615. Sent to Surat to investigate the possibilities for establishing a Dutch factory there, Van Ravesteyn warned against what he regarded as the extortionate and imperious comportment of Mughal governors, who in his view ruled over the local community 89 On Botero and southern India: Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 294–300. 90 Botero, The Travellers Breviat, 111. 91 Ibid., 140. See: François Bernier, Histoire de la Dernière Revolution des Etats du Grand Mogol etc. (2 vols. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670–1671). 92 One such survey was the encyclopedic Compleat Geographer (1709), which defined Mughal government as ‘Absolute’ and its subjects as ‘profoundly Submissive to their Governors; Timourous and Cowardly to their Enemies, and mean spirited in their common actions’: Anon, The Compleat Geographer: Or, The Chorography and Topography Of all the known Parts of the Earth (3rd ed. London: Awnsham and John Churchill and Timothy Childe, 1709), II, 91.

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‘like absolute kings’.93 To explain the behaviour he accused them of, the Dutch factor claimed that Mughal officials were transferred between posts annually and hence had little incentive to care for the common good, using their short stints only to fill their pockets by whatever means possible.94 Because agreements made with previous governors were commonly disregarded by their successor, he told his superiors, it would be necessary for the Company to obtain general trading rights directly from the emperor. Even then, Van Ravesteyn suggested, such imperial decrees (farmans) offered no firm guarantees as the stipulations contained in them were frequently disregarded in practice.95 Because of the constant stream of complaints about local dignitaries acting in violation of the emperor’s farmans, James Tracy has rejected the idea that VOC agents in Surat regarded Mughal government as absolute.96 However, whilst Company servants certainly recognised that, in practice, Mughal emperors were not all-powerful, by defining what they regarded as ‘tyrannical rule’ at the local level as the product of an imperial system in which all property devolved to the ruler, Van Ravesteyn and others made it clear that both phenomena were in fact perceived as two sides of the same coin.97 Variations on Van Ravesteyn’s account are found in the two Remonstranties by Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh (c. 1625) and Francisco Pelsaert (c. 1627), respectively, which contain characterisations of Mughal governors as corrupt and covetous, uncertain of their lives and lands, and liable to pervert the course of justice. ‘Concerning their laws, few or none are upheld, as they all rule absolutely’, as Pelsaert put it.98 Hawkins defined the authority of the emperor in equally pithy terms: ‘All the lands in his monarchie are at his disposing, who giveth and taketh at his pleasure’.99 Rights of succession, the 93

‘regeeren de governeurs genoech als absolute coninghen’: Remonstrance about the present state of Surat by Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn, 22 October 1615: H. Terpstra, De Opkomst der Westerkwartieren van de Oost-Indische Compagnie (Suratte, Arabië, Perzië) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), 207. 94 Ibid., 207–209. On average, the term in office of a town governor in seventeenth-century Surat lasted two years: M.P. Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire, 1556–1707: An Administrative-cum-Economic Study (New Delhi: Adam Publishers, 1985), 195–196. 95 Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 207–213. 96 Tracy, ‘Asian Despotism?’. 97 ‘de onredelijcke tijraniege regeeringe deses governeurs’: Diary Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn, 6 October 1615, in: Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 190. 98 ‘Wegen hare rechten, wordender weynich oft geene gehanthaeft, dan heerschen alle absolut’: Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 251, 305 (quote); Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 17–18, 38–39, 53. 99 Foster, Early Travels, 112.

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ruler’s power and income, and the justice system were among the key topics on which Company leaderships gathered information. Though originally compiled as corporate tools for understanding commercial environments, these descriptions were ideally suited to theoretical abstraction. For instance, Hawkins had framed his passing remarks about the jagirdar system – the temporary allotment of lands to nobles for purposes of administration and revenue collection – in terms of arbitrariness and cruelty, suggesting that its built-in rotations caused a lack of security to Mughal landholders and therefore inevitably led to excessive exploitation of the population.100 Within a few years, views of this kind would be synthesised by the Dutch geographer and director of the West-Indische Compagnie, Joannes De Laet, whose learned De Imperio Magni Mogolis (1631) provided lasting authority for the idea that Mughal government was ‘purely tyrannical’.101 Centring on the suppositions that ‘the will of the Emperor is held to be law’ and that ‘the king is the sole master of the whole kingdom, and gives estates at his will to his subjects, or takes them away again’, De Laet’s characterisation of the Mughal Empire was repeated verbatim in the Dutch vernacular in Johan van Twist’s description of Gujarat, first published in 1638 and reprinted multiple times both as a separate text and as part of Isaac Commelin’s Begin ende Voortgangh (1645–1646).102

100 101

102

Ibid., 114. J.S. Hoyland and S.N. Banerjee (eds.), The Empire of the Great Mogol: a Translation of De Laet’s “Description of India and Fragment of Indian History” (Bombay: Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1928), 94. A Dutch manuscript version of the first eight chapters of De Laet’s book exists as the ‘Beschryvinge van Indien, ofte van het gebied des grooten magols’. It seems likely that this little-known manuscript, which may have been prepared by or for the geographer, formed the basis for the Latin translation: NL-HaNA, VOC 4904. The Dutch text read: ‘Voorts is dit een rijck vol tijrannie: want de wijl de coninc alleen heer is van al het lant, so geeft hij & neemt na sijn believen die van sijn ondersaten’: Ibid., f. 28. As has been established before, the second part of De Laet’s book is based on Francisco Pelsaert’s chronicle of Mughal history, while the sections on Mughal society and government draw on Pelsaert’s Remonstrantie: NL-HaNA, VOC 4905 and 4906. Hoyland and Banerjee, The Empire of the Great Mogol, 94. Compare: ‘hier sijn geen geschreven wetten/ als alleenelijcke den wil van den Prins/ die onwederspreeckelijcke wert aenghenomen’ and ‘Voorts is sijn Rijck vol Tyrannij/ want de wijle den Coninck alleen Heer is/ soo neemt ende geeft hy naer sijn believen ’t Lant aen sijn Onderdaenen’: Johan van Twist, Generale Beschrijvinghe van Indien ende in ’t besonder van ’t Coninckrijck van Guseratten, staende onder de beheersinge van den Groot Machtighen Coninck Chaiahan: anders genaemt den grooten Mogor (Batavia: 1638), 18. Large chunks of Van Twist’s “General Description of India” are direct translations from De Laet (e.g. Chapters 1 and 15), while many other sections are composed of digests of information from Geleynssen de Jongh’s Remonstrantie (e.g. chapters 20–21, 27–31, 33, 35).

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The availability of an entrenched set of stereotypes to describe Asian governments lent greater uniformity to descriptions written across time and geographical contexts, a development amplified by the logic of Company writing. Hence it could happen that a Dutch agent in Mocha (al-Mukha in Yemen) complained about ‘governors who, not knowing whether they will be continued from one year to the next, seek nothing but to fill their pots’, in what reads like an exact reproduction of Van Ravensteyn’s depiction of Mughal office-holders.103 A similar trend is evident in published accounts, from Methwold’s report on the sultanate of Golkonda – which features local governors extorting and oppressing the local population like ‘petty kings’104 – to Robert Knox’ description of the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy, which qualified Rajasinha II’s reign as ‘Tyrannical and Arbitrary in the highest degree’.105 Still more pertinent is the perpetuation of stereotypical views within corporate discourses. Nowhere was the institutionalisation of ideas and images more clearly embodied than in Van Dam’s monumental Beschryvinge, commissioned by the Heren XVII in 1693 and completed in 1701 (with some further additions up to 1704). As secretary of the VOC, Van Dam spent more than fifty years attending every meeting of the Heren XVII, examining all incoming letters, and composing all draft replies to Batavia. When this master of the Company archive produced the sections of his work that dealt with Mughal India, he copied Van Ravesteyn’s remarks about Surat almost verbatim, while lifting other passages directly from Geleynssen.106 Van Dam’s account of the Mughal state as one whose ruler was master over his subjects’ lives and goods, as we have seen in the Introduction, represented the summation of the received knowledge available to the Heren XVII around 1700. As Susanne Friedrich has argued, information included in the Beschryvinge ‘was frozen in time as permanently valid’, part of ‘a general depository that was easily applicable to concrete cases’ and thereby intended to equip the Heren XVII with ‘all the knowledge needed to run the company’.107 Even after the best part of a century, writings from the formative stage of Dutch activity in South Asia thus continued to receive the stamp of institutional authority.

103

‘gouverneurs alhier die nijet wetende oft naeste jaer sal gecontinueert werden anders nijet en soect dan syn pot vol te schrapen’: Willem de Milde to Amsterdam, Mocha, 6 September 1621: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 37r. 104 Moreland (ed.), Relations of Golconda, 11. 105 Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies (London: Richard Chiswell, 1681), 43. Italics in original. 106 Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 12–13, 71. Cf. Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 207–208; Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 67–68. 107 Friedrich, ‘Caveat From the Archive’, 5, 7–8.

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Character and Complexion

If the language of civility and barbarism supplied the criteria used to classify a society and its members, and the concept of despotic rule endorsed stereotypes of Asians as tyrannical yet submissive, the discourse of humouralism underpinned the belief that one could reliably define a people’s “nature”.108 From Edmund Scott to Pieter van Dam, Company writing abounds in claims about the shared character of certain ethnic groups. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, prescriptive texts such as the VOC’s instructions for the writing of reports actively encouraged the assessment of people in collective terms, following a trend set by contemporary travel advice literature. Works of political theory such as Bodin’s Six Livres (1576) and instructions for travellers such as Palmer’s Essay of the Meanes (1606) demonstrate the unremitting appeal of the medical theory concerning the four bodily fluids or humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile or choler) as an explanation for variations in people’s mental and physical traits.109 Indeed, it was because bodily features could be considered signs of character that Palmer listed height, skin tone, and body shape among the ‘discouerer[s] of the peoples nature’.110 A similar premise may well have been a factor behind Company writers’ attention to the physical appearance of the men and women they encountered, including their use of terms such as ‘well proportioned’ and ‘well limbed’ to describe them.111 Based on the founding texts of Hippocrates (Airs, Waters, Places) and Galen (On Complexions), humoural theory held that different environments cause different combinations of the four humours and the four qualities (hot, cold, moist, and dry), together making up what were called “complexions”. Each complexion was thought to produce certain physical, mental, and moral characteristics in a person.112 Although this constitution was unique to each individual, groups of people living under the same climatic conditions were believed to develop similar complexions. For instance, classical humouralism maintained that the complexion produced in hot and dry places caused black skin, curly 108

See the claim that ‘in sixteenth-century England humoralism is ethnology’: Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12. 109 Bodin stressed that rulers should ‘apply the forme of a Commonweale to the diuersity of mens humors’, devoting a chapter to ‘the meanes how to discouer the nature and disposition of the people’: Jean Bodin, Richard Knolles (trans.), The Six Bookes of a Common-Weale (London: G. Bishop, 1606), V, 545. 110 Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes, 77. 111 Barbour, The Third Voyage Journals, 202; Foster, The Voyage of Nicholas Downton, 57. 112 Lynn Thorndyke, ‘De Complexionibus’, Isis 49.4 (1958), 398–408.

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hair, timidity, physical weakness, and sharp intellects, whereas the complexion produced by a cold and moist environment resulted in white skin, smooth hair, bodily strength, boldness, and dull wits. Predictably, the ideal complexion was held to be a moderate one, resulting in a well-proportioned body and a wellbalanced mix of character traits.113 Many early modern travellers appealed to humoural knowledge to explain or endorse beliefs and observations, even if their claims were usually detached from theoretical underpinnings. A case in point is Linschoten’s discussion of the Hindu practice of sati, the immolation of widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husband. Attributing its origin to the supposed tendencies of Indian women to loose sexual conduct and mariticide, the justification the Dutchman offered was that ‘they are very lecherous and inconstant both by nature and complexion’.114 While the original medical connotation of “complexion” strictly indicated a person’s combination of humours, from the sixteenth century onwards the term’s meaning shifted to denote also a person’s skin tone.115 This mixture of meanings can be traced in Company writing, where characterisations of people as ‘average-sized persons, but of strong complexions, hard natures, [and] brown-skinned’ are found alongside descriptions such as ‘[o]f stature and complexion tall and black’.116 Likewise, the term “humours” increasingly came to be applied to refer to people’s temperament or disposition, used interchangeably with terms such as aert (character or nature) by Company writers.117 Recent studies have drawn attention to the changing understanding of complexion as part of the racialisation of human difference, the beginnings of which they locate in the decades around 1600. It was in this period, Valentin Groebner has 113 114 115

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Ibid., 402; Joseph Ziegler, ‘Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-Racism 1200–1500’, in: Miriam Eliav-Feldon et al. (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181–199, at 183–185. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Discours of Voyages into ye East & West Indies (London: Iohn Wolfe, 1598), 71. Compare: ‘zy seer luxurieus ende onkuys van natueren ende complexien zijn’: Kern, Itinerario I, 166. Valentin Groebner, ‘Complexio/Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250–1600’, in: Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds.), The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 361–383; Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007), Ch. 5. The statements are from Van der Does about the Javanese (‘het syn middelmatige parsoonen, maer sterck van complexie, herdt van naeture, bruyn van vell’) and Edward Dods­ worth on the inhabitants of Madagascar: De Jonge, Opkomst II, 333; Foster, The Voyage of Nicholas Downton, 73. For instance: ‘aert ofte humeuren’: Kolff and Van Santen (eds.), De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 355.

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argued, that the formerly variable notion of complexion became increasingly applied ‘as a “natural”, congenital, and immutable category’ for the description of physical variation.118 Likewise, Mary Floyd-Wilson has pointed out that older humoural theory was ingeniously reworked in early modern England to accommodate ‘the ongoing construction of modern racial categories’.119 The discursive twists that were required to construct an image of northern civility and southern incivility – used to justify colonialism and slavery – were often at odds with classical humouralism. To solve such inconsistencies, Floyd-Wilson argues, conflicting elements in the Hippocratic and Aristotelian heritage were smoothed out and brought into agreement with recent ethnographic accounts.120 Skin colour had always counted as a sign within the traditional system of humouralism, yet in early modern Europe its meanings were increasingly mapped onto prevailing understandings of civility and barbarism. Among the first to articulate a colour-coded hierarchy was the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, whose late sixteenth-century writings drew a sharp line between peoples he classified as black – including Indians – and white, including the Chinese and Japanese. The former he regarded as base, servile, and ignorant, and therefore not offering the high hopes of conversion which he entertained for the latter, whom he esteemed more civil and rational.121 The criteria underpinning Valignano’s classification remained in large part religious and cultural. Thus, he excluded Indian Muslims from the group of black people in which he placed the Indian gentiles, and he supported his observations on Hindu character with reference to the traditional authority on civility: Aristotle.122 Nevertheless, his grading of civility corresponded to a racial hierarchy, with nudity and lack of refinement being paired with blackness. Valignano in 1580 was also the first to put in writing the hierarchical classification which ranked the mixed-race subjects of the Estado da Índia according to their degree of Portuguese ancestry. This model, whose terminology was to be adopted by the 118 Groebner, Who Are You?, 139. 119 Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race, 3. 120 Ibid., 6, 32–47. 121 Josef Franz Schütte (ed.), John J. Coyne (trans.), Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan I: From His Appointment as Visitor until His First Departure from Japan (1573–1582) (St Louis: The Institute for Jesuit Sources, 1980), 130–133; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe I, 258– 259; Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 5–10, 174. 122 ‘They are, as Aristotle says, of a servile nature, because they are commonly poor, miserable, and mean, and for any gain they will do the lowest things’: Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 7. Compare the somewhat different translation in Schütte, Valignano’s Mission Principles, 131.

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Companies some decades later, accorded the highest rank to persons born in Europe, followed by persons born in Asia from European parents, the children of European fathers and Eurasian mothers (castizos), and finally the children of European fathers and Asian mothers (mestizos).123 With Linschoten we see how within such classificatory schemas the darker skin colour of Portuguese descendants could be treated as a visual indicator of their degree of Asianness. Having noted that the children of mestizos were ‘of colour and fashion like the naturall borne Countrimen’ – that is, indistinguishable from other Indians – the Dutch traveller concluded that ‘the posteritie of the Portingales [Portuguese], both men and womĕ[n] being in the third degree, doe séeme to be naturall Indians, both in colour & fashion.’124 Valignano’s black-and-white dichotomy was not yet shared by the majority of his contemporaries, most of whom called upon a wide and variable palette incorporating different shades of white, yellow, brown, black, and even “olive” to describe the skin colour of Asian people.125 However, the assumptions underlying his template can be found in a much wider range of sources. Recounting a voyage to Cape Verde in 1566, the English trader George Fenner wrote that ‘although the people were blacke and naked, yet they were civell’ – a construction suggesting that blackness and civility were otherwise seen as at variance with each other.126 In other texts too, negative connotations attached to skin colour were conveyed in statements expressing what were seen as positive exceptions. When stopping in Sierra Leone in September 1607, John Hearne, diarist on the EIC ship Red Dragon, recorded the hospitable reception received from the local population: ‘This people are verry lusty men, stronge and well limmed, and a good people and true. They will not steall as others of their collour will doe in other places’ [my emphasis].127 Hearne’s reference to ‘a black heathen nation’, and even more Batavia’s use of the hyphenated ‘cruel-black-barbaric people’, indicate how closely dark skin had become asso123

C.R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 62. I use the common English spelling in this book, rather than the Portuguese castiço and mestiço. 124 Linschoten, Discours, 53. 125 For instance, Thomas Coryat wrote about Mughal emperor Jahangir: ‘He is of complexion neither white nor blacke, but of a middle betwixt them: I know not how to expresse it with a more expressive and significant Epitheton then Olive’: Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (20 vols. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905–1907), IV, 473. See also: Linschoten, Discours, 20; Van Foreest and De Booy, De Vierde Schipvaart I, 194. 126 Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages VI, 270. 127 Barbour, Third Voyage Journals, 179.

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ciated with some of the least favoured categories in European ethnographic classifications.128 As the seventeenth century wore on, it became common for Company agents to employ colour-based designations in South Asia as well, as exemplified by the growing use of the labels “white” and “black” to differentiate Europeans from Asians.129 The institutionalised nature of this practice can be gleaned from the fact that, when the VOC produced a subject index on the Heren XVII’s outgoing letters, its entry for ‘Blacks’ (Swarten) simply stated ‘see Indians’.130 Humouralism and the civility/barbarism scheme remained the most influential models for explaining human difference until the late eighteenth century, with Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748) ensuring climate theory’s ongoing popularity. The persistence of climatic explanations meant that early modern explanations for physical variations between people were far less rigid and essentialist than nineteenth-century conceptions of inherent and immutable biological traits.131 That said, from the fifteenth century onwards, Europeans did begin formulating ideas about genealogy, blood, and sexual reproduction that presumed biological transmission.132 Among other outcomes, this tendency led to increased questioning of the supposed correlation of environment with skin colour. In 1600, a close associate of Hakluyt, John Pory, suggested that what caused black skin ‘seemeth rather to be an hereditarie qualitie transfused from the parents, then the intemperature of an hot climate.’133 The growing appeal of such “biological” arguments left its mark 128 129 130

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‘wreede-swarte-barbarische menschen’: The phrase referred to the inhabitants of New Guinea: Posthumus Meyjes, De Reizen van Abel Janszoon Tasman, 170. For Hearne: Barbour, Third Voyage Journals, 179. Earlier instances are found in relation to Southeast Asia: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd Pieter Both, 199, 203, 205; Akveld, Machtsstrijd om Malakka, 187. ‘Siet Indianen’. Indianen here referred to Asians in general. This first index covered letters up to 1707, and may have been produced shortly afterwards: NL-HaNA, VOC 345, f. 550. Compare the English Court of Committees’ reference to Madras’ Asian population as ‘our black subjects’: Company to Fort St. George, London, 22 January 1692: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 183. Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”’; Harrison, Climates and Constitutions; Wheeler, The Complexion of Race; Neil Safier, ‘The Tenacious Travels of the Torrid Zone and the Global Dimensions of Geographical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern History 18.1–2 (2014), 141–172. David Nirenberg, ‘Was There Race Before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain’, in: Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 232– 264; Rubiés, ‘Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?’; Adam Hochman, ‘Is “Race” Modern? Disambiguating the Question’, Du Bois Review 16.2 (2019), 647–665. Leo Africanus, Pory (trans.), Geographical Historie, 32.

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on Company writing too. Following his stay in the Mughal province of Orissa, William Bruton wrote of its inhabitants that ‘[t]heir Bodies are for the most part blacke, which is not accidentall, but naturally arising from the quality of the seed they are begotten’.134 As will be shown in Chapter 8, ideas about inheritable traits gained momentum in the colonial societies which sprang up in Company settlements. Inter-ethnic sex prompted concerns about the moral character of children born from mixed unions, while skin colour began to function as a marker of status in the multicultural societies brought under Company administration.

“Moors” and “Gentiles”

Cultural and physical markers of difference held great significance in Company writing, yet its primary form of classifying people was based on religion. As the Compleat Geographer (1709) put it, the inhabitants of India ‘are known by Europeans, under these two general Denominations: Moors and Gentues, the former being the Mahometans, and the latter the Pagans’.135 VOC and EIC agents inherited their binary division of South Asians into “Moors” (from mouros, applied to Muslims) and “gentiles” (from gentios, in South Asia applied to Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists) from Portuguese usage, which was itself in accordance with Indo-Persian practice.136 They employed this overarching terminology alongside and sometimes interchangeably with more specific designations such as “Mughals” or “banias”, a caste label denoting commercial occupations but often applied by Europeans as a shorthand for Hindu and Jain communities in general. Such was the case with John Ovington, who distinguished the inhabitants of Surat into ‘Moors, or Moguls’ and ‘Bannians or Antient Gentiles’, with a third group consisting of Parsis.137 Particularly telling was the usage of Christopher Farewell, who recalled his arrival in Surat as follows: ‘[E]uery thing almost seemed new vnto me, the people with theyr customes especially; not the Moores (for I had seene of them before in Spaine and Barbarie) but the antient natiues of the Country, called Banians’.138 Fare134

William Bruton, Newes from the East-Indies: Or, a Voyage to Bengalla, one of the Greatest Kingdomes under the High and Mighty Prince Pedesha Shassallem, usually called the Great Mogull (London: Humphrey Blunden, 1638), 33. 135 Anon, The Compleat Geographer II, 91. Italics in original. 136 Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India, 15, 285. 137 Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 233. Italics in original. 138 The moment recounted took place in 1614. Farewell, An East-India Colation, 17. Italics in original.

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well’s statement underlines the importance of existing categories for making sense of novel observations, in his case by applying Mediterranean connotations to western India. While we cannot be certain of the exact associations made by individuals such as Farewell, much can be learned from surveying the categories employed by Company agents and the contemporary meanings attached to them. The identity labels Europeans used to designate Asian peoples were anything but mutually exclusive, hence the more detailed divisions were often also the most garbled. Linschoten, whose ethnographic survey was particularly comprehensive, wrote that Goa was home to ‘all sorts of nations, as Indians, Heathens, Moores, Iewes, Armenians, Gusarates, Benianes, Bramenes, and of all Indian nations and people’.139 His enumeration betrays no strict method of taxonomy, but rather the jumbling together of heterogeneous categories under the heading of “nation” or “people”. The groups he distinguished show how religious labels (“heathens”, Muslims, and Jews) were employed alongside others based on region of origin (Armenians and Gujaratis) or caste (Brahmins and banias). While his first use of the generic “Indians” may have been restricted to people originating from India – those he refers to as ‘naturall borne’, which is comparable to Farewell’s ‘antient natiues’ – his later reference to ‘Indian nations’ almost certainly applied to Asians in general, or all people from that part of the world denoted as “the East Indies”.140 Muddled classifications would remain a feature of Company writing as well. In one of the best-informed attempts, Geleynssen de Jongh in the late 1620s introduced the banias as the ‘native-born’ inhabitants of Gujarat and Hindustan, employing the label as an expansive umbrella term: ‘Among this nation, which one generally calls by the name of banias, are four different main sects and lineages which sustain many different subsidiary groups, up to sixty or seventy in number’.141 The four main “sects” Geleynssen distinguished comprised Jains, Smarta Brahmins, Vaishnavites, and Jogi. One group he excluded was the Rajput warrior caste, which he discussed elsewhere as a separate “nation”. Exemplifying the nebulous labelling characteristic of much early modern ethnography, Geleynssen wrote that ‘these Rajputs are not Moors, 139 Linschoten, Discours of Voyages, 53. Compare: ‘Indianen, Heydenen, Mooren, Joden, Armenien, Gusaratten, Banianen, Bramenen, ende alle Indiaensche natien ende volcken’: Kern, Itinerario I, 124. 140 ‘ingheboren ende naturelen’; ‘Oost Indien’. For examples: Kern, Itinerario I, 40, 59, 64, 122. 141 ‘inlanders gebooren’; ‘Onder dese natie, die men generalijcken bij den naem van Benjanen noemt, syn vier verscheyde hoofdsecten en geslachten die noch onder haer veele verscheyde bijloopers voeden, tot 60 a tseventich in getalle’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 72, 75.

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neither heathens, but are called Hindus, corresponding mostly to the religion of the banias’.142 It is instructive to set Geleynnsen’s divisions alongside those in Streynsham Master’s ‘Short account of the Most Considerable Nations that Inhabitt this part of India’, meaning the province of Gujarat. Part of a letter written in 1672, Master’s description focused on three ‘Nations or sorts of People, that is the Moores or Mahumedans, the Hindooes, and Parsees’. Using ‘Hindooes’ as his umbrella term for ‘the Naturall Inhabitants of the Country’, the five principal sub-groups (‘Tribes’, ‘Casts’, or ‘Sects’) that he identified consisted of Rajputs, Brahmins, banias, ‘Gentooes’, and coolies.143 With ‘Hindoo’ here referring to the inhabitants of Hindustan and ‘Gentoo’ here denoting a professional class (craftsmen), neither label was principally religious in nature, which was true for Master’s other sub-groups as well. As with Geleynssen and other writers, then, we see that the same labels were often applied in a variety of ways to denote groups within the larger category of “nation”. The flexible use of the latter meta-category reflects the inclusive understanding of the term in VOC and EIC writing as denoting a distinct community with identifiable shared characteristics, including religion, dress, language, geographical origin, and social customs.144 Like identities themselves, the use of identity labels was inherently situational – hence a Hindu merchant from Surat might be referred to in Company sources as Indian, Gujarati, “heathen”, “gentoo”, “Hindoo”, or bania, the specific circumstances determining which distinctions were intended and why. With its separate connotations of Islam and black skin, early modern uses of the term “Moor” were equally contingent on context.145 In the Mediterranean context, “Moor” often signified North African, as opposed to Ottoman or “Turk”. Such was the case in an English description of a series of castles between Cairo and Mecca, of which ‘the two first are kept of Moores, and the

142 143 144

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‘Raspoeten sijn geen Mooren, mede geen heydenen, werden Hindoes genaemt, comen meest met het gelove van de Benjanen overeen’: Ibid., 69. Henry Yule and R. Barlow (eds.), The Diary of William Hedges, Esq. (afterwards Sir William Hedges), During his Agency in Bengal; as well as on His Voyage Out and Return Overland (1681–1687) (3 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1887–1889), II, cccviii–cccxi. The concepts of “nation” or “people” as used by Dutch and English writers corresponded to the Portuguese use of nação and gente. The Portuguese term casta was also adopted by VOC and EIC writers (as “caste”), although it was less commonly used. On the Portuguese usage: Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 91, 99. On the conflation of both connotations: Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 17. For a critique: Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

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other three of Turkes’.146 “Moor” could also be a used to denote “Black African”, regardless of ethnicity or religion. In the English edition of Linschoten’s Itinerario, we read about Mozambique that ‘some of the Moores of the Iland are likewise Christians, and some heathens’, as the translator substituted ‘Moores’ for Swarte (‘Blacks’).147 And finally, John Pory simply equated the term with “African”, speaking of ‘white or tawnie Moores’ and ‘Negros or blacke Moores’, describing some of them as ‘Gentiles’, others as ‘of the sect of Mahumet’, and yet others as Christians or Jews.148 This range of uses notwithstanding, in the context of South Asia the common European convention was that clarified by the sixteenth-century Venetian traveller Cesare Federici: ‘[A]lwayes whereas I have spoken of Gentiles, is to be understood Idolators, and wheras I speak of Moores I meane Mahomets sect’.149 Just like the Venetian, seventeenth-century VOC and EIC writers employed the term “Moor” exclusively in relation to Muslims, with followers of Islam described as having ‘the Moorish religion’, converts as those who ‘turned […] Moores’, and Mughal officials as ‘Moorish regents’.150 Common epithets applied to Muslims were those associated with arrogance (‘proude Moores’), faithlessness (‘perfidious Moores’), or greed (‘the Moors’ inborn covetousness’), negative adjectives which were at least in part associated with the discourse of absolute rule.151 Such were the snappy generalisations distilled from fine-grained reports, or the catchphrases employed to furnish claims with explanatory power. As exemplified by Geleynssen’s Remonstrantie, the more comprehensive descriptions in Company writing tended to be more rounded, applying finer distinctions between groups and adopting a far more balanced tone. Concerning Muslims in the Mughal Empire, Geleynssen told his readers that ‘the nature and condition of these Moors is plural and 146 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 347. 147 Linschoten, Discours of Voyages, 10. ‘Sommige van dese Swarte van ‘t Eylandt zijn oock Christenen, ende sommighe Heydenen’: Kern, Itinerario I, 21. 148 Leo Africanus, Pory (trans.), Geographical Historie, 6. See about Pory’s clumsy translation: Barthelemy, Black Face, 13–15. 149 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 411. 150 ‘‘t moors gelooff’: De Jonge, Opkomst III, 338; Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 289; ‘Moorse regenten’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.2, 27. As an eighteenth-century exception to this rule, several men bearing Portuguese names (suggesting a Luso-Asian Christian background) were classified as “Moor sailor” in VOC records: Matthias van Rossum, ‘A “Moorish World” within the Company: The VOC, Maritime Logistics and Subaltern Networks of Asian Sailors’, Itinerario 36.3 (2012), 39–60, at 46. 151 Foster, The Voyages of Sir Lames Lancaster to Brazil, 6; Moreland, Peter Floris, 117; ‘der Mooren aengeboren begeerlijckheyt’: Hoge Regering to Heren XVII, Batavia, 22 December 1638: Generale Missiven I, 721.

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diverse, because among them (although all are Moors) there are three different nations or castes, namely Mughals, Pathans, and Hindustanis’.152 Out of these three groups, the Hindustanis or Indian Muslims were the least esteemed, he explained, characterising them as less intelligent than the other two, but harsher in their government and greedier. The Pathans or Pashtuns, soldiers and administrators of Afghan descent, were well-known for their martial valour, yet the Dutchman held them for ‘a haughty and conceited nation’, universally disliked for their arrogance.153 Finally, those whom the VOC agent labelled as Mughals proper, comprising those imperial elites stemming from Central Asia and Persia, had the best reputation. Using adjectives such as ‘polite’, ‘affable’, and ‘compassionate’, Geleynssen’s text represents the complex concurrence of negative tropes with appreciative views of everyday interaction that was characteristic of much Company writing produced on the ground.154 Ambiguity stood at the core of European representations of Indian “gentiles” too. On the one hand, Company writing was heir to a tradition of travel accounts that described Indian religious and social customs as superstitious, cruel, and foolish, singling out the practice of sati as an embodiment of ‘many strange and beastly deeds done by the Gentiles’.155 On the other hand, these travellers portrayed Indians as highly skilled and shrewd competitors in the sphere of commerce. As early as the 1510s, the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires remarked that the Gujarati banias equalled the Italians in their commercial knowledge, and suggested that the Portuguese should learn the trade from them.156 In later years, Federici praised the sophisticated brokerage practices characterising Gujarati commerce, while Linschoten described the banias as

152

‘De nature ende conditie van dese Mooren syn veele en verscheyde, want onder dese (hoewel al Mooren syn) synder drie verscheijde natien ofte casten, namentlijck Magols, Pathannen ende Hindoestanders’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 67–68. Note that Geleynssen grouped together the Persian-speaking Iranis and Turkish-speaking Turanis under his label of “Mughals”, distinguishing them from the Pashtu-speaking Afghans and Muslims of Indian origin, known as Shaikhzadas. For a detailed breakdown of the composition of the Mughal nobility in the second half of the century: M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (revised ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), Ch. 1. 153 ‘een hoochmoedich en opgeblasen natie’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 68. 154 ‘de best geschickste ende beleeftste’; ‘minnelyck ende seer liefftalich’; ‘mededogent’: Ibid. 155 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 384 156 Tomé Pires, Armando Cortesão (ed.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515 (2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), I, 41–42.

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surpassing all others in the Indian Ocean world ‘in casting of accounts’.157 Positive views are also found in the account of Francesco Carletti, the Florentine merchant who praised his counterparts in Cambay for their ‘fidelity in all their actions’ and ‘observance of their word and promises’.158 Yet even on the part of appreciate writers, admiration regularly shaded into apprehension. Early in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese factor Duarte Barbosa declared that banias were reputed to be ‘falsifiers of weights and measures and many other goods and of coins; and great liars’, while eighty years later, Linschoten characterised them as ‘very perfect in the trade of merchandise, & very ready to deceiue men’.159 VOC and EIC reports contain clear echoes of such depictions. With regard to Hindus in Golkonda, Methwold asserted that ‘murder and violent theft are strangers amongst them, and seldome happen; but for cozenage [cheating] in bargaining, caveat emptor’.160 Geleynssen on his part claimed that Gujarati banias ‘do not consider it a sin to cheat someone’, describing them as experts in calculations, extremely greedy, though ‘enemies of public thievery’.161 Master cast the latter group in the most positive light, describing them as ‘gross Idolaters’, but otherwise peppering his account with evidence of their superior wit and commercial aptitude.162 In an evocative statement that embodies Company writing’s penchant for casting locally specific impressions in generally applicable terms, Geleynssen typified the banias as follows: ‘Wherever profit is to be made one shall commonly find them; one can compare this nation and their intercourse with none but the Chinese or Jews’.163 The Dutchman’s choice of exemplar was anything but coincidental. If on one level it simply highlighted the banias’ commercial acumen, his readers were likely to connect it to common early modern Euro157 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 375–376; Linschoten, Discours, 71. 158 ‘fedeltà in tutte le loro attioni’; ‘osservatori della parola et di quello che promettono’: Francesco Carletti, Adele Dei (ed.), Ragionamenti del mio viaggo intorno al mondo (Milan: Mursia, 1987), 175. Carletti spent twenty-one months in Goa between March 1600 and December 1601 as part of his journey around the world. His account, completed upon his return, was not published until 1701. 159 Duarte Barbosa, Mansel Longworth Dames (ed.), The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the countries bordering to the Indian Ocean and their inhabitants (2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1918–1921), I, 112; Linschoten, Discours, 71. 160 Moreland, Relations of Golconda, 14. 161 ‘maecken geen sonden yemant te bedriegen’; ‘vijanden van openbare diverij’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 73. 162 Yule, The Diary of William Hedges, cccxi–cccxiii. 163 ‘waer eenige proffijt valt ofte wat te verdienen is, sal men haer gemeen vinden; men can dese natie ende haren ommeganck bij niemant als Sineesen off Jeuden vergelijcken’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 73.

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pean stereotypes of Jews as wily and avaricious.164 Such notions were certainly behind Edmund Scott’s claim that the Chinese community in Banten ‘like Jewes, live crooching under them [the Javanese], but robb them of their wealth and send it for Chyna’.165 They also underpinned the characterisation of Brahmins by one of the first English travellers to India, the Levant merchant Ralph Fitch, who defined them as ‘a kind of craftie people, worse then the Jewes’.166 As we will see in Chapter 3, these comparisons prefigured similar analogies by seventeenth-century travellers such as the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and a surgeon in EIC service, John Fryer. In a particularly telling instance, the English factor John Gourney called upon the Court of Committees to employ ‘men of great understanding, discretion and courage’ in Masulipatnam, arguing that ‘the arrogancy of governors and great Moors and the Jewish subtlety of the Gentiles can and will sift the best factors you can send’.167 Here as before, the point is not that Company agents were ignorant of the distinctions between Asia’s manifold ethnic and religious communities, nor that they consistently grouped all “Others” together indiscriminately. The identities which VOC and EIC representatives ascribed to individuals and groups were multi-faceted, situational, and pluriform; they were based on a varying set of markers relating to geographical origin, religion, language, physiognomy, political rank, and social status, which shifted according to time, place, and the circumstances of writing. However, because Company writers tended to describe diverse realities using a limited store of cultural tropes and by drawing parallels between contexts, in practice their representations of different groups ended up having much in common. The mechanisms that accounted for this dynamic, as the next chapter makes clear, were the routines and imperatives of corporate writing. 164

On perceptions of Jewishness in early modern England: Eva Johanna Holmberg, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination: A Scattered Nation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 165 Foster, The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton, 174. 166 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 476. 167 John Gourney to Company, Patani, 28 July 1614: Letters Received II, 86.

CHAPTER 2

Writing Routines and the Making of Company Discourse The global enterprises of the East India Companies depended on writing as much as they did on extensive capital outlay, oceangoing ships, and the solid walls of fortresses. Commissions laid out the duties, aims, and competences of captains and governors. Ordinances defined the limits of permissible behaviour and the punishments for transgressors. Ships’ logs and factory diaries gave accounts of day-to-day decision-making and stored a wealth of information. And letters, reports, and memorandums functioned as vehicles for recording, directing, informing, and justifying past and future actions. Extending well beyond the sphere of internal management, written records such as grants, charters, contracts, and treaties also formed the bedrock of the Companies’ legal authority, both at home and abroad.1 Determined to tackle the immense challenges of managing politico-commercial enterprises operating in dozens of complex locales situated thousands of miles apart, Company directors implemented rigorous routines of everyday writing. While we know a fair deal about the systematic practices of recording and reporting that underpinned the corporate writing cultures of the EIC and VOC, research into the forms and content of Company discourses has remained limited.2 Expanding on the intersections between Company writing and early modern ethnography laid out in Chapter 1, this chapter will explore how the VOC and EIC each developed a set of institutional writing and archiving practices responsible for generating, disseminating, and solidifying information about Asia. I will focus on two equally important stages in the functioning of these routines: a primary phase focused on the collection and recording of information, and its subsequent distilling and dissemination. Interest in ‘the written world’ of the EIC and VOC has boomed in recent years.3 Whilst most attention has centred on the information gathering and documentation practices that sustained the EIC’s bureaucracy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the lens of written culture is productive

1 On corporate sovereignty: Stern, The Company-State. 2 On corporate writing: Barbour, Before Orientalism, 147; Barbour, The Third Voyage Journals, 3. 3 The term is from: Ogborn, Indian Ink, Ch. 1. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_004

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for examining seventeenth-century administrative praxis too.4 Recent studies have shown how the Companies utilised routines of writing and archiving to construct global commercial and diplomatic links; to exert power and discipline over their employees; and to stay on top of the latest intelligence on ports, products, and markets.5 Furthermore, as bureaucratic machineries developed for navigational and commercial purposes became adapted to the needs of colonial governance, registration tools such as population censuses offered means for classifying and controlling the free and enslaved people of Asian, European, and African descent living under VOC or EIC jurisdiction.6 Much of this frantic recording was aimed at comprehending the vast Indian Ocean space, including its intricate commercial environment and its diverse inhabitants. Part of a wider ‘empirical bent’ as manifested in the fields of diplomacy, trade, missionary activity, exploration, scientific enquiry, and imperial administration, the VOC and EIC instituted routines of writing about foreign societies that came to comprise both empirical “facts” and the labels, concepts, and stereotypes used to think and talk about them.7

‘Continuall and True Iournalls’

Stemming from common traditions of record-keeping at sea and responding to analogous circumstances in Asia, the writing routines of the EIC and 4 Bayly, Empire and Intelligence; Bowen, Business of Empire; Raman, Document Raj. 5 Ogborn, Indian Ink; Barbour, The Third Voyage Journals; Adrien Delmas, ‘From Travelling to History: An Outline of the VOC Writing System During the 17th Century’, in: Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn (eds.), Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas 1500–1900 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 97–126; Nico Vriend, ‘“An Unbelievable Amount of Paper”: The Information System and Network of the Dutch East India Company’, in: Charles Jeurgens, Ton Kappelhof, and Michael Karabinos (eds.), Colonial Legacy in South East Asia: The Dutch Archives (The Hague: Stichting Archiefpublicaties, 2012), 67–95; Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade. On the Compagnie des Indes: Agmon, A Colonial Affair, Ch. 6. 6 Remco Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities 1600–1800’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Leiden University, 1996); Delmas, Les Voyages de l’Écrit; Nigel Worden, ‘Cape Slaves in the Paper Empire of the VOC’, Kronos 40 (2014), 23–44. 7 Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, in: Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds.), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 1–56, at 31. If particularly strong in Europe, this empirical trend was common to the wider early modern world. See: Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The notion of a “fact” in modern knowledge regimes differs markedly from its seventeenth-century meaning as a “deed” or thing accomplished. The contemporary term for bits of empirical information was “particulars”: Julia Schleck, Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands: Forms of Mediation in English Travel Writing, 1575–1630 (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 146–151, 159.

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VOC proceeded from a similar set of core principles. Among the key policy instruments of Company leaderships were uniform sets of directives supplied to officials on departing fleets, including detailed stipulations regarding the recording and management of intelligence. First and foremost, and laying the epistemological groundwork for their enterprises, Company directors ordered the compilation of ‘Continuall and true Iournalls’.8 This phrase first occurred in the commission issued to Captain William Keeling in March 1607; which made it clear that ‘a true relacon of eu[e]ry thinge that passeth’ was expected not just from the fleet’s captains and pilots, but also from merchants and other functionaries. The Court of Committees instructed these various individuals to regularly compare notes so as to achieve a complete and ‘p[er]fect discourse’, delivered upon their return to London and there ‘to be kept for better direccon of posteritie’.9 The corporate accumulation of pertinent information had been a prominent feature of EIC instructions as early as 1602, when George Waymouth was ordered to compile a written report ‘of all & eu[e]ry his p[ro]ceedinge in the viadge worthie of note or memory for the good of the Companie’.10 With each voyage this institutional memory fleshed out a little further, as existing reports were re-read and new instructions and reports became more targeted and precise. As captain of the first EIC fleet dispatched to Mughal India, Keeling was to inquire ‘whether the kinge of Cambaya or Suratt or any of his havens be in subiection to the Portugalls’, which the evidently still unaware directors required ‘to be sett downe in writeing for the Companies better informacon’.11 A still more explicit desire to learn about Asian states and peoples was manifested soon afterwards. In 1608, the EIC’s board of executives instructed Alexander Sharpeigh to report about Aden ‘what Condicon the People are of what trade & what interteinem[en]t towardes strangers’.12 And two years later, they ordered Lawrence Femell that ‘wheresoeu[e]r you shall come or settle a ffactory, [you shall] inquier and informe yo[u]r selfe sufficiently of the Condicons and manners of the people, and gou[e]rnm[en]t’.13 Such directives stress the importance placed on ethnographic understanding, and were echoed in later deliberations about the need to appoint to the Surat presidency 8

9 10 11 12 13

For this standard stipulation: Commission for the Third Voyage, London, 9 March 1607; Commission to Alexander Sharpie, London, 28 February 1608; Commission to David Middleton, London, 14 April 1609; Commission to Henry Middleton, London, March 1610; Commission to John Saris, London, 4 April 1611: Birdwood, Register of Letters, 116, 242, 297, 331, 399. Commission for the Third Voyage, London, 9 March 1607: Ibid., 116–117. Articles of agreement between the EIC and George Waymouth, London, April 1602: Ibid., 24. Commission for the Third Voyage, London, 9 March 1607: Ibid., 123. Commission to Alexander Sharpie, London, 28 February 1608: Ibid., 255. Instruction to Lawrence Femell, London, March 1610: Ibid., 319.

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a person with ‘experience in the knowledge and disposicon of the people; the Country, [and] the comodities’.14 Interwoven into reports about commercial affairs or inserted into accounts of a voyage, assertions about the manners and disposition of certain peoples often appear tied to specific experiences and individual perspectives. However, as EIC operations branched out and lines of communication thickened, documents and the ideas contained in them circulated among a fast-growing range of Company officials, many of whom read and wrote collectively. Communal writing had been part of the routine of record-keeping at sea since the earliest voyages, as observed in the instruction to Keeling. Guidelines issued in 1610 extended this principle to account-keeping, ordering agents in Banten ‘that yo[u]r bookes and accomptes may be publique and comon to all the rest of o[u]r ffactors’.15 These various regulations were brought together and codified in the EIC’s expanded ‘Lawes or Standing Orders’, printed in 1621.16 Special attention was given to the Company’s two principal centres of trade at this point, the factories of Banten in western Java and Surat in western India, the chiefs of which were tasked with compiling letter books of all correspondence to and from the other factories, duplicates of which should be sent annually to the Court of Committees. The same rule applied to the record of ‘all the notable occurrences in those parts, briefly set downe day by day in the forme of a Iournall’.17 Although regular series of diary and consultation books appeared only from the final third of the seventeenth century, surviving minutes show that the practice of collective writing and decision-making was well-established in Surat by the early 1620s. Furthermore, copies of letter books reveal that by this time the Surat Presidency already functioned as a hub for processing and relaying information to and from subordinate factories in western India, and as a centre for communications with colleagues in Masulipatnam, Isfahan, Batavia, Aceh, and elsewhere.18 14

15 16

17 18

EIC Court Minutes, 20 February 1633: BL, IOR/B/15, f. 203. Also see: Margaret Makepeace, ‘The India Office Records: A History’, East India Company (Marlborough: Adam Matthew, 2017). Consulted online at (last accessed 1 October 2020). Company to Banten, London, 19 March 1610: Ibid., 312. A much briefer set of ‘standing ordinaunces’ was first ordained on 10 February 1601: Henry Stevens and George Birdwood (eds.), The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company 1599–1603 (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 129–131. East India Company, The Lawes or Standing Orders of the East India Company (n.p. 1621), 51. For the earliest Surat Factory Records: BL, IOR/G/36/1 (consultations, 1620–1626), IOR/G/36/84 (letters sent, 1616–1617), and IOR/G/36/102 (letters received, 1621–1636).

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In its basic outline, the EIC’s burgeoning writing culture was comparable to that of the VOC.19 The two sets of institutional practices developed in sync over the first ten years, when both companies based their operations around individual round-trip voyages. During the 1610s, the development of parallel factory systems also generated similar types of documentation. However, starting with the appointment of a Governor-General in 1609, and culminating in the establishment of a central rendezvous at Batavia in 1619, the VOC’s administrative structure underwent several fundamental changes which had no EIC counterpart, and which added an extra level of complexity to its communications system. Equally important was the fact that, starting in the 1610s, the VOC’s board of directors (Heren XVII, or Gentlemen Seventeen) began to issue more focused instructions for the writing of reports than did the EIC’s Court of Committees. This striking variance likely resulted from the VOC’s active early interest in colonial settlement, reflecting a larger disparity between the two companies at this point in time. Over the course of the seventeenth century, it led to the development of a reporting culture that was both richer and more diverse than that of its English rival.20 The Heren XVII manifested their growing interest in Asia’s political economy in their instructions to the first Governor-General, Pieter Both, which revealed their concern with the principles upon which Asian states based their trade and alliances with European powers. Conscious of Portuguese competition, the directors ordered Both to survey ‘the inclinations, affections, and favours of any and all kings, nations and peoples of all quarters of the Indies’.21 Focusing on the latter’s ‘power, richness, and situations’, the VOC directors were particularly interested in finding out ‘how, by whom, and through which persons the respective dominions are ruled, and what means should be practised for gain19

20

21

Delmas, ‘From Travelling to History’; Guido van Meersbergen and Frank Birkenholz, ‘Writing that Travels: The Dutch East India Company’s Paper-Based Information Management’, in: Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen, and Edmond Smith (eds.), Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), 43–70. This would change with the EIC’s assumption of imperial power in the 1750s: Bowen, The Business of Empire, Ch. 6. Tellingly, one of the few seventeenth-century geographical accounts of India by an English author was compiled by a private trader: Thomas Bowrey, Sir Richard Carnac Temple (ed.), A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1905). ‘de genegentheden, affectiën, ende gunsten van alle ende yegelijcke coningen, natiën ende volckeren van de gantsche quartieren van India’: Instruction to Pieter Both, Amsterdam, 29 November 1609: P.J.A.N. Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd Pieter Both (1568–1615): Gouverneur-generaal van Nederlands-Indië (1609–1614) (2 vols. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1987), II, 214–215.

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figure 2 V OC memoir for the writing of reports [Memorie Voor de Koopluyden En Andere Officieren], printed, c. 1722–1757. The earliest known printed copy was issued in 1670. Printed copies continued to be produced, virtually unaltered, up to the late eighteenth century. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1.04.02, inv. no. 11050

ing access to them’.22 The stated purpose being ‘to have, maintain, and as far as possible increase good intelligence in all places’, Both was ordered to organise his letters in numbered articles which could be answered point by point.23 Only a few years later, the VOC had settled on its lasting practice of furnishing the ship’s box with a standard set of directives delineating the duties of specific classes of personnel.24 Among the tasks outlined for merchants was the responsibility for keeping ‘a written memoir book or journal’ which detailed the most notable affairs occurring at their places of residence, an innovation 22 23 24

‘de macht, rijckdommen ende gelegentheiden’; ‘hoe, bij wie, ende wat persoonen alle saecken in de respective rijcken geregeert worden, wat middel omme communicatie ende acces bij deselve te hebben, aengewendt moeten werden’: Ibid. ‘men overal goede intelligentie mach hebben, houden, en sooveel mogelijck is te vermeerderen’: Ibid., 215. The organisation of letters in numbered paragraphs was in fact not implemented by the VOC until the late eighteenth century. See: Register of instructions, letters, and papers sent with the ships Witten Beer and Swarten Beer, November 1614: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, unpaginated.

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which prefigured the collectively kept factory diary.25 Soon afterwards, agents overseeing VOC operations in a given region were given the duty of reporting annually on matters of trade, war, and the spread of Christianity. Drawing on such information, the Hoge Regering was instructed to compile an annual report on ‘the state of the Indies’, creating the basis for the vital Generale Missiven, or general letters from Batavia sent with each homebound fleet.26 Lastly, from 1614 if not before, each outgoing VOC ship also carried a methodical outline of matters to be included in reports, providing a uniform template for corporate knowledge-making. The VOC’s Memoir for the Writing of Reports Entitled “Memoir of the things which merchants and other officers should observe in compiling their reports or discourses in order to instruct the directors punctually about everything” (Figure 2), the VOC’s instruction for the writing of reports represents the most concrete manifestation of the Heren XVII’s pursuit of knowledge about Asia.27 Its inclusion in the list of papers dispatched in 1614, the first year for which bundles of outgoing documents are available, suggests that the Memorie may have existed earlier still.28 This undated memorandum, bound into the copybook of outgoing letters for 1614–1617, is nearly identical to a version dated December 1619, with the exception of two points that are omitted in the later copy.29 Both versions state that ‘there are six principal or chief points to which all discourses should pay principal attention’, before listing five to eight subsidiary points for each of the six categories apart 25 26 27

28 29

‘een schriftelijcke Memorie boeck ofte Journael’: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, f. 50. Instruction to Governor-General and Councillors of the Indies, Middelburg, 22 August 1617: J.A. van der Chijs (ed.), Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602–1811 (17 vols. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885–1900), I, 38–39. ‘Memorie vant geene daer op de Commisen ende andere Officiers in het stellen van haerlieden rapporten, ofte discoursen sullen hebben te letten om de Bewindthebberen van alles punctuelijck te onderrichten’: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, f. 53. Note that ‘punctuelijck’ meant “punctually”, as in precise, but also “point-for-point”, which is appropriate here given the structure of the document. Register of instructions, letters, and papers sent with the ships Witten Beer and Swarten Beer, November 1614: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, unpaginated. The memoir is also listed among papers sent in 1616, 1619, and 1620: NL-HaNA, VOC 313, unpaginated. Memoir of the things which merchants and other officers should observe in compiling their reports, Amsterdam, 7 December 1619: NL-HaNA, VOC 359. Of the five manuscript copies I have identified, only one consists of 55 points, while the other four consist of 57 points. The three printed copies I have identified all contain 59 points.

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from the second, which is split up once more into three subcategories encompassing a total of twenty-seven points.30 Together the six main points lay out the Company’s principal areas of interest: (1) the geographical situation of the place being discussed; (2) its government; (3) its trade and shipping; (4) the availability of natural products; (5) the Iberian (‘enemy’) presence there; and finally, (6) the VOC’s own power and circumstances in this area of operations (Figure 3). At nearly half the total number of headings, the second and most extensive category is also the most relevant with regard to corporate ethnography. The Heren XVII’s attentiveness to the social and political structures of Asian states is plainly evident from the first subcategory, secular government. The first of ten points prompts authors to describe whether the country is ruled by a monarch, nobles, or the citizenry, or is instead administered by no one in particular but exists ‘in a wild state’.31 Other points in this subcategory deal with rulers’ power and entourage, the strength of their armies, their palaces and fortresses, their royal revenues and resources, their geopolitical rivals and reasons for waging war, their relations with the Portuguese and Dutch, the execution of civil and criminal justice, and finally the weaponry used in warfare. In the next subcategory, which focuses on matters of public religion, the Company displayed its interest in general matters of an ethnographic nature, such as rites and customs, as well as its concern with the practical implications of operating in a cross-confessional environment. To start, merchants were to inform their superiors about the religions practised in the place where they were active and give an account of the type and number of places of worship with their respective income streams. Additionally, the directors instructed officials to discuss the clergy, describe how the Dutch were treated with respect to religion, and explain what stance local officials showed towards Christianity in general. Finally, by calling for details regarding specific ceremonies, including religious worship, marriage customs, and funeral rites, the memoir underscores just how much the Company’s epistemological project overlapped with contemporary ethnographic inquiry. The third and final subcategory dealing with government, which centres on ‘economy, or housekeeping and government as practised by nobles and other private persons’, makes the adoption of traditional categories of ethnographic description even more visible.32 Divided into ten points, the first few items on 30 31 32

‘Daer sijn ses principaele ofte hooft poincten daer op in alle discourssen principalijcken dient geleth’: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, f. 53. ‘bij niemandt maer int wilde geregeert wordt’: Ibid. ‘de oiconomie, ofte huyshoudinge en regieringe die by den eedelen ende andere particulieren gehouden wort’: Ibid.

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figure 3 V OC Memoir for the writing of reports [Memorie vant gene daer op de ­Commisen ende andere officieren in het stellen van haerlieden raporten ofte discoursen sullen hebben te letten]. This is the earliest extant copy. Manuscript copies were in use at least up to the mid- seventeenth century. Manuscript, c. 1614–1617. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1.04.02, inv. no. 313, f. 517

this list are concerned with the types of houses and household effects owned by inhabitants of the country in question, the styles of dress and jewellery used, and their customary food and drink. Another cluster of questions focus on marriage and family life, issues that at least partly reflected the more lasting and intimate cross-cultural relations established in some parts of Asia by this point. VOC agents were tasked with providing population estimates, with

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describing local conventions around matrimony and succession, and with discussing the upbringing of children, particularly those fathered by Dutchmen or other Christians. Relating ‘what fashion of people they are, both men and women’ was almost certainly to be done through a physical description, given that the Dutch term fatsoen in early modern usage referred to form or physical appearance.33 Finally, a question about moral qualities rounded off the section as a whole. Posed in the straightforward manner used throughout the memorandum yet now also offering authors two sets of polar opposites to guide their answers, the question to describe a people’s ‘character and condition, whether cruel or friendly, faithful or unfaithful’ is without doubt the most intriguing item on the list.34 It underscores in categorical fashion that the Heren XVII deemed assessments of the collective nature of different Asian peoples both viable and instrumental for their operations, and confirms that they actively sought to incorporate such analyses into the Company’s writing culture. The extent to which this institutional incentive contributed to the public dissemination of ideas and information regarding Asia can be gleaned from Isaac Commelin’s collection of VOC accounts published in the 1640s.35 Several narratives in this compendium reveal the structural influence of the Memorie, that is, those by François Caron (with notes by Hendrick Hagenaer) on Japan, Joost Schouten on Siam, and (indirectly) Johan van Twist on Gujarat. Moreover, the category of ‘character and condition’, used by the Heren XVII in the Memorie, in Commelin’s published work functioned as an index entry which enabled readers to quickly look up descriptions of the ‘Aerdt ende Conditie’ of a wide variety of peoples, including the Malays, Ambonese, Chinese, Turks, Macassarese, Uzbeks, and Persians. Other groups listed included Japanese noblewomen, the nayar elite in Calicut, and ‘Indians in general’, which was a reference to Paulus

33

34 35

‘Wat het voor fatsoen van volck is, Soo mans als vrouwen’: Ibid., f. 54. For instance, Linschoten described different Indian populations as ‘similar in colour and fatsoen of body and limbs’. Its association with physiognomy and physique is also clear from Linschoten’s comparison of the appearance and skin colour of different Asian peoples: ‘Die van Aracan, Pegu, ende Sian, is volck by naer van fatsoen ende wesen, van aensicht, ghelijck die van China: maer heeft noch eenighe differentie; zijn van coluer veel witter als die Bengalen, ende een weynigh bruijnder als die van China’: H. Kern et al. (eds.), Itinerario, Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien 1579–1592 (5 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910–1939), I, 69, 170. ‘van wat aert, ende conditie, wreet, ofte vrientelijck, trouw ofte ontrouw’: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, f. 54. Isaac Commelin, Begin ende Voortgangh der Vereenighde Nederlantsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie (2 vols. [Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius], 1645–1646).

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van Caerden’s account of the customs and social divisions that historically obtained in Vijayanagara.36 In both structure and spirit, the VOC’s memorandum for the writing of reports belonged to the wider contemporary corpus of instructions to travellers. Structurally, its divisions and subdivisions into numbered points followed the pattern of well-known examples of the genre, for instance Albrecht Meyer’s Certaine briefe, and Special Instructions (1589).37 While Meyer’s detailed list of topics has a different focus than the Memorie, evident overlap exists in the sections dealing with geography, government, religion, and cultural customs. Furthermore, Meyer’s listing likewise moves from surveying a country’s political system, dress, and diet, to the ‘wits, and conceits of the people’ and ‘morall vertues of the Inhabitantes’.38 It is Meyer’s inquiry about ‘[t]he disposition and spirit of the people: whether warlike and valiant, or faint hearted and effeminate’ – cast in the dichotomous form common to many questionnaires – which most clearly suggests the influence of current templates on the VOC’s Memorie.39 Another possible inspiration for the reports envisaged by the Heren XVII existed in the form of the Relaciones Geográficas, the standardised surveys written in response to the printed questionnaires that were distributed to colonial administrators across the Spanish empire.40 Several hundred such reports are known to have been produced by Spanish officials in the Americas in the later sixteenth century, whilst the ethnographic descriptions of East and Southeast Asian peoples bundled in the Boxer Codex suggest that similar models may have motivated colonial authorities in Manila.41 The visual ethnography contained in the Boxer Codex, or in the earlier Codex Casanatense 36 Commelin, Begin ende Voortgangh II, bk. 14, 17, 21. 37 Albrecht Meyer, Certaine Briefe, and Special Instructions for Gentlemen, Merchants, Students, Souldiers, Marriners, &c. Employed in Seruices Abrode, or anie Way Occasioned to Conuerse in the Kingdoms, and Gouernmentes of Forren Princes (London: John Wolfe, 1589). 38 Ibid., 14–15. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 A total of 208 Relaciones Geográficas have been counted for the period 1578–1589. This number had grown to several thousands by the early nineteenth century. Howard F. Cline, The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577–1586’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 44.3 (1964), 341–374, at 350; Francisco de Solano (ed.), Cuestionarios para la formación de las Relaciones Geograficas de Indias siglos XVI / XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1988), xiii. 41 George Bryan Souza and Jeffrey S. Turley (eds.), The Boxer Codex: Transcription and Translation of an Ilustrated Late Sixteenth-Century Spanish Manuscript Concerning the Geography, Ethnography and History of the Pacific, South-East Asia and East Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 10–12.

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produced in Goa, has no direct counterpart in the production by or for the two Companies, yet its written descriptions of the customs, dress, weaponry, religion, physical characteristics, and perceived character traits of different communities in and around the Philippines indicate shared origins in a common ethnographic tradition.42 As instruments of imperial government, Spanish memorandums of matters to be discussed reflected a metropolitan desire to comprehend, command, and reap the benefits from little-known subjects and possessions. Although the VOC was a different kind of organisation, what its directors shared with royal officials in Spain was their confidence in their ability to capture a distant world in writing, from the quality of the soil to the ‘understanding, inclinations, and manner of living’ of its inhabitants.43 Most compilers of early modern instructions took for granted the possibility of collectively characterising entire ethnic groups, and consequently very few of them clarified their criteria for assessment. An exception to this rule was Thomas Palmer, the author of an extensive travel advice manual published in 1606.44 Much like the VOC’s Memorie, Palmer presented his readers with ‘Six general heads’ to be surveyed, in this case comprising a country’s language, geographical features, customs, form of government, secrets of state, and ‘the Nature of the people’.45 Defining the latter as ‘the generall inclination, sway, maners, and fashion of them in euery common motion, or action’, Palmer enjoined travellers to consider ‘whether a people bee ciuill or barbarous’, ‘free or seruile’, ‘religious or profane’, and ‘warlike or effeminate’. He then proceeded to discuss several ‘Meanes to interpret the nature of people’.46 An eclectic concoction of climate theory, humouralism, and the relativist belief that virtues and vices occur equally the world over, Palmer’s explanations offer clues as to the kinds of reasoning that may well have supported ethnographic 42

43 44 45 46

See for instance: Souza and Turley (eds.), The Boxer Codex, 315–323, 429–433. For recent discussions: Manel Ollé and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds.), El Códice Boxer: Etnografía colonial e hibridismo cultural en las islas Filipinas (Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universitat de Barcelona, no date [2019]). On the Codex Casanatense: Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Civility and Sin: The Survey of the Peoples, Polities and Religions of Portuguese Asia in the Codex Casanatense’, Anais de História de Além-Mar 13 (2012), 73–111, and the other articles in the same issue. The nearest counterparts to such visual depictions of ethnographic types produced under the auspices of the East India Companies are the watercolours by the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch artist Andries Beeckman. See: Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘Une curiosité oubliée: le «Livre de dessins faits dans un voyage aux Indies par un voyageur hollandais » du marquis de Paulmy’, Archipel 54 (1997), 35–62. ‘sus entendimientos, inclinaciones y manera de vivir’: Solano, Cuestionarios, 82. Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 60–61. See the marginalia for the latter quote.

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assertions in contemporary Company writing. As the ‘Two causes of ciuility or barbarousnesse’, Palmer identifies ‘discipline’ and ‘naturall temperature of bodies’. Citing a time-honoured Renaissance commonplace, the author noted that ‘civill nations’ are ‘gouerned by lawes diuine and humane written’, and that Asians, living in hot climates, are ‘by nature barbarists’.47 Palmer did offer his readers more practical tools to ‘suruey the ciuilitie and barbarousnesse of Nations’, encouraging them to pay close attention to ‘the gesture, apparell, decencie, conuersation, diet, feeding, giuing of honour, and all other actions of the people of a countrey’.48 Similar advice applied to the remaining categories. Discipline or the want of it helped explain a people’s warlike or effeminate character, while identifying servile natures was useful in recognising ‘the loyaltie and vnsteadinesse of Subjects’ and ‘who are to be trusted for friends, and who feared for enemies’.49 Finally, as the ‘fift[h] discouerer of the peoples nature’, Palmer explained that their ‘condition of bodie’ could be identified by body shape, skin colour, and longevity, while signs regarding the ‘disposition of the peoples mindes’ included their idleness or industry, occupations and trades, degrees of learning, and typical virtues and vices.50 The active procurement of information about such topics by the Heren XVII suggests that they too attributed crucial diagnostic value to them. With very little modification, the VOC’s instruction for the writing of reports continued to be dispatched to outgoing ships throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first as hand-written copies but from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards in printed form.51 The fact that the Memorie continued virtually unaltered, despite substantial long-term changes in the 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 61. Ibid., 61, 67. Ibid., 71–72, 75. Ibid., 77–78. Extant manuscript copies include: NL-HaNA, VOC 312, ff. 53–55 (undated, c. 1614); NL-HaNA, VOC 313, ff. 517–520 (undated, c. 1619); NL-HaNA, VOC 359 (7 December 1619); NL-HaNA, Collectie Geleynssen de Jongh 66 (two copies, undated). Printed copies include: NL-HaNA, VOC 11050: Memorie voor de Koopluyden en andere Officieren (Middelburg: Leenderd Bakker, no date); Memorie voor de Koopluyden en andere Officieren (Middelburg: Pieter van Goetthem, 1669); BL, 1250.m.23.5: Memorie voor de Koopluyden en andere Officieren (Middelburg: Pieter Gillissen, 1779). For a published version, dated to 1 December 1670: Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek II, 530–534. When the Heren XVII in 1649 resolved to print seven of the documents from the ship’s box, it decided that the memoir for the writing of reports would continue to be supplied in manuscript form. This confirms that the date of September 1649, which is handwritten on the eighteenth-century copy printed by Leenderd Bakker, is incorrect: Resolutions Heren XVII, 6 September 1649: NL-HaNA, VOC 102, f. 145r. Leenderd Bakker was active as a printer in Middelburg from 1722 to 1757.

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Company’s position in Asia, prompts the question of how it functioned in practice. It is clear that, unlike the Spanish Crown, the VOC did not amass a collection of uniform reports responding closely to the prefabricated structure of the questionnaire. Instead, authors appear to have used the Memorie more flexibly as an authoritative guideline for selecting relevant topics for description. A telling example is the instruction to Mathijs Quast concerning an exploratory voyage to the east of Japan, issued by the Hoge Regering in 1639. If he reached unknown lands, Quast was to ‘thoroughly investigate […] the character and condition of the inhabitants’, describe their religion and form of government, and note against whom they waged war, what kind of weaponry they carried, and what food and dress they used – a list of topics evidently drawn from the Memorie.52 When dispatching Abel Tasman to explore the Terra Australis in 1642, the indebtedness of Batavia’s instruction to the Memorie was even more obvious. Tasman and his fellow officers were to take note of the geographical situation of any southern lands they encountered, describe local fruits and animals, and discuss the structure of houses. Moreover, in what reads like a direct paraphrasing of the Memorie, Tasman was instructed to make inquiries as to ‘the fashion and being of the inhabitants, their dress, weapons, customs, manners, food, livelihood, religion, government, warfare, and other remarkable matters, particularly whether they are good- or ill-natured’.53 The Memorie was similarly adapted to the needs of exploration by Jan van Riebeeck, the first VOC governor at the Cape of Good Hope (1652–1662), who supplied a copy of the text to several Dutch parties sent into the South African hinterland. In the accompanying instructions, he paraphrased those sections deemed most relevant, focusing on the dress, religion, habitation, leadership, warfare, and trade goods of any people encountered, as well as ‘how they conduct themselves towards our nation, whether they are cruel or friendly, and at all reasonable and well-governed’.54 If the occasion required it, the standard survey could be fully customised to the case at hand, an insight we owe to François Caron’s decision to structure his 1636 description of Japan according to the 52 53

54

‘den aert ende conditien der Inhabitanten […] wel grondigh ondersoeken’: Instruction to Matthijs Quast, Batavia, 1 June 1639: Verseput, De Reis van Mathijs Hendriksz. Quast, 88. ‘t’fatsoen en wesen der inwoonderen, haer cleedingh, wapenen, zeden, manieren, spijse, erneringh, religie, regieringe, oorloge en andere merckwaerdige saecken meer, jnsonderheijt ofte goet ofte boosaardig sijn’: Instruction to Abel Tasman and Frans Jacobsz Visscher, Batavia, 13 August 1642: Posthumus Meyjes (ed.), De Reizen van Abel Janszoon Tasman, 150. ‘Hoe sij onse natie genegen sijn, of se oock wreet, vruntlijck ende van eenige redelijckheyt ende politie sijn’: Instruction Jan van Riebeeck, Cape of Good Hope, 4 February 1659: Dagverhaal van Jan van Riebeek, Commandeur aan de Kaap de Goede Hoop (3 vols. Utrecht, 1884–1893), III, 17–19. See also: Ibid., 450, 556.

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31-point questionnaire received from Director-General Philip Lucasz.55 Caron’s list included various inquiries about Japan’s government, military organisation, justice system, revenues, religion, treatment of Christianity, trade, and external relations, all of which had their counterparts in the Memorie. Several questions were lifted directly from that template, including those about the ruler’s retinue, the type of houses and household effects, marriage practices, the education of children, rules of succession, and ‘whether that nation is faithful or unfaithful’.56 Although Caron’s deliberate question-and-answer format is not found in extant reports covering South Asia, the topics of description outlined in the Memorie are clearly reflected in the structure and content of texts produced there as early as the 1620s. One such case is an anonymous geographical description, possibly by Jan Thijssen, entitled ‘Brief account and Description of the renowned Island of Ceylon, concerning its fertility, riches, the conditions and humours of its inhabitants, as well as their religion and dealings with strangers’.57 Other examples include the respective Remonstranties of Francisco Pelsaert and Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh, the one-time factory chief in Bharuch (1624–1631) and Agra (1636–1640), who kept two manuscript copies of the Memorie among his private papers.58 Weaving his responses into a continuous narrative, Geleynssen’s template nonetheless remains evident. Hence, he would label one section ‘account of the situation, trade, manufacture, rivers, roads, revenues, gardens and dependencies of the town of Vadodara’, and summarise another as ‘the manner of warfare in Hindustan, the weapons that are used, […] the nations that reside there, the livelihood of each, […] how they maintain their laws, how they raise their children, the manner of their houses, churches, dress, and burial of the dead’.59 It is likely that Pelsaert at some point 55

Caron’s indebtedness to the Memorie was first identified by: V.D. Roeper and G.J.D. Wildeman, Reizen op Papier: Journalen en reisverslagen van Nederlandse ontdekkingsreizigers, kooplieden en avonturiers (Amsterdam: Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, 1996), 48. 56 ‘Of die natie Trouw, of ontrouw is’: Francoys Caron, Rechte Beschryvinge Van het Machtigh Koninghrijck van Iappan, Bestaende in verscheyde Vragen, betreffende des selfs Regiering, Coophandel, maniere van Leven, strenge Justitie &c. voorgestelt door den Heer Philips Lucas, Directeur Generael wegens den Nederlandsen Staet in India (The Hague: Iohannes Tongerloo, 1661), ‘Verscheyde Vragen, Concernerende het Jappanse Ryck’. 57 Brief account and Description of the renowned Island of Ceylon, possibly by Jan Thijssen, c. 1640: NL-HaNA, Collectie Sweers 7, ff. 183–196. 58 Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh; Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert. For the Memories: NL-HaNA, Collectie Geleynssen de Jongh 66. 59 ‘Verclaringe van de gelegentheijt, coophandel, manefacture, revieren, wegen, incoomsten, hoven, tuijnen, ende wat daeraen dependeert van de stadt Brodera’: Caland, De Remonstrantie, 20; ‘op wat maniere in Hindustan de oorlogh gevoert, wat wapenen zij

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possessed a copy too. Closing his account of Mughal India with an apology for omitting to discuss ‘the provenance of the inhabitants, their character or humours, dress, manner of warfare, etc.’, the manuscript which this former VOC agent in Agra submitted to his superiors in or just after 1627 testifies to the uniform standards and expectations that had come to characterise the VOC’s reporting culture within just two decades of its foundation.60

The Logic of Company Writing

Policies to foster and focus the institutional gathering of information comprised the first major stage in the development of Company writing; the second involved the distilling of key content from the fast-expanding volume of texts circulating within VOC and EIC networks. As a consequence of the continuing process of consulting, extracting from, copying, and responding to letters and reports at multiple levels inside both organisations, the style and substance of these documents became more uniform. This development was amplified by the Companies’ routines of collective writing and the standardisation of document templates, complete with marginalia and indexes to make the processing and retrieval of information easier and quicker. The need to make locally specific impressions intelligible to distant readers, furthermore, inspired a degree of abstraction and generalisation in the language used. And finally, the fact that Company servants in the course of their careers moved between factories further aided the transfer of ideas, terms, and tropes between geographical contexts. The institutional logic behind Company writing thus directly affected the nature of corporate discourses, as it stimulated the articulation of contextspecific observations using context-transcending terminologies. This included blanket categories such as “heathenish people” and universally applied concepts such as “civility”, and meant, for instance, that Indian Muslims were classified as “Moors” together with their co-religionists of other ethnic backgrounds, facilitating the mixing and merging of connotations. The Companies’ complex processes of extracting and abstracting information about Asia relied chiefly on three classes of documents: diaries and resolution books kept in

60

totte selvige gebruijcken, [...] als mede wat natie hier te lande woonachtich zijn, ende waermede een yegelijcke hem meest geneert; [...] haer onderhouden van hare wetten, topvoeden van hare kinderen, maniere van haer huijsen, kercken, cleedinge als begravinge van hare dooden’: Ibid., 48. ‘het herkommen van de inwoonders, haeren aert ofte humeuren, kledingh, manier van oorloghe etc’: Kolff and Van Santen (eds.), De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 355.

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the different nodes of the network; dispatches exchanged between these sites; and, specifically in the case of the VOC, periodic memorandums surveying the full state of affairs in a given location.61 The VOC’s writing system gradually expanded in scope and complexity in the decades following the founding of Batavia as the Company’s central hub in Asia. A significant step was the Heren XVII’s ruling, in 1621, that detailed diaries should be kept at all factories.62 Subsequent letters show the directors’ insistence on this point, declaring that all factors were expected to reserve an hour daily to recording matters of trade, relations with European and Asian powers, and interactions with the inhabitants of the country where they were stationed.63 Together with the resolutions taken by the respective chief agent (gouverneur, directeur, or commandeur) and his council, factory diaries formed the backbone of local VOC administrations across Asia. They contained day-today records of commercial, political and organisational affairs, gave accounts of decisions taken, and created an institutional memory referred to and built upon on subsequent occasions. Another key tool introduced to take stock of, explain, and facilitate local administration was the memorie van overgave (succession memoir), compiled by outgoing chief agents to give an account of their period of tenure and inform new incumbents. First emerging around 1640, the oldest extant succession reports by officials heading VOC operations in different parts of South Asia appeared in the 1650s.64 A central tool of corporate knowledge-making and repository of institutional memory, memories van overgave continued to be produced and consulted throughout the VOC period and into the nineteenth-century era of the colonial Dutch East Indies.65 These documents of key strategic value were remarkable for their intertextuality, as reports were written with those left by 61 62 63 64

65

Excluded here are the key tools for processing financial information: account books. On the EIC’s construction of order and hierarchy through these various forms of writing: Ogborn, Indian Ink, Ch. 3. Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek I, 604–605; J.A. van der Chijs et al. (eds.), Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India (31 vols. The Hague/Batavia: Martinus Nijhoff, 1887–1931), 1640–1641, iv. Heren XVII to Surat, Amsterdam, December 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 314, ff. 245–246; Heren XVII to Coromandel, Amsterdam, December 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 314, f. 269. The earliest memories van overgave appear to be those produced in Japan (1639) and Malacca (1642). For South Asia: Instruction left by Joan Maetsuycker to his successor Jacob van Kittensteijn, Matara (Ceylon), 27 February 1650: NL-HaNA, VOC 1351, ff. 2361–2387; Succession memoir Gerard Pelgrom to Hendrick van Gent, Surat, 12 April 1655: NL-HaNA, VOC 1215, ff. 598–602; Succession memoir Joan Verpoorten to Pieter Sterthemius, Bengal, 28 October 1655: NL-HaNA, VOC 1212, ff. 211–225. Schrikker, ‘Institutional Memory’, 126.

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predecessors in mind, citing such older texts to buttress claims or observations. A clear example is the memoir which Hendrick Zwaardecroon left to the council of Jaffna, the northernmost province of Ceylon, after ending his threeyear stint as commandeur in January 1697. Writing nearly four decades after the VOC took command of the region, Zwaardecroon had at his disposal an extensive local factory archive, which he utilised to refer his readers to instructions compiled as far back as the 1650s. The active role which textual borrowings and cross-referencing played in perpetuating ethnographic tropes is plainly apparent. For instance, in 1679 Laurens Pijl in his own final report had written regarding Jaffna’s Sri Lankan elites that ‘in matters of justice the greatest possible caution must be practised amongst these vicious people, because they are very cunning and deceiving’.66 Almost eighteen years later, Zwaardecroon directed the council’s attention towards Pijl’s recommendation, endowing its negative stereotyping with axiomatic status: ‘To wit […] one must deal with the greatest caution in the world amongst these vicious, cunning, and deceiving people’.67 Zwaardecroon methodically constructed his memoir with reference to letters, resolutions, reports, and journals originating in Jaffna, Colombo, and Batavia, and noted that his draft would be subject to ‘revision, amplification, and alteration’ by the Company’s highest authority in Ceylon, the Governor and Council in Colombo.68 Once approved, duplicates of succession memoirs, factory diaries, and resolutions followed their course to Batavia, alongside copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence, all of which were shipped as supplements with original letters addressed to the Hoge Regering. The next phase in the process of digesting and distilling information took place in Batavia’s general secretariat. Lengthy summaries of incoming documents were inserted on a rolling basis into the diary kept at Batavia Castle, a considerable task which the later Governor-General Joan Maetsuycker at one point carried out singlehandedly.69 He would be mostly relieved of this in 1642, when the burden of registering the key content from incoming let66

67 68

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‘In saacken van Justitie moet met de grootse voorsightigh.t onder dese valsche menschen gegaan worden, als ’t mogel: is, want sij sijn seer listig en bedriegen’: Memoir Laurens Pijl to Ruthgaart de Heyde and Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 9 November 1679: NL-HaNA, VOC 1351, f. 2443v. ‘te weten dat men daar omtrend moet te werk gaen med de grootste vorsigtigh:t vande wereld onder dese valsche, listige, en bedriegelijke menschen’: Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 884v. Sophia Pieters (ed.), Memoir of Hendrick Zwaardecroon, Commandeur of Jaffnapatam, (afterwards Governor-General of Nederlands India), 1697. For the Guidance of the Council of Jaffnapatam, During his Absence on the Coast of Malabar (Colombo: H.C. Cottle, 1911), 1 and passim. Resolutions of Batavia Castle, 9 January 1640: ANRI, K66a, 860, f. 633.

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ters and composing draft replies was divided into five parts, with three more Councillors of the Indies taking their share alongside Maetsuycker and the secretary of the Hoge Regering, Pieter Mestdagh.70 Responsibility for keeping up with correspondence from Gujarat, Hindustan (northern India), Persia, and the Red Sea region fell to Salomon Sweers, who had spent eighteen months at the Dutch factory in Ahmedabad in the mid-1630s. Copies retained among his private papers reveal the systematic résumés he compiled from the letters from Surat and its subordinate factories, as well as, occasionally, the Coromandel Coast, Bengal, and Ceylon.71 A periodic digest of principal matters from each area of operations then made its way into the next generale missive. After individual sections had been drafted by the different members of the Hoge Regering, the full document was composed following a set arrangement of topics, before being approved of and signed by the assembly as a whole.72 Dispatched with a large number of supporting materials from the various factories, upon arrival in the Netherlands the whole mass of documentation was sorted by area of origin, paginated, and bound into annual volumes with their individual tables of content.73 At this point, the final stage in the parsing and processing of information began, from the 1640s onwards carried out by a dedicated sub-committee of the directors which met annually in The Hague. This Haags Besogne first read the letters from the different factories to Batavia and their respective replies, following the set order of the generale missiven, which started with Ambon and worked its way clockwise around the Indian Ocean. Summaries of these papers ended up in the so-called Haags Verbaal, which also noted the extent to which the Hoge Regering had fulfilled the orders sent to them two years previously, based on scrutiny of the generale missive and the resolutions taken in Batavia. Before concluding its month(s)long meeting, the Haags Besogne tasked the Company’s secretary with composing the draft response to the Hoge Regering, submitted for review to each of the six Chambers, together with the Haags Verbaal.74 This is when, if it had 70 71 72 73 74

Resolutions of Batavia Castle, 1 February 1642: ANRI, K66a, 861, ff. 347–348; Dagh-Register Batavia 1640–1641, v–viii. NL-HaNA, Collectie Sweers 6. W. Ph. Coolhaas, J. van Goor, and H.K. s’Jacob (eds.), Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (13 vols., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1960–2007) (hereafter: Generale Missiven), II, vii. The exact procedure is described in undated notes compiled during the second half of the eighteenth century, probably by J. Adami: Concept-notes regarding the tasks of the clerks at the [Amsterdam] secretariat: NL-HaNA, VOC 7227, unfoliated (document 6). Van Dam, Beschryvinge I.1, 313–314. F.S. Gaastra, ‘The organization of the VOC’, in: G.L. Balk, F. van Dijk, D.J. Kortlang (eds.), The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Local Institutions in Batavia ( Jakarta) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 20–21; J.R.

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made it through the multi-level process of distilling and extracting, a claim about the inhabitants of Jaffna that passed through Colombo, Batavia, and The Hague would have been noted at the summer meeting of the Heren XVII. Collectively reading the Haags Verbaal and finalising the concept letter to Batavia, the board of directors at this last of three seasonal sessions completed one communications cycle just as it commenced another.75 When set side by side with what has been described as the ‘clumsily constructed’ central management of the VOC – conducted in six different Chambers of varying importance – the EIC’s organisational structure looks utterly straightforward.76 Its executive command was concentrated in twenty-four annually elected directors (collectively known as the Court of Committees until 1709, and as the Court of Directors afterwards), who met in London at least once a week. The Committees corresponded directly with the chief agent and council of the principal Asian establishments, or Presidencies, including Surat (after 1687, Bombay), Madras, and (from 1690) Calcutta. When letters arrived in London, they were read by the Court of Committees before being delegated to the sub-committee tasked with examining their content more closely and drafting responses. Court minutes make it clear that the selected Committees were expected to ‘report to ye Court how the Orders from hence have been complied with there’, and ‘to direct the penning of the letters for India, according to the Sence of ye Court’.77 Unlike the Haags Besogne, the ‘Committee of Writing Letters’ was part of the regular day-to-day running of the EIC. Once the sub-committee had completed its drafts they were read at the following meeting of the Court of Committees, where as a rule they were approved of, with those amendments and additions deemed necessary, ‘wrote out fair’, signed, and ordered to be despatched with the next possible conveyance.78

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76 77 78

Bruijn, F.S. Gaastra, and I. Schöffer, Dutch-Asiatic shipping in the 17th and 18th centuries (3 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979–1987), I, 17–18. Prior to the establishment of the Haags Besogne, the advocaat had already held responsibility for summarising incoming correspondence and drafting replies. See: Index on resolutions Heren XVII, 1602–1736 (19 March 1614): NL-HaNA, VOC 221, f. 9. Van Dam, Beschryvinge I.1, 264–266; Femme S. Gaastra, Bewind en Beleid bij de VOC: De financiële en commerciële politiek van de bewindhebbers, 1672–1702 (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1989). As a rule, the Heren XVII addressed letters directly to the commander at the Cape of Good Hope and to the Hoge Regering, the latter containing orders relating to each of the factories to be passed on from Batavia. In addition, the directors also communicated by sea (until 1636) and overland with its factors in Persia and India, while in 1665 a direct shipping link was established with Ceylon: Gaastra, ‘The organization of the VOC’, 24. Gaastra, ‘The organization of the VOC’, 22. Court Minutes, 17 August 1659: BL, IOR/B/26, f. 210. Court Minutes, 12 February and 9 April 1703: BL, IOR/B/44, ff. 69r, 113r.

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Given the pivotal position of despatches in the information system of the EIC, it is unsurprising that the English Company went to great lengths to formalise their structure and use. During the second half of the seventeenth century, EIC directors started ordering their general letters in numbered paragraphs and had their subordinates in India reply in the same manner.79 The standardised format allowed for the methodical answering of queries and greater ease of reference, while the consistent use of marginalia and the introduction of indexing further facilitated the quick scanning of individual letters and the retrieval of information from despatch books as a whole. Furthermore, the Court of Committees prepared abstracts of incoming letters which followed the same numbered paragraph structure, condensing their contents into onesentence digests.80 This abstraction of information into bite-size snippets rendered complex Asian realities as recognisable maxims. For instance, abstracts of letters from Madras received in London in 1704 featured paragraphs summarised as ‘nothing but force can reduce the Moors to reason and make the Companys Estates and Factors Secure’, and ‘Nothing can prevent Moors insults like a Visible Strength’.81 Discursive uniformity was stimulated further by the directors’ insistence that agents wrote ‘in such language as may be under stood’. Criticising the high degree of assumed knowledge in letters from India, the Court demanded that references to local conditions on the Coromandel Coast or Bengal had to be transparent to readers in London.82 Once again, we observe how the institutional logic of Company writing stimulated the expression of wide-ranging views and observations in discourses current throughout the organisation as a whole. Although the immense volume of journals, letters, and reports arriving in London or the Dutch Republic testifies to the rapid accumulation of detailed institutional knowledge, it would be a mistake to think of the East India Companies as closed circuits. Representatives of the two organisations engaged in inter-institutional dialogues both in Europe and Asia; papers were privately kept and copied; journals ended up in print; and servants moved between employers in pursuit of opportunities.83 In addition to people, papers circu79 80 81 82 83

Miles Ogborn traces this practice to the 1670s: Ogborn, Indian Ink, 94. As K.N. Chaudhuri notes, it was ‘standard practice in London and in Asia […] to prepare abstracts of all letters, rules, and standing orders as guides to policy’: Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 75. Abstracts of Fort St. George to Company, Madras, 5 November 1703, 28 January and 12 February 1704: RFSG, Despatches to England 1701–02 to 1710–11, 5, 7. Cited in: Ogborn, Indian Ink, 95. An early example was a veteran of English expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, John Davis, who first sailed to Asia as chief pilot on a fleet sent out from Zeeland in 1598,

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lated between both companies, despite stringent guidelines to the contrary.84 Such data leaks remind us of the practical limits of the information systems which Company directors strove hard to build. What was perhaps even more important, people talked. In cosmopolitan cities such as Surat, Dutch and English agents socialised with one another and with members of the wider Christian community, as well as with Mughal government officials and Indian merchants.85 Providing important occasions for information exchange, such everyday interactions also accounted for conceptual and linguistic borrowings, including through the medium of Portuguese. Company discourses, then, evolved dynamically through set practices of institutional recording and reporting that existed within a wider context of day-to-day oral and written communication. Emerging out of wider early modern traditions of describing foreign travel and expansion, the corporate writing and archival practices developed by the East India Companies gave rise to exceptional stores of information about Asian products, markets, states, and peoples. In committing their impressions to paper, Company agents were guided by clearly defined instructions about the type of matters to record and the manner in which to record them. Set writing routines imposed a degree of uniformity on documents produced over the course of many decades at a multiplicity of sites; institutional processes of conveying and extracting information encouraged generalisation of the language used; and locally available repositories stimulated the perpetuation of ideas and stereotypes at the factory level. By expressing context-specific views and observations in context-transcending vocabularies, VOC and EIC writers formed composite images of the various groups of people they encountered in

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before writing an account of the voyage in English and joining the EIC’s First Voyage. The other way around, two Dutchmen, known as Peter Floris and Lucas Antheunisz, led the EIC’s Seventh Voyage after having previously served the VOC on the Coromandel Coast: Albert Hastings Markham (ed.), The Voyages and Works of John Davis the Navigator (London: Hakluyt Society, 1880), lxiii–lxx; W.H. Moreland, Peter Floris His Voyage to the East Indies in the Globe 1611–1615 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), xxxvi–l. About inter-institutional dialogue: Ruoss, ‘Competitive Collaboration’. See for one such instance: Ernest M. Satow (ed.), The Voyage of Captain John Saris to Japan, 1613 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900), 24. More commonly, opportunities for reading one another’s letters arose because each Company sent mail on the other’s ships. For this reason, the VOC instructed its servants not to entrust important documents to the EIC: Index on outgoing letters Heren XVII, 1614–1707, letter of 6 December 1625: NL-HaNA, VOC 345, f. 376. On the social life of Company agents in Mughal India: H.W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India: Geleynssen de Jongh in het land van de Groot-Mogol (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 2001), 51–71.

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the Indian Ocean world – subtly shaded portrayals that were not simply imagined, yet that were never strictly empirical either. As the chapters in Part 1 have shown, travel writing provided established frameworks for assessing foreign societies, and first-hand experiences of other parts of the world influenced the ways Company agents approached and conceived of Asian encounters. When making statements about the presumed character of a given community, Company writers employed concepts rooted in long-standing ethnographic traditions. The language of civility and barbarism equipped them with a set of Eurocentric cultural standards for assessing foreign societies; the concept of absolute rule provided a conceptual frame for explaining Asian state forms; and humoural theory lent authority to the belief that people living under the same conditions shared clearly identifiable character traits. As exemplified by the VOC’s memoir for the writing of reports, expectations to assess the “nature” of Asian people were integral to corporate writing cultures from the early days of Company activities. Before long, the ethnographic assumptions contained in VOC and EIC documentation came to sustain a set of corporate attitudes and expectations about cross-cultural contact. We have seen how Company leaderships issued blanket warnings about non-European treachery, or how Blackness was construed as a signifier for a lack of civility. Negative connotations are likewise conveyed in constructions intended to express exceptions to the norm, including ‘Heathen and Idolaters, yet very kind and friendly’, and ‘civill and rationall men, though Mahumetans’.86 Promoted at an institutional level and disseminated through everyday writing, such ideas left an indelible mark on the Companies’ daily engagements in trade, diplomacy, and colonialism. 86

Instruction to John Drake, Surat, 28 March 1636: EFI 1634–1636, 186; Anon, A Trve Relation Withovt All Exception, of Strange and Admirable Accidents, which lately happened in the Kingdom of the great Magor, or Magvll, who is the greatest Monarch of the East Indies (­London: Thomas Archer, 1622), 1.

PART 2 Accommodation and Conflict

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map 2 The Western Indian Ocean

CHAPTER 3

Trade Relations and Representations: The EIC and VOC in Gujarat When the English and Dutch East India Companies started commercial operations on the Indian subcontinent in the 1600s and 1610s, their merchants came equipped with a set of cultural attitudes and assumptions that conditioned their approaches to cross-cultural trade. The reports and correspondence of EIC and VOC agents reveal a lasting preoccupation with cross-cultural trust and persistent strands of ethnic and religious prejudice. At the same time, it is equally evident from their writings that commercial and political transactions with Indian merchants, brokers, and state officials were an integral part of the daily practice of Company trade, and indispensable to its success. The complex relationship between the rhetoric of Company writing and the reality of commercial encounters forms the subject of Part 2 of this book. It explores how extensive negative stereotyping in VOC and EIC sources coexisted with quotidian and often cordial relations between Company officials and their Indian counterparts, and examines the various strategies for managing Euro-Indian brokerage relations and forms of elite sociability that served to reduce cultural distance and lessen distrust. Conversely, by drawing attention to recurrent spells of conflict, I will also show that such lessening of distrust and prejudice was always partial, did not necessarily conform to a progressive development over time, and did relatively little to modify corporate discourses. In focusing on the ethnographic discourses which Dutch and English Company agents employed to characterise the behaviour of Indian actors and justify their own responses, my concern in this chapter is to show that cultural assumptions and the resultant distrust should be accorded a central place alongside economic rationality and political calculation as factors determining VOC and EIC approaches to trade in Asia. I build on recent literature concerning cross-cultural trade by examining a set of European–Asian commercial interactions characterised by ‘uneasy trust’ or ‘credibility without trust’ – that is, relationships between members of different communities in which shared routines and interdependent interests generated, if not mutual trust per se, then at least workable accommodations based on credible expectations about

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_005

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one another’s behaviour.1 Focusing on the role of apprehension about those considered culturally ‘other’ moves the discussion beyond narrow understandings of Company agents as purely rational actors strictly motivated by profit maximisation, and takes seriously what in a different context has been described as the ‘emotional content in decisions about […] trust’.2 In Craig Muldrew’s account of credit relations in early modern England, this referred to the considerations about fairness, neighbourliness, and sociability that structured dealings between ‘individual emotional agents’.3 Here, I highlight the importance of affective responses such as anxiety and prejudice in the formation of trust.4 The dynamics of accommodation and conflict that came to characterise the Dutch and English presence in the Mughal Empire first took shape in the early decades following their arrival in Gujarat in northwestern India. The extensive corpus of EIC and VOC writing produced in sites such as Cambay, Ahmedabad, Bharuch, and above all Surat provides details of harmonious ‘reciprocall vissitts’ and ‘mutual imbracins’ between Company representatives and local elites, side by side with pejorative descriptions of Indian brokers and administrators as ‘knaves’, ‘doggs’, and ‘base infidels’ – people characterised by ‘inborne cunning’, about whom it was claimed that ‘nothing but fear will make [them] 1 On ‘uneasy trust’: Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 4. For ‘credibility without trust’: Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat, ‘The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A Form of Cross-Cultural Trade between Southern Europe and the Maghreb (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, in: Trivellato, Halevi and Antunes, Religion and Trade, 108–130, at 118. 2 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), 125. For an argument that gives greater weight to cultural factors in analysing commercial trust, see also: Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and their Overseas Networks (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2010). The classic thesis that the East India Companies, unlike their Portuguese competitors, subordinated all their activities to the rational pursuit of economic profit is: Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution. For a critique: Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Felipe F.R. Thomaz, ‘Evolution of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the Sixteenth Century’, in: James D. Tracy (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 298– 331, at 328. 3 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 3. 4 For the position that trust and distrust are rational, cognitive processes: Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness; Hardin (ed.), Distrust. For criticisms of this view as insufficiently attuned to emotional, moral, and cultural factors, as well as insufficiently historicised: Sztompka, Trust; Hosking, Trust. About prejudice as ‘an affective or emotional response’: Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping, 267.

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figure 4 View of the harbour of Surat, c. 1670 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-4778

honest’.5 Such modes of conceptualising the Asian trading world were central to both Companies’ understanding of their place within it, and elicited comparable responses. Let us enter this commercial realm by way of one of its main gates: the Mughal port of Surat (Figure 4).

‘The Only Key to Open All the Rich and Best Trades’

The arrival of the English ship Hector in Surat in August 1608 initiated the 250-year-long relationship between the Mughal state and the EIC. The location of this first encounter was no coincidence, given that Surat, located near the mouth of the Tapti River and with its seaport at Suvali (Swally), was well on its way to becoming the principal commercial entrepôt, foremost financial

5 References follow the order of appearance of the quotes: Thomas Rastell et al. to Masulipatnam, Surat, 29 September 1630: EFI 1630–1633, 53; President Methwold’s Diary, Surat, 2 June 1636: EFI 1634–1636, 254; William Finch to Captain Hawkins, Surat, 12 July 1609: Letters Received I, 25–26; James Bickford et al. at Ahmedabad to Council Surat, 24 December 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 351; James Bickford et al. at Ahmedabad to Council Surat, 21 December 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 348; Thomas Kerridge et al. to Company, Surat, 18 February 1620: EFI 1618–1621, 183; Thomas Kerridge to Surat factors, Agra, 7 September 1613. Letters Received I, 282.

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centre, and one of the largest cities in seventeenth-century India.6 Surat rose to its distinctive position as the principal port of the Mughal Empire in the wake of Akbar’s conquest of Gujarat in 1572–73, benefitting from its nodal position on the crossroads of caravan and shipping routes, and its function as the principal hub for pilgrim (Hajj) traffic to Mecca.7 The city harboured a large and prosperous mercantile community consisting of Hindu and Jain banias; Indian, Persian, Turkish, and Arab Muslims; and Parsis, Armenians, and smaller numbers of other Asian and European merchants plying their trade both westwards to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa, and eastwards to the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia.8 Apart from Chinese and Japanese traders, Johan van Twist noted in the 1630s, one encountered merchants from all over Asia in the ports of Gujarat.9 Entering this centuries-old commercial system in the early years of the seventeenth century, the Dutch and English newcomers had to make their way into sophisticated pre-existing structures, by and large, ‘as simply two more groups of foreign merchants’.10 As decades of detailed scholarship has shown, early modern Indian markets, with their wealthy indigenous merchants, powerful government interests, and considerable distances separating inland production centres from coastal outlets, could not be dominated by any outside party.11 Particularly in large and cosmopolitan emporiums such as Surat, the arrival of yet another foreign trading group was neither unusual nor particularly disruptive. It is obvious therefore that the position of European traders in Mughal India contrasted sharply with that in parts of Asia where they seized control over the production and export of key commodities, including in Ceylon and the spice-producing islands of eastern Indonesia. To a lesser degree, the Companies’ presence as it developed 6 Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 52–54, 176–187. Surat’s population may have reached 200,000 by 1700, making it the second largest city in the Mughal Empire, after Ahmedabad. Around 1620, it surpassed Cambay as the major port in the region. 7 Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, Surat in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in Urban History of pre-modern India (London: Curzon Press, 1978); Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat; Ruby Maloni, Surat, Port of the Mughal Empire (Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House, 2003); Hasan, State and Locality. 8 See for extensive treatments of Indian Ocean trade: Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization; Barendse, Arabian Seas; Pearson, The Indian Ocean. 9 Van Twist, Generale Beschrijvinghe van Indien, 6. 10 M.N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 4. 11 This remained true at least until the second half of the eighteenth century. See for the structural changes taking place from the 1750s onwards: Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 322–336.

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in Gujarat also differed from that in southern India. In places such as Pulicat and Madras on the Coromandel Coast, the VOC or EIC acquired extraterritorial rights, including licences to build fortifications, from local rulers, whilst in Mughal domains the Companies were obliged to rent unfortified factory premises under the close supervision of the local government.12 Yet even in the part of the subcontinent where VOC and EIC activities were most strictly limited to trade, the Companies relied on periodic deployment of maritime force to promote their strategic aims. Here we see the main conditions that defined the Dutch and English presence in Surat and its hinterland: the Companies had to compete with Indian businesses sailing the same routes, needed to access a complex system of procuring credit and exporting goods through local intermediaries, and remained subject to the favour of the imperial administration. However, they also possessed substantial bargaining power due to their ability to inflict economic damage on Indian shipping. The significance of maritime force, albeit as one factor among several, was apparent early on. When the EIC first sought to found a trading post in Surat, starting with the attempts of the Hector’s captain, William Hawkins, the still formidable presence of Portuguese fleets off the Indian west coast dissuaded the local Mughal authorities from granting the newcomers access. A combination of events in the years 1612–1613 would result in permission to establish a factory. First, the rift in Mughal–Portuguese relations that occurred in 1613 created an opening for the English and, a few years later, the Dutch. Secondly, the EIC displayed its sea power by defeating various Portuguese squadrons just off Surat, as well as by seizing numerous Gujarati ships in the Red Sea.13 These latter actions, carried out by Henry Middleton in April 1612, were singled out by fellow EIC captain Thomas Best as the main reason the Mughal government accorded the English rights to trade: ‘I think that Sir Henry’s capture of those ships was the real cause of the grant of commerce to us; for they are a people base and servile, and at sea are at the mercy of all nations’.14 Needless to say, such simplified assessments reduced the complex set of factors motivating Mughal authorities to an easily graspable reality that reflected positively on the English. Yet what matters here is that the idea that their entertainment in Surat proceeded from fear rather than affection would be reiterated by other 12 13

The first exceptions to this rule were granted in Bengal in the late 1690s: Ibid., 151–152. I. Bruce Watson, ‘The Establishment of English Commerce in North-western India in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 13.3 (1976), 375– 391; Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1984), 271. 14 Foster, The Voyage of Thomas Best, 230.

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EIC agents in the years to come, and that such later commentators, like Best, were prone to link the presumed efficacy of forceful action to claims (‘a people base and servile’) of an explicitly ethnographic nature. By the end of the 1610s, English trade in Surat was up and running, and subordinate factories had sprung up in the inland centres of Agra, Ahmedabad, and Burhanpur, in coastal Bharuch, and in Cambay.15 The geographical concentration of early Dutch activity in northwest India was roughly similar, although into the 1620s the VOC’s engagements with the Mughal Empire remained at a low intensity because of its prioritisation of spices from Southeast Asia and textiles from the Coromandel Coast. Early on, the VOC had sent the merchant David van Deynsen to Gujarat, but after he apparently committed suicide in ambiguous circumstances it would take nearly another decade before the Company established a factory in Surat (Figure 5).16 The Dutch commercial presence was formally recognised in 1618 by Prince Khurram, the future emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1657), and at this point subahdar (provincial governor) of Gujarat. After a slow start hampered by the lack of sufficient capital, the VOC’s activities in the Mughal Empire accelerated shortly after 1620, when additional factories were opened in Bharuch, Vadodara (Baroda), Ahmedabad, Agra, Burhanpur, and Cambay.17 For both Companies, permission to rent factory buildings, move about the empire unhindered, settle disputes within their respective communities, and worship freely, derived from a variety of sources. Foremost among these were imperial edicts (farmans) issued by the Mughal emperor, yet hardly less important were an assortment of written orders (nishans, husb-ul-hukms, parwanas) from imperial princes, the imperial wazir (chief minister), or provincial governors, respectively. These official commands stipulated the rate of customs duties to be paid by a given community of merchants of common origin, as well as the further privileges such “nations” enjoyed, such as exemption from transit duties and other taxes imposed by local authorities.18 Imperial decrees were addressed to subordinate Mughal officials and tributary power-holders and were often 15 Foster, EFI 1618–1621, v. 16 In his chilling last letter, Van Deynsen relates the rumours that torture and certain death awaited him as a result of Portuguese scheming. Not long thereafter he was found dead, a long-barrelled gun lying by his side: David van Deynsen to Coromandel, Burhanpur, 17 November 1607: NL-HaNA, VOC 1055, unfoliated. See also: Journal Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn, 24 August 1615: Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 185. 17 Hans Walther van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620–1660 (Meppel: Krips Repro, 1982), 9; Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 55–105. 18 Many relevant Mughal edicts are available in contemporary Dutch translation. See: Heeres and Stapel, Corpus Diplomaticum.

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figure 5 The VOC’s factory in Surat, 1629 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-75.465

issued in response to specific complaints or requests. Accordingly, petitioning at the various levels of the imperial administration formed the main focus of Dutch and English diplomatic activity. It should be noted that such edicts were not the mutual treaties or irrevocable charters which some European observers thought – or rather wished – them to be. The emperor could unilaterally supersede farmans with new edicts, while concessions lost their validity and had to be renewed in the case of imperial successions. Governors were likewise not bound by the commands of their predecessors, although in practice both emperors and subordinate officials were usually willing to honour customary privileges when presented with the right kind of honorific solicitation.19 The legal status of the Dutch and English “nations” residing in Mughal domains as corporate groups of foreign merchants enjoying internal jurisdiction fitted a larger pattern of concessions granted to foreign merchant communities throughout the Indian Ocean region.20 One could also compare their status to the position of European communities in the Ottoman 19

20

For a detailed account of this dynamic with regards to the VOC’s rights to trade in Bengal: Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 36–47. On the EIC in the same region: Sushil Chaudhury, Companies, Commerce and Merchants: Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Era (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 51–58. Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 4–14.

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Empire, as expressed in the Sultan’s ahdnames (“capitulations”).21 Unlike in the Levant, however, it was highly unusual for ambassadors, consuls, or any other state-appointed diplomats to represent English or Dutch interests in the Mughal Empire, since the Companies themselves enjoyed rights of diplomatic representation by virtue of their charters.22 Hence the principal spokesmen of the English and Dutch merchants in this part of the world were the EIC’s President and the VOC’s directeur (director of trade) in Surat, both aided by their respective Councils.23 Besides the main settlement in Surat and subordinate factories in Gujarat, these collegiate bodies also supervised the smaller trading posts in North India.24 At one point glowingly described as ‘the only key to open all the rich and best trades of the Indies’, the commercial advantages that accrued to the Companies by gaining access to the markets of Gujarat are evident.25 Yet the Mughal government likewise obtained significant benefits from overseas trade, which explains their welcoming stance towards the frequently troublesome European merchants. The expansion of commerce in Mughal ports occasioned a major increase of import and export duties, as well as a considerable influx of precious metals. In line with the “bullion for goods” model that characterised European–Indian trade, the Companies provided vast quantities of silver in exchange for raw silk, cotton textiles, indigo, and a variety of other goods, such as saltpetre. The need to pay for Indian commodities in cash resulted from the lack of demand for European goods, although Surat also represented a major export market for the VOC’s spices.26 Much of the imported specie 21 22

23 24

25 26

Niels Steensgaard, ‘Consuls and Nations in the Levant from 1570 to 1650’, in: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (ed.), Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), 179–221. The two exceptions were the royal ambassadors, Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris. Note that, for a brief period of time starting in 1698, the short-lived “New” East India Company employed chief agents with the formal rank of consul over the English nation in its factories in Surat, Masulipatnam, and Bengal. See: Harihar Das and S. C. Sarkar (eds.), The Norris Embassy to Aurangzib (1699–1702) (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1959). On the concept of “nation”, or natio: Barendse, Arabian Seas, Ch. 3. Hence their jurisdiction excluded VOC and EIC settlements in Bengal and on the Coromandel Coast, which fell under the directeur in Hughli (from 1656) and gouverneur in Pulicat (from 1610; after 1690: Nagapattinam); and the Presidents in Calcutta (from 1690) and Madras (from 1640), respectively. In 1687, the seat of the EIC’s Western Presidency was moved from Surat to Bombay. Thomas Aldworth et al. to Company, Surat, 25 January 1612/13: Letters Received I, 238. Om Prakash, Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade, 1500–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004). For an overview of imports and exports to and from Surat by the European Companies: O.P. Singh, Surat and its Trade in the Second Half of the 17th Century (Delhi: University of Delhi Press, 1977), 97–171.

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was minted into silver rupees and as such contributed to the monetisation of the Indian economy, while the customs duties that flowed into the Mughal treasury helped pay for the imperial administration and military establishment.27 More generally, the expansion and continuation of Mughal authority in the provinces had always relied on a range of negotiated relationships with local political actors and communities co-opted into the imperial framework.28 Drawing foreign entities such as the East India Companies into this flexible framework as a means to ‘enfranchise’ their economic and military resources was simply in keeping with this wider logic.29 Indeed, a key reason the authorities were keen to attract and co-opt various competing groups of Europeans was that it helped prevent any one party from becoming too powerful; this was particularly pertinent because the Mughals themselves lacked a strong fleet to offset European power at sea.30 Ultimately, in an ambitious attempt to exert control over the western Indian Ocean and extend protection to Indian shipping, Aurangzeb during the 1690s temporarily succeeded in imposing naval policing duties on the European Companies as a precondition for trade.31 Finally, given the practice of farming out the customs of particular ports to officials responsible for overseeing their collection, an increase in the volume of trade in a given location also brought substantial benefits to these individual office-holders and their private trading interests. While the latter could, and frequently did, seek to maximise the returns on their investment by imposing additional taxes and demands, it was likewise common for port town officials to collaborate with Company agents in tax evasion schemes that diverted some of the revenue from the imperial coffers into private pockets. As Farhat Hasan has argued, such collusion between European agents and Mughal officials, ‘though not without its own contradictions, safeguarded and fostered each other’s interests’.32 The principal official the Companies dealt with in Surat was the mutasaddi (town governor), who was directly appointed by the emperor to administer town government and oversee trade. His permission was required for ships to load or unload, for goods to be carried into the country, or for persons to 27 For imperial expenses: Richards, The Mughal Empire, 75–76. 28 For this argument: Hasan, State and Locality. 29 On ‘enfranchisement’ as a general pattern: Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire. 30 Winius and Vink, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified, 23–26, 65. 31 Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 144–146. 32 Farhat Hasan, ‘Conflict and Cooperation in Anglo-Mughal Trade Relations during the Reign of Aurangzeb’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34.4 (1991), 351–360, at 356. For a recent study of similar collusions between VOC agents and Mughal officials in Bengal: Sur, ‘Keeping Corruption at Bay’.

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come ashore. In addition, the duties of the shahbandar (harbour master or customs officer) included the checking of incoming goods, conducting the search of persons, and estimating the value of imported merchandise. Goods could not be cleared from the custom house before their price had been fixed, tolls paid, and a stamp of approval attached.33 Customs rates varied throughout the empire and fluctuated over time. In Surat, the English and Dutch merchants were held to pay an ad valorem tax on imported and exported goods at a rate of 2.5%, although custom stipulated that an additional 1% brokerage fee applied.34 The base rate was temporarily reduced to 2% in 1664, before Aurangzeb increased it to 3.5%, including 1% in lieu of the reinstated jizya (poll tax) levied on non-Muslims, in 1679. Finally, in the early eighteenth century, the rate payable by the VOC was once more reduced to 2.5%, while in 1717 the EIC even obtained full exemption from custom duties against an annual payment of 10,000 rupees.35 Besides official customs dues, which benefited the central treasury, a variety of additional charges were exacted by local authorities, including anchorage dues, road tolls, and duties on transactions. Although the imperial court repeatedly issued orders that prohibited such unofficial levies, in practice little was done in terms of enforcement. Moreover, the mechanism of valuing merchandise left mutasaddis considerable freedom to enhance revenues by overvaluation, which provided them with a means to compensate for the investment made in acquiring the port on tax farming.36 The leeway enjoyed by port town officials thus placed them in a position to impose terms on the Companies, but also to work out arrangements that were beneficial for all parties involved. In the complex relationships of mutual advantage that developed between representatives of the Companies and members of the Indian mercantile and administrative elites, disputes coexisted with cooperation, and threats were 33 Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port, 194–206; Murari Khumar Jha, ‘The Mughals, Merchants and the European Companies in the 17th century Surat’, Asia Europe Journal 3.2 (2005), 269–283. 34 In 1662, Aurangzeb granted the VOC remission of the additional 1% brokerage fee. Its confirmation in later farmans, for instance those issued by Bahadur Shah in 1709 and Jahandar Shah in 1712, shows that in practice the charge continued to be levied. See: A.J. Bernet Kempers (ed.), Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis naar den Groot-Mogol Aurangzēb, 1662 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1941), 50; NL-HaNA, Hoge Regering Batavia, inv. no. 855: Translated farmans granted to the VOC by Mughal emperors, 1618–1729. 35 Farhat Hasan, ‘The Mughal Fiscal System in Surat and the English East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies 27.4 (1993), 711–718; Hans van Santen, Op Bezoek bij de Groot-Mogol: Twee Hofreizen van de VOC naar de Groot-Mogol in India, 1662 en 1711–1713 (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2016), 118. 36 Hasan, ‘The Mughal Fiscal System’.

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balanced with counter-threats. The Mughal government’s ability to clamp down on the Companies’ land-based assets functioned as an insurance policy against European predations on the high seas, while Dutch and English threats of punitive action against Indian shipping served as a counterweight against high-handed treatment by Mughal port town officials. The resulting ‘balance of blackmail’, as Ashin Das Gupta termed it, formed the backdrop against which everyday cross-cultural interactions took place and provided a conceptual framework that coloured mutual perceptions.37 When reading accounts of early modern encounters, it is therefore imperative to remain sensitive both to the ways in which tension and animosity framed representations, and to the role of negative ethnic stereotyping in making conflicts more likely to occur.

Brokerage and Trust

Business dealings in early modern Gujarati port towns customarily took place through the intermediation of brokers, who took commission from both buyer and seller.38 These men were almost invariably Hindu or Jain banias, a caste label that was used broadly to encompass a variety of mercantile functions, such as that of merchant, banker, accountant, shopkeeper, and the commission-based agent.39 A report thought to be compiled in 1617 by the junior merchant and first chief of the Dutch factory in Surat, Wouter Heuten, asserted that brokers were needed even for the smallest transactions.40 Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh echoed this statement in the late 1620s, emphasising that ‘in this country one cannot go to the market to buy something without a broker being present; in other ways one cannot be served’.41 Such provisions greatly 37

Ashin Das Gupta, ‘Indian Merchants and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies 19.3 (1985), 481–499, at 494. For Indian perceptions of Europeans: Subrahmanyam, ‘Taking Stock of the Franks’. 38 In the late seventeenth century the EIC paid its brokers at a rate of 3% on sales and purchases: Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 401. 39 Gokhale, Surat, 117; Michael N. Pearson, ‘Brokers in Western Indian Ocean Port Cities: Their Role in Servicing Foreign Merchants’, Modern Asian Studies 22.3 (1988), 455–472. 40 ‘geen coopmansz. soo cleyn, ofte daer moet een mackelaer bij wesen’: Short relation about the state of trade in the city and district of Surat, undated. The Cordt relaes was attached to a letter of 29 January 1620 sent by Pieter van den Broecke to the Heren XVII, yet internal evidence suggests it was written in 1617, based on information collected by Wouter Heuten and supplemented by his successor Pieter Gillisz van Ravesteyn: Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke in Azië II, 380. 41 ‘Men can hier te lande niet te marct gaen om yets te coopen, off daer moet een maeckelaer bij sijn, anders cont niet nae u wille bericht werden’: Caland (ed.), De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 10.

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facilitated commercial interactions between strangers, as the sixteenth-century traveller Cesare Federici made clear. Writing about the entrepôt of Cambay, he described how brokers took charge of logistics as soon as a merchant arrived, ordering their servants to unload the latter’s merchandise, pay custom charges, and carry the goods into the lodgings reserved for their owner. All of this took place, Federici emphasised, with ‘[t]he Marchant not knowing any thing thereof, neither custome, nor charges’.42 If seamless at first sight, in practice such brokerage arrangements were nonetheless fraught with tension. Many of the difficulties Company agents experienced in the marketplace centred on the problem of trust, and with few exceptions the issue was compounded by cultural biases concerning the alleged unreliability of specific groups of people. Readers familiar with Philip Curtin’s Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984) will recognise in Federici’s depiction of bania brokers a classic example of commercial specialists acting as middlemen.43 An agenda-setting work of great impact, Curtin’s treatment of cross-cultural trust remained limited to the observation that foreign merchants are commonly regarded with suspicion and trusted less than members of one’s own kin, culture, religion, or linguistic group.44 Contemporary studies on trust support these findings, indicating that the information available about and social bonds existing between members of the same group reduce uncertainty and create incentives for trustworthy behaviour.45 Like most social scientific research, historical work on commercial trust has dealt primarily with the functioning of reputation mechanisms within fairly close-knit communities.46 Such a focus on intra-group trust, 42 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations V, 375–376. 43 Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 44 Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade, 1–7. For recent historiographical discussions, see Trivellato, ‘Introduction’, in Trivellato, Halevi, and Antunes, Religion and Trade, 1–23; Leor Halevi, ‘Religion and Cross-Cultural Trade: A Framework for Interdisciplinary Inquiry’, in: Trivellato, Halevi, and Antunes, Religion and Trade, 24–61. 45 Janet Tai Landa, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994); James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, and Jeremy M. Weinstein, ‘Coethnicity and Trust’, in: Cook, Levi, and Hardin (eds.), Whom Can We Trust?, 42–64; Sztompka, Trust, 80–82; Hosking, Trust, 44. 46 Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). About the ‘lack of systematic

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while important in its own right, is inadequate for understanding the dynamics that shaped commercial interactions between members of different cultural groups. The latter problem has been addressed by Francesca Trivellato, who has shown that a combination of legal instruments and shared social norms enabled Sephardic Jews to establish relations of trust with Christian and Hindu merchants, without in any way dissolving group boundaries or necessarily producing mutual respect and appreciation.47 Her conclusions are instructive for thinking about commercial relations between Company agents and Indian merchants too. As state-chartered, joint-stock companies equipped with the right to make treaties and employ military force, the VOC and EIC have featured in the literature on trust strictly as institutional innovations that reduced the uncertainty inherent in long-distance trade, and hence lowered transaction costs.48 The internalisation of protection costs through armed trading, and legal protection as extended through farmans, indeed offered important institutional safeguards, yet they were not in and of themselves sufficient to inspire cross-cultural confidence.49 What is needed is to observe how agents on the ground experienced the demands of trusting those they viewed as “other”, and to map the mixture of formal and informal devices they employed to tackle perceived constraints. An early instance of such dynamics is found in the reporting of a business deal gone wrong by the English factor William Finch in 1609. The problem originated with the sale of a cargo of lead to Muqarrab Khan, a high-ranking Indian nobleman who acted variously as mutasaddi of Surat and Cambay, customs officer in these ports, and subahdar of Gujarat, among a range of other political and diplomatic appointments. Like many members of the Mughal political elite, Muqarrab Khan was also deeply involved in trade.50 In 1609, this attention to the role of trust in intergroup relationships’ in social science literature, see: Roderick M. Kramer, ‘Ingroup-Outgroup Trust: Barriers, Benefits, and Bridges’, in: Eric M. Uslaner (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 95–116, at 95. 47 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers. 48 Douglass C. North, ‘Institutions, Transaction Costs, and the Rise of Merchant Empires’, in: James D. Tracy (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 22–40; Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution. 49 Indeed, the practice of armed trading contributed a great deal to South Asian views of Europeans as violent and deceitful: Subrahmanyam, ‘Taking Stock of the Franks’. 50 Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, ‘An Aristocratic Surgeon of Mughal India: Muqarrab Khān’, in: Irfan Habib (ed.), Medieval India 1: Researches in the History of India 1200–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 154–167; Jorge Flores, ‘The Sea and the World of the

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dignitary had arranged with a broker named Tapidas Parekh to reimburse the EIC for the aforementioned sale. However, when a ship owned by Tapidas was seized by the Portuguese, the broker was imprisoned by the Surat authorities on account of outstanding debts.51 Tapidas’ house and goods were confiscated to pay his creditors, and Finch realised that he could not expect to recover the full sum owed to the Company. To make matters worse, Tapidas’ associate fled Surat to escape payment claims. Reporting the affair to William Hawkins, then residing at the Mughal court in Agra, Finch defended himself by stating: ‘If you shall think it very indiscreetly done by me to trust him, I would have your Worship to take notice, that as then no man in the city mistrusted or once dreamed of so strange an accident’.52 Finch’s explanation makes it clear that available information about Tapidas’ past conduct and communal reputation had encouraged him to trust the broker. It also implies that Finch had access to the local communication circuit in which communal judgements about people’s creditworthiness were circulated, a situation he would have been deeply familiar with from contemporary England.53 Following game theoretic models, the expected response to Tapidas’ defection would be for the duped agent to cease future dealing with this particular business partner.54 Yet such a basic explanation fails to account for the attribution effects at play here, as the conclusions Finch presented to Hawkins related to a wider collective: ‘by which your worship may see the villainy of these people and the little confidence that ought to be reposed in them, and for mine own part it shall be a warning to me for ever trusting more whilst I am in Surat’.55 Not just Tapidas’ worse-than-expected performance, but also Finch’s seemingly misguided reliance on community reputation appears to have led him to fall back onto a baseline position of distrust that extended to Tapidas’ community. Known as “out-group unitisation”, Finch’s response reflects the tendency not to differentiate between members of out-groups, treating a breach of trust by one member as representative of the group as a

Mutasaddi: A Profile of Port Officials from Mughal Gujarat (c. 1600–1650)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 21.1 (2011), 55–71. 51 William Finch to William Hawkins, Surat, 12 July 1609: Letters Received I, 24–25; Foster, Early Travels, 131. 52 Ibid., 25. 53 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 2, 150–152. 54 For the rational-choice model of trust: Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness. On reputation mechanisms: Greif, Institutions, 428–452. 55 William Finch to William Hawkins, Surat, 12 July 1609: Letters Received I, 25.

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whole.56 In sum, he wrote: ‘Sale of our cloth or more lead, I can by no means make unless I should, as we say, trust those knaves therewith.’57 Finch’s expressions of discomfort were by no means exceptional. Writing in 1617, the English factor John Browne described the customs that governed trade in the Indian marketplace as a source of constant anxiety: ‘We are here never sure of any bargain till we have it in our hands; custom here (though an ill one) giveth advantage to make a shameless retreat from their words.’58 His Dutch contemporary Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn raised a similar point in the survey of trade conditions in Surat he compiled in 1615: ‘Anyone trading here on behalf of the Company’, he cautioned, ‘needs to make sure that when selling any goods, that these will not be delivered to anyone without having received payment, because these nations are not to be trusted, and no matter whether they have agreed on a price, once the goods are in their possession they will give whatever they want’.59 Van Ravesteyn’s warning about the business practices of Gujarati merchants was consistent with his negative views overall about the reliability of the people he identified as Mughals. In the same report, he noted that ‘I find the Mughals to be a nation whose word one may not believe’, while elsewhere he observed that ‘the Mughals are a people who think lightly about breaking their word’.60 Presumed dishonesty was particularly problematic with regard to brokerage relations because Company agents were dependent on Indian brokers to carry out trade. They needed to entrust the latter with money, while having only partial insight into their activities and agendas due to language barriers and information asymmetry. Unease about such vulnerability frequently translated into suspicions that they were being cheated. Such was the case in 1621, when the English agents in Cambay stated 56 57

58 59

60

Roderick M. Kramer, ‘Collective Paranoia: Distrust Between Social Groups’, in: Hardin (ed.), Distrust, 136–166, at 141. William Finch to William Hawkins, Surat, 12 July 1609: Letters Received I, 25. The gravity of the term ‘knave’ may be inferred from Daniel Defoe’s claim that ‘once denominate a man a knave, and you need not forbid any man to trust him’. Cited in: Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 128. John Browne to Company, Swally, 10 February 1617: Letters Received V, 76. ‘Jemant hier wegen de E. compe negotieerende, dient te letten als eenijge goederen vercoopt, dat de selve aen niemant en laet volgen, sonder eerst betaelt te sijn, alsoo dese natien niet en sijn te betrouwen, ende al is ’t schoon dat se prijs hebben gemaeckt, als ’t goet wech hebben, geven daer naer wat selver willen’: Remonstrance about the present state of Surat by Pieter Gillis van Ravesteyn, 22 October 1615, in: Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 215. ‘Ick bevinde de Mogullen een natie, die men haer woort niet en mach geloven’: Ibid, 207; ‘de Mogullen [zijn] een volck die daer weijnich om geven of haer woort breecken’: ‘Journal of occurrences since our departure from Masulipatnam’, 8 May 1615–9 February 1616, in: Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 188.

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of their brokers that ‘wee knowe they are men that have little faith, troth, nor honesty, and this our opinion of them that they practize nothinge more then to cozen us and gett our monny.’61 In part, such accusations simply reflected the Companies’ lack of command over a complex commercial environment in which they were regularly outperformed or outwitted. Hence, when Van Twist in a report about the state of trade in Surat of 1634 complained about ‘the malice of the profit-seeking banias, who not only daily impoverish the quality of cloth, but also significantly reduce its length and width’, he merely laid bare the inability of the VOC to control the price and quality of imports when having to compete in a market with multiple buyers. Particularly in the early years of Company trade, when the Dutch and English traded from a position of comparative weakness and regular continuation of commercial relations was far from evident, Indian agents would have had greater incentives to act opportunistically. It appears that quite a few Company agents found it difficult to accept this. Van Twist’s characterisation of the bania middlemen in the textile trade of Gujarat as ‘this selfish nation’ is symptomatic of the frustration felt by him and his colleagues when their mercantile aims were thwarted – not to mention their hypocrisy, given the VOC’s own monopolistic ambitions.62 His statement is but one example of a wider tendency of framing self-interested Asian actors as duplicitous, fickle, or greedy, manifested in claims such as that ‘these Indian nations are altogether tainted with the flaw of favouring those from whom they expect most profit’, which followed a reference to ‘the inborn maliciousness and trickery of the inhabitants’ of the Coromandel Coast.63 Perhaps the most extensive diatribe against Indian duplicity is found in a report by an agent of the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales, Georges Roques, who was active in Surat and Ahmedabad between 1676 and 1693. Roques claimed that European merchants dealing in India were forced ‘to be in a state of continuous mistrust’ in order to ‘avoid the traps which are laid 61 62

63

Joseph Salbank and Richard Lancaster at Cambay to Council Surat, 27 November 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 344. ‘de malitie vande baetsuchtige Benjanen, die dagelijcx de lijnwaeten, niet alleen slechter van stoffe maken, maer merckel. in lengte & br[eedte] vercorten’; ‘dese eijgenbatige natie’: Report of the state of trade in Gujarat by Johan van Twist, c. 1634: NL-HaNA, VOC 1133, f. 247v. ‘dese Indiaensche natie al te samen met desen euvel besmet syn, dat se die liefst hebben, die meest geven ofte proffyt af staen te verwachten’; ‘de aengeboorne schalekheden ende bedriegeryen van de inwoonders’: Short Remonstrance about the present state of some places in the Indies by Jacques l’Hermite, Amsterdam, 20 August 1612: De Jonge, Opkomst III, 394.

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for us when we want to do trade with these barbarous and perfidious nations, who have no other passion but the appetite for an illicit profit.’64 He took aim particularly at Gujarati banias, whom he described as professional swindlers.65 With regard to Roques, Indrani Ray has pointed out that ‘his persistent and violent indictments might simply be reflecting reactions of a representative of a potentially aggressive European mercantile capitalism against the middleman, the greatest obstacle to its monopolistic ambitions.’66 Whilst this was surely a factor, it is equally clear that frustration over commercial competition or subjection to foreign rules occasioned the intense level of scorn and generated the type of commentary that it did because of pre-existing cultural prejudice. The latter appears clearly in Joseph Salbank’s claim, when he discovered that intelligence received from local informants in Bharuch turned out to be incorrect, that ‘there is noe more truth in these people then is in a dogg’.67 It also shines through in the complaint by his colleagues in Ahmedabad, that subahdar Safi Khan’s power to prevent the dispatch of English goods ‘slaveishly caused us to stoope to the demaund of even base infidels’.68 The religious dimension evident in the last quotation was particularly pronounced with regard to Muslims and formed a notable impediment to trust. In 1616, the English factors in Surat informed Sir Thomas Roe that ‘[t]here is no trust to the promises of Moors if the performance tend not to their profit’.69 A decade later, the Dutch chief of the Surat factory, Pieter van den Broecke, claimed that ‘one may not belief nor trust the words of Moors’.70 And towards the end of the century, the EIC’s President and Council in Madras noted that ‘there is no reliance or Securety in the Moores faithless vows or promices’.71 Further, John Browne’s observation about Muqarrab Khan that ‘he is a Moor, and therefore doubtful’, and Thomas Kerridge’s use of the phrase ‘many Moors’ promises of faithless affection’ even indicate that, to at least part of the Company’s personnel, assurances given by Muslims by definition occasioned 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Indrani Ray, ‘Of Trade and Traders in the Seventeenth-Century India: An Unpublished French Memoir by Georges Roques’, in: Lakshmi Subramanian (ed.), The French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean: A Collection of Essays by Indrani Ray (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1999), 1–62, at 11. Ibid, 12. Ibid, 16–20. Joseph Salbank at Ahmedabad to Council Surat, 22 October 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 309. James Bickford et al. at Ahmedabad to Council Surat, 21 December 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 348. Surat Factors to Thomas Roe, Surat, 23 July 1616: Letters Received IV, 323. ‘dat men de mooren woorden geen gelooff geven mach noch vertrouwen’: Pieter van den Broecke to Batavia, Surat, 22 April 1625: NL-HaNA, VOC 1084, f. 48r. Elihu Yale et al. to Jacob Uphill, Fort St. George, 30 April 1689: RFSG, Letters from Fort St. George 1689, 23.

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doubt.72 This notion was raised to the status of merchants’ wisdom by William Bruton, an English quartermaster who spent seven years in Coromandel and Bengal in the 1630s: ‘[H]e is no wise Merchant, that ventures too much in one bottome, or that is too credulous to trust Mahometanes or Infidels’.73 Within a context of continual written and oral exchanges between members of the different European nations in Asia, such tropes easily crossed back and forth between organisations and locales. In 1637, the Hoge Regering in Batavia likewise referred sceptically to ‘Moorish promises’ made by Mughal officials in Bengal, a year after deciding not to provide military assistance to Shah Jahan in the event of a Mughal attack against the Portuguese, arguing that ‘the Moors are not faithful enough to base a substantial undertaking on their promises of future benefits’.74 The common European cliché that Islamic doctrine did not consider promises to Christians as binding, plus the fact that early modern Europeans themselves often articulated trust in outspokenly Christian terms, go some way towards explaining the preponderance of anti-Muslim suspicion.75 More concretely, in the context of Company writing regarding South Asia, the regular occurrence of anti-Islamic statements was connected to the fact that Muslims, who made up the majority of office-holders in the Mughal Empire and several of its neighbouring states, were often in a position to impose terms on the Companies. Nonetheless, frequent references to the unreliability of banias show that charges of dishonesty were far from confined to a single group, and an author such as Roques regarded Muslim merchants as more noble and just by comparison.76 As Chapter 1 has shown, descriptions of treacherous people are found in European accounts produced throughout Asia, and they drew on a common stock of tropes and stereotypes. It was due to this generic quality that situational descriptions of specific groups so often slipped into

72

John Browne to Company, Swally, 10 February 1617: Letters Received V, 78; Thomas Kerridge to Thomas Roe, Surat, 18 November 1616: Letters Received IV, 348. 73 Bruton, Newes from the East-Indies, 5. 74 ‘moorsche beloften’: Dagh-Register Batavia, 1637, 99; ‘den Mooren niet trouw genoegh en sijn om op de beloften van haere volgende aen ons te vergunnen voordeelen yets remarcabels aen te vangen’: Hendrik Brouwer et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 4 January 1636: Generale Missiven I, 529. 75 Tracy, ‘Introduction’, 10; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 15; Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 130. 76 Ray, ‘Of Trade and Traders’, 45–46. Several historians have argued that, compared to their denouncement of the “superstition” of “gentile” religion as practised in southern India in particular, Dutch observers’ attitudes towards Islam and Muslims were relatively favourable: Kruijtzer, Xenophobia, 42; Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 29.

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generalisations using overarching labels such as ‘Orientals’.77 The torrent of remarks that linked presumed untrustworthiness to certain ethnic or religious identities underscores the lasting influence of ethnographic assumptions on the formation of Company attitudes towards Asian trade more generally, a crucial factor that has been overlooked in the existing literature. Given that distrustful rhetoric was so widespread, the question of how the Companies established relations with Indian business partners is all the more pertinent. The statements of Heuten and Geleynssen de Jongh cited earlier indicate that the indispensability of middlemen was recognised early on. An instruction issued to the VOC’s factors in Surat in 1632 explicitly acknowledged this situation when ordering them to continue to buy through Indian brokers because of the latter’s superior knowledge of the market.78 Over time, the preferred method of both Companies was to engage in longer-term relations with the same person or family, often extending over more than one generation. Repeated transactions based on mutual advantage could expand the bonds of trust beyond the level of individuals to include their kin. By linking together the reputational considerations of family members, such a mechanism provided both continued incentives for cooperation on the part of the brokers and extended assurances of reliable service to the Companies. As both parties valued the continuation of the relationship, it was in the interest of both to take the other’s interests into account.79 The enhanced predictability generated by stable collaborations helps explain why, despite inauspicious beginnings, the EIC continued to employ members of the Parekh clan, although the fact that the latter controlled an extensive regional network and possessed invaluable expertise and influence in commerce and banking was probably even more crucial. References to Tapidas Parekh, first mentioned in 1609, occur in Company records as late as 1660. Continuing with Tulsidas Parekh between the 1630s and 1660s, the brothers Kalyandas and Bhimji Parekh from the 1620s through to the 1660s and 1680s, respectively, and Bhimji Parekh’s son, Vanmalidas, who was appointed as the EIC’s chief broker in 1697, this family facilitated English commerce in Surat for the greater part of the seventeenth century.80 Such services were not based on 77 78 79 80

Ray, ‘Of Trade and Traders’, 11. Ann Bos Radwan, The Dutch in Western India 1601–1632: A Study of Mutual Accommodation (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd, 1978), 97. In economic terms, inter-generational relationships pose a solution to the ‘end-game problem’: Greif, Institutions, 434–435. About ‘trust as encapsulated interest’, see: Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness. Makrand Mehta, Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991), 65–90; Gokhale, Surat, 119–125. For eighteenth-century

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exclusivity. Bhimji Parekh also acted as envoy for Surat’s mutasaddi to Goa and supplied credit to the Dutch, while another member of the family network, the wealthy Mohandas Parekh, acted as broker to the VOC.81 The Dutch community in Surat engaged in the longest continuous relationship with a single mercantile clan, which secured a considerable hold over the Company’s affairs. Starting with the appointment of Kishandas as Company broker in 1659, the same office would be held by members of Kishandas’ family all the way down to the VOC’s dissolution in the 1790s.82 Writing in 1702 about Kishandas’ grandsons, Risikdas and Bhagwandas, the departing directeur in Surat, Hendrik Zwaardecroon, told his successor that nothing was done without their involvement, describing the brokers as ‘the bridges one has to traverse’ in any matter of importance concerning both trade and dealings with the local as well as the central government.83 The cases of the Parekhs and Kishandas’ family in Surat, like that of the chief merchants Beri Timana and Kasi Viranna in Madras, throw light on a notable development taking place over the course of the seventeenth century, by which brokerage relations increasingly came to follow established patterns that largely reflected the influence of these powerful merchants.84 An example of such institutionalisation was the annual “New Year’s Gift” which the EIC’s government in Madras made to its chief brokers, building on a practice that was widespread in early modern England.85 Rewarding services in this way was supposed to strengthen bonds of loyalty and ensure future performance, which ritual of relationship building the brokers reciprocated by presenting gifts to the EIC factory staff during Diwali.86 However, alternative, less congenial schemes to ensure commitment to the Company were also floated. One of the more cynical proposals was to make brokers more reliant on their employer by

brokerage relations between Surat’s merchant families and the European Companies: ­Ghulam Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750– 1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). 81 Jorge Flores, Nas Margens do Hindustão: O Estado da Índia e a expansão mogul ca. 1570– 1640 (Coimbra: Coimbra University Press, 2015), 305; Mehta, Indian Merchants, 74–78. 82 Nadri, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat, 170, n. 12, 202. 83 ‘de bruggen, waar over men moet gaan’: Memoir Hendrik Zwaardecroon to Pieter de Vos, Surat, 20 April 1702: NL-HaNA, Hoge Regering Batavia 829, unfoliated. 84 On Beri Timana and Kasi Viranna: Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 81–93; Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, Chs. 1, 3. 85 Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 68–82. In Madras, the practice dated back to at least the 1670s: Consultation Fort St. George, 1 January 1679: RFSG, DCB, 1678–1679, 52. 86 Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 401–402.

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uprooting them from their home environments.87 Cut off from access to their personal networks, the reasoning went, brokers would have fewer opportunities to pursue their own commercial agendas. A solution of this kind was advocated in 1630 by the EIC factors in Surat, who suggested to their colleagues in Persia that for the office of linguist (interpreter) they should employ ‘a Hindoo from hence of our owne selecting, who being a stranger there and haveing his dependance merely on the English may give us the more assurance of his loyalte’.88 A similar motivation induced Edward Knipe and William Jesson in 1645 to suggest an exchange of brokers between Surat and their station in Agra. Their proposal makes it crystal clear that they held a low opinion about the inherent trustworthiness of Indian middlemen: ‘Itt may verie well bee answered those brokers in Surratt are as craftie knaves and have as nimble facultie in deceipt as those here; which cann hardly bee denied, while they are amoung their owne tribe, with such able coadjutours to help them to binde upp the bundle of their falcities under a faire glosse hardly discerneable’. However, the Agra factors continued, a change of setting would at least reduce the chance that English business interests were harmed: ‘[B]ut when hither transplanted, the soyle will not prove soe firtle to their fraudulent humors.’89 Such overtly pejorative statements expressing stereotypical notions of Indian brokers as deceitful (‘craftie knaves’; ‘nimble facultie in deceipt’) in the classic ethnographic language of humouralism (‘their fraudulent humors’) compel us to be cautious about accepting a progressive narrative of a gradual lessening of distrust over time. Even if remarkably steady and mutually beneficial business relations between Indian merchant families and the European Companies took shape, a close reading of Company writing reveals that such engagements were grounded pragmatically on economic interdependence but did relatively little to change commonly held negative views. Indeed, positive experiences with individuals seldom alleviated group prejudice.90 Hence, when seeking to justify what the Court of Committees perceived as their overly strong reliance on their chief broker, Bhimji Parekh, President Gerald Aungier and the Council of Surat explained that ‘[w]ee Judge him an honest mann, 87 88 89 90

Compare the position of Armenians in New Julfa as ‘rootless outsiders’ in Safavid Iran: Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean, 1–2. Thomas Rastell et al. to William Burt in Persia, Surat, 6 October 1630: George W. Forrest (ed.), Selections from the Letters, Despatches, and other State Papers preserved in the Bombay Secretariat (2 vols. Bombay: Government Central Press, 1887), I, 8. Edward Knipe and William Jesson to Surat, Agra, 12 November 1645: EFI 1642–1645, 300. This observation aligns with a wider tendency for people to discount behaviour that does not conform to their stereotypical view of a group ‘as isolated and untypical’: Knights, ‘Historical Stereotypes’, 246.

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one that in his way feareth God and serves you not in a Mercenary Seruile way as most Banians doe’; thus contrasting Parekh’s genuine promotion of the Company’s interest to the allegedly servile and venal character of other bania brokers.91 The long-term persistence of ethnic stereotypes related to trust is clearly visible in the aforementioned memoir by Georges Roques and the published accounts by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and John Fryer, all compiled during the final third of the seventeenth century.92 Recounting his dealings with bania brokers in Shahjahanabad (Delhi), Tavernier asserted that ‘in trade these Banians are a thousand times worse than the Jews; more expert in all sorts of cunning tricks, and more maliciously mischievous in their revenge’.93 Published two decades later, Fryer’s account echoes the same tropes and sentiments. Variously describing the banias of Surat as ‘Vermin’, ‘Horse-leeches’, and ‘worse Brokers than Jews’, the EIC surgeon offered an archetypal depiction of Hindu middlemen as servile (‘enduring servily foul Words, Affronts and Injuries, for a future hope of Gain’), treacherous (‘Lying, Dissembling, Cheating, are their Masterpiece’), and money-hungry (‘Their whole desire is to have Money pass through their Fingers, to which a great part is sure to stick’).94 As historians of British India have observed, the heavy dependence on Indian knowledge and skills continued to be a source for mistrust and anxiety on the part of Company administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.95 The types of relations and representations discussed in this chapter, then, speak to the formation of patterns that applied widely not just in the marketplace but in a whole range of spheres from the domestic to the diplomatic. Whilst traditions of aggressive othering did not stand in the way of profitable and even intimate cross-cultural partnerships, they did fuel the tension that marked such 91 92

Gerald Aungier et al. to Company, Swally, 7 November 1671: BL, IOR/E/3/32, f. 93v. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Ecuyer Baron D’Aubonne, Qu’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes… Seconde Partie (Paris: Gervais Clouzier and Claude Barbin, 1676); John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, in Eight Letters. Being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672, and Finished 1681 (London: R. Chiswell, 1698). 93 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne; Through Turky, into Persia and the East-Indies (London: Robert Littlebury and Moses Pitt, 1677), II, 56. Compare: Tavernier, Les Six Voyages… Seconde Partie, 85: ‘Ces Banianes sont pour le negoce pires mille fois que les Juifs & plus sçavans qu’eux en toutes sortes de ruses & de malices quand ils se veulent venger.’ 94 Fryer, A New Account, 82–83. 95 Alena K. Alamgir, ‘“The Learned Brāhmen, Who Assists Me”: Changing Colonial Relationships in the 18th and 19th Century India’, Journal of Historical Sociology 19.4 (2006), 419–446.

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relations. As the next chapter makes clear, they also worked to provide discursive legitimacy to the Companies’ use of coercive methods, as views similar to those that held that a Muslim’s promises should be given little credence underpinned calls for the deployment of maritime force.

CHAPTER 4

‘No Thing but Feare Keepes a Moore in Awe’: Local Conflict and Quotidian Exchange If commercial relations during the 1610s had been charged with tension, the first significant outbreak of conflict between the Mughal authorities and the two major East India Companies took place in the early 1620s. Political disputes in Surat and other sites followed attempts by the VOC and EIC to assert their maritime power in the western Indian Ocean, and were prefigured by a number of small-scale skirmishes dating back to the early days of English trade in Gujarat. Such clashes formed part of a broader pattern of European– Asian violence and should be seen as a standard feature of Company strategies. Countless examples of harbour blockades, captures of ships, abductions of individuals, and other similar tactics employed by the Dutch and English (as well as the Portuguese, French, and Danes) testify to this state of affairs.1 Writing about the tense relationship between the VOC and the Deccan sultanate of Golkonda, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has rightly observed that ‘the logic of violence is bound to affect the logic of political ethnography’.2 Yet the reverse was also true. Supported by a pervasive ethnographic discourse which connected the suitability of given lines of action to the supposed character of the people at whom they were aimed, the application of maritime violence came to be touted as an effective or even necessary tool in dealings with Indian governments.3 Even Pieter van Dam, who stressed that in Mughal domains the Dutch ‘ought to submit to and comply with the laws of these countries’, agreed that the occasional display of strength was useful ‘to keep the Moors in devotion’.4 On multiple occasions, then, both Companies applied force when more conciliatory routines of quotidian engagement with Indian elites were deemed to have failed. 1 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce, 155–160, 275–281. 2 Subrahmanyam, ‘Forcing the Doors’, 137. 3 See also: I. Bruce Watson, ‘Fortifications and the “Idea” of Force in Early East India Company Relations with India’, Past and Present 88 (1980), 70–87. Although Watson’s overall analysis of Anglo-Indian relations is hampered by his uncritical acceptance of the English perspective, his argument that the idea of force was important to the EIC’s understanding of the AngloMughal relationship remains valuable. 4 ‘gehouden ons te submitteren en te voegen na de wetten en ordres van die landen’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.2, 17; ‘om de Moren in devotie te houden’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 36. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004471825_006

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The force of many arguments for the deployment of maritime power resided in their claims to ethnographic insight. Van Ravesteyn asserted that the Mughals were ‘a nation [...] that wants to be treated with coercion rather than sweetness’, a conclusion meant to rationalise the restrictions placed on navigation from Gujarati ports by the Portuguese cartaz (shipping pass) system.5 Wouter Heuten and his co-authors believed that the sight of a Dutch fleet outside Surat would serve ‘to gain some esteem with these haughty Moors’.6 And Thomas Kerridge stated that the arrival of English ships in Surat would ‘affright this people whom nothing but fear will make honest’.7 Calls for the employment of strong-arm tactics tended to be linked to perceived abuses of power by local government officials.8 In reality, regular dismissals of mutasaddis and other office-holders on account of complaints from the merchant community offer ample proof that these officials could not act with impunity.9 Yet such checks on their power were commonly overlooked or deemed inadequate by Company agents, who made a habit of complaining about ‘the excessive tyranny and covetuousness of the governors of all sorts’.10 Other early instances of the argument that sea power offered the best security against high-handed government officials are found in the correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe. Although he is better known for his advice to the EIC to seek profit ‘in quiett trade’, and not follow the Portuguese and Dutch in establishing forts and colonies, the ambassador firmly believed in the value of gunboat diplomacy.11 On numerous occasions, Roe stressed that it was out of fear that the Mughals had opened up their ports to the English, and that the Company’s presence would need to continue on the same footing.12 Growing frustration over his lack of 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

‘een natie alhier die meer met dwanck als soetticheijt willen onderhouden wesen’: Terpstra, Westerkwartieren, 208. ‘om bij dese superbieuse Mooren wat in aensien te geraecken’: Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke II, 390. Thomas Kerridge to Surat factors, Agra, 7 September 1613. Letters Received I, 282. See for instance: James Bickford et al. to Surat, Ahmedabad, 20 December 1621: EFI 1618– 1621, 347. Farhat Hasan, ‘The Mutasaddi of Surat – Evidence of Persian Records of the 17th Century’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 53rd Session (1992–93) Warangal (Delhi: Indian History Congress, 1993), 276–280; Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port, 195–196. William Methwold et al. to Company, Swally, 29 December 1634: EFI 1634–1636, 65. Roe to Company, Ajmer, 24 November 1616: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 304. See for instance: ‘only for a little feare we were entertayned’; ‘they will feare yow sooner then love yow’; ‘upon the same ground that wee began, and by which wee subsist, feare’; and ‘feare only keepes us in’: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 162, 303, 435, 466. Compare Thomas Kerridge et al. to Thomas Roe at Ajmer, Surat, 26 May 1616: Letters Received IV, 311: ‘as our entertainment was in a manner forced, our privileges and good usage (if at all, as we fear) must accordingly be obtained and continued.’

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diplomatic success confirmed him in his belief that ‘[a]ny thing that would stir these people to know and feare us will woorke better effects then all the faire wayes of the world’, as he put it in a letter to Surat of October 1617.13 Within the space of a few years, from the mid- to late 1610s, justifications of naval display that drew on assumptions of an ethnographic nature – and the connected idea that one’s reputation rested on the ability to avenge oneself – became increasingly prominent articles of faith in the political reasoning of VOC and EIC agents. True to form, various proponents of a hard-hitting approach theorised about a mentality common to Muslims to imbue their claims with greater rhetorical force. Reflecting on ‘the troubles and abuses of o[u]r people by the Govern[o]r and great men’ of Surat, George Ball and his fellow agents in Banten mused that English action against Indian shipping in the Red Sea would offer greater remedy than diplomatic solicitation at the Mughal court: ‘No thing but feare keepes a Moore in awe, use him kindly, & he will abuse you, but deale with him in smooth words & nipping deeds and he will respect and reverence you’.14 By 1620, this conviction was widely shared among the members of the English Council in Surat, who explicitly based their support for coercive methods on the well-established stereotype of Indian craftiness: ‘The inborne cunning of the people of India is incredible. The abuse of the Guzerates will not be remidyed but by one meanes only, namely, by deteyning their junckes’.15

Raids and Retaliations

As rhetoric turned into action, it so happened that only part of the aggressive measures that pitted the Companies against the Mughal authorities expressly targeted Mughal subjects, with the remainder forming part of a wider pushback against western Indian shipping. This is most evident in the case of the VOC. As early as 1616, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the future Governor-General, pondered attacks on vessels from the Deccan port of Dabhol as a means of forcing a way into the Red Sea trade.16 Five years later, in 1621, the High Government in Batavia ordered the ships Sampson and Weesp to carry out raids in the Babel-Mandeb strait, the narrow entrance to the Red Sea near the Yemeni port of 13 14 15 16

Roe to Thomas Kerridge in Surat, Mandu, 4 October 1617: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 387. George Ball et al. to Company, Banten, 19 January 1618: BL, IOR/E/3/5, ff. 254v–255r. Thomas Kerridge et al. to Company, Surat, 18 February 1620: EFI 1618–1621, 183. Das Gupta, ‘Indian Merchants’, 496.

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Mocha, which was a favoured pirate hideout.17 Seizing upon the circumstance that ships from Dabhol and other ports carried Portuguese passes or had Portuguese goods in them, the Hoge Regering declared all such vessels fair game. Indian captains who feared Dutch designs acquired letters of safe conduct from the VOC’s chief merchant in Mocha, Willem de Milde. Nonetheless, a total of six ships from places all along India’s western coast – Chaul, Dabhol, Diu, Kutch, and Cannanore – were robbed as soon as they reached open sea, and either captured, set on fire, or sunk.18 Unjustifiable even by the Company’s own standards, as Coen was forced to admit, these actions triggered a serious outcry on both sides of the Arabian Sea.19 De Milde and his staff were held hostage in Mocha, where they eventually died in captivity. The pilot Jan Pietersen and a few dozen others who had been put in charge of two of the captured ships ended up being overpowered by the latter’s Indian crews, and were either killed or imprisoned in Dabhol. Finally, intervening on behalf of those subjects who had money or goods onboard ships taken by the VOC, the Mughal authorities employed guards to seal off the Dutch factory in Surat for several weeks in November 1623.20 One of the people the Dutch had offended was Asaf Khan, imperial wazir and brother-in-law of the emperor, Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). Like many members of the court nobility, Asaf Khan invested in commerce, and as it turned out he was the owner of a cargo of silverware and gold ducats taken out of a ship arrested by the Weesp. The wazir quickly made his influence felt, and Wouter Heuten, then in charge of the Dutch factory in Agra, was summoned to court and forced to pay more than 13,000 reals of eight in restitution.21 Eager to restore relations with the Mughal authorities, the VOC’s director of trade in Surat, Pieter van den Broecke, offered to pay compensation to Asaf Khan, while consenting to the demands of Surat’s governor to free all captive ship 17 Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 40. 18 C.G. Brouwer, ‘Willem de Milde, Kânî Shalabî and Fadlî Bâshâ or, A Servant of the Dutch East India Company received in Audience by the Beglerbegi of Yemen, 1622–1624’, in: Geert Jan van Gelder and Ed de Moor (eds.), Eastward Bound: Dutch Ventures and Adventures in the Middle East (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 7–50, at 11–13. 19 Jan Pieterszoon Coen to Jacob Dedel, Batavia, 8 May 1622: H.T. Colenbrander (ed.), Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden Omtrent zijn Bedrijf in Indië (6 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919–1934), III, 182. 20 Jan Pietersen to Pieter van den Broecke, Dabhol, 24 October 1621: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 397r; Surat factors to Abraham van Uffelen, 30 May 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 239r: Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 11 January 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, ff. 225v–226r. 21 Pieter van den Broecke to Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Surat, 24 December 1623: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, f. 214r.

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crews and supply letters of safe conduct to Gujarati ships.22 He also agreed to provide an escort to the large ship owned by Prince Khurram which was preparing to undertake its annual trip to Mocha, a journey which in recent years had been compromised by English interventions. However, the watch placed on the Dutch factory would not be withdrawn until the local authorities and representatives of the merchant community in Surat had also negotiated an agreement with the English.23 The latter example indicates that there was some truth to the EIC factors’ assertion that the Mughals made ‘no distinction between the English and Hollanders, regarding them as one nation’.24 Although most members of the government were perfectly aware that different groups of farangis (“Franks”, the Persian term used to refer to Europeans) traded in the empire, it was common for the diverse community of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Christians in Surat and other places to socialise, intermarry, and generally be regarded as belonging to the same group.25 The settlement reached between the EIC and the administration of Surat in November 1623 marked a pause in a series of disputes. Contention had centred on the local government’s opposition to English trade to the Red Sea and obstruction of English imports of coral, besides more general English grievances about bribes and exactions. The directors in London authorised their servants in Surat to put pressure on the local authorities by preventing the ship belonging to Prince Khurram from leaving the harbour, and when effected in March 1621 this bought them at least some of the desired concessions.26 The ship was again detained upon its return from the Red Sea in November of the same year. Seven thousand reals of eight belonging to merchants from the Konkani ports of Chaul and Dabhol were confiscated, ostensibly in retaliation for 22

23 24

25

26

Roman Siebertz, ‘Ein Kaufmann als Diplomat: Pieter van den Broecke als Vertreter der Niederländischen Ostindiengesellschaft in Arabien und Indien 1615–1619’, in: Ralph Kauz et al. (eds.), Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und im Mittleren Osten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 323– 348, at 340–344. Bos Radwan, The Duch in Western India, 58. ‘datse geen distinctie en maecken tusschen d’Engelsen & Hollanders, menende een natie te sijn’: Translated letter English Surat factors to Batavia, Surat, 7 May 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 236r. See also: Nathaniel Halstead and William Hill at Ahmedabad to Surat factory, 21 March 1622: EFI 1622–1623, 68–69. Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 17–25; Barendse, Arabian Seas, 87–88, 102–104. For the category of “Franks” in the Ottoman Empire: Eva Johanna Holmberg, ‘In the Company of Franks: British Identifications in the Early Modern Levant c. 1600’, Studies in Travel Writing 16.4 (2012), 363–374. Consultation Surat Council, 9 March 1621; Thomas Rastell et al. to the Company, Surat, 7 November 1621; EFI 1618–1621, 237–239, 325, 328.

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the attack in February 1621 on a caravan carrying English-owned textiles and indigo from Agra to Surat. This robbery had been carried out by forces under the command of Malik Ambar, the chief minister of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate of Ahmadnagar, and an inveterate enemy of the Mughals.27 Yet while Chaul belonged to Ahmadnagar, Dabhol fell under the authority of the Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur. It is plausible that the English blockade of both ports in the autumn of 1621 used the caravan incident as a pretext for an attempt to cripple the commercial competition offered by Dabhol’s merchant shipping, as Ashin Das Gupta has argued.28 In the end, the EIC took only one ship during its blockade, a disappointing harvest caused by the fact that most prizes had already been obtained by the Dutch.29 The English returned to Dabhol the following year, when they took two frigates and engaged in a fruitless attack on the house of Agha Raza, the thanadar or chief officer of the town.30 Around the same time, matters also came to a head regarding a ship from Lahori Bandar in Sindh, the cargo of which the English had confiscated in 1619. The pressure put on EIC agents in Surat, Cambay, Ahmedabad, and Agra by injured Sindhi merchants and Mughal officials reached a peak in December 1621.31 In consequence, Surat’s English merchants were forced to leave their factory and take refuge with the Dutch. Subahdar Safi Khan blocked the transport of English goods from Ahmedabad and Cambay until adequate restitution was made of the sums confiscated. Moreover, the English merchants in Agra were imprisoned in January 1622 and their goods and money seized.32 The rebellion of Prince Khurram in the summer of 1622 appears to have temporarily taken the mind of Gujarat’s authorities off the English, who in 1623 once again set out to capture Indian ships. Yet after eight vessels from Dabhol, Gogha, Diu, and Surat were seized – and their crews and passengers taken hostage – the government responded by imprisoning some forty Englishmen in and near Surat under harsh conditions. A series of meetings between heads of Surat’s merchant communities and English representatives in November 1623 eventually settled the matters of the Agra caravan, the detainment of junks, and the 27

Consultation Surat, 16 March 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 243. Malik Ambar’s career is described in: Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105–128. 28 Das Gupta, ‘Indian Merchants’, 493. 29 Surat’s Council had warned in vain about this outcome: Consultation Surat Council, 16 March 1621; Thomas Rastell et al. to the Company, Surat, 7 November 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 244, 328. 30 Thomas Rastell et al. to Pulicat, Surat, 29 April 1629: EFI 1622–1623, 228. 31 James Bickford et al. to Surat, Ahmedabad, 29 December 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 354–355. 32 Foster, EFI 1622–1623, xv–xvii.

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imports of coral.33 Or so it seemed, because the forced nature of the agreement had bred resentment amongst the Gujarati traders, who subsequently used their influence at the Mughal court to seek redress.34 Following the departure of the English ships in January 1624, the EIC’s personnel in Surat were put in irons and their goods confiscated on the orders of the emperor. After several months’ imprisonment, the payment of 70,000 mahmudis, the mediation of Indian merchants, and an array of English petitions and threats, a final settlement was reached in September 1624.35 The terms of the settlement guaranteed the EIC unrestricted trade in Mughal dominions and freedom of transit tolls in certain places, and reconfirmed their servants’ free exercise of religion. However, the English merchants were no longer permitted to board their ships without licence from Surat’s governor.36 As for future disputes, it was agreed that the EIC assumed responsibility for any offence against Mughal subjects committed by Englishmen, but not by other Christians; that differences between Englishmen and Muslims were to be judged collectively by Surat’s governor and the English President; that the English were to offer ‘all friendly assistance’ to ships belonging to Surat, whether in the harbour or at sea; and that nobody was to forcibly enter the English factory, but that any grievances were to be brought before the mutasaddi and the English President to be addressed jointly.37 Concluding a series of violent disputes and ushering in a pattern of mutual accommodations, the agreements of 1623–1624 provided a framework for future conflict resolution, not lasting guarantees against forthcoming quarrels. The conflicts of the early 1620s and their manner of redress are instructive 33

Nathaniel Halstead and William Hill to Surat, Ahmedabad, 16 April 1622; Edward Heynes and William Hoare to Thomas Rastell, Daman, 27 September 1623; Joseph Hopkinson et al. to Thomas Rastell, Surat, 5 November 1623; Joseph Hopkinson and John Willoughby to Thomas Rastell, Surat, 7 November 1623; Joseph Hopkinson et al. to Thomas Rastell, Surat, 13 November 1623: EFI 1622–1623, 73–74, 264, 299–305, 319. 34 Thomas Rastell et al. to the Company, Swally, 14 February 1625: EFI 1624–1629, 56; Pearson, Merchants and Rulers, 119. 35 Thomas Rastell et al. to the Company, Swally, 14 February 1625: EFI 1624–1629, 59. The mahmudi was a silver coin in use in western India with a value of roughly two fifths of a rupee. See: Anirban Biswas, Money and Markets from Pre-Colonial to Colonial India (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2007), 55–56. 36 Agreement between the English and the Surat authorities, September 1624: EFI 1624–1629, 27–30. The ‘Contract of Peace’ is signed by governor Saif Khan and twenty other (mainly Muslim) signatories, including the qazi (judge), the captain of Surat’s castle, and members of Surat’s merchant community. The final signature was that of the famous Jain “merchant-prince” Virji Vora. 37 Ibid.

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precisely because they established a blueprint which continued to guide relations between the East India Companies and the Mughal authorities in Gujarat until the ‘fragile equilibrium’ was decisively upset in the mid-eighteenth century.38 Further bouts of conflict – in the mid-1630s, the late 1640s, the late 1680s, and the mid-1690s to mid-1700s – played out and were resolved with the same combination of measures and counter-measures. Several of these crises were the result of European piracy – the first of which occurred in September 1635, when the Roebuck, an English privateer operating under a commission from Charles I, appeared in the Red Sea and plundered the Taufiqi from Surat and the Mahmudi from Diu. Not only were goods lifted from these ships, their crews and nakhoda (captain) were also tortured to make them disclose the whereabouts of their valuables. William Methwold’s pleas that the EIC was not responsible were to no avail, and in April 1636 the mutasaddi of Surat ordered the President’s arrest and the payment of indemnities under the terms of the agreement of 1624. Only after eight weeks’ imprisonment and the compensation of losses amounting to 107,000 rupees was Methwold released.39 More alarming still was the spike in piracy during the 1690s, when several richly laden ships belonging to Surat’s wealthiest merchant, Mulla Abdul Ghafur, were attacked by Anglo-American pirates. News spread that women returning from the hajj had been abused and abducted during the plunder of the heavily loaded pilgrimage vessel Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695. Faced with an empire-wide ban on European trade, the Dutch, English, and French East India Companies were compelled to equip warships to convoy Gujarati shipping. In 1699, following a further large-scale act of piracy, the three Companies even had to accept responsibility for any losses that Surat’s merchants might suffer due to piratical activity, with representatives of all three made to sign a bond (muchalka) obliging them to protect a specific trading route each. Aurangzeb issued the order in response to political lobbying by some of the affected merchants, after which the Companies endeavoured through similar diplomatic 38

In 1759, the EIC took control of Surat in the so-called “Castle Revolution”. See: Jos Gommans and Jitske Kuiper, ‘The Surat Castle Revolutions: Myths of an Anglo-Bania Order and Dutch Neutrality, c. 1740–1760’, Journal of Early Modern History 10.4 (2006), 361–390. For ‘fragile equilibrium’: Subrahmanyam, ‘Forcing the Doors’, 137. In the first half of the eighteenth century, local disputes and accommodations in Surat centred on the issuing of maritime passes by the EIC to Indian merchants. See: Tristan Stein, ‘Indian Merchants, Company Protection and the Development of the Bombay Shipping Pass Regime, c. 1680–1740’, in: William A. Pettigrew and Mahesh Gopalan (eds.), The East India Company, 1600–1857: Essays on Anglo-Indian Connection (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 73–89. 39 Foster, EFI 1634–1636, xx–xxv.

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means to get the muchalka annulled. The situation escalated further when several more ships belonging to Abdul Ghafur were plundered in 1701, following which Aurangzeb issued an imperial ban on European trade and ordered compensation of the owners through the confiscation of goods from the Companies’ warehouses.40 As had been the case with earlier conflicts, the Dutch responded by blockading Surat and arresting Indian ships, while the Mughal authorities confined Company personnel and their families to the factory. Using similar rhetoric as that employed during the 1620s, VOC representatives in the 1700s identified ‘Moorish greed and insolence’ as the root cause of the troubles, presenting European reprisals as the logical response to ‘most unreasonable Moorish acts resulting from the impertinence of Surat’s governors and Moorish merchants’.41 Several rounds of intense negotiations ensued between the government of Surat and the captains of the Dutch fleets anchored near Swally, until, in 1707, the blockade was lifted and the status quo restored after a fruitful mixture of local and central diplomacy.42 Two final examples – one involving the Dutch, the other the English – further illuminate the close connections between diplomacy at the Mughal court and trading disputes at the local level. In April 1648, an assault on the VOC’s factory in Surat by a 150-strong mob left one Dutchman dead, two injured, and 27,000 guilders worth of goods missing.43 Because the authorities in Surat showed little inclination to trace those responsible for the incident, the Company decided to seek restitution with the central government, dispatching Joan Tack to the court of Shah Jahan. Once in Delhi, Tack had to compete with a merchant delegation from Surat, which submitted its own grievances regarding the VOC’s restrictive policy of maritime passes. Indeed, the plunder of the factory should probably be seen in the light of resentment created by Batavia’s recent prohibition on the supply of passes to Indian ships involved in the tin trade of Aceh and the Malay Peninsula. Outflanked in their diplomatic 40 Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 145–146; Memoir Hendrik Zwaardecroon to Pieter de Vos, Surat, 20 April 1702: NL-HaNA, Hoge Regering Batavia 829, unfoliated. 41 ‘de moorsse hebsugt en onhebbelijkheden’; ‘gants onbillicke moorsse handelingen, meest door de brutaliteijt der Suratse governeurs en moorsse coopluijden’: Report about the state of affairs of the Dutch Company in the Indies by Joan Pietersz van Hoorn, former Governor-General, delivered to the Dutch States General on 17 October 1710: NL-HaNA, VOC 436, unpaginated. 42 For these blockades: Diary, incoming and outgoing letters, and resolutions received, dispatched, and taken by Commander Meijndert de Boer during his expedition to Surat, 6 September 1704–6 April 1705: NL-HaNA, VOC 11318; Diary kept on the expedition to Surat under commander Meijndert de Boer and senior merchant Willem Six, 10 August 1705–10 June 1706: NL-HaNA, VOC 11320. 43 Journal Joan Tack, Delhi, 1 June–4 August 1648: NL-HaNA, VOC 1168, ff. 626–638.

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effort, the Dutch chose to retaliate at sea and, in 1649, seized the large royal ships Ganjawar and Sahebi and lay hold of the money found onboard. Negotiations with Surat’s governor, Mir Musa, resulted in a local compromise. This stipulated that Gujarati navigation to Southeast Asia was to cease and that the Company would receive compensation for the raid on its Surat factory, in return for restitution of the money taken from the ships.44 Only after the dispute was settled locally, in September 1649, did the VOC dispatch a petition to Shah Jahan, complete with a list of articles to be included in the requested farman and a favourable letter of recommendation from the mutasaddi and leading merchants.45 Compared to the messy undertaking of the Weesp and Sampson, the Dutch fleet sent to Surat in 1649 carried out its strike with surgical precision. Commander Gerardo Pelgrom and his crew were ordered, on pain of harsh punishment, not to harm any persons or their possessions, but only to seize Indian ships, goods, and cash to be held as security in the ongoing negotiations. All goods needed to be properly packed and sealed, with a detailed inventory drawn up, including each owner’s name and personal seal or signature. Furthermore, the captains of detained ships were asked to provide signed declarations of all goods they delivered into Dutch hands.46 Similar care was taken to keep an accurate record of prizes obtained in the course of the so-called Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690, which saw skirmishes in and around Bengal, Bombay, and Surat.47 In 1689, the English agreed to deliver the twenty-one ships taken off the western coast in the course of the conflict, and to compensate for goods and money as per the bills of lading. In return, the governor of Surat, Mukhtar Khan, was to release those Englishmen and their brokers held in prison, return English assets that had been seized, and support the Company’s appeal for a new farman from Aurangzeb. The deal was brokered through a series of meetings in the Portuguese-held town of Daman, which took place between July and September 1689 and 44 Baldaeus, Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel, 10–11; Van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 20–24; Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 141–142. Note that in practice Indian navigation to Southeast Asia continued, leading to a de facto acknowledgement by Batavia of its inability to monopolise the tin trade without risking its commercial interests in Mughal India. 45 Cornelis van der Lijn et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 31 December 1649: Generale Missiven II, 375. For the text of the articles agreed to by Mir Musa on 19 September 1649: Heeres and Stapel, Corpus Diplomaticum I, 521–528. Compare: Baldaeus, Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge, 7–10. 46 Baldaeus, Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge, 3–6. 47 For recent treatments of this conflict: Hunt and Stern, The English East India Company; Hunt, ‘The 1689 Mughal Siege’; Vaughn, ‘John Company Armed’; Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, Ch. 5.

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involved George Weldon and Abraham Navarro on the English side and Qazi Ibrahim and Mir Nizam on that of Surat.48 If Weldon and Navarro’s embassy to Aurangzeb’s court subsequently brought the conflict to a close, the most crucial legwork had already been done through successful local conflict resolution. As examples demonstrating the importance of cross-cultural arrangements at the local level for the development of formal institutional provisions, each of these episodes calls for further attention to the patterns of quotidian exchange that structured interpersonal relations on the ground.

Mutual Accommodations and Quotidian Exchange

By the mid-1620s, Mughal retaliations against the Companies’ privateering had clearly laid bare the Europeans’ vulnerability on the mainland. Shaken by their recent experiences, President Thomas Rastell and his Council in 1625 informed the EIC directors in London that a continuation of hostilities would prove hazardous and uncertain, whilst the settlement reached the previous year brought security, profit, and convenience of trade.49 Their change of heart aligned with the approach advocated for some time by Pieter van den Broecke, the main architect of the Dutch policy of accommodation.50 Upon learning about the actions of the Sampson and Weesp, which reportedly included acts of murder, rape, torture, and the embezzlement of money and goods, the directeur lamented that the VOC’s reputation had been blemished in the eyes of the whole world. He felt particularly troubled by the violation of De Milde’s passes, which seriously compromised the Dutch self-portrayal as ‘pious Batavians’ and ‘honest [...] word-keeping people’.51 Whilst the Hoge Regering in Batavia agreed that the employment of force had been indiscreet, they only reluctantly acknowledged that if the Company 48 49 50 51

‘A Diary of all occurrances of our Expedition to Daman in order to the making a peace between the English Nation and the Mogull’, 29 May 1689–23 September 1689: BL, Sloane MS 1910, ff. 47r–57v. Thomas Rastell et al. to the Company, Swally, 14 February 1625: EFI 1624–1629, 60–61. On this policy, see: Bos Radwan, The Dutch in Western India. ‘de natuere van onsse vromen batavieren’: Pieter van den Broecke to Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Surat, 1 February 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 41r; ‘onsen eerlycke naem van woort houdende lieden’: Pieter van den Broecke et al. to Abraham van Uffelen, Surat, 30 May 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 239r. Such behaviour clashed with contemporary Dutch self-images as champions of freedom and a counterweight to Habsburg tyranny. See: Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570– 1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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wished to continue their trade in Surat and Mocha, it would have to relax its restrictive policies and allow free navigation to ‘nearly all Moors without distinction’.52 Being nearer to the crisis and more deeply entrenched in the local setting, Van den Broecke displayed a more realistic view of the intricacies of trade in the western Indian Ocean. As chief of the Surat factory he had dealt with claimants from Chaul and Dabhol and experienced in person how soldiers kept watch day and night even in his own room.53 Looking back on the privateering incident, Van den Broecke pleaded that in order to drive a profitable trade in Surat and restore, if not trust, then at least ‘credit’ and ‘reputation’ in the eyes of its inhabitants, it was ‘necessary to deal with them more civilly’.54 Going against the notion that ‘no thing but feare keepes a Moore in awe’, the Dutchman argued that friendship accomplished more than force. The ideal way for the Dutch to restore credit, he suggested, was to freight Indianowned goods on Company ships going to Persia and the Red Sea, a practice which the EIC had already begun to implement.55 Transporting Indian goods was a means to turn a profit on otherwise unused space, yet it also offered a loophole for private trade conducted under the name of Asian merchants. This was hard to detect, especially because the VOC exempted influential persons, such as Surat’s shahbandar, the officers of the customs house, and the Jain “merchant prince” Virji Vora from paying freight costs.56 Initially in defiance of official prohibitions issued by the Heren XVII and Batavia, the Dutch factors in Surat continued to transport Indian goods on freight, and by the 1640s formal protests ceased.57 As enshrined in the General Instruction of 1650, the 52 53

54

55 56 57

‘bijkans allen Mooren sonder onderscheyt overal vrij passagien sullen moeten verleenen’: Hoge Regering to Heren XVII, Batavia, 6 September 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, f. 26r. Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 7 August 1622: NL-HaNA, VOC 1076, ff. 408– 411: Pieter van den Broecke to Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Surat, 24 December 1623: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, f. 214r; Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 11 January 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, ff. 225v–226r. ‘aensien en reputatie’; ‘crediet’; ‘salder sivilder met de inwoonders gehandelt moeten worden’: Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 16 January 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, f. 232r. In a later letter putting forward the same argument, ‘sivilder’ is replaced by ‘t’saemen’, or ‘together’: NL-HaNA, VOC 1082: Pieter van den Broecke to Amsterdam Chamber, Surat, 12 March 1624, f. 9r. Van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 16 March 1623: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, f. 224v; Van den Broecke to Amsterdam Chamber, Surat, 12 March 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 1082, f. 10r; Van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 24 April 1625: NL-HaNA, VOC 1084, f. 135r. Van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 53. See for the career of Virji Vora: Mehta, Indian Merchants, 53–64. See for instance: Instruction to Governor-General Hendrik Brouwer, Middelburg, 17 March 1632: P. Mijer (ed.), Verzameling van Instructiën, Ordonnanciën en Reglementen voor de Regering van Nederlandsch Indië (Batavia: Lands-drukkerij, 1848), 59; Jan Pieterszoon

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VOC’s official position from mid-century onwards would be that costly conflict should be avoided as much as possible through the cultivation of amicable relations with Mughal power-holders.58 In seeking to advance corporate as well as private interests, many VOC and EIC officials adopted an informal approach based on the cultivation of interpersonal ties with imperial officials. This mode of operating was preferred partly because the Companies regarded the pursuit of formal diplomatic arrangements at the imperial court as overly time-consuming, costly, and uncertain; and partly because the relative autonomy of Mughal government in the provinces meant that the extent to which imperial decrees were enforced depended strongly on the collaboration of local power-holders.59 Furthermore, agents on the ground, as well as senior managers, understood that the trade they carried on in Mughal India relied heavily on credit from local merchants and bankers, whom it would be equally ill-advised to alienate. Hence, in 1628, the EIC was compelled to send the Hart to Bandar Abbas laden with Indian-owned goods because Virji Vora and other Surat-based merchants had threatened to call in all their debts if their request was denied. In a letter of 1643, the English merchant Edward Knipe roundly stated that ‘Virge Vora, by reason of our continuall mighty ingagements, must not bee displeased in any case’.60 As long as their conduct could plausibly be described as befitting merchants – in other words, if expenses were controlled – representatives of both Companies enjoyed ample freedom to engage in such forms of cross-cultural interaction as were deemed requisite in their area of operations. The adoption of strategies of self-fashioning and practices of social exchange in accordance with “the mode of the country” was most apparent in the diplomatic sphere, yet these had their counterparts in the forms of cross-cultural elite sociability that guided Mughal-European interactions in port and market towns, which after all were the sites where Company envoys first became accustomed to the ways of Mughal society. A point worth stressing is that the more sociable strat-

58 59

60

Coen et al. to Pieter van den Broecke, Batavia, 15 June 1628: Colenbrander, Bescheiden V, 312; Van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 54–56. General Instruction of Heren XVII to Hoge Regering, Amsterdam, 26 April 1650: Mijer, Verzameling van Instructiën, 87. On the relations between imperial centre and local government: Hasan, State and Loca­ lity. For the importance of provincial diplomacy: Guido van Meersbergen, ‘Diplomacy in a Provincial Setting: The East India Companies in Seventeenth-Century Bengal and Orissa’, in: Clulow and Mostert, The Dutch and English East India Companies, 55–78. Consultation held aboard the Blessing, 8 December 1628: EFI 1624–1629, 300; Edward Knipe to Company, aboard the Crispiana, 18 July 1643: EFI 1642–1645, 108; Gokhale, Surat, 137–146.

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egies for cross-cultural dealings drew on presumed ethnographic insight just as much as the belligerent ones discussed earlier, as each was promoted as appropriate to what were held to be Mughal manners and mindsets. The first strategy adopted by high-ranking Company agents in Surat concerned the mimicking of the ceremonial language through which local elites expressed their power and standing. In the instruction given to Jan van Hasel upon succeeding Van den Broecke as directeur in Surat in 1628, Governor-General Coen criticised the habit of VOC servants in India of incurring great costs on ‘stately pomp’ and ‘useless ostentation’ in a bid to ‘seek honour and reputation with the Moors’.61 In his view, expenses could be diminished by two thirds if the factors cut down on their large retinues of native servants and horses. Coen’s account of stately display is corroborated by contemporary European travellers. About his visit to Surat in 1623, the Roman nobleman Pietro Della Valle recounted how Van den Broecke and the English President, Thomas Rastell, ‘live in sufficient splendor, and after the manner of the greatest persons of the Country’.62 In a colourful passage, Della Valle explained that ‘these Governours of the two Frank or Christian Nations’ took to the streets with a great entourage of horsemen and Indian foot soldiers armed according to the mode of the country. When riding out in a coach or on horseback, they were preceded by a servant on foot carrying a long scroll bearing inscriptions, a local custom used by ‘all men of quality here’. Conspicuous display of power was so common, Della Valle stressed, because any individual possessing the means was free to engage in it, servants were cheap and widely available, and ‘the Indians are inclin’d to these vanities’.63 Evidently, their use of banners, horsemen, armed soldiers, and typically Asian status symbols such as palanquins, signals the degree to which European Company agents in India conformed to what they perceived as local norms and customs.64 Later testimonies confirm such proud use of pomp. When recounting his stay in Surat in 1674, John Fryer described the habit of the English President of being carried in a palanquin, preceded by trumpet61

‘onnutte ostentatie’; ‘met groote oncosten te doen, pracht ende staet te voeren, eere ende reputatie by de Mooren soecken’: Instruction for Jan van Hasel, Batavia, 18 July 1628: NL-HaNA, VOC 1095, f. 321r. 62 Pietro Della Valle, The Travels of Sig. Pietro della Valle, A Noble Roman, into East-India and Arabia Deserta (London: Henry Herringman, 1665), 22. 63 Ibid. 64 See also: Van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India. For Bengal: Byapti Sur, ‘Beyond the Company and its Commerce: Reviewing the Presence of the VOC in Mughal Bengal, 1600–1700’, in: Raziuddin Aquil and Tilottama Mukherjee (eds.), An Earthly Paradise: Trade, Politics and Culture in Early Modern Bengal (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 123–155.

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ers and a horse of state, and shaded by an ostrich-feather fan ‘as the Ombrahs [umara, or high-ranking Mughal noblemen] or Great Men have’.65 The other members of the EIC’s Council would not leave Surat without at least four or five Indian peons (footmen) attending their coach either, as English chaplain John Ovington recalled based on his stay in the city during the early 1690s. Such a performance of status was deemed to raise the esteem of the English in the eyes of their Indian onlookers: ‘This creates a Respect from the Natives as they pass along, strikes them with a Regard to the English wherever they meet them; makes them value our Friendship, and place an Honour in our Intimacy and Acquaintance.’66 The combination of ‘Probity’ and ‘Grandeur’, which to Ovington characterised ‘the English Living’ in Surat, was thus seen as instrumental in instilling goodwill and ‘Veneration’, and hence as conducive to creditworthiness and economic cooperation. But it was also openly connected to claims to authority and political legitimation: ‘[I]t has Eclips’d the greatness of their own Government, by incouraging the Injur’d and Distress’d Indians, to apply themselves for Relief, rather to our President, than their Governour’.67 Mimicking local elites in life, senior Company officials even did so in death. Bearing silent testimony to this form of cultural appropriation are several Mughal-style funeral monuments erected for high-ranking VOC and EIC agents who died during their sojourn in India (Figure 6), fittingly described by Ovington as being adorned with ‘stately Towers or Minorets’ and ‘large Punch-Bowls’ or domes.68 The importance placed on visual display was also apparent in a second approach embraced by Company agents, one that centred on quotidian interactions and which comprised practices such as gift exchange, mutual visits, and social entertainment. In spite of lingering tensions and the occasional outbreaks of conflict, everyday European–Mughal contacts were structured by pragmatic and fairly smooth routines of interaction. According to Edward Terry, chaplain to Thomas Roe from 1617 to 1619, the English were well received when visiting Mughal noblemen, whom he found to be ‘as civil to strangers, 65 Fryer, A New Account, 68. 66 Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 400. 67 Ibid., 401. 68 Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 405. On these funerary monuments, constructed by Indian craftsmen in the Timurid style, the earliest of which date to the 1640s: Chris Scarre and Judith Roberts, ‘The English Cemetery at Surat: Pre-Colonial Cultural Encounters in Western India’, The Antiquaries Journal 85 (2005), 250–291; Alexander Drost, ‘Changing Cultural Contents: The Incorporation of Mughal Architectural Elements in European Memorials in India in the Seventeenth Century’, in: Michael North (ed.), Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 73–87.

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figure 6 Tomb of Francis Breton (d. 1649) at English Cemetery in Surat. Breton was President of the English factory in Surat from 1639 till his death in 1644. YashIsIn. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

as to their own Countrey-men’. He approvingly noted that the Mughals used many polite phrases and ‘good wishes to one another’, including ‘Salam Allacum, God give you health’.69 A picture of practical coexistence arises in particular from Geleynssen de Jongh’s description of day-to-day contacts between the Mughals and the Dutch, which he qualified as ‘reasonable and mostly comparable to the way it is in many other places where Moors are’. Merchants joined merchants, soldiers joined soldiers, and men of higher rank sought out each other’s company, too.70 Writing in the late 1620s, with several years’ worth of experience as chief of the Dutch factory in Bharuch, Geleynssen provided the most detailed guidance to date on how to curry the favour of a Mughal nobleman. It was essential ‘to accommodate oneself to his humours’, the senior merchant suggested, which could be done in various ways: ‘If he enjoys your company, visit him often; if inclined to merrymaking, let him find you; if he takes pleasure in drinking, present him with some strong liquors; if he enjoys the hunt, join his company 69 70

Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 212–214. ‘Den dagelicxe ommeganck tusschen haer ende onse natie is redelijck ende meest gelijck ’t op veele andere plaetsen is daer Mooren sijn’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 59.

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when time can be spared’.71 Examples of such cross-cultural sociability abound in contemporary records. For instance, when describing a meeting with the brother of the Mughal governor of Bharuch, Van den Broecke reports how he was invited by the nobleman to participate in the deer hunt, using leopards to chase the prey.72 Tellingly, when ending his words of advice with a recommendation on gift-giving, Geleynssen appealed to the established trope of Moorish greed to explain his counsel: ‘If avaricious, as it is a common defect among the Moors, one must at times honour him with some small rarity’.73 The matter-of-factness of Geleynssen’s advice was mirrored by that of his contemporaries. In his Remonstrantie of 1627, the Dutch factor in Agra, Francisco Pelsaert, rather dryly told the Heren XVII not to be astonished that gifts and payments were disbursed when dealing with the Mughal administration, ‘because it is the way of this country’.74 Years of experience in out-stations with limited capital and manpower and little formal oversight had convinced these agents of the expediency of conforming to local conventions and adopting informal means for acquiring governmental support, a practice common in early modern Europe too.75 After all, as Heuten had remarked earlier, even import and export tolls could be negotiated as long as one cultivated a good relationship with the officers of the custom house.76 Geleynssen explicitly referenced the VOC’s lack of power vis-à-vis the land-based Mughal Empire in support of his defence of an accommodative stance, just as Van den Broecke had done some years before him.77 Then still in charge of the Surat factory, the latter informed his superiors in the United Provinces that the Mughals were a proud and powerful people who would live happily without the Dutch; hence it was incumbent on the Company to tone down its aggressive mercantile aims and adapt its behaviour. Who would enjoy being affronted in their own country, he asked rhetorically, let alone ‘by people to whom they show more 71

‘u selven te accommoderen naer sijn humeur, soo vermaect is met u geselschap hem dickwes te besoecken, soo tot vrolicheijt genegen is u te laten vinden, soo den dranck bemint hem somwijlen met eenige starcken dranck te vereeren, soo totte jacht genegen is somwij­len als den tijt lyden can in sijn gezelschap te vertoonen: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 46. 72 Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke II, 258. 73 ‘soo begeerlyck, alst een gemeen gebreck onder de mooren is, moet men somwijlen haer met een cleijnicheijt, dat vreemt is, sien te vereeren’: Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 46. 74 ‘omdattet in dit landt de maniere is’: Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 306. 75 Fontaine, The Moral Economy. 76 Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke II, 382. 77 Caland, De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, 46.

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courtesy than to their own nation’?78 Realising just how valuable networks of personal contacts were for Company trade, and cherishing the good treatment generally received from Surat’s inhabitants, it was with abhorrence that the directeur had witnessed how the actions of the Weesp and Sampson had upset the status quo. As briefly noted already, Van den Broecke’s diary is instructive about the type of quotidian social interactions that sustained cross-cultural relationships and protected the Companies’ interests. In March 1628, when the former mutasaddi and shahbandar of Surat, Ishaq Beg, arrived from Hormuz onboard a Dutch fleet, Van den Broecke was quick to welcome him onshore with great display of honour, two days prior to being greeted by Surat’s inhabitants upon his arrival in the town itself. Less than eight weeks later, as news spread that the VOC had detained a large ship belonging to Shah Jahan and the merchant community demanded the pillaging of the Dutch factory, such action was prevented by the mutasaddi, whom Van den Broecke described as his friend, and from whom he received a gift of two pamris or silk cloths the following month.79 Finally, in April 1629, on the eve of his departure for Batavia, Van den Broecke took Jan van Hasel around town when taking his leave of the mutasaddi and ‘principal Moors’. He used the opportunity to request the members of Surat’s Muslim elite to regard his successor as highly as they had regarded him, assuring them that for his part Van Hasel would offer them full contentment. The merchants collectively promised to do as requested, Van den Broecke tells his readers, thus successfully concluding this ceremonial attempt at transmitting the goodwill and relationships built up over a decade from one contact onto the next.80 As for Van Hasel, in participating in this rite of passage he would have felt backed by his superiors in Batavia, whose instructions actively encouraged him to maintain warm ties with Mughal noblemen by way of small gifts, ‘polite treatment, cordial and civil interaction, as well as an upright style of life’.81 Although EIC sources from this period are less rich when it comes to describing social interactions, the available evidence suggests that the situation for 78

‘Dit volck is machtich ende suberbieus’: Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 16 January 1624: NL-HaNA, VOC 1079, f. 232r; ‘wie isser geerne in sijn eigen landt geaffronteert, van volck, diese meer cortoisie als haer eigen natie aendoen’: Pieter van den Broecke to Heren XVII, Surat, 24 April 1625: NL-HaNA, VOC 1084, f. 135r. 79 Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke II, 340–345. 80 Ibid., 357. 81 ‘met beleefde bejegeningen, minnelijke & civile ommeganck, mitsgaders goedt comportement van leven’: Instruction for Jan van Hasel, Batavia, 18 July 1628: NL-HaNA, VOC 1095, f. 322r.

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the English was comparable to that of their Dutch counterparts. Thus, in 1628, President Kerridge and his Council assured the Court of Committees that all means were being employed to maintain cordial contacts with Surat’s inhabitants, with the result that relations were now characterised by ‘greater peace and amity’ than ever before: ‘[T]he last great breach twixt these inhabitants and your servants induced our uttmost indeavour to regaine their affections, according to your order; which by often visiting, presents, and invitacions we have obtained in an unwonted measure.’82 Again, in September 1630, President Rastell and his Council reported that following their ‘solemne and extraordinary ceremonios reception’ by the Mughal governor and chief merchants of Surat, the next few days had been entirely taken up by ‘reciprocal vissitts, both wee to them and they to us’.83 A concrete outcome of these meetings was that the English factors agreed to escort the richly loaded merchant ship Shahi safely back into Surat’s harbour.84 Here, as before, it bears emphasising that such arrangements were the product of interpersonal relations at the local level, not at that of high politics. Whilst farmans and other written commands were crucial in setting out the formal parameters within which commercial interactions took place, mutual accommodations by individual actors were indispensable for the framework to function in practice. The ensuing pattern of cooperation based on interdependence in matters of trade formed no guarantee against the periodic outbreak of conflict, yet it did ensure that hostilities remained ‘contained’, that is, limited to short-lived and geographically confined actions which did not cause a permanent breach in relations.85 The complex concurrence of intense day-to-day crossings and exchanges with periodic outbursts of hostility traced in this chapter played out in varying combinations across Mughal India throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Close cross-cultural interactions fast became an integral part of the daily routines of Company agents and regularly took the form of polite social engagements and longstanding commercial partnerships. Copious evidence shows that the barriers to trust posed by prejudice and unfamiliarity could be overcome, at least partially, through a mixture of institutional provisions, established routines of social communication, long-term relations with the same individual or family-based network, and communal accommodations 82 83 84 85

President Kerridge et al. to Company, Surat, 4 January 1628: EFI 1624–1629, 192, 211. Thomas Rastell et al. to Masulipatnam, Surat, 29 September 1630: EFI 1630–1633, 52–53. Consultation held aboard the Royal James, 28 September 1630: EFI 1630–1633, 49; Ruby Maloni, European Merchant Capital and the Indian Economy: A Historical Reconstruction Based on Surat Factory Records, 1640–1668 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 123, 133. For the ‘contained conflict’ thesis: Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, 252–254. Also see: Van Santen, De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 25.

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based on mutual interest. Yet violence, both physical and rhetorical, remained part of this story. If Van den Broecke’s call for friendly cohabitation represents one end of the spectrum of Company attitudes towards European–Mughal relations, the English Ahmedabad factors’ denouncement of the actions of Surat’s officials as ‘the more then barbarous tirannie and salvage dealinge of these viprous, dessemblinge, and crockadillike currs’ represents the other.86 Writing in December 1621 upon hearing that their colleagues in Surat had been expelled from the factory, James Bickford and his three co-writers employed every rhetorical device to condemn the government’s behaviour. It is clear that their eclectic appeal to tyranny, savagery, and barbarism was intended to lend superior weight to the slur, not to offer conceptual nuance. Still, their choice of metaphors was no coincidence, as their defamation of Surat’s magistrates as malignant (“viperous”), unreliable (“dissembling”), monstrous (“crocodilelike”), and base (“cur”) invoked established stereotypes that lent further credence to their portrayal of Mughal government as cruel and unjust. The analysis of cultural representations in Part 2 of this book has shown that the language of trust in VOC and EIC writing was steeped in assumptions about collective character traits, and that the latter constituted an important device used by Company agents to explain or argue for particular modes of conduct. In Bickford’s day, aggressive ethnographic discourses served to underpin calls for the deployment of maritime force against Gujarati shipping. In the decades that followed, similar preconceptions motivated EIC and VOC officials to argue that only fortifications could ensure undisturbed trade on the Coromandel Coast, or that a firm hand was required to rule the inhabitants of Ceylon. Even when power asymmetries strictly forestalled such high-handed action and Company agents had to be at their most accommodative, their understandings of the Asian environment in which they operated influenced their approaches to cross-cultural contact in profound ways. With respect to strategies of selffashioning and practices of elite sociability, Company agents consciously and persistently adapted their modes of comportment to what they perceived to be Mughal norms and predilections. As I will argue in the next chapter, this dynamic was nowhere more pronounced than in the sphere of diplomacy. 86

James Bickford et al. to Surat, Ahmedabad, 20 December 1621: EFI 1618–1621, 347.

PART 3 Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange

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map 3 The Mughal Empire

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Ceremonies of Submission: Diplomacy in a Mughal Register At the culmination of his public audience at the imperial court in Delhi on 12 September 1677, the VOC merchant Johannes Bacherus was clad in sumptuous robes of honour (khilʾat or sarapa) and led before the throne of the reigning Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb. An unassuming mission undertaken by a handful of Company employees, the principal significance of Bacherus’ assignment lies not in its soliciting of imperial edicts addressed to the provincial government in Mughal Bengal – the eventual effect of which was negligible – but in its detailed recording of practices of cross-cultural exchange. As a prime example of the Companies’ dominant mode of small-scale diplomacy, routine missions such as Bacherus’ provide ample insight into the customary ways by which Company agents participated in and responded to Mughal court ceremonial.1 With a turban wrapped around his European-style hat, a long coat with a skirt (jama) covering his body, and a rich scarf or sash around his shoulders, the Dutch merchant-envoy was guided into the Diwan-i-Am or Am-Khas (Hall of Public Audience), and positioned in the emperor’s field of view.2 Having waited patiently for around half an hour, the moment arrived when Aurangzeb turned his gaze to the envoy.3 Bacherus humbly acknowledged the favour shown to him by performing the ritual obeisance known as taslim four times in succession, after which he was directed to take a place among those nobles who commanded a thousand horsemen. Recounting the events of the day in his diary, the envoy was sure to stress the significance of his reception: ‘This 1 For the Companies’ modes of diplomacy, see Guido van Meersbergen, ‘The Diplomatic Repertoires of the East India Companies in Mughal South Asia, 1608-1717’, The Historical Journal 62.4 (2019), 875–898. On Bacherus’ mission: Guido van Meersbergen, ‘Kijken en bekeken worden: Een Nederlandse gezant in Delhi, 1677-1678’, in: Lodewijk Wagenaar (ed.), Aan de Overkant: Ontmoetingen in Dienst van de VOC en WIC (1600-1800) (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2015), 201–216. 2 Extract from the Diary of Johannes Bacherus at the Mughal Court in Delhi, 11 September 1677. NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, ff. 629r–631v, at 630v. For the last item of dress Bacherus uses the term kamarband, the waistband typical of Mughal elite male dress. As he describes it as being placed around his neck, however, it is more likely it would have been a sash (patka) or scarf. 3 Ibid. The phrase Bacherus uses is ‘well over one ghari’, a unit of time-keeping equating to twenty-four minutes. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_007

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was truly the greatest honour the Company could wish this monarch should pay to her delegate, which made everyone look upon us in admiration, on account of the esteem His Majesty showed me, and because for several times afterwards he honoured me by turning his eyes towards me’.4 Bacherus’ testimony is emblematic of the responses of Dutch as well as English Company agents to Mughal social and political ritual more widely. In addition to indicating their almost matter-of-fact compliance with the norms of Mughal court ceremonial, it also reveals the extent to which many Company envoys assessed the treatment they received by what they regarded as the standards of their host culture, not by the conventions of intra-European diplomacy. A closer look at his audience helps place Bacherus’ reception and response into context. It tells us that the VOC envoy was in fact accorded a relatively modest rank in the spatially stratified setting of Delhi’s Diwan-i-Am. After recounting how he was led before Aurangzeb’s throne dressed in robes of honour, and immediately before laying claim to exceptional honour and regard, Bacherus described how the emperor personally directed him towards his appointed place: His Majesty himself, with the raising of his right hand, gestured that I should take position within the silver fence, whereto the aforementioned darogha [officer] of the sarapas guided me along the left-hand side, and positioned me in the third row behind the umara and among those of yek hazari, or a thousand horses.5 To anyone familiar with the spatial configuration of the Mughal court, such details were extremely significant. Halls of Public Audience in Mughal palaces were carefully arranged according to a uniform principle expressing gradations of rank, whether it was in Agra, Lahore, Delhi, or in the mobile courts set up in army camps.6 Stephen P. Blake described the lay-out of the Diwan-i-Am in Shahjahanabad (Delhi) as follows. The emperor sat at the closed end of the hall 4 ‘dit was voor waar de grootste eere die d’E: Comp.e can wenschen dat van desen monarch haar affgesondene moght aangedaan worden, en deedt ijder met admiratie aen, en op ons sien, van wegen de achtinge die mij van sijn maij.t gebeurde, en dat hij ‘t sedert noch soo verscheijde mael mij verwaardighde d’oogen na mij toe te slaan’: Ibid. 5 ‘wees sijn maij.t selver, met t’oplighten van sijn righter handt mij boven op, in’t silver heck te stellen daer ick door de voorn. cerpaeuws droga, aen de slincker h.t op te gaan begeleijt, ende in de derde rij achter de amerouwen tusschen die van eeck hasarij, oft een duijsent paarden gestelt wierde’: Ibid. 6 For a comparative perspective: Carla M. Sinopoli, ‘Monumentality and Mobility in Mughal Capitals’, Asian Perspectives 33.2 (1994), 293–308.

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in an elevated balcony supported by marble pillars, below which was a small semi-circular area enclosed by a five-foot-high golden railing reserved for the imperial princes. Beyond this was a larger area delineated by a five-foot-high silver railing, within which high nobles (umara) with a personal rank of higher than 2000 zat stood in their respective places, along with foreign visitors of note.7 The remainder of the pillared hall was reserved for mansabdars (imperial rank-holders) with ranks between 200 and 2000 zat, who stood within a fence of red-painted wood. Outside the hall proper was a large courtyard divided into two by a railing of red sandstone; the inner segment of this was occupied by mansabdars of the lowest ranks, along with the higher military functionaries in the retinues of great nobles, while foot soldiers, servants, and retainers were admitted to stand only in the outer ring. Within the hall all officers took up position according to their rank in their specifically appointed places.8 Although the number of 1,000 horses cited by Bacherus is seemingly at odds with Blake’s division, the envoy’s account in all other matters matches what we know about Mughal court ceremonial.9 When admitted within the area enclosed by the silver fence, the Dutchman was summoned to stand in the third row behind the high nobility.10 In the early decades of Aurangzeb’s reign, nearly five hundred Mughal noblemen were appointed to mansabs of 1,000 and above; some two hundred of these received mansabs of 2,000 or higher.11 Standing among the commanders over a thousand mounted troopers, Bach7

Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 92. The position of Mughal office-holders (mansabdars) in the imperial hierarchy was expressed in the double rank of zat and sawar, the former indicating personal rank and pay, and the latter the number of horsemen an officer was expected to maintain. 8 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 92. Compare Jahangir’s account of the introduction of the silver railing in the Hall of Public Audience, completed during his eighth regnal year (1613– 1614). Inside the silver railing, ‘Amirs, ambassadors, and people of honour sat, and no one entered this circle without an order’: Henry Beveridge (ed.), Alexander Rogers (trans.), The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī, or Memoirs of Jahāngīr (2 vols. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909– 1914), I, 242. 9 Blake’s division is based on the zat rank, while Bacherus’ mention of 1,000 horsemen suggests he may have referred to the sawar rank (see note 7 above). This variance would explain the discrepancy. 10 During Aurangzeb’s reign, the title amir (plural: umara) referred to any mansabdar holding a rank of 1,000 zat or more. The elite group holding zat ranks between 2,500 and 7,000 were regarded as ‘great amirs’: Blake, Shahjahanabad, 86–87. 11 M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society, and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66, 265. The exact figures as calculated by Athar Ali are 486 and 202, respectively. In the same period (1658–1678), 141 mansabdars held personal ranks of 3000 zat and above.

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erus thus rubbed shoulders with those who among the Mughal elite (umara) occupied the lower ranks. His sarapa, which consisted of the standard threepiece set ‘given to ordinary mansabdars’, and was priced at just 170 rupees, likewise signals that the marks of distinction the envoy received were estimable but fairly unremarkable.12 These details make Bacherus’ proud claims regarding the honour Aurangzeb’s gaze and gestures conferred upon him all the more significant. Evidently, the subordinate position in which the envoy was placed fully accorded with his expectations and self-image, both of which were in keeping with the hierarchical relationship expressed through the courtly ritual. In other words, unlike an aristocratic ambassador such as Sir Thomas Roe, who sought to compete on a royal level, merchant-envoys such as Bacherus cherished the prestige bestowed on them by the emperor because it put them on a par with army commanders and government officials, their interlocutors in day-to-day business. Hence, much like the early eighteenth-century EIC ambassador John Surman, who looked for advice on how to receive the emperor’s farman to what the ‘Rajahs and the Nobility of that Kingdom are wont to doe’, Bacherus took Mughal elites as his point of reference.13 Bacherus’ audience offers just one illustration of the profound ways in which VOC and EIC representatives adapted their diplomatic approaches to their Asian environment. Mapping a wide range of Dutch and English engagements in diplomacy in a Mughal register, this chapter argues that Company agents’ participation in diplomatic encounters reveals their understanding of Mughal imperial culture, as well as of their own place within the Mughal imperial framework.

Diplomacy and Mughal Court Culture

In the history of early modern Asian–European encounters, few events enjoy greater canonical status than the embassy of Thomas Roe to the court of Jahangir (Figure 7). If Roe’s embassy (1615–1619) is the most studied instance of English diplomacy in Mughal India, the best-known individual episodes are those court audiences when the royal envoy was presented with honorific gifts. Juxtaposing the gold-threaded robe of honour he received from Prince Khurram (the later Emperor Shah Jahan) to the theatrical garments worn by the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s stage play Tamburlaine the Great, Roe remarked 12 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 107; Extract from the Diary of Johannes Bacherus at the Mughal Court in Delhi, 11 September 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, f. 631r 13 Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 251.

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figure 7 Jahangir investing a courtier with a robe of honour, c. 1616. The bareheaded figure dressed in orange is believed to depict Thomas Roe. British Museum, London, 1933,0610,0.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved

that ‘the garment would well have become the actor; but it is here reputed the highest favour to give a garment woorne by the Prince, or, beeing new, once layd on his shoulder.’14 As these words suggest, Roe was aware of the symbolic significance of this act of investiture, and he made sure to tell his readership that he regarded it as an unwelcome imposition. Recounting the ceremony that took place on 9 November 1616, he stressed that the cloak was ‘caused to bee putt on my back, and I made reverence, very unwillingly’.15 In analogous fashion, when, on the occasion of Nowruz (Persian New Year) in March 1617, Roe was informed that Jahangir wished to grant him a robe of honour, he claims to have ‘returned answere that I had no use of a Babylonish garment’.16 The ambassador’s repeated allusions to the theatricality of Mughal court ceremonial have led Bernard S. Cohn, Kate Teltscher, and others to conclude 14 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 294. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 357.

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that he misread a foreign system of meanings: ‘Equipped with the wrong cultural script, Roe turns a compliment into an insult.’17 In the spirited debate that followed, various scholars have argued against such a notion of mutual incomprehension based on incommensurate meanings, maintaining that existing equivalences between European and Indian court cultures would have provided Roe with a fair grasp of the rituals he participated in.18 Taking up an intermediate position, Audrey Truschke suggested that European misinterpretations of Mughal court life were far too numerous to accept an optimistic view of mutual understanding, yet conceded that Roe ‘likely understood the claims of authority and subordination that often accompanied’ gifts of khilʾat.19 Such a reading is certainly the most convincing. Roe’s embassy journal leaves little doubt that the symbolic acts of submission to Mughal imperial authority expected of the Englishman – including prostrations and the donning of ceremonial robes – appeared to him as ‘affronts and slavish customes’ incompatible with the office of an ambassador.20 Yet the root cause was that Roe felt bound to the contemporary European conception of diplomatic honour shared by his English courtly audience, which held that a royal ambassador represented his sovereign in person. In other words, it was not Roe’s inability to comprehend a foreign ceremony, but his concern about how his actions would be looked upon at home that accounted for his dismissive stance.21 Indeed, the evidence from EIC and VOC records demonstrates that South Asian and European actors were more than capable of working out mutually intelligible routines of diplomatic interaction, an insight that becomes clearer when we 17 Teltscher, India Inscribed, 21. Compare: Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 18; Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues, 31. 18 William R. Pinch, ‘Same Difference in India and Europe’, History and Theory 38.3 (1999), 389–407; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris’, in: Bowen et al., The Worlds of the East India Company, 69–96; Nandini Das, ‘“Apes of Imitation”: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India’, in: Jyotsna G. Singh (ed.), A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 114–128; Kim Siebenhüner, ‘Approaching Diplomatic and Courtly Gift-Giving in Europe and Mughal India: Shared Practices and Cultural Diversity’, The Medieval History Journal 16.2 (2013), 525–546. 19 Audrey Truschke, ‘Deceptive Familiarity: European Perceptions of Access at the Mughal Court’, in: Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks (eds.), The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400-1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 65–99, at 89. 20 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 318. Roe’s account is strewn with statements of this kind. See: Ibid., 70–71, 100, 109, 118–119, 214, 262, 273. 21 On Roe’s reporting on his embassy to different audiences in England: Rupali Mishra, ‘Diplomacy at the Edge: Split Interests in the Roe Embassy to the Mughal Court’, Journal of British Studies 53.1 (2014), 5–28.

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broaden the focus beyond Roe’s embassy to include the full scope of East India Company diplomacy.22 Diplomatic ceremonial has long interested scholars of early modern court culture and inter-polity relations, in the first place because of the ways in which such rituals symbolise, constitute, and reproduce relationships of power between princes, polities, and courtly actors.23 Recent studies increasingly pay attention to cross-cultural diplomacy beyond Europe and have placed the ceremonial exchange of material objects at the heart of their analyses.24 Within this body of literature, the khilʾat ceremony has received special attention in discussions about cross-cultural (mis)understandings and transculturation, on account both of its central place in court ritual across Afro-Eurasia and its prominence in diplomatic accounts.25 In sharp contrast to the ‘ceremonies of possession’ that accompanied European expansion in the New World – which 22 23

24

25

I develop this argument in Van Meersbergen, ‘The Diplomatic Repertoires’. A foundational study is William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, The Journal of Modern History 52.3 (1980), 452–476. For a historiographical discussion, see Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass 14.9 (2016), 441–456. See for instance: João Melo, ‘Seeking Prestige and Survival: Gift-Exchange Practices between the Portuguese Estado da Índia and Asian Rulers’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013), 672–695; Peter Burschel, ‘A Clock for the Sultan: Diplomatic Gift-giving from an Intercultural Perspective’, The Medieval History Journal 16.2 (2013), 547–563; Maartje van Gelder and Tijana Krstić, ‘Introduction: Cross-Confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, Journal of Early Modern History 19.2–3 (2015), 93–105; Toby Osborne and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction: Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World’, Journal of Early Modern History 20.4 (2016), 313–330; Christina Brauner, ‘Connecting Things: Trading Companies and Diplomatic Gift-Giving on the Gold and Slave Coasts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Early Modern History 20.4 (2016), 408–428; Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Michael Laver, The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift-Giving and Diplomacy (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020); Birgit Tremml-Werner, Lisa Hellman, and Guido van Meersbergen, ‘Introduction. Gift and Tribute in Early Modern Diplomacy: Afro-Eurasian Perspectives’, Diplomatica 2.2 (2020), 185–200. Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khilʾat in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ralph Kauz, Giorgio Rota, and Jan Paul Niederkorn (eds.), Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und im Mittleren Osten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009); Peter Burschel and Christine Vogel (eds.), Die Audienz: Ritualisierten Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2014); Christine Vogel, ‘The Caftan and the Sword: Dress and Diplomacy in Ottoman–French Relations around 1700’, in: Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann (eds.), Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2015), 25–44.

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embodied ‘the sense of superiority’ most Europeans felt in their encounters with Amerindians – the khilʾat ceremony and other forms of ritual submission that were expected and performed in courts from Istanbul to Edo represented the other end of the spectrum of cross-cultural power relations forged during this first age of global interactions.26 The diaries and correspondence of VOC and EIC envoys offer rich if underused sources for the study of Mughal–European diplomatic exchanges. Besides exemplifying the by now well-established need for Europeans in Asia to adapt to local demands and conventions, they also reveal a concerted willingness on the part of hosts and visitors to incorporate the newcomers into existing structures of political authority. I will offer a detailed analysis of VOC and EIC gift-giving strategies in Chapter 6, while the present chapter focuses on Company agents’ participation in Mughal ritual, including their reception of farmans and robes of honour. To better understand the practices men such as Roe and Bacherus witnessed and took part in, the remainder of this section will outline the meanings and purposes of ceremonial gifting in Mughal imperial culture.27 The Mughals distinguished between two types of ceremonial offerings. Gift items presented to a superior were called pishkash, which in the Timurid and Persian traditions had formally originated as voluntary offerings, although in practice constituted an obligatory tribute or tax through which the donor acknowledged the supreme authority of the recipient.28 Gifts of this kind were expected by the Mughal emperor on special occasions, such as his solar and lunar birthdays, the Nowruz festivities, the birth of a royal prince, or the celebration of a memorable event such as a military victory or the ruler’s recovery from illness. Furthermore, nobles presented pishkash to the emperor upon receiving an appointment or when they sought a particular favour. This type of gift entailed precious articles such as costly pearls, rubies, fine horses and elephants, and was expected to reflect the donor’s status in its value. In addition to pishkash, Mughal officers presented the emperor with nazr, ceremonial gifts of coins. This offering was regarded as an expression of gratitude or tribute on more routine occasions. Numbers varied from just a few gold coins (mohurs) 26 27 28

Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 9. On Mughal diplomacy, see N.R. Farooqi, ‘Diplomacy and Diplomatic Procedure under the Mughals’, The Medieval History Journal 7.1 (2004), 59–86. R.G. Mukminova, ‘The Timurid States in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in: M.S. Asimov and C.E. Bosworth (eds.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume IV: The Age of Achievement: A.D. 750 to the End of the Fifteenth Century (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 350–366, at 360; Ann Lambton, ‘Pīshkash: Present or Tribute?’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57.1 (1994), 145–158.

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and a handful of silver rupees to hundreds or even more than a thousand coins.29 Apart from differences of substance, pishkash and nazr were different in the sense that the latter was always offered in person, whereas the former could also be sent, and particularly in that the term nazr (vow or dedication, from Arabic nadhr) carried the implication of an oath of allegiance.30 Ceremonial gifts of pishkash and nazr from subordinates to superiors were customary at all levels of the imperial hierarchy, which meant that every office-holder at different times participated in the rituals of both giving and receiving. Such offering was a public act intended to enhance the splendour of the court and to confirm the bonds of loyalty between donor and recipient. The emperor, naturally, was positioned at the head of this chain of patronage; he was the embodiment of the empire and from him authority and favour flowed downwards. The marks of distinction bestowed by Mughal emperors on their nobles included honorific titles, warrants of office, insignia of exalted rank, such as standards and kettledrums, robes of honour, and ceremonial presents. Items in the latter category typically consisted of jewellery, decorated daggers, swords, and other weaponry, and horses or elephants with ornamental trappings made of silver or gold. Company envoys usually received one or several of the following three items: ceremonial robes, horses, and ornamented daggers known as khanjars. Gift-giving by superiors was designed to reward subordinates for services performed, ensure their continued loyalty, and display the munificence of the donor. The methodically prescribed manner in which gifts were to be received emphasised their symbolic significance. For instance, in the case of a gift of weapons, a sword would be hung around the recipient’s neck, a dagger placed on his head, and a quiver upon his shoulders.31 Afterwards, the recipient had to perform four times the official obeisance known as taslim, described by the chronicler of the reign of Akbar and foremost Mughal ideologue Abu’l-Fazl (1551–1602) as follows: The salutation, called taslím, consists in placing the back of the right hand on the ground, and then raising it gently till the person stands erect, when he puts the palm of his hand upon the crown of his head, which 29

30 31

Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility, 142–144. Mughal chronicles contain numerous examples. See for instance: Sāqi Must’ad Khan, Jadunath Sarkar (ed.), Maāsir-i-‘Alamgiri: A History of the Emperor Aurangzib-‘Alamgir (reign 1668-1707 A.D.) of Sāqi Must’ad Khan (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947), 147, 150, 217, 277. Gail Minault, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Robing and Sovereignty in Late Mughal and Early British India’, in: Gordon, Robes of Honour, 125–139, at 127. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility, 139–143; Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art, and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 69–71.

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pleasing manner of saluting signifies that he is ready to give himself as an offering.32 As this passage makes clear, submission to imperial authority was the key principle expressed by the taslim, as it was in the two further types of salutation introduced by Emperor Akbar. The most intimate and exclusive was the sijdah, or complete prostration in the manner of prayer, which was performed by some of Akbar’s closest disciples during private audiences as a sign of complete submission and personal adoration.33 Yet the most common form was called kurnish, and consisted of placing the palm of the right hand on the forehead and bowing the head downwards. As Abu’l-Fazl explained, this salutation ‘signifies that the saluter has placed his head [...] into the hand of humility, giving it to the royal assembly as a present, and made himself in obedience ready for any service that may be required of him’.34 Whereas taslim was expected whenever a subject was presented to the emperor or when he received a gift or command from him, kurnish was performed by all who beheld the sovereign at the daily ceremony of jharoka-i darshan (the emperor showing himself from a balcony), as well as in the Hall of Public Audience. The gift item located at the heart of the system of rituals that constituted imperial authority was the honorific robe or khilʾat, in Persian known as sarapa (sar-ā-pā: from head to foot). The custom by which rulers or other powerwielding individuals invested beneficiaries with luxurious garments as a mark of honour was both historically and geographically widespread. Stewart Gordon has shown that evidence for the donning of khilʾat can be traced back to the first millennium CE in societies along the entire axis from sub-Saharan Africa to China, where the practice seems to have originated. In South Asia, the practice spread from Islamic to Hindu court cultures, and remained in use in princely states during the British Raj.35 The central principle of the khilʾat ceremony was the public establishment or confirmation of a client relationship between donor and recipient, reinforcing ties of personal loyalty and obliga32 33

34 35

Abu’l-Fazl, H. Blochmann (trans.), H.S. Jarrett (trans.), The Ain i Akbari by Abul Fazl ‘Allami, translated from the original Persian (2 vols. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1873–1891), I, 158. Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 124–127; John F. Richards, ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir’, in: John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 285–326, at 307–309, 314. Abu’l-Fazl, Ain i Akbari I, 158. Stewart Gordon, ‘Introduction: Ibn Battuta and a Region of Robing’, in: Gordon, Robes of Honour, 1–30.

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tions of service on the part of the latter. At the same time, the reception of a robe of honour also distinguished the recipient from the common people and enhanced his status among his noble peers. Honorific robes were bestowed on Mughal officers to mark promotions within the mansabdari (rank-holder) system or to reward them for special services performed, to accompany farmans addressed to them, and at ceremonial occasions throughout the year, such as the Nowruz festival, the emperor’s birthday, or the anniversary of the imperial succession. To achieve the purpose of exactly ranking the various hierarchical relations expressed through gifts of khilʾat, an intricate system of gradations in the fineness and value of its fabric was set up to differentiate between different kinds of honorific garments.36 Within the Mughal context, the typical khilʾat set had three pieces – a turban (dastar), a long silk coat with a round skirt (jama), often adorned with gold or silver thread, and a waist-scarf (kamarband). A more distinguished version of khilʾat included a jewelled turban-ornament (sarpech) and a band for decorating the turban (balaband), in addition to the three previous items. Even more sophisticated was the seven-piece set, while the most honourable gift of all was a robe that had been worn by the emperor himself.37 The practice of granting a personal piece of apparel had originated with the idea that this garment, having made contact with the ruler’s body, contained some of his essence. In the Mughal era, it had become common for honorific robes, which were by then granted by the thousands, to be mass-produced in imperial workshops within the palace grounds. Nevertheless, as we have seen in Roe’s account of the practice, newly woven ceremonial robes were usually at least brushed along the emperor’s shoulder to capture his essence, and in this way retained the links with the custom’s original meaning.38

The Companies and Khilʾat

Whereas vassalage and sharing in the ruler’s majesty were the primary values connected with khilʾat, the variety of contexts in which robes of honour were granted renders their significance more complex. A century ago, the pioneering work of F.W. Buckler established the normative view of khilʾat as being about 36 37 38

Stewart Gordon, ‘Robes of honour: A “Transactional” Kingly Ceremony’, The Indian Social and Economic History Review 33.3 (1996), 225–242. Gavin R.G. Hambly, ‘The Emperor’s Clothes: Robing and “Robes of Honour” in Mughal India’, in: Gordon, Robes of Honour, 31–49, at 38–39. Gordon, ‘Introduction’, 13.

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political incorporation through claims of suzerainty.39 Gordon’s more recent work has shown that Buckler’s theory requires updating to fully account for the multiplicity of meanings the practice could carry.40 First, honorific attire was presented by a host of other actors besides the emperor. Members of the royal family, both male and female, built up their personal client networks and used khilʾat to exert their patronage. Particularly for princes of the blood – who awaited a succession struggle upon the death of the reigning emperor, if not during his lifetime – it was crucial to cultivate extensive networks of support among the Mughal nobility from an early stage.41 In addition, high nobles, provincial governors, military commanders, and even minor noblemen frequently invested individuals with honorific robes. Striking examples of the widespread and multifarious nature of this practice are found in the accounts of Dutch and English merchant-diplomats. One such instance concerns the diplomatic mission of VOC agents Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, who travelled from Agra to Delhi in late 1652. At the end of their stay at court in the early months of 1653, Berckhout received a sarapa from Emperor Shah Jahan, but also from Princess Jahanara and her former wet nurse, Huri Khanam. The emperor, his daughter, and her confidante each presented an additional sarapa to be delivered to the Dutch directeur in Surat, while both women also granted a robe to Tack. The mir bakhshi (chief paymaster in the central administration), Mahabat Khan, further bestowed a sarapa upon Berckhout, while Tack enjoyed the same distinction from another high nobleman (and future mir bakhshi), Khalilullah Khan. Finally, on the day of their departure, the imperial wazir, Sa’dullah Khan, honoured both Berckhout and Tack with a pamri, or silk cloth used as mantle or scarf.42 The obvious diversity of these instances prompts the question of how these various acts of investiture, and the relationships they implied and enacted, should be understood. 39 40 41 42

F.W. Buckler, ‘Two Instances of Khilʾat in the Bible’, Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1922), 197–199; F.W. Buckler, ‘The Oriental Despot’, Anglican Theological Review 10.3 (1928), 238–249. Gordon, ‘Introduction’, 2, 9–10, 21–22. Munis D. Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, ff. 759–770, at ff. 763, 769–770. The title Mahabat Khan had just been bestowed on Mirza Lahrasp. It was previously held by his father, best known for staging a coup against Jahangir in 1626: Nawwāb Samsām-Ud-Daula Shāh Nawāz Khān and ‘Abdull Hayy, H. Beveridge (trans.), Baini Prashad (ed.), The Maāthir-ul-Umarā: Being Biographies of the Muhammadan and Hindu Officers of the Timurid Sovereigns of India from 1500 to about 1780 A.D. (2 vols. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1911–1952), II, 28–31. For pamri: Henry Yule, Arthur Coke Burnell, and William Crooke (eds.), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (London: J. Murray, 1903), 665.

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Diplomatic interactions expose the limitations of readings of the khilʾat ceremony that focus on subordination in a strict sense. For instance, unless one allows for a situational and multifaceted understanding of khilʾat, the implications of the reciprocal exchange of ceremonial robes between sovereigns would become near impossible to disentangle.43 An example from intra-Asian diplomacy will help clarify the kind of relationship Company agents and their principals entered into when invested with robes of honour. In May 1661, the Safavid envoy Budaq Beg arrived in Delhi to deliver Shah Abbas II’s letter of congratulation to Aurangzeb following his succession three years earlier. At his audience with the emperor, alongside a turban-jewel, a jewelled dagger, perfume with a gold cup and saucer, and betel leaves with a gold betel-casket and tray, the ambassador received a robe of honour. Two months later, having been granted leave to depart, Budaq Beg was presented with an even richer assortment of gifts, which again included robes of honour.44 Stemming from a court culture that shared the Persianate language, symbols, and rituals of the Mughal court, it would have been unthinkable for the Safavid envoy to formally submit his master to the suzerainty of a neighbouring ruler. A more plausible reading is that through gifts of honorific dress, Aurangzeb symbolically incorporated the ambassador into his patronage network, which in practice implied protection for the duration of the latter’s stay. If the multiplicity of meanings of khilʾat allowed the emperor to maintain the appearance of a claim of overlordship, the same ambiguity enabled Budaq Beg to accept the robes as a personal distinction without compromising the shah’s sovereignty or his own obligation of fealty to the latter. A focus on the productive capacity of ambiguity is also relevant to understanding the responses of Dutch, English, and other European representatives in Mughal India.45 Although an act of political incorporation from a Mughal point of view, most European recipients seem to have regarded the khilʾat ceremony as a ritual submission to authority and an expression of honour, yet not as the full-blown subordination of the Company or state which they served. This interpretation explains why seventeenth-century European–Indian encounters involving khilʾat only rarely led to unease for the European recipient, despite what Roe’s famous example might suggest. As previously mentioned, Roe held to a circumscribed notion of diplomatic status that severely 43 44 45

Gordon, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. Must’ad Khan, Maāsir-i-‘Alamgiri, 21–22. On productive ambiguity in diplomatic encounters, see Christian Windler, ‘Performing Inequality in Mediterranean Diplomacy’, The International History Review 41.5 (2019), 947–961.

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restricted the range of conduct he believed he could honourably engage in. Just how much such reservations, if they were more widely shared to begin with, had dissipated in the space of half a century can be observed from the advice about Mughal court ceremonial which François Bernier provided to the director-general of the newly formed Compagnie des Indes Orientales, François Caron. In a memorandum dated 10 March 1668, the French traveller and former physician at Aurangzeb’s court argued that if French envoys were to receive sarapas, he saw no harm in them performing ‘the salam in the Indian way, putting the hand three times on the head and stooping to the ground’.46 As in other courtly settings, what mattered most in his view was the relative degree of distinction the French might enjoy in relation to their fellow ambassadors. Since Bernier had never seen any envoy, with the single exception of Budaq Beg, omitting this form of obeisance, he saw no harm in the French following the custom.47 Tellingly, Bernier observed a need to justify the performance of taslim, but not the reception of robes of honour itself, a practice whose meanings he must have been thoroughly familiar with after several years of serving in the imperial entourage.48 A degree of familiarity with the Islamic world also underpinned the response to Mughal robes of honour of Roe’s diplomatic predecessor, William Hawkins. Hawkins had spent time in the Levant, spoke Turkish, and was said by his detractors to observe ‘the custome of the Moores or Mahometans’.49 Regarding his reception by Mirza Abdur-Rahim, a Mughal poet and general who held the title khan-i-khanan, in February 1609, Hawkins boasted that ‘after three houres conference with him, he made me a great feast, and being risen from the table, invested me with two clokes, one of fine woollen, and another of cloth of gold, giving me his most kind letter of favour to the King’.50 Further indications that many Europeans took pride in the honorific robes they received are found scattered across seventeenth-century travel accounts. When describing the gold brocade robe, mantle, two waistbands, and turban he received from the viceroy of Bengal, Shaista Khan, the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier cheer46

François Bernier, Theodore Morison (trans.), ‘Minute by M. Bernier upon the Establishment of Trade in the Indies, dated 10th March, 1668’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 65.1 (1933), 1–21, at 9. 47 Ibid. See for intra-European diplomatic competition at the Ottoman court: Vogel, ‘The Caftan and the Sword’. 48 Bernier served the nobleman Danishmand Khan, the mir bakhshi or chief paymaster of the imperial army. On Bernier’s advice to the Compagnie: Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 2–7. 49 Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 220. 50 Foster, Early Travels, 80.

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fully noted that it comprised ‘all the Apparel that the Princes are wont to give to those to whom they intend any Honour’.51 And when John Fryer recounted the achievements of Sir George Oxenden, the principal feat he highlighted was that the President’s bravery during Shivaji’s sack of Surat (1664) was such ‘that he had a Collat [khilʾat] or Serpaw [sarapa], a Robe of Honour from Head to Foot offered from the Great Mogul’.52 As a rule, European recipients of robes of honour tended to voice their appreciation at obtaining this personal mark of distinction, provided that the hierarchy expressed in the gift was not perceived as misrepresenting the donor’s status in relation to the beneficiary. Such was the case when the governor of Gujarat, Bahadur Khan, presented nine robes to Caron to be delivered to Louis XIV. Judging that the French King had little reason to rejoice, the English agents in Surat dryly noted: ‘[W]hen he comes to understande the Custome of this Countrey that Sirpawes [sarapas] are neuer giuen but by Princes or great Umrawes [umara] to their Inferiors he will not haue reason to thanke his Directeur for this addition of honour’.53 Apparently, the Englishmen were not alone in judging Caron: ‘The ffrench Padres here haue allready been concerned at this action as rendering their King hereby equall or rather Inferiour to Bhadur Caun’.54 More detailed information is contained in the account of Dutch ambassador Dircq van Adrichem’s departure audience at the Hall of Public Audience in Delhi’s Red Fort, on 22 October 1662.55 Having been clad in a sarapa in a manner similar to Bacherus fifteen years later, Van Adrichem was led to the bottom of the steps leading up to the stage where Aurangzeb was seated, ‘four times bringing his hand from the earth to his head’.56 As the audience unfolded, the imperial stable master, Iftikhar Khan, placed a jewelled dagger (khanjar) on Van Adrichem’s head, and the reins of a horse with a gilded saddle around his neck. Upon receiving each item, the ambassador went through the routine of ‘salam’ four times in succession, as he did a final time when the emperor 51 Tavernier, The Six Voyages II, 20. Compare: Tavernier, Les Six Voyages… Seconde Partie, 12: ‘tout l’assortiment que les Princes ont accoûtumé de donner à ceux à qui ils veulent faire honneur.’ 52 Fryer, A New Account, 87. Italics in original. 53 Gerald Aungier et al. to Company, Surat, 20 November 1670: BL, IOR/E/3/31, f. 149v. 54 Ibid. In 1668, Caron founded the French factory in Surat, a part of Asia where he had no prior experience. 55 I analyse this mission in more detail in: Guido van Meersbergen, ‘The Dutch Merchant-Diplomat in Comparative Perspective: Embassies to the Court of Aurangzeb, 16601666’, in: Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 147–165. Also see: Van Santen, Op Bezoek. 56 Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 192.

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looked towards him. Later that day, having received a farman from the hands of the imperial wazir, Fazil Khan, Van Adrichem, the merchant Joan Elpen, and the secretary Fernandinus de Laver once more performed the prescribed ritual. Of particular interest in the description of this scene are the bits of commentary by De Laver, which were inserted to accentuate the singular honour the VOC’s delegation had received. We learn that Aurangzeb had passed the dagger ‘from his own hands’ to Iftikhar Khan with the express purpose of granting it to the Dutchman, and that the emperor focused his gaze intently on the envoy while the latter performed his salutations.57 Upon concluding his embassy, an evidently proud Van Adrichem even put in a formal request to keep the khanjar received from Aurangzeb ‘as a remembrance of such a high and mighty prince’.58 As with Bacherus, the actual degree of distinction accorded to Van Adrichem was fairly modest. He received robes of honour of the same gradation as Bacherus and entered the silver fence only during the presentation of the VOC’s gifts, resuming his usual place within the red wooden railing afterwards.59 Yet the extent to which De Laver may have imagined or inflated the honour accorded to Dutch representatives is of lesser importance here than the fact that these and other Company officials assessed their reception at the Mughal court by what they understood to be the benchmarks of the Mughal ‘economy of regard’.60 The entirely matter-of-fact recording of the numerous instances at which Company agents ‘humbly offered the required obedience after this country’s fashion’ should not surprise us if we consider the glaring power asymmetries between one of the mightiest rulers of the day and the merchants who solicited his favour, yet it bears emphasising because of its contrast with Roe’s dissonant response, which has hitherto dominated the scholarly debate.61 57 58

59 60 61

‘met eygen handen’: Ibid. ‘temeer ‘tselffde tot een gedachtenisse van soo een grootmachtigen vorst stricken soude’: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 62. By granting this request, the Hoge Regering made an exception to established VOC policy that all diplomatic gifts received by individuals should be handed over to the Company. Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602-1811, II, 269. As another indication that royal gifts could be regarded as a source of great personal pride and proof of accomplishment, the VOC ambassador to Persia, Joan Cunaeus, chose to have his portrait painted wearing the gold velvet khilʾat he received from Shah Abbas II during his 1651–1652 embassy. On the portrait: Erlend de Groot, ‘The Dutch Embassy to Isfahan (Persia) in 1651–52 led by Johannes Cunaeus: A New Interpretation of Weenix’s Monumental History Painting’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 57.4 (2009), 312–325. Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 164, 184. For this term, see: Avner Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, Economic History Review 50.3 (1997), 450–476. ‘volgens de dees lants wyse de vereyste eerbiedigheut nedrigh opgedragen hebben’: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 160.

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By granting robes of honour to VOC or EIC representatives, then, Mughal emperors gave visual expression to the protection and patronage which these foreign subjects enjoyed in their territories by virtue of imperial farmans, all the while confirming their claims to overlordship. In turn, by accepting sarapas, Company officials pledged formally to remain worthy of the emperor’s favour as well as loyal to his commands, a relationship that by proxy extended to the resident communities in Mughal domains whom they represented. Yet how else was this relationship defined and maintained? One key device were the official communications that accompanied diplomatic interactions. For instance, in the letter addressed to the Dutch Governor-General Joan Maetsuycker in the wake of Van Adrichem’s mission, Aurangzeb explained that he had sent a robe of honour, a diamond-studded dagger, and a horse as signs of his royal affection.62 In return, the contemporary Dutch translation makes clear, the emperor demanded that his commands would be observed throughout his empire, that the Governor-General was to ‘acknowledge our lofty affection with a thankful countenance’ and remain on ‘the right path’, and that Maetsuycker’s subordinates in India would comport themselves honourably in the latter’s name.63 Although Aurangzeb’s letter makes mention of Dutch gifts ‘sent in the name of firm alliance and friendship’, the numerous references to ‘humble supplication at the feet of Our Majesty’ both in royal farmans and Dutch petitions addressed to the emperor leave no doubt about the hierarchical nature of this relationship.64 The same was true for imperial husb-ul-hukms (literally: according to command) such as the one received by Thomas Pitt in Madras along with ‘a Vest of Honour Graciously sent him from the Throne of Beneficence and Grace’, which did not fail to remind the English president that ‘according to his good service he may expect a Retribution’.65 Writing to his son about the robe of honour he received, Pitt even bragged that Bahadur Shah (r. 1707–1712) had additionally accorded him ‘the command of five thousand horse, and to have the pay without doeing service’.66 Examples such as these illustrate how the Mughal government employed robes of honour as part of an integrated repertoire of material and symbolic instruments of imperial authority, one systematically employed to incorporate the 62 63 64 65 66

Dagh-Register Batavia 1663, 347. ‘dat hy onse hooge genegenheyd met een danckbaer gemoed erkenne ende den rechten weg (in welke niet dan goet gedacht werdt) standvastig houde’: Ibid. ‘om vaster alliantie en vrundschaps wille’; ‘aen den voeten onser Mayesteyt syne nedrige supplicatie [..] heeft gedaen’: Dagh-register Batavia 1663, 105, 347. Husb-ul-hukm by Bahadur Shah to Thomas Pitt, 9 Sha’ban in the second year of the reign (24 October 1708): RFSG, DCB 1708, 63. Cornelius Neale Dalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 345.

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Dutch and English newcomers into the imperial order. Imperial commands such as that addressed to Pitt and his symbolic appointment as a Mughal mansabdar cast senior Company officials in the role of imperial officeholders, a dynamic characterised by rhetorical reciprocity. As soon as the Mughals annexed Golkonda, in 1687, the English President in Madras wrote to the newly installed nawab (provincial governor), Mahabat Khan, that the English were ready to ‘pay o[u]r humble Sallams to ye Great Mogull’ and ‘offer o[u]r faithfull obedient services to ye King’, entreating the nobleman to ‘hon[ou]r me w[i]th your Comands’.67 Once the EIC’s de facto control of Madras was acknowledged by nawab Zulfiqar Khan in a kaul (lease or grant) of 1690, the English settlement formally came under Mughal suzerainty. Nishans and parwanas sent in the following years by Prince Muhammad Kam Bakhsh and wazir Asad Khan urged Elihu Yale to ‘hope and depend on the Emperours favour and protection’ and to always ‘manifest your readiness to serve the Emperour’, and stressed that if ‘you Still continue carefull in the Kings Service that you may reap the benefitt & advantages of your good performances’.68 As they became nominally incorporated as self-governing subjects of the Mughal emperor, agents of both Companies were expected to take an active part in the ceremonial performances of imperial authority in the provinces, whether as recipients of farmans or khilʾats, or as participant observers. Mughal sources specify in great detail the rituals enacted upon the receipt of ceremonial robes and imperial farmans, which were held to embody the presence of the emperor himself.69 In the Ain-i-Akbari, one reads: ‘When an officer receives such an order he proceeds a proper distance to meet it, performs various acts of obeisance, puts it on the crown of his head, makes the sijdah, and rewards the messenger according to the favour conferred upon himself’.70 More information is provided by the Mughal officer Mirza Nathan, who recounts how he and other imperial officers received farmans from Shah Jahan during the latter’s rebellion. Velvet canopies having been erected for the messenger carrying the farmans, all the men dismounted at a distance of an arrow shot and performed their rites before approaching. Upon reaching the messenger, Mirza Nathan ‘made three obeisances and prostrations of gratitude’, after which ‘he placed the Farmāns respectfully with his two hands over his head and again 67 68 69 70

Eliyu Yale to Mahabat Khan, Fort St. George, 15 November 1687: BL, IOR/G/19/21, f. 129. Mahabat Khan had served Abul Hasan Qutb Shah of Golkonda before entering into Mughal service: Maāthir-ul-Umarā II, 5–9. Consultation Fort St. George, 19 April 1692: RFSG, DCB 1692, 8–9. Richards, ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority’, 315. Abu’l-Fazl, Ain i Akbari I, 265.

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performed the rites of obeisance and prostrations of gratitude, and put on the robe of honour’.71 ‘[E]ntertain’d with as much respect as if himself were present’, as Edward Terry put it, receptions of the emperor’s gifts and commands were community events.72 In his diary for 1636, the English President in Surat, William Methwold, relates an occasion during which the local Mughal governor received a farman and a sarapa from Shah Jahan, noting that he was expected to join the well-wishers: ‘Custome invites such as are of quality to vissitt and congratulate his honor with a mombarake [mubarak] or “God give him joy”’.73 In much the same way, when Van Adrichem returned to Surat with his newly obtained farmans and robes of honour, the town’s officials and merchants came forward to welcome and congratulate him for the imperial favour he now literally carried.74 On similar occasions in Madras and Calcutta we read of ‘the publick show and Rejoycing we made for the Honour of the Kings Seerpaw [sarapa]’, a conscious performance of humble gratitude which the English understood would be recorded by Mughal intelligence officers in their waqia or imperial news reports.75 Public festivities on such days included processions, gift-giving, and the firing of guns in the presence of crowds of European and Indian citizens of note.76 Although a sizeable number of Company agents perceived the demands of Mughal ceremonial as onerous and even potentially a distraction, as when the Council of Fort St. George wrote of the government’s ‘deluding us according to their old Custom with Vests, Horses and a peice of ffine paper’, the need to play their part was broadly recognised as a necessary consequence of the hierarchical nature of the Mughal–European relationship.77 That the claims to service implied by these relations could carry concrete expectations of material support is seen most clearly from the repeated demands for ships, cannons, gunners, and military assistance by a succession 71

Mirza Nathan, M.I. Borah (trans.), Bahāristān-i-Ghaybī: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the reigns of Jahāngīr and Shāhjahān, by Mīrzā Nathan (2 vols. Gauhati: Government of Assam, Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, 1936), II, 705–706. 72 Terry, A Voyage to East India, 383. 73 President Methwold’s Diary, Surat, 8 August 1636: EFI 1634-1636, 300. 74 Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 64, 212. 75 Consultation Fort William, 1 June 1714: C.R. Wilson, (ed.), The Early Annals of the English in Bengal, being The Bengal Public Consultations for the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (3 vols. London: W. Thacker & Co., 1895–1917), II.1, 175. 76 Consultation Fort St. George, 13 December 1708: RFSG, DCB 1708, 61; Consultation Fort William, 16 November 1717: Wilson, Early Annals II.1, 286. 77 Edward Harrison et al. to Calcutta, Fort St. George, 23 October 1711: Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 259.

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of emperors and their provincial governors.78 A particularly telling account came from the pen of Jacob Verburgh, the director of Dutch trade in Bengal, who in February 1677 recorded in the Hughli factory diary that Shaista Khan, uncle of the emperor and Bengal’s viceroy, had gifted him a sarapa. Noting that through this act of investiture he was ‘by aforesaid Majesty after his manner appointed as supreme commander’, Verburgh explained that the honourable distinction came accompanied by a demand for military aid against rebellious zamindars (landholders) in neighbouring Orissa.79 As tended to happen on similar occasions, the VOC duly supplied the Mughal campaign with naval backing so as not to lose favour with their powerful protector, even if the support provided was modest and given reluctantly.

Diplomatic Communication and Self-Representation

In aligning their diplomatic approaches with the conventions of Mughal courtly culture, agents of the Dutch and English East India Companies incorporated ever more elements of Indian social and political life into their daily conduct. This process of acculturation manifested itself in Company agents’ participation in formal court ritual as much as in social interactions, communication routines, and practices of self-representation. As we have seen, a large proportion of the communications between the Mughal administration and the Companies was conducted on paper. With Persian the medium of official written communications, Company agents were required to engage with Persian epistolary etiquette as laid down in the insha’ tradition.80 If the elaborate forms of address used in Persian correspondence were often omitted in the translated copies kept in Company archives, the latter still contain relevant clues, such as ‘after some Moorish honorific titles after this country’s fashion the letter read as follows’, or mention that the missive started with ‘the usual 78 79 80

For a more detailed discussion: Van Meersbergen, ‘Diplomacy in a Provincial Setting’. ‘door zijn voorsz[eijde] hoogh[eij]t op zijn maniere tot absoluijt oppergesachebber wert verkoren’: Hughli factory diary, Hughli, 22 February 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1328, ff. 485v–486r. See: Colin Paul Mitchell, ‘To Preserve and Protect: Husayn Vafiiz-i Kashifi and Perso-Islamic Chancellery Culture’, Iranian Studies 36.4 (2003), 485–507; Ogborn, Indian Ink, 36–37. On letter-writing in Islamic Eurasia more widely: Gagan D.S. Sood, ‘“Correspondence is Equal to Half a Meeting”: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Eurasia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50.2/3 (2007), 172–214

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Moorish compliments’.81 In other cases, the stylised Persian titles carried over into the translations with remarkable clarity. General John Child’s humble supplication to Aurangzeb, sent in a fruitless attempt to settle the ongoing dispute which would see a Mughal tributary force besiege Bombay in 1689–1690, is one such example.82 The long list of appellations by which Child addressed the emperor included ‘Lord of beneficence and Liberalitie’, ‘Epitomie of Preisthood’, ‘Potentate of ye World’, ‘Emperour of ye Earth and of ye Age’, and ‘The Divine Shadow of ye holy Prophet Mahomet’.83 Similar honorifics were used by the President of Calcutta, John Russell, who addressed Emperor Jahandar Shah (r. 1712–1713) as ‘Prop of the Universe’, ‘Conqueror of the world’, and ‘Hereditary Support of Justice’; and his successor, Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–1719), as ‘Lord of the world, and the present age’, ‘a Support and shade to all that inhabite the world’, ‘a second Cyrus’, and ‘an eradicator of violence and oppression’.84 Each of these letters also contained other references to royal virtues and figures from the Islamic and Persianate traditions, including Darius, Solomon, and Iskander (Alexander the Great). Besides their intricate preambles listing the addressee’s numerous titles and complimentary epithets, invocations of God’s blessing, and wishes of prosperity and good health, the Companies’ letters and petitions to Mughal rulers and dignitaries also conformed to Persianate norms and conventions in the self-deprecating tone adopted by the author. Child described himself as ‘ye least of your servants’ and as ‘w[i]th humility and lowliness of mind kissing ye Floor of all servile Offices w[i]th lipps of Respect and obsequiousness’, whilst Russell professed himself to be ‘the smallest particle of sand [...] with his forehead at command rub’d on the Ground’.85 The inclusion of such florid phrases in letters sent by Dutch and English Company officials demonstrates that their purpose, need, and aesthetic value were duly acknowledged, even if we know that the composition itself was the work of specialised scribes, and that some agents objected to what they regarded as the overly degrading 81 82 83 84 85

‘Naar eenige moorse eertitulen op dese lants maniere was den brieff aldus luydende’; ‘Naar de gewone moorse complimenten’: Translated letter Willem Volger to Muhammad Amin Khan, Surat, 4 and 19 December 1676: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, ff. 1453v, 1455r. On Yaqut Sidi Khan’s siege of Bombay: Hunt, ‘The 1689 Mughal Siege’. Petition John Child to Aurangzeb, Bombay, undated [February 1689]: BL, IOR/E/3/47, f. 224r. John Russell to Jahandar Shah, Calcutta, 15 September 1712; John Russell to Farrukhsiyar, Calcutta, 27 March 1713: Wilson, Early Annals II.1, 65, 111. Petition John Child to Aurangzeb, Bombay, undated [February 1689]: BL, IOR/E/3/47, f. 224r; John Russell to Farrukhsiyar, Calcutta, 27 March 1713: Wilson, Early Annals II.1, 65, 111.

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tone.86 It is likely that Company servants had access to Persian letter-writing manuals, even if it is doubtful that more than a few Europeans would have acquired the competence to use them. A concrete example of the shape such an encounter with the insha’ tradition could take is provided in the form of the Persiaanse Secretaris (The Persian Secretary), a small volume containing templates of Persian letters addressed to different classes of people and for different purposes, composed by Daniel Havart some years after his return to the Netherlands from the Coromandel Coast in 1685.87 As Havart stated in his introductory address, his intention was ‘to show to the reader the meticulous and far-fetched words of the Persians, their artfulness in embellishment, and how they strive with heart and soul to excel in this matter, elevating someone so highly by way of their flattering pen, that, as a manner of speaking, he comes to resemble the Gods’.88 Even if he did not believe it necessary ‘that the Hollanders always and on all occasions use exactly this absurd, flattering, selfdeprecating style’, Havart pointed out that a direct translation from Dutch into Persian would fail to meet its intended purpose, and argued that adaptation to Persian rhetorical practice was essential: ‘In those countries one has to follow their way, if seeking to write a letter without affront, and well composed, principally to great Lords’.89 An illuminating perspective on the day-to-day engagement with Mughal epistolary conventions is provided by the Dutch directeur in Surat, Hendrick 86

87

88

89

As an example of the appreciation of the aesthetic value, see Roe’s comment regarding the honorific titles (alqab) in the translated letter from Jahangir to King James dispatched in 1618: ‘Many of these phrases beeing in the Arabicque (sic) cannot bee expressed litterally in English woords; but they import the height of honor and are in their owne dialect very elegant.’ Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 506. D[aniel] H[avart], Persiaanse Secretaris, Of een Nette Beschryving van de Stijl die de Persianen Gebruiken in hare Brieven en Notariale Stukken; Als Ook Van de Feest-en vierdagen der Muhammedanen door het gehele Jaar in het Koninkryk Golconda (Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, n.d. [1689]). Note also that Edward Terry, chaplain to Roe during his Mughal embassy, included a section entitled ‘Of the manner of the stile or writing of that Court’ in the account of his Indian sojourn. Terry translated the opening passages of three letters addressed by Jahangir to James I as an example of the ‘Complements’ used in Persian epistolary culture: Terry, A Voyage, 436–439. ‘om den Leser te doen sien de naukeurige en vergesogte woorden der Persianen, haar cierlykheid in het op-pronken, en hoe se met hart en ziel arbeiden daar in uit te steken, om iemand door haar vleiende pen so hoog te verheffen, dat hy by manier van spreken, den Goden gelyk zy.’: Havart, De Persiaanse Secretaris, ‘Aan Den goetgunstigen Leser’, unpaginated. ‘Maar ‘t is daarom niet nodig, dat de Hollanders altijd juist en in alle gelegentheden die belachelyke, vleiachtige, en haer personen al te veel verminderende stijl gebruiken’; ‘daarom moet men in die landen haar manier volgen, wil men een brief sonder opspraak, en wel ingesteld, voornamelyk aan grote Heren schrijven’: Ibid.

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Zwaardecroon, as part of the notes concerning diplomatic affairs at the Mughal court he and his colleagues kept in 1700. On 3 June of that year, Zwaardecroon, the administrator, Joan Grootenhuys, the independent attorney, Jean Diodati, and two of their Indian brokers, the brothers Risikdas and Bhagwandas, debated the draft letters intended for Aurangzeb and his wazir, Asad Khan, which the brokers had just translated ‘after the fashion of the country’.90 The three Dutchmen noted that although the content of the letters remained unaltered, they had become ‘entirely Persian or Hindustani’ in style, an observation that dovetails with Gagan Sood’s assertion that translation into Persian entailed the often profound rewriting of one’s message in a rhetorical style familiar and appropriate to the recipient.91 In a clear reference to the selfeffacement adopted by Persian letter writers, the Dutchmen argued that the result was ‘to a European somewhat repulsive to read’.92 The two brokers took the opposite view, and argued that the use of the Dutch style would appear offensive to Mughal readers. In the end, the VOC’s factors in Surat decided to follow their brokers’ advice, explaining that it was necessary to accept ‘‘s lands wijse, ‘s lands eere’, a Dutch proverb that can be translated as “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, and that could well have been a direct borrowing from Havart’s Persiaanse Secretaris.93 Without doubt, Zwaardecroon’s pragmatism was widely shared, as could be seen nine years later when the Hoge Regering addressed a letter to Aurengzeb’s successor, Bahadur Shah. When ordering Cornelis Bezuyen to have it translated into Persian, the Governor-General and Councillors of the Indies advised that its writing style should be ‘in wording and expressions corresponding to the method of the Moors […] in order not to offend at court, but to make a pleasing impression’.94 Batavia cited the letter delivered to Aurangzeb in 1662 as a model worth following. This epistle used a highly deferential tone, addressing 90 91 92 93 94

‘na de manieren van het land’: Copy secret resolutions Hendrik Zwaardecroon, Joan Grootenhuys, and Jean Diodati, regarding negotiations with Mughal court, Surat, 3 June 1700: NL-HaNA, VOC 11316, unfoliated. ‘den stijl t’eenemael persiaans of hindoustans sijnde gemaakt’, Ibid.; Sood, ‘“Correspondence is Equal to Half a Meeting”’, 178–179. ‘sulks voor een Europee somtijds wat walchelijk te lezen’: Copy secret resolutions Hendrik Zwaardecroon, Joan Grootenhuys, and Jean Diodati, regarding negotiations with Mughal court, Surat, 3 June 1700: NL-HaNA, VOC 11316, unfoliated. Havart cited both the proverb ‘’s Lands wijse (segt men) is ‘s Lands eer’, and the Latin original ‘Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more’, attributed to St Ambrose: Havart, Persiaanse Secretaris, ‘Aan Den goetgunstigen Leser’, unpaginated. ‘onder bewoordingen en spreekwysen, overeenkomende met d’methode der Mooren, […] om ten hove niet te mogen stooten, maer aengenaem voor te komen’: J. Ph. Vogel (ed.), Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis naar den Groot Mogol te Lahore, 1711-1713 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1937), 293–294.

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the Mughal emperor as the mightiest ruler on earth and informing him that the Dutch ‘herewith take the liberty to approach Your Majesty in your exalted state with our humble greetings’.95 After mentioning the gifts that accompanied the letter and introducing Van Adrichem, Governor-General Joan Maetsuycker proceeded to request the emperor ‘most respectfully, to grant us the honour to have the latter appear at the feet of Your Majesty’s magnificent throne’.96 Besides a willingness to accommodate, in this case to the imperial parlance that framed those granted an audience with the emperor as having ‘the good fortune to kiss the threshold’, such letters also signal spheres of commensurability, including that of shared religious concepts.97 On this occasion, Maetsuycker conveyed the wish to Aurangzeb that ‘the Lord of Heaven and Earth will abundantly bless Your Majesties government and person for the well-being of the kingdom’.98 In spite of differences of religion, the mutual belief in a single creator allowed for the inclusion of such generic religious references in polite communications travelling both ways. In 1636, President Methwold wrote to Surat’s governor that he knew that the latter had completed the hajj to Mecca and was held to be ‘religeous in your lawe, alwaies practizing a pious life’. On these grounds, he expressed the hope that the mutasaddi would govern justly, and reminded him that ‘in fyne you are to give account to God’.99 Twenty years later, Laurens Pit, in more generous terms, assured Mu’azzam Khan (Mir Jumla) that he prayed that the nobleman would accumulate ever greater honour in the emperor’s service, heartily wishing him ‘the merciful blessing of the Lord God’.100 Correspondence travelling in the opposite direction likewise included monotheistic references, from Jahangir’s wish to James I that ‘God maynteyne your estate’, to a note sent by the Mughal noblewoman Huri Khanam to the VOC’s chief in Surat, Gerardo Pelgrom, which commenced by expressing the hope 95 96 97 98

99 100

‘nemen wy mits desen de vrymoedicheyt om UE. Mayesteyt met onse nedrige groete in dien hoogh verheven staet te comen naderen’: Draft letter Hoge Regering to Aurangzeb, Batavia, 22 September 1661: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 25. ‘op ’t alder eerbiedichste versoeckende, dat ons de eere believe te doen om denzelve te laeten verschynen aen de voeth van UwE Mayesteyts heerlycken throon’: Ibid. Beveridge (ed.), The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī I, 222, 269, 371, 414, 427, and passim. ‘dat den Heere des Hemels en Aerde Uwe Mayesteyt regeringe ende persoon tot welstant van het coninckrijck overvloedich believe te zegenen’: Draft letter Hoge Regering to Aurangzeb, Batavia, 22 September 1661: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 25. Summary of Memorial delivered to the Governor of Surat regarding piracy, Surat, April 1636: EFI 1634-1636, 203. ‘den genadigen zegen van god de here uijt gronde mijns harten ben toe wensende’: Laurens Pit to Mu’azzam Khan, Pulicat, 17 November 1656: NL-HaNA, VOC 1210, f. 1045v.

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that God Almighty would keep the Dutch commander under His protection.101 The examples quoted here are far from exhaustive, yet they suffice to conjure up a picture of a common ground based on correspondences between cultures which helped to establish a discourse of mutuality in the service of diplomatic interactions. The importance placed on linguistic awareness also filtered through in the choice of ambassadors. Joan Josua Ketelaar’s eligibility to lead a major VOC embassy to Bahadur Shah’s court in 1711 was justified on the basis of ‘his experience and competence in the Moorish language and customs’. Likewise, Rogier Beerenaerd was deemed qualified to assist on this mission because he was ‘linguistically able and experienced in the intercourse with Moors’.102 Earlier examples include Marcus Oldenburgh, described as ‘experienced in the country’s language and customs’, and Van Adrichem, who claimed proficiency in Hindustani (Hindu/Urdu).103 On the English side, an aborted mission to Bahadur Shah’s court was to include a certain John Berlu, third on the Council of Fort St. David at Cuddalore, who was selected because he was ‘generally well respected by the Natives, and understands Moors and Gentue Languages as alsoe their Customs’.104 This pairing of language proficiency and ethnographic knowledge implies that the two were regarded as intricately linked, and that both were seen as prerequisites for successful cross-cultural diplomacy. In the case of Ketelaar, we know for certain that he had something to show for his language skills. During his time in Agra in 1696–1697 he compiled a Dutch guide to the Persian language together with the first known grammar of Hindustani, the lingua franca spoken by the elites in the core areas of the Mughal Empire in northern India.105 While Ketelaar’s degree of investment in Indian languages was exceptional, the archives created by Bacherus attest to the fact that he too engaged intensely with local language and idiom. Among the papers Bacherus left for the period when he served as Commissioner on the 101 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 596; ‘Eer ende respeckt come toe den hollantsen commandeur die godt almachtich.t in sijn bescherminge wil bewaren’: Translated letter from Huri Khanam to Gerardo Pelgrom, received in Surat on 17 October 1652: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 771r. 102 ‘syne ervarentheyt en bequaemheyt in de Moorse taele en costuymen’; ‘taelkundigh en in den ommegangh met de Moren ervaren’: Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 24, 290. 103 ‘beyde in de tale ende ‘s lants costumen wel ervaeren’: Hendrick Brouwer et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 15 August 1633: Generale Missiven I, 381; Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 157. 104 Consultation Fort St. George, 15 January 1709: RFSG, DCB 1709, 14. 105 Instructie off onderwijsinge der Hindoustanse en Persiaanse talen […] by Joan Josua Ketelaar, copied by Isaacq van der Hoeve, Lucknow, 1698: NL-HaNA, Collectie Sypesteyn 2.

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Coromandel Coast (1684–1693) are numerous documents in Indian languages; 65% of these were written in Persian.106 Furthermore, the many neologisms and linguistic borrowings in their idiom are a constant reminder of the close engagement of Company agents with their host culture. Typical examples are the Dutch ‘getasalijmt’, as the past participle of the verb “to perform taslim”, and ‘salammaacken’, for the verb “to perform salam”, or to greet in the Islamic fashion.107 More revealing still, Tack, Bacherus, John Surman, and others habitually calculated time in ghari (spelled as ‘grij’, ‘gerrij’, or ‘Gurreys’), the unit used in the Indian method of time-keeping which amounts to one-sixtieth of a day, or twenty-four minutes.108 The final area in which Company agents’ adoption of local customs clearly manifested itself was in their practices of diplomatic self-fashioning. In 1661, the English agents in Madras informed their directors that a projected deputation to the king of Golkonda would involve heavy costs, explaining that ‘it is not only the present that is to bee looked uppon, but the manner of its presentacion; which must bee by the principall servants on the Coast, attended on by a large traine’.109 Time and again, the use of pomp is discussed in Company writing as necessary due to the conventions of Indian diplomacy. Visual sources confirm just how closely the representational strategies of Company agents mimicked South Asian practice. Among the best-known examples are two miniatures by an anonymous Deccani artist depicting Cornelis van den Bogaerde amidst various South Asian trappings of power. Executed in the Islamicate style current at the court of Golkonda during the 1680s, both paintings were probably commissioned by Van den Bogaerde during his tenure as chief of the VOC factory in Hyderabad (1686–1690).110 In the first miniature, we see the Dutch agent holding court in the style of an Indian nobleman, seated under a canopy and resting against large cushions (Figure 8). The scene depicts Van den Bogaerde receiving three Hindu merchants in his private court or dar106 107 108 109 110

Jos Gommans, Lennart Bes, and Gijs Kruijtzer (eds.), Dutch Sources on South Asia c. 16001825 Volume I: Bibliography and Archival Guide to the National Archives at The Hague (The Netherlands) (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 370–377. Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 766v; Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 185. Journal of Joan Tack’s Mission to Delhi, 1 June–4 August 1648; NL-HaNA, VOC 1168, ff. 626– 638, at f. 627r; Extract from the Diary of Johannes Bacherus at the Mughal Court in Delhi, 11 September 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, f. 630v; Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 228. Thomas Chamber and Thomas Shingler to Company, Fort St. George, 28 November 1661: EFI 1661–1664, 54. Gijs Kruijtzer, ‘Pomp Before Disgrace: A Dutchman Commissions Two Golconda Miniatures on the Eve of the Mughal Conquest’, Journal of the David Collection 3 (2010), 160–184.

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figure 8 The Darbar of Cornelis van den Bogaerde, c. 1687 © Pernille Klemp / The David Collection, Copenhagen, 43/2008

bar. To the left a Southeast Asian servant is seen fanning his Dutch master with a morchal or peacock-feather fan, a distinctive symbol of authority in Mughal India. The same status symbol is carried by one of the Indian footmen in Van den Bogaerde’s entourage in the second painting (Figure 9), which depicts the VOC agent seated on horseback, led and followed by a dozen Hindu and Muslim soldiers on foot, carrying flags, guns, and a ceremonial sword. Having acquired a good command of Hindustani whilst in Gujarat, Van den Bogaerde visibly took pride in his reputation among contemporaries for being well-versed in interactions with the inhabitants of India’s Muslim-ruled regions.111 Less famous, yet even more telling about the visual display that came to characterise the VOC’s statelier diplomatic missions, is the large textile painting produced by a Golkondan artist during Bacherus’ stay in Aurangzeb’s army camp in the Deccan in 1689 (Figure 10). Commissioned by Bacherus himself, the central part of the cloth is occupied by a depiction of the ambassador’s encampment, delineated by an enclosure of red canvas screens (kanats). Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleur and Gijs Kruijtzer have identified the various 111

Ibid, 174; Daniel Havart, Op-en Ondergang van Cormandel (3 vols. Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1693), II, 192.

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figure 9 The procession of Cornelis van den Bogaerde, c. 1687 © Pernille Klemp / The David Collection, Copenhagen, 42/2008

components of the camp, including the ambassador’s diwan khana or audience chamber. Beyond his private tent, Bacherus is shown seated among flowerbeds smoking a huqqa or water pipe, while an Indian attendant stands to the side waving a peacock fan (Figure 11).112 Along the lower border of the painting, Bacherus is portrayed a second time while being transported in his palanquin as part of a large procession, as reproduced on the cover of this book. The footmen heading the embassy train carry the red-white-blue Prinsenvlag with the arms of the VOC and the flag of the States-General. In addition to the sixteen Dutch soldiers on foot and the convoy of Mughal cavalry, the retinue consisted of several horses, the broker Virji Das on horseback, Indian footmen playing flutes, an attendant with a peacock fan, mace-bearers, and a man beating his two naqqaras or kettledrums.113 As argued by Lunsingh Scheurleer and

112 113

Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer and Gijs Kruitzer, ‘Camping with the Mughal Emperor: A Golkonda Artist Portrays a Dutch Ambassador in 1689’, Arts of Asia 35.3 (2005), 48–60. Ibid., 57–58. The use of kettledrums was a privilege reserved to high nobles. As Asad Khan would later make clear to Norris, no one was permitted to have their drums beaten in the presence of the emperor: Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 913, f. 102.

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figure 10 Ambassador Johannes Bacherus in the Mughal encampment of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan, 1689 Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. TM-A-9584

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figure 11 Ambassador Johannes Bacherus in the Mughal encampment of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan, 1689 (detail) Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. TM-A-9584

Kruijtzer, the painting offers ample proof that the Dutch envoy ‘mimics Mughal nobility in the pomp and circumstance with which he surrounds ­himself’.114 With his mixed assortment of European and Asian trappings of power, Bacherus’ representational strategy offers a fitting exemplar of the transcultural nature of East India Company diplomacy. At the end of the day, it was not the celebrated courtier Thomas Roe, but the all-but-forgotten merchant Johannes Bacherus – styled Gulzar Khan (“Flourishing Khan”) by his Mughal interlocutors – who personified the seventeenth-century Company envoy.115 114 115

Lunsingh Scheurleer and Kruijtzer, ‘Camping with the Mughal Emperor’, 58. Gommans et al., Dutch Sources on South Asia, I, 370. Bacherus was awarded this title during his embassy to Aurangzeb in 1689.

CHAPTER 6

Gratifying Mughal Tastes: Company Gift-Giving Strategies When John Surman, his Armenian second-in-command, Khwaja Israel Sarhad, and their vast retinue of guards, attendants, and 1,200 porters embarked on their protracted journey from Patna to the Mughal court in Delhi in March 1715, the colossal baggage train they dragged along the roads included one hundred bullock carts carrying about sixty tons of presents.1 Besides large quantities of textiles, glassware, sword blades, firearms, silverware, wine, and gilded mirrors, the goods selected as gifts for Emperor Farrukhsiyar and his leading nobles comprised such choice items as chiming clocks, copper fountains with air pumps, and a six-foot-wide, gold-embellished world map with place names inscribed in Persian.2 Over seven years in the making, the EIC’s belated bid to have its privileges confirmed following Aurangzeb’s death had been preceded by extensive communications with the Mughal government. In its earliest stage, Governor Pitt in Madras had benefitted from the detailed advice of a nobleman in Bahadur Shah’s retinue, Ziyauddin Khan, who forwarded a lengthy list of things ‘Proper for a Present’.3 Other documentation consulted in the lead-up to Surman’s embassy related to the recent ambassadorial missions of Sir William Norris (1699–1702) and Joan Josua Ketelaar (1711–1713), both of whom had attended the Mughal court with extravagant sets of gifts of their own, including Japanese lacquerware, elephants, and brass canons.4 Exactly a hundred years after Thomas Roe’s rather hesitant first stabs at impressing the Mughal court with luxury items, then, Surman’s embassy represented the culmination of a lengthy development of Company gift-giving strategies. This chapter traces the process by which representatives of both Companies

1 Wilson, Early Annals II.2, xx–xxiii. 2 For the custom-made map: Consultations Fort William, 4 January and 1 February 1714: Wilson, Early Annals II.1, 153, 158–161. See also: Ibid., 169–170. 3 Ziyauddin Khan to Thomas Pitt, received 13 December 1708: RFSG, DCB 1708, 65–67. On this episode: Guido van Meersbergen, ‘“Intirely the Kings Vassalls”: East India Gifting Practices and Anglo-Mughal Political Exchange (c. 1670–1720)’, Diplomatica 2.2 (2020), 270–290. 4 For the documentation consulted: Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 283–300. For Norris’ presents to Aurangzeb: BL, IOR/E/3/61, no. 7559. For Ketelaar’s gifts: Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_008

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became familiar with Mughal elite tastes, how they sought to gratify them, and how they adopted Mughal gifting practices in their day-to-day interactions. Scholars are increasingly focusing on the central role of gift-giving in the commercial and diplomatic strategies of the East India Companies, particularly with regard to the VOC.5 This growing interest forms part of a broader turn in diplomatic history towards the cultural, social, and political significance of the presentation of objects, cash, animals, and even people as part of the conduct of relations between political actors.6 More broadly still, historians have built on the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and others to explore how gifts sustained a wide variety of social bonds and obligations, from dealings between neighbours to kingly patronage.7 Expressing notions of liberality and gratitude, debt and reciprocity, loyalty and reward, hierarchy and deference, and competition and friendship, gifts can be agents of conflict as well as social cohesion. They are able to carry multiple contingent meanings at once, depending on the context in which gifts are given, the actors involved in the exchange, and the understandings each bring to it.8 The gift cultures of Mughal India and other parts of Asia were sufficiently similar to the modes of social and courtly giving current in early modern Europe for the Companies to become quickly and deeply involved in them, though sufficiently distinct 5 Cynthia Viallé, ‘“To Capture Their Favor”: On Gift-Giving by the VOC’, in: Thomas DaCosta Kauffmann and Michael North (eds.), Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 291–319; Frank Birkenholz, ‘MerchantKings and Lords of the World: Diplomatic Gift-Exchange between the Dutch East India Company and the Safavid and Mughal Empires in the Seventeenth Century’, in: Sowerby and Hennings, Practices of Diplomacy, 219–236; Adam Clulow, ‘Gifts for the Shogun: The Dutch East India Company, Global Networks and Tokugawa Japan’, in: Biedermann, Gerritsen, and Riello (eds.), Global Gifts, 198–216; Laver, The Dutch East India Company. The EIC’s gift-giving strategies are comparatively understudied, but see: Natasha Eaton, ‘Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art, Gift, and Diplomacy in Colonial India, 1770–1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46.4 (2004), 816–844; Cynthia Klekar, ‘“Prisoners in Silken Bonds”: Obligation, Trade, and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.1 (2006), 84–105; Van Meersbergen, ‘“Intirely the Kings Vassalls”’. 6 For recent surveys of gifts in global diplomacy, see: Harriet Rudolph and Gregor M. Metzig (eds.), Material Culture in Modern Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016); Biedermann, Gerritsen, and Riello (eds.), Global Gifts; Tremml-Werner, Hellman, and Van Meersbergen, ‘Introduction’. 7 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1954); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernard Jussen (eds.), Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Heal, The Power of Gifts. 8 About the ‘polysemy of the gift’, see: Christian Windler, ‘Gift and Tribute in Early Modern Diplomacy: A Comment’, Diplomatica 2.2 (2020), 291–304.

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to warrant extensive commentary. Building on the analysis of Company diplomacy as responsive to its Indian environment laid out in Chapter 5, the present chapter will show that the approaches of Company agents to gift-giving were closely bound up with their understandings of and assumptions about Mughal culture, character, and customs.

Local Tastes and Global Gifts

A useful place to start when mapping European responses to Mughal gift-giving conventions, as in other matters, is with Thomas Roe. On 24 November 1615, the ambassador wrote a long letter to the EIC in which he exposed the quandaries he faced because he could not maintain the largesse expected from someone holding the status of a royal envoy. ‘[P]resents are here expected as due as the Kings customes’, he asserted, before reproaching the Company for leaving him seriously short of gift items, even in comparison with the merchant-envoys who preceded him. The goods sent that year, he did not fail to mention, were ‘extremely despised’ by the people who saw them, as they were ‘mean’, ‘ill packt’, ‘rotten’, and ‘decayed’; in short, they revealed ‘such error in the chooyce of all things, as I thincke no man ever heard of the place that was of councell’.9 Roe assured his employers that only the highest quality was esteemed by the Mughal elites, who imported costly rarities over land from Italy and by sea from Hormuz. Reviewing the situation, he had little hope of a positive reception at court: ‘[I] shalbe ashamed to present in the Kyngs name [...] things soe meane, yea, woorse then former messengers have had; the Mogull doubtless making judgment of what His Majestie is by what he sends’.10 Since generosity and liberality were considered as marks of royalty in Mughal India as well as in Europe, Roe’s concerns were amply justified. Indeed, on at least two occasions Jahangir expressed his wonder and discontent at the meagre gifts offered to him, which reportedly made him doubt ‘whether the King of England were a great Kyng, that sent presents of so small valewe’.11 The one exception appears to have been the English coach presented in January 1616. Although the emperor ordered it taken apart and transformed so rigorously that Roe barely recognised it when he next saw it, the horse-drawn carriage left

9

Thomas Roe to Company, Ajmer, 24 November 1615: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 73, 76–77. 10 Ibid., 77. 11 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 99, 352.

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enough of an impression on Jahangir for him to mention it in his memoirs, a distinction not reserved for the ambassador himself.12 Unfortunately for Roe, his stock of presents was scarcely replenished during his time in India. Returning to the subject in August 1617, the envoy painted an excessively bleak picture of the opinion which he believed the Mughal ruler and nobles held of the English: It is often cast unto mee: what breing yow but trash that wee esteeme not? […] wee expected from yow fine, rare, and rich stuffs and toyes to buy from yow, to serve the King with at the Norose [Nowruz] and other feasts, wherby wee might be furnished at hand, and eased of the labor and chardge to seeke and send abroad; but yow fitt us with nothing but knives and ill looking glasses. What advantage have wee by yow?13 Convinced that the EIC’s representatives in India were looked down upon by Mughal elites for the goods they imported, Roe argued for the importance of sending the right type of presents so that he, and his countrymen, could at last become ‘acceptable’ to Jahangir and his court.14 Together with a letter of January 1618, he enclosed a detailed list of items which he advised the Company to send to their factors in Surat. Under the heading of presents fit for the emperor, Roe included precious stones, fine pieces of arras, silk, and gold cloth, a fine crown inlaid with stones, a bed veil decorated with lace or other embroidery, a decorated horse saddle and caparison, an embroidered bow, quiver, and arrows, a satin embroidered coat, cushions and cabinets, and finally a variety of pictures, especially history paintings. As articles to sell on Surat’s market for luxury goods – much of which would be used as gift items by the buyer – Roe recommended broadcloth in various colours, coral, quicksilver, richly decorated swords and knives, large pearls, precious stones of different kinds, items of jewellery, arras, gold and silver cloth, satins, gold lace, camlets in various colours, coats of mail, quivers for bows and arrows, embroidered coats, and other items of embroidery in Indian patterns. Finally, in addition to goods which were to be supplied from Europe, the ambassador listed a small number

12

On 29 October 1616, Jahangir also presented a carriage made after the English model to his son, Prince Khurram: Beveridge, The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī I, 338–340; Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 282–285. 13 Thomas Roe to Captain Martin Pring, Mandu, 30 August 1617: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 373. 14 Ibid.

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of items originating in Southeast and East Asia, such as all kinds of spices, Chinese porcelain, and Japanese chests, cabinets, and bedsteads.15 The complexities involved with choosing the right sort of presents are brought out by Roe’s explanation that demand for some previously sought-after items had dropped dramatically within a few years, due to saturation of the market and the fact that Indian artisans had learned how to reproduce European craftwork. His surest advice was that the best type of gift, besides jewels, consisted of ‘a new raretie or curiositie never seene here’.16 With his emphasis on the importance of rarities as gifts, Roe acknowledged that a changing stock of foreign luxury goods was required to keep up with shifting elite tastes. This idea quickly became one of the leading principles behind the gift-giving strategies of the EIC and VOC in Mughal India. With their focus on rarities, the Companies acted in accordance with contemporary notions regarding diplomatic gift-giving in Europe, as well as with time-honoured practices at the Christian and Islamic courts of medieval and early modern Eurasia.17 Nonetheless, the most immediate influence came directly from the Mughal court. Jahangir desired James I ‘to command your merchants to bring in their shipps of all sorts of rareties and rich goods fitt for my palace’, while he and his successors regularly ordered their officers to seek out rarities newly arrived on European ships and dispatch them to the court.18 In 1630, the English President and Council in Surat exposed in plain terms what they perceived as the necessity of conforming to the Mughal gift-giving regime: ‘Without presents nothing canne bee donne with these people. Generall custome amongst themselves makes itt a law to us’.19 The Companies’ compliance was eased by the mercantile consideration that what counted as rarities in India could often be procured for comparatively low prices in their country of origin. In 1614, Thomas Kerridge asserted that ‘[t]hings best for presents generally with all the people of these countries are novelties and things of little worth’,20 while a Dutch report from the late 1610s expressed the

15 16 17

Ibid., 457–460. See also Ibid., 99. Ibid., 449. Anthony Cutler, ‘Significant Gifts: Patterns of Exchange in Late Antique, Byzantine, and Early Islamic Diplomacy’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.1 (2008), 79–101; Swan, Rarities of These Lands. 18 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 505; Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 300. See for example: Shah Jahan’s farman to Mir Arab, the mutasaddi of Surat in 1649, as printed in: Baldaeus, Naauwkeurige Beschryvinge, 11. 19 President Richard Wylde et al. to Company, Swally, 13 April 1630: EFI 1630–1633, 28. 20 Thomas Kerridge to Nicholas Downton, Ajmer, 22 November 1614: Letters Received II, 152.

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opinion that ‘presents should not be expensive but artful’.21 Wouter Heuten and his co-authors advised that Jahangir’s favour should be sought by offering ‘some extraordinary rarity’, and recommended clocks, paintings, rare jewels, well-trained greyhounds and water dogs, and large mastiffs that could fight leopards for the emperor’s entertainment. Elsewhere they mentioned that Mughal nobles frequently paid off government officials with a tohfa or rare gift, which the VOC agents believed to be particularly effective ‘because these people are very curious’.22 Lists of suggested gift goods such as those compiled by Roe and Heuten soon turned into critical components of the Companies’ administrative machinery, forming the backbone of the global circulation of precious items by European carriers in response to Asian demand. Employed alongside other sources, Company inventories of diplomatic gifts inform us about elite tastes in different parts of Asia, as well as about the trans-oceanic networks of exchange which the EIC and VOC tapped into to support their diplomatic activities. A cross-section of EIC letters from 1640–1641 lets us observe a rich spectrum of gifts in motion: horses from Basra were shipped to Surat for the Mughal emperor, while Persian horses travelled to Golkonda and Banten, from where they were to be forwarded to the queen of Jambi in central Sumatra. Canary wine was sent from Europe to Surat and onwards by caravan to Kashmir in order to supply Shah Jahan’s court, whilst rosewater and fruits from Persia were transported to Southeast Asia. The latter products were intended for use by the English factors in dealings with ‘those petty Kings in whose countries they trade and reside’, a clear indication that they were used as presents.23 Selections of gift goods were formed upon local consultation, which generated increasingly detailed instructions. In a memoir produced in 1687, Johannes Bacherus carefully described the hybrid design of clocks destined for Mughal officials in Bengal. Notably, their display had to incorporate an inner circle indicating twenty-four hours, as well as an outer circle dividing the day into sixty ghari cut out in Persian characters.24 Focusing on gifts presented by the Companies during missions to the Mughal court, three distinct sets of items can be identified: first, luxury goods of the type that the emperor and his nobles received as 21 22 23 24

‘dat de presenten niet costel. maer cunstich mosten wesen’: Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke in Azië II, 389. This advice echoes that of one of the principal classical authorities on gift-giving, the Roman philosopher Seneca. See: Heal, The Power of Gifts, 19. ‘alsoo dit volck seer nyschierich is’: Coolhaas, Pieter van den Broecke in Azië II, 385. Surat factors to Company, Surat, 26 February and 29 December 1640; Thomas Merry et al. at Isfahan to Company, 18 June 1641; Surat factors to Persia, Surat, 15 November 1641: EFI 1637–1641, 240–41, 289, 301, 307–308. Viallé, ‘“To Capture Their Favor”’, 311.

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pishkash; second, rarities imported from Europe; and finally, exotica or artful objects that stemmed from the wider region of the Indian Ocean, but were foreign to the Indian subcontinent. Articles of the first kind included rich silk fabrics, decorated betel boxes, hookahs or water pipes, palanquins, jewels, ornamented swords, rosewater, and gifts in cash.25 Furthermore, the Companies exploited their pivotal role in Indian Ocean trading networks to supply fine specimens of Persian and Arabian horses, to which the VOC added a steady stream of Ceylonese elephants. Presents in this category were clearly intended to gratify Mughal tastes, themselves reflective of wider patterns of diplomatic exchange and elite consumption in Asia and beyond.26 No less importantly, by mimicking the gift-giving customs of Indian noblemen, Company representatives appealed to a conception of status in the Mughal system of social stratification which was superior to that usually accorded merchants. Horses were critical for Mughal warfare and were imported by the thousand via the overland route through Kabul and Kandahar. Whilst the vast bulk fell under the category of Turkish breeds from Central Asia, a type that was best fitted for military service, the more exclusive Arabo-Persian breeds accounted for a considerable proportion of the imperial stables. Besides their military function, horses were highly esteemed as symbols of royalty and as markers of nobility more widely.27 Although the number of horses supplied by the VOC was modest and that by the EIC even smaller, their symbolic significance was noteworthy. The so-called “Golden Farman” granted to the English Company by the Sultan of Golkonda, Abdullah Qutb Shah, explicitly stated that its privileges were contingent on the annual supply of Persian horses, a stipulation also found in Sriranga III’s grant of Pulicat and surrounding villages to the VOC, issued in 1646.28 In the Mughal 25 26

27 28

For examples: Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 395; Bernet Kempers, Journaal Van Adrichem, 54; Das, The Norris Embassy, 211; Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 301– 305, 368. Indeed, prestigious items including horse trappings, silks, rich cotton textiles, firearms, watches, and jewel-encrusted betel boxes were widely present in diplomatic gift repertoires of the Portuguese, Spanish, and others. See: George Bryan Souza, ‘Gifts and Gift-Giving in Portuguese-Indonesian Diplomatic Relations’, Revista de Cultura 24 (2007), 21–32; Jeffrey S. Turley and George Bryan Souza (eds.), The Commentaries of D. García de Silva y Figueroa on his Embassy to Shah ʿAbbās I of Persia on Behalf of Philip III, King of Spain (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 453–454; Biedermann, Gerritsen, and Riello (eds.), Global Gifts. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire, 1500–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 111–121. The Golden Farman for Trade in the Kingdom of Golkonda, 26 February 1634: EFI 1634– 1636, 14–16; Heeres and Stapel, Corpus Diplomaticum I, 473–474. Sriranga III was the last ruler of the by then much reduced Vijayanagara Empire.

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context, in 1653, Shah Jahan informed his Dutch petitioners that although he had no need for the two elephants they presented because he had such animals in plentiful supply, he wished that the Company would bring him more fine horses.29 The Dutch do not appear to have heeded this request on their next deputation – in 1656, Joan Tack’s presents consisted entirely of broadcloth and Japanese lacquer, two of the VOC’s standard gift items – and Shah Jahan soon afterwards lost his throne. However, in 1662 Dircq van Adrichem did present seven Arabian horses (and no elephants) to Aurangzeb, while half a century later, in the early 1710s, Joan Josua Ketelaar gifted nine Persian horses alongside nine Ceylonese elephants to Bahadur Shah.30 Although by the seventeenth century they had lost much of their importance on the battlefield, elephants continued to hold a high ceremonial standing at the Mughal court.31 The first mention of a ‘fine young Ceylonese elephant’ gifted to a Mughal emperor by the VOC occurs in relation to Cornelis Weylandt’s visit to Shah Jahan’s court in 1642. The animal was presented alongside a large copper chandelier, six pieces of red scarlet, some bottles of spice oil, and a pair of birds of paradise.32 Not much later, the Dutch also prepared a gift of two elephants and two Arabian horses to the Sultan of Golkonda, an embassy that had been delayed for several years after one elephant and two horses died on an earlier occasion.33 The VOC’s sudden availability of elephants was related to their 1638 treaty with Rajasinha II of Kandy, which gained them a first foothold in Ceylon. From the 1640s onwards, the Company’s supply of elephants increased steadily and eventually reached an annual figure of some 120 to 130, ninety of which on average survived to be sold.34 To put the volume of gifts presented by the Companies into perspective: the powerful nobleman and general Mir Jumla is said to have made a present of sixty elephants and countless jewels worth a total sum of 15 lakhs or 1.5 million rupees to Shah 29

Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 759v. 30 Extract from the diary kept by Joan Tack in Shahjahanabad, 10 July–4 August 1656: NL-HaNA, VOC 1210, ff. 1050–1052, at f. 1050v; Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 54; Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 365. 31 Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 121. 32 Paulus Croocq to Heren XVII, Surat, 26 January 1643: NL-HaNA, VOC 1141, f. 318v. The suggestion to present Shah Jahan with ‘several elephants’ (eenige olijphanten) had been raised as early as 1637: Dagh-Register Batavia 1637, 274–275. 33 Richard Hudson to Andrew Cogan, Masulipatnam, 16 July 1639: EFI 1637–1641, 143; Andrew Cogan et al. to Banten, Fort St. George, 4 January 1643: EFI 1642–1645, 81. 34 Els M. Jacobs, Merchant in Asia: The Trade of the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2006), 50; Wagenaar, Cinnamon & Elephants, 155–159.

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Jahan upon his appointment as diwan-i-kul (chief finance minister). Even more exuberantly, a Persian embassy to the Ottoman court in 1590 reportedly brought with it gifts that included no less than 1,500 horses, while Aurangzeb’s ambassador to Shah Abbas II, in 1663, carried gifts to the value of seven lakhs.35 The gifts presented by the Companies were stunning in their own right, yet never exceptional in comparison.36 With presents from the categories of European and foreign Asian rarities, which in number outstripped what I have described as Mughal gift items, the Companies capitalised on their access to overseas markets. Lists of gifts contain many items of gold and silverware, glassware, mirrors, magnifying glasses, telescopes, writing equipment, sword blades, pistols and guns, as well as several varieties of alcoholic drink. Along with exclusive consumption goods – wine, spirits, and tobacco – and articles which represented the Companies’ commercial capacity – the ubiquitous broadcloth – a significant proportion of gift items were meant to reflect European technological innovation. The latter could take the form of timepieces, microscopes, cabinets with mechanical figures, or even of a life-size mechanical doll, such as the one which the VOC presented to Shah Sultan Husayn of Persia in 1716. The German soldier Johann Gottlieb Worms, part of the VOC’s embassy guard, described the doll as representing a Dutch lady sitting on a chair, who through her internal mechanism was made to stand up, make a bow, move the eyes and mouth, and sit back down again.37 Less curious, but arguably more useful, were the twelve pieces of brass cannon which William Norris presented to Aurangzeb.38 Finally, among other gifts already mentioned, Surman gifted Farrukhsiyar a table clock set with precious stones, a ‘Box of English flowers’, a ‘Unicorns Horn’, and ‘Horse Pistolls’.39 As an example of what Claudia Swan has described as ‘transcultural self-representation’, the Companies’ choice of gifts served to demonstrate the

35

Shāh Nawāz Khān, Maāthir-ul-Umarā II, 191; Rudi Matthee, ‘Gift-Giving in the Safavid Period’, in: Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopædia Iranica Volume X (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 610; Must’ad Khan, Maāsir-i-‘Alamgiri, 29. 36 Unlike in Mughal India, in the Indonesian archipelago the VOC did endeavour to compete at a royal level. As noted by Cynthia Viallé, the government in Batavia ‘conducted itself like any other kingdom in the region in diplomatic and ceremonial respects’: Viallé, ‘“To Capture Their Favor”’, 291. On the VOC’s reception of Asian envoys in Batavia: Leonard Blussé, ‘Queen among Kings: Diplomatic Ritual in Batavia’, in Kees Grijns and Peter J.M. Nas (eds.), Jakarta-Batavia: Socio-Cultural Essays (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2000), 25–41. 37 Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 111. 38 The cannon had cost 949 pounds sterling: Das and Sarkar, The Norris Embassy, 90–91. 39 Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 46–47, 51–52.

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range and depth of their trading networks and the craft, skill, and technological advances of their region of origin.40 The VOC in particular complemented its range of European gift items with precious Asian rarities. Indonesian spices and fragrant spice oils were frequently among the gifts presented by the Dutch, a category of products which more than any other embodied the VOC’s commercial significance and maritime power. Furthermore, colourful birds of paradise, indigenous to the rainforests of New Guinea and other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, were among the gifts presented by Berckhout, Van Adrichem, and Bacherus.41 Exclusive and highly prized, birds of paradise were avidly sought after by early modern collectors of exotica and functioned as important ‘objects of display’ in cross-cultural diplomacy.42 In 1625, the Dutch presented Jahangir with a cassowary, another exotic bird from the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, but in this case measuring over 1.5 metres in height and weighing more than 50 kg. It probably testifies to the success of this gift that, in 1653, the VOC offered another cassowary to Shah Jahan.43 Scarcely less exclusive were the range of handcrafted items which the VOC imported from Japan, a country that since 1640 had been closed off to European trade, with the notable exception of the small Dutch factory on the man-made island of Deshima. Most conspicuous among the lacquer works that figured as gifts presented to Aurangzeb in 1662 were the howdah (a carriage to be positioned on the back of an elephant), the takht-e-rawan (a carrier throne), and the palanquin. In addition, the monarch was offered many smaller items of Japanese manufacture, such as a cabinet and drawer-desk, as well as a total of twenty-five shields and twenty-six boxes.44 In 1712, Bahadur Shah even received an impressive 255 items of Japanese lacquerware.45 Perhaps even more striking than their exquisite character, therefore, is 40 41

42 43

44 45

Claudia Swan, ‘Birds of Paradise for the Sultan: Early Seventeenth-Century Dutch-Turkish Encounters and the Uses of Wonder’, De Zeventiende Eeuw 29.1 (2013), 49–63, at 51. Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 759v; Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 176; Extract from the Diary of Johannes Bacherus at the Mughal Court in Delhi, 11 September 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, f. 631r. Swan, ‘Birds of Paradise’, 60–61. Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 759v; Extract from the Diary of Johannes Bacherus at the Mughal Court in Delhi, 11 September 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, f. 631r; Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 54; Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert, 38. A cassowary was among the gifts received by one of the captains of the first Dutch voyage to Java, which was presented to the States of Holland in The Hague and later gifted to Rudolf II in Prague: Swan, Rarities of These Lands, 22–23. Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 166. Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 365.

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the sheer quantity of Japanese goods carried on the VOC’s embassies. At least some proportion of these were imported in the hopes of sale, to which purpose the Dutch procured made-to-order items from Japan at the request of Mughal nobles.46 Indeed, a grey area existed in which diplomatic gifts overlapped with commercial transactions. When Nicolaes Verburgh and Joan Tack presented a Japanese lacquer palanquin and a takht-e-rawan to Shah Jahan in 1646, the monarch demanded to know how much it had cost the VOC. Although expressing his displeasure at hearing of its steep price of 8,000 rupees, he nevertheless ordered this sum to be reimbursed.47 Throughout Asia, the most numerous and most precious gifts were reserved for the ruler, members of the royal family, and influential members of the nobility (in that order), and Mughal India was no exception.48 Persons of lesser standing received smaller and less extraordinary gifts, including curious “toys” of the Nuremberger variety and practical items such as scissors and spectacles. In the case of Ketelaar’s mission of 1711–1713, the projected inventory of gifts included no less than 325 pairs of glasses. The embassy’s accounts reveal that at least twenty minor nobles received a single pair as their only present; that seven others were given two or three pairs; and that another fifteen courtiers received one pair of spectacles in addition to a sword blade, some porcelain, or another small rarity.49 Furthermore, the detailed record of disbursed gifts show that material exchanges were integral to encounters on the lengthy journeys to and from the imperial court. For instance, Ketelaar’s stop-over in Udaipur during his outward journey to Agra, in April 1711, turned into a significant diplomatic event in its own right when his party was ceremoniously received by Maharana Sangram Singh II (r. 1710–1734) of Mewar. This encounter evidently sparked the interest of the Udaipuri court in its foreign visitors, judging by the spectacular art work that was produced in its wake (Figures 12 and 13).50 As part of the amicable exchange, Ketelaar gifted his young host a variety of items including lacquerwork, swords, guns, spices, diverse textiles, mirrors, a gilded flower, and six pairs of glasses.51 46 47 48 49 50

51

Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 63–64. Nicolaes Verburgh and Joan Tack to Arent Barentsz in Surat, Lahore, 16 April 1646: NL-HaNA, VOC 1161, ff. 1028–1030. Viallé, ‘“To Capture Their Favor”, 293. Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 376–380. Andrew Topsfield, ‘Ketelaar’s Embassy and the Farangi Theme in the Art of Udaipur’, Oriental Art 30.4 (1984), 350–367; Joachim Bautze, ‘Maharana Sangram Singh of Udaipur Entertaining Members of the Dutch East India Company led by Johan Josua Ketelaar’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 36.2 (1988), 117–132. Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 46–47, 386–387.

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figure 12 Maharana Sangram Singh receives the embassy of Joan Josua Ketelaar, c. 1711. This cloth painting was produced in Udaipur (Rajasthan) following Ketelaar’s reception there whilst on his outward journey to the Mughal court. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 09405(IS)

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figure 13 Maharana Sangram Singh receives the embassy of Joan Josua Ketelaar, c. 1711 (detail). This cloth painting was produced in Udaipur (Rajasthan) following ­Ketelaar’s reception there whilst on his outward journey to the Mughal court. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 09405(IS)

Surveying more than a century of diplomatic gift-giving, it becomes evident that the English and Dutch Companies employed gifts that fell broadly in the same three categories, yet that the VOC gave presents in larger quantities and of a more varied nature. In Asia as a whole, the VOC spent well over a million guilders on gifts annually during the 1640s, a figure that increased to well over four million guilders per year by the late 1680s. More than 600,000 guilders were spent on gifts in the course of Ketelaar’s mission alone.52 Differences in budget and the respective scales of seventeenth-century English and Dutch enterprise in Mughal India and beyond explain the VOC’s greater expenditure, yet the latter also underlines that the VOC’s political aspirations were more fully developed at this stage. Their unparalleled intra-Asian trading network, moreover, gave the Dutch a significant edge over their English rivals and other suitors of the Mughal ruler, as it put hard-to-come-by exotica and custommade Asian luxury goods at their disposal.

52

Viallé, ‘“To Capture Their Favor”, 295; Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 357. The total expenditure on this embassy was 1.2 million guilders.

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Gifts and Interaction Ritual

Outside the heavily scripted public audiences at the imperial court, gift-giving and other material exchanges continued to form an integral part of the everyday routines of diplomatic communication. When receiving and when providing hospitality, VOC and EIC agents adjusted to and sought to appropriate the customary practices of Mughal interaction ritual. Let us first observe some instances of receiving hospitality. Towards the end of their sojourn in Delhi in the early months of 1653, Berckhout and Tack encountered Sa’dullah Khan, the imperial wazir, on the road. Having performed their reverence, the two Dutchmen recorded with great satisfaction that the nobleman offered them ‘great courtesy by giving betel to us in the street’, a sign of public acknowledgement.53 A few weeks earlier both men had responded with similar delight to the exquisite banquet which Jahanara had had delivered to their lodgings, and which included all sorts of fruits and confectionery. They asserted that ‘the Dutch nation was done a great honour’ and claimed that the Mughal princess had never before paid a similar favour to anyone.54 Similar responses are recorded with respect to the reception of ceremonial gifts. In 1651, Prince Shah Shuja presented a sarapa to the English envoy, Richard Davidge, along with a dagger for the EIC’s president in Surat. Davidge and his colleague described the gift in detail and praised it for its fine workmanship and the costly design of its sheath and handle, which was made of crystal garnished with gold and studded with rubies. Having thus given an indication of the monetary value of the dagger, the agents shifted the attention to its symbolic worth: ‘The Prince used to weare it himselfe; the favour therefore the greater’.55 Far from stopping at simply learning how to interpret common Mughal practices, Dutch and English agents also incorporated locally observed customs into their own routines. Numerous examples show that, when visiting Indian dignitaries for business purposes or to honour social conventions, Company representatives complied with the custom of nazr. Hence, setting out to meet the governor of Hughli, Malik Qasim, in 1669, Joseph Hall was told that ‘[a]ccording to the country custome, which admits not empty vissitts, you must lay him downe a 20s. piece of gold and three rupees’.56 Likewise, when 53 54 55 56

‘groote cortoisie met betel op d’straet aen ons te geven ontfingen’: Diary Joan Berckhout and Joan Tack, Agra and Delhi, 26 December 1652 to 30 March 1653: NL-HaNA, VOC 1201, f. 766r. ‘waermede de Hollansche Natie een groote eere is geschiet, also nooijt voordesen aen ijmant soodanige gonste betoont heeft’: Ibid., 764r. Richard Davidge and Thomas Andrews to Surat, Agra, 8 March 1651: EFI 1651–1654, 49–50. Instruction to Joseph Hall, Balasore, 7 May 1669: EFI 1668–1669, 297.

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William Hedges heard that a son was born to the aged nawab Shaista Khan, he visited the octogenarian in the latter’s darbar in Dhaka and offered him ‘13 Gold Mohurs and 21 Rupees’.57 A comparable occasion in 1711 elicited a similar response. Learning of the birth of a son to Ziyauddin Khan, the President and Council of Calcutta noted that it was ‘ye Custom to pay a Complim[en]t & send a present on such occasions’, and decided to send their vakil (agent or attorney) to the governor with ‘a yard of Brocade Silk & 5 Gold Moors [mohurs]’.58 William Norris offers a particularly telling illustration of this much wider pattern. Although his attitude concerning points of diplomatic protocol was reminiscent of Roe’s, his adoption of quotidian Indian practices underlines the fact that views as to what constituted the normative behaviour of a royal ambassador had shifted considerably in the course of a century. Emblematic of the blend of English and Indian customs in Norris’ public engagements were the celebrations he staged to commemorate King William’s birthday on 4 November 1699. This was, by definition, a first-rate occasion to impress his audience with the might and splendour of his monarch, yet the ambassador’s approach also reveals careful consideration of local conventions. Norris invited all the English and Dutch factors present in Masulipatnam, as well as some French and Portuguese traders, the havildar (town governor), the waqianavis (imperial news writer), and the merchant Muhammad Said. The ambassador explained that by inviting all his acquaintances in town, he followed ‘ye usuall formality amongst these people when they keepe a day of rejoycinge’.59 Having learned that Aurangzeb gave out money on his birthday, Norris ordered his treasurer to distribute coins to his dubashes (interpreters), peons (footmen), and other Indian staff. Moreover, before leaving the banqueting hall, he threw out several handfuls of silver, and made sure to have 5,000 paisas (copper coins) ready at hand ‘to be flunge out to ye poore people who swarmed under ye window’.60 This way of distributing gifts to the poor on auspicious days adhered closely to the Persianate custom of tassadoq, routinely practised by Mughal emperors in the form of ‘scattering money on both sides of the road’ when riding out.61

57 58 59 60 61

Yule, The Diary of William Hedges, I, 48. BL, IOR/P/1/2, f. 76: Consultation Fort William, 5 February 1711. Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 912, f. 40. Ibid., f. 41. Matthee, ‘Gift giving’, 611; Beveridge, The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī I, 166. The citation is taken from Jahangir’s account of his return to Agra after a hunting expedition in 1610. An example of the Dutch agents in Surat scattering copper paisas ‘among the poor’ is recorded as part of the funeral procession for Cornelis Bezuyen in 1709: Van Santen, Op Bezoek bij de Groot-Mogol, 78.

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Of equal interest is the description which Norris gave of the audiences he held with several Muslim and Hindu merchants while camping outside Surat. He relates how he received his guests in a large room furnished for the purpose with rich carpets and scarlet cloth, seated in a chair of state covered with scarlet velvets embroidered with gold thread. In the grand style reminiscent of Indian noblemen holding court, Norris – who was commissioned by King William III to act on behalf of the short-lived “New” or “English” Company, created in 1698 to replace the “Old” or “London” Company – heard the merchants’ complaints about the Old Company and promised to do them justice. At the close of the reception, he dismissed them in the country’s customary manner by serving betel and rosewater in gold cups.62 Again this was a meaningful act that was consciously chosen to appeal to a local sense of propriety. Norris had been initiated into the custom of giving betel leaves or paan by the New Company’s consul on the Coromandel Coast, John Pitt, and routinely practised it at various occasions during his stay in India. He noted that betel was ‘an Item of departure’ and explained that it was considered to be a ‘farther marke of kindnesse & friendship’ if the donor presented betel and rosewater from his own hand.63 The omnipresent consumption of areca nut folded in paan leaves had already been remarked upon by Peter Mundy in the context of his journey from Agra to Patna in 1632. In a section entitled ‘Paan what it is’, the English traveller and EIC agent explained that in India ‘[t]here is noe vesitt, banquett, etts. without it’, likening it to the use of tobacco in England. His description of the place of paan in interaction ritual was particularly apt: ‘To Strangers it is most comonly given att partinge, soe that when they send for Paane, it is a signe of dispeedinge, or that it is tyme to be gon.’64 Around the turn of the century, Niccolao Manucci added to the chorus of voices which described the widespread use of this stimulant, as well as its function as a hospitality gift. In particular ‘among the great men’, the Venetian traveller explained, it was standard practice to present betel to visitors upon departure, ‘as a mark of goodwill, and of the estimation in which they hold the person who is visiting them’.65 Although gifts of paan thus came to be understood by European 62 63 64 65

Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 913, ff. 24–27. Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 912, f. 18. Richard Carnac Temple (ed.), The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667 (5 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1907–1936), II, 96–97. William Irvine (ed.), Storia do Mogor or Mogul India 1653–1708 by Niccolao Manucci Venetian (4 vols. London: John Murray, 1907–1908), I, 63. See also: David L. Curley, ‘“Voluntary” Relationships and Royal Gifts of Pān in Mughal Bengal’, in: Gordon, Robes of Honour, 50–79.

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observers chiefly as a polite way of indicating the end of a reception, its association with a sign of honour reflected its original significance. In the courts of both Hindu and Muslim rulers in South Asia and Southeast Asia, royal gifts of tambula – betel leaves prepared with lime, shaved areca nuts, and spices – had historically been constructed as a personalised ceremony through which political relationships were constituted, a symbolic practice reminiscent of the donning of khil’at.66 David Curley has argued that, in Mughal India, the implications of gifts of paan in the seventeenth century and beyond were modified from the restricted meaning of giving and accepting commands in hierarchical contexts, towards an expression of ‘more peripheral, ephemeral or ambiguous relationships’.67 This dynamic cultural moment hence allowed newcomers to participate in this custom, adopt it, and adjust it to their own purposes. The practice that most palpably demonstrates that senior Company representatives consciously appropriated elements of Mughal elite culture is their imitation of the custom of khil’at. From the second half of the seventeenth century, ceremonial gifts of dress items to Indian Company brokers became increasingly common. When Van Adrichem presented a pamri or shawl to his broker, Kishor Das, in May 1662, the practice was already common enough for his secretary to add the words ‘according to custom’. De Laver explained that the gift was intended to prompt the broker to perform his duties according to expectation, hence sealing bonds of loyalty.68 Ensuring future service as well as visually performing patronage in a recognisably Indian register were also the principles behind Norris’ decision to present a horse, a pamri, and a turban to his broker, the distinguished Parsi merchant Rustamji Manakji.69 If we credit Norris’ version of the event, the responses of Rustamji and the wider Parsi community suggest that EIC patronage effortlessly blended with the Indian socio-cultural framework. Norris described Rustamji’s reaction as follows: ‘[H]e made 3 salams to ye ground went out & immediately put of ye habitt & then & there the shaull over his shoulders w.ch is ye Greatest piece of honour & marke of favour I could show him’.70 Evidently pleased with this spectacle, the ambassador continued: ‘This is ye Greatest honour y.t was ever done his Cast &

66 67 68 69

70

Curley, ‘‘Voluntary’ Relationships and Royal Gifts of Pān’, 50–52. Ibid., 66–67. Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 83–84. Rustamji Manakji (c. 1635–1721) was a successful merchant and leader of the Parsi community in Surat who, besides his relations with the English, also acted as diplomatic broker between the Portuguese and the Mughal authorities. See: Subrahmanyam, ‘The Hidden Face of Surat’, 237–238. Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 913, f. 39.

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soe taken by all ye Rest as a particular honour done their Cast’.71 Like Mughal noblemen, who performed the same ceremonies through which emperors reaffirmed patron–client ties but on a smaller scale in their own audience halls, Norris publicly rewarded his subordinate through an act of investiture, which the latter in turn duly acknowledged by doing reverence (three salams to the ground) in ritual fashion. A decade later, Joan Josua Ketelaar must have carried an entire stock of honorific robes, given the large number he distributed to followers as well as others who crossed his path. By presenting robes of honour and horses to his three Hindu brokers, Ketelaar acted in the same spirit as Van Adrichem and Norris. Yet he went beyond this conventional usage when he added a total of four sarapas to the cash payment needed to obtain free passage through the territory of the raja of Jhabua. Ketelaar clearly perceived this “gift” as a forced transaction, one that shifted agency from the donor to the recipient; thus adding a further dimension to the diverse meanings which the negotiated practice of khil’at took on in different contexts. Regarding the episode as an unconcealed case of bribery, Ketelaar emphasised that he counted himself unlucky for having to deal with ‘these variable and thuggish heathenish humours’.72 Another instance in which robes of honour were employed as a bargaining chip took place in 1715 upon John Surman’s arrival at the Mughal court. When the Indian porters who had conveyed the embassy train all the way from Patna to Delhi became disgruntled and demanded the wages due to them, Surman offered a financial settlement and proceeded to dismiss their service, ‘giving Seerpaws, [saropās] etc. to their Cheifs with which they are contented’.73 Here too, Surman followed a practice that was well-established among senior EIC officials in Bengal, as can be seen from the granting of robes of honour to Mughal gurz­ bardars (mace bearers, charged with messenger duties) who delivered the emperor’s sarapas and farmans to the English.74 The appropriation of gifts of betel, the presentation of robes of honour, and the mimicking of ceremonies associated with Indian notions of nobility by Norris, Surman, and Ketelaar was exemplary of a dominant trend among senior Company agents. Over the course of the seventeenth century, meetings between Mughal officials and Company representatives came to follow 71 Ibid. 72 ‘die soo voriabele en schelmagtige heydense humeuren’: Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 277. 73 Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 49. 74 Surman Embassy Diary, 31 December 1714: Wilson, Early Annals II.2, 14; Consultation Fort William, 25 November 1717: Wilson, Early Annals II.1, 289.

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a set pattern predicated upon the former’s customary way of doing business. The basic components of such encounters are succinctly described in Van Adrichem’s embassy diary with regard to a visit from Agra’s mint master, a former shahbandar in Surat and brother to one of the principal contacts of the Dutch at Aurangzeb’s court. A routine journal entry tells us that this Mughal official was received with formulaic words of welcome and other compliments, and that he ‘after an exchange of various discussions back and forth and a short while sitting in the Moorish fashion, being honoured with rosewater and pinang [betel], took his leave’.75 Accommodating local notables by receiving them according to local custom was one thing; abandoning divine service on Sundays to admit them was something different, as Shem Bridges was duly told. In his defence, this English factor in Balasore explained that persons of note ‘cannott bee kept at door untill wee have finished our oraisons’, and argued that since ‘it being there [sic] custome to admitt us, though they bee at the exercise thereof [i.e. their devotion]’, it would be unseemly to refuse them likewise.76 The matter-of-fact way in which these Company agents described their daily routines supports the overall impression that visits to and from Indian officials, gifts of betel, and sitting according to the Mughal manner simply formed part of the stock-in-trade of a European residing in India. Still, when we turn to the discursive content of Company writing, it becomes clear that in many cases the pragmatic compliance with what Company agents perceived to be “the custom of the country” did not automatically equate to an open-minded embrace of foreign ways.

Gift-Giving and Ethnographic Discourse

Like François Bernier, who opened his published letter to Jean-Baptiste Colbert by stating that ‘it is the custome of Asia, never to approach Great Persons with empty hands’, VOC and EIC representatives seldom failed to point out that, in courts across India, gift-giving was necessary whenever one visited or

75 76

‘Dies naar diverse over en weder gewisselde redenen en weynigh zittens op de Moorse wyse met roosewater en pienangh vereert zijnde, affscheyt nam’: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 120. Shem Bridges to Joseph Hall, Balasore, 12 May 1669: EFI 1668–1669, 298. Similar reasoning was used by Streynsham Master, who excused his omission of public prayers on weekdays by claiming that it did not fit with the everyday running of a factory, ‘the Natives comeing and goeing at unseasonable and uncertain times’: Yule, Diary of William Hedges II, cccviii.

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petitioned a person of status.77 William Hawkins asserted early on that ‘there is no man that commeth to make petition who commeth emptie-handed’, a practice described by Norris as ‘ye fashion of ye country’.78 Far from being limited to the Mughal polity, such observations were conceived of in broad, transcultural terms. For instance, when dispatching Henry Oxenden to the court of the Mahratta ruler Shivaji Bhonsle in 1674, the Governor and Council of Bombay informed him that ‘ye evill custome of theise Easterne parts puts the Compa[ny] to an indispencible necessity of presents in such cases, there being nothinge to be done in theise parts of the world without them’.79 As this statement suggests, the sizeable expenditure which VOC and EIC agents in South Asia thought necessary to maintain favourable relations with government representatives was often deemed to be at odds with the Companies’ core objective of profit maximisation. Caught between the budgetary pressures of a commercial operation and the demands of maintaining the stateliness required of a political actor, a good number of Company servants resorted to portraying the realities they faced by means of crude ethnographic generalisations. For instance, in 1617, when the English factor James Bickford sought to convince the EIC’s Governor in London that gifts were essential to doing business in Mughal India, the picture he painted was one of collective and institutionalised greed: ‘[T]he people of this country being generally all so base, and thieves they are all from the beggar to the king, and live as fishes do in the sea; the great one[s] eat up the little’.80 Again, during the late 1630s, when the EIC’s representatives in Masulipatnam argued that a regular flow of pishkash to the Sultan of Golkonda was needed to safeguard English privileges, they supported their position with the observation that ‘presents must be given; or else noe liveinge amongst these people’.81 In part, such rhetoric would have been .

77

François Bernier, The History of the Late Revolution of the Great Mogol... to which is added, a Letter to the Lord Colbert (London: Moses Pitt, 1671), ‘A Letter to the Lord Colbert’, 1. Italics in original. Bernier may have had in mind the difficulties experienced by the French embassy to Aurangzeb’s court of 1666. Compare: George Oxenden et al. to Company, Surat, 25 September 1666: EFI 1665–67, 158. 78 Foster, Early Travels, 89, 119; Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. C. 912, f. 14. See also Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 166. 79 Instruction to Henry Oxenden, Bombay, 11 May 1674: IOR/E/3/35, f. 13v. As Oxenden’s journal suggests, recommendations that it was ‘not ye Custome of theise Easterne parts to appeare before a Prince empty handed’ would often have been communicated by Indian interlocutors: Journal of Henry Oxenden’s journey to the court of Shivaji, 13 May–13 June 1674: IOR/E/3/35, f. 19r. 80 James Bickford to Sir Thomas Smythe, Swally Road, 4 March 1616/17: Letters Received V, 134. 81 Andrew Cogan et al. to Company, Masulipatnam, 25 October 1639: EFI 1637–1641, 183. See also: Gerald Pinson and Thomas Clark to Banten, Masulipatnam, 1 December 1636: EFI 1634–1636, 326.

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employed to describe a foreign state of affairs to relative outsiders, as the directors in London evidently were. However, the fact that the Masulipatnam factors used similar language when informing their colleague in nearby Golkonda that ‘there is noe Moore a freind longer then what will you give mee’ confirms that the ethnographic component in the EIC’s approach to gift-giving should not be dismissed.82 VOC records similarly demonstrate that gift-giving was an area in Company writing in which the language of national character consistently cropped up. With regard to a projected embassy to the Sultan of Golkonda, the directeur on the Coromandel Coast and later Governor-General, Carel Reijniersz, advised against creating an expensive precedent to prevent becoming ‘continually and at great costs subject to the Moors’ inborn greediness’.83 Such ideas about innate greed were treated as a given, a deplorable fact one simply had to deal with.84 The corollary of reading the actions and intentions of one’s diplomatic interlocutors in terms of systemic greed or corruptibility was that a uniform solution was readily found. For instance, when the Dutch envoys at the provincial court in Dhaka in 1636 did not receive the hearing they hoped for, they concluded that nawab Islam Khan ‘after the nature of the wicked Moors was seeking to scrape as much as possible’, and responded by spending 1,150 rupees in gifts to secure the aid of various courtiers.85 Likewise, when instructing Bacherus about the mission he was to undertake at Aurangzeb’s court in Delhi in 1677, Willem Volger and the Council of Surat explained that they had furnished him with gifts to present to Mughal dignitaries ‘because we know that nothing can be achieved with this nation without first filling their hands’.86 Statements of this kind convey a sense of resignation to what Company agents portrayed as a necessary evil, a sentiment echoed in Hawkins’ remark that ‘knowing the custome of these Moores that without gifts and bribes nothing would either goe forward or bee accomplished, I sent my broker to 82 83 84 85 86

Richard Hudson and Thomas Peniston to Andrew Cogan at Golkonda, Masulipatnam, 11 June 1639: EFI 1637–1640, 143. ‘die servituyt door der Mooren aengeboren begeerlijckheyt niet gestadigh met groote oncosten subject te wesen’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 22 December 1638: Generale Missiven I, 721. In 1636, the Hoge Regering matter of factly remarked that ‘‘t Is de Mooren om voordeel te doen ende daervan de meeste proffijten trecken, sijn van hun best bemint’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 28 December 1636: Generale Missiven I, 562. ‘naer den aert der valsche mooren soo veel socht te schrapen als mogelijck was’: Dagh-Register Batavia 1637, 99. ‘vermits wel weten met desen landaart niet uytte rigten is, sonder haar alvoorens de handen gevult te hebben’: Instruction to Johannes Bacherus, Surat, 18 January 1677: NL-HaNA, VOC 1323, f. 1452r.

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seeke out for jewels’.87 At one point, the English agents in Bengal even sullenly observed that the Dutch were more successful in bribing the local authorities, claiming that bribery ‘in these parts is the most effectuall oratour’.88 Repeated references to following ‘the Moorish custom’ or ‘this nation’s usage’ in matters of gift-giving and ceremony bear testimony to the pragmatic way in which VOC and EIC envoys incorporated Mughal social conventions into their daily intercourse with government representatives.89 Nonetheless, recurrent piercing remarks remind us of the distance separating such practical acquiescence from genuine acceptance of cultural difference: compulsory compliance with Indian customs could breed resentment and heighten cultural prejudice. Embassy diaries provide further evidence in support of such a reading. Following a meeting with the faujdar (district commander) of Ajmer on his outward journey to Delhi, Van Adrichem complained that ‘this avaricious and money-grubbing nation is only after gain’, while some months later he protested that despite daily gifts of broadcloth, Japanese lacquer, and other rarities to the imperial scribes charged with writing up the farmans, the Dutch were still ‘obliged to constantly butter them up according to the Moorish nature’.90 Confronted with a similar situation fifty years later, Ketelaar sought to justify his extraordinary outlay on gifts and bribes by explaining that only through such means was it possible to counteract ‘the slow nature of these natives’.91 Whether it was the Mughals’ alleged greed, penchant for curiosities, fickleness, or supposed proclivity for endlessly delaying diplomatic affairs which Company agents chose to highlight, in each case European gift-giving strategies were felt to respond to presumed ethnographic insight. Financial considerations provide a straightforward explanation for the critical reactions of many VOC and EIC agents to the Mughal gift-giving regime, yet such concerns combined with other factors. As was the case with diplomatic reports concerning Russia or the Ottoman Empire, the European tradition of depicting Eastern courts as marked by ‘Oriental avarice’ played a role in framing Company

87 Foster, Early Travels, 94. 88 William Blake et al. to Surat, 12 April 1666: EFI 1665–1667, 257. 89 See the following examples from Van Adrichem’s embassy diary: ‘volgens ‘s lants gewoonte’; ‘conform de moorse costuime’; ‘volgens de dees lants wyse’; ‘conform usance deses lantaarts’, ‘naar de Moorse wyse’: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 87–88, 160–161, 191. 90 ‘het dese schraapsughtige en geltgrage natie niet anders dan om t’hebben te doen is’; ‘genootsaackt volgens den Moorse aart haar geduyrigh heuningh om den mont te smeeren’; Ibid., 106, 190. 91 ‘den langsamen aard deser landsaaten’: Vogel, Journaal van J.J. Ketelaar’s Hofreis, 338.

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accounts of diplomatic gift-exchange in Mughal India.92 Expectations held by their intended readership likely encouraged authors to explain foreign realities using conventional tropes, as much as the popularity of such tropes coloured the way authors interpreted what they observed. A clear illustration of this comes from Roe, who made countless complaints about the ‘want of civilitye’ and ‘barbarous customes’ he felt subjected to during his embassy.93 A later example comes from the pen of Gerardo Pelgrom, director of Dutch trade in Surat, who in 1655 lamented that Shah Jahan’s ‘wicked palace’ was ‘filled with none but greedy vultures, who constantly call out for gifts’.94 Because the type and value of gifts were expected to be commensurate with the status of both donor and recipient, as Roe found out early on, courtly giftgiving turned into highly public manifestations of power and affluence. As the Companies entered this competitive arena, they had to navigate between courtly expectations of conspicuous display and mercantile considerations surrounding investments and returns. In 1661, concern for the balance sheet motivated the VOC’s Governor-General and Councillors to limit gifts reserved for Aurangzeb to a value of 15,000 guilders. They explained that they would have sent more presents if they had expected greater benefits in return, yet that they knew that ‘this monarch inclines more to taking than to giving’.95 While the Mughal nobility – whose career prospects and private fortunes were linked to the distribution of imperial favours, land grants (jagirs), and offices – are likely to have raised their eyebrows at Batavia’s assessment, the Companies did not experience the reciprocal dimensions of the Mughal political system in the same way. Hence, whilst EIC and VOC representatives appreciated the importance of gift-giving for the daily conduct of trade and looked upon expensive embassies as a necessary price to pay for the privileges they enjoyed, they also continued to assess their relations with the imperial government from an accountant’s perspective.

92

Siebenhüner, ‘Approaching Diplomatic and Courtly Gift-Giving’, 541. Compare: Jan Hennings, ‘The Failed Gift: Ceremony and Gift-Giving in Anglo-Russian Relations (1662– 1664)’, in: Sowerby and Hennings, Practices of Diplomacy, 237–253; Vogel, ‘The Caftan and the Sword’, 40. 93 Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 33, 109. Also see: Ibid., 30, 37, 70, 100, 104, 270, 464. 94 ‘heyloose paleys’; ‘met niemandt anders als gierige grijpvogels vervult is, die gedurich om schenckagie roepen’: Cited in: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 27. 95 ‘dewyle dien monargs genegentheyt meer tot nemen als tot geven streckt’: Hoge Regering to Surat, Batavia, 22 September 1661: Bernet Kempers, Journaal van Dircq van Adrichem’s Hofreis, 23.

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In the course of a century of diplomatic encounters, the gift-giving practices, representational strategies, routines of social communication, and responses to courtly ritual of VOC and EIC agents stationed in Mughal India increasingly took shape in response to their understandings of local custom. This set in motion a process of blending Indian social practices into the behaviour of Company agents, matching a general pattern of cultural appropriation also manifested in commercial encounters and colonial engagements. By observing approaches to cross-cultural contact along with their accompanying discourses, this chapter has emphasised the internal contradiction that characterised the outlook of EIC and VOC envoys, many of whom mimicked the social comportment of the very noblemen they denounced as proud and greedy.96 John Surman’s mission, with which this chapter began, was the last of a series of formal embassies sent to the imperial court by either the EIC or the VOC. From the 1760s, British political representation became organised through the novel mode of attaching residents to the courts of princely states.97 This change in diplomatic organisation reflected the waning of Mughal authority and the rise of regional successors, the EIC among them. Nevertheless, for the next half century if not more, the Company’s practice of diplomacy remained steeped in the forms and political language of Mughal imperial culture. When engaging in political gift-giving, including the offering of nazr and presentation of khil’at, then, British representatives in the decades around 1800 built upon longstanding diplomatic routines first incorporated into the EIC’s institutional practice in the seventeenth century.98

96

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98

A parallel ‘contradiction between condemnation and emulation’ characterised European attitudes vis-à-vis Ottoman elites: Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Trafficking with the Turk: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Seventeenth Century’, in: Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 35–52, at 35. On the residency system: Michael H. Fisher, ‘The Resident in Court Ritual, 1764–1858’, Modern Asian Studies 24.3 (1990), 419–548; Michael H. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India, 1526– 1858’, in: H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid (eds.), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 249–281. For political interaction ritual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Callie Hannah Wilkinson, ‘The Residents of the British East India Company at Indian Royal Courts, c. 1798–1818’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of Cambridge, 2017); Tanja Bührer, ‘Cooperation and Cultural Adaptation: British Diplomats at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, c. 1779–1815’, in: Tanja Bührer, Flavio Eichmann, Stig Förster, and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds.), Cooperation and Empire: Local Realities and Global Processes (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), 90–114; Tanja Bührer, ‘Intercultural Diplomacy at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, 1770–1815’, The International History Review 41.5 (2019), 1039–1056.

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When turning our gaze beyond the immediate sphere of diplomacy, it becomes clear that the objectives pursued by the Dutch and English at different stages in their diplomatic encounters give an insight into their gradual entrenchment as political actors on the South Asian stage. From the 1680s onwards, the EIC made constant overtures to the Mughal government to ensure formal acknowledgement of its tenure of Madras and Calcutta with their surrounding villages. This was finally secured with Farrukhsiyar’s farman of 1717. Much earlier, in the 1650s, the Dutch had already acquired extensive territorial holdings in Ceylon. After decades of military conflict with the inland kingdom of Kandy, regular diplomatic relations were established in 1688. The symbolic subservience performed during embassies to Kandy ensured the VOC’s de facto possession of large parts of the island, while it sustained the legal fiction that the Dutch governed as “loyal servants” of the Kandyan king, at least until the Dutch-Kandyan war of 1760–1766.99 It is by turning to the birth of Company settlements in Ceylon and Madras that we will see how seventeenth-century Dutch and English engagements in commerce and diplomacy were interwoven with incipient colonialism. 99

Lodewijk Wagenaar, ‘‘Met eer en respect’: Diplomatieke contacten tussen de VOC-­ gouverneur in Colombo en het hof van het koninkrijk Kandy, 1703–1707’, in: Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Peter Rietbergen (eds.), Hof en Handel: Aziatische Vorsten en de VOC 1620–1720 (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004), 227–250; Alicia Schrikker, ‘Dutch Political Attitudes in Asia: Diplomacy in Eighteenth century Ceylon as Example’, in: Masanari Nishimura, Minoru Sato, Mizuka Kimura, and Hiromichi Okamoto (eds.), Cultural Reproduction on its Interface: From the Perspectives of Text, Diplomacy, Otherness and Tea in East Asia (Suita: Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies Kansai University, 2010), 43–59.

PART 4 The Birth of Company Settlements

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map 4 South India and Ceylon

CHAPTER 7

‘Safe Habitations’: Colonial Settlement in Ceylon and Madras Within decades of arriving in South Asia, the merchants and diplomats of the Dutch and English East India Companies began their gradual transformation into colonial administrators equipped with the means and ideologies for exercising government over Asian people. During the seventeenth century, EIC jurisdiction remained limited to a small number of places, where the extent of European power was limited. Even so, starting in 1640 and picking up in intensity around 1700, the growth of English settlements in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta created new situations in which Company agents’ ideas about and understandings of their Indian environment found expression in policies of colonial governance. In the same period, the VOC embarked on much more extensive territorial expansion in present-day Sri Lanka, a full-blown project of colonial conquest and settlement accompanied by spirited discussions about the best means to rule the Sinhalese and Tamil populations. The two sites of encounter – the town of Madras and the island of Ceylon – foregrounded in Part 4 of this book differed greatly in size and character, and in some ways represent two extremes. However, by exploring them alongside each other as two points on the same spectrum, we can begin to see how Company agents in each location also confronted comparable issues and displayed a number of shared responses. In both organisations, concerns about security in a foreign environment drove the creation of fortified settlements, built to provide protection against European rivals and keep Asian powers at arm’s length. Both Companies devised policies for managing the multi-ethnic populations residing within their jurisdictions that drew their rationale in part from similar understandings of cultural identity. And Dutch as well as English agents reflected on and adopted what they held to be the style of governance best suited to an Asian setting. The VOC’s hybrid character as a mercantile organisation wielding colonial power is well-established in the historical literature.1 While submissively peti1 In the words of Jurrien van Goor, the VOC was ‘run as a business concern but acting like a kingdom’: Jurrien van Goor, ‘State and Religion under the Dutch in Ceylon, c. 1640–1796’, in: Jorge Flores (ed.), Re-exploring the Links: History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007), 211–232, at 213. See also: Gerrit Knaap © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004471825_009

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tioning powerful rulers for trading rights in the Mughal Empire, Persia, Japan, and China, the Dutch corporation aggressively acquired significant swathes of territory in other regions, comprising parts of modern-day Indonesia, Taiwan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, where it came to govern several hundred thousand mainly Sinhalese and Tamil inhabitants.2 In contrast, prior to the 1750s English claims to Asian soil remained limited to a few small pockets of jurisdiction scattered along the coasts of the Indian subcontinent and western Sumatra, acquired not by forceful means but (in nearly all cases) through a lease from Asian sovereigns. It is largely for this reason that the established image of the seventeenth-century EIC has long been that of a purely commercial organisation. Recent scholarship has compellingly argued that the EIC should be regarded ‘as a form of government’ from its inception, a view that finds ample support in the records produced in Fort St. George (Madras), which document in detail how the EIC founded civic institutions, levied taxation, administered justice, farmed out revenues, and mobilised its defence against potential outside interference.3 As shown most recently by David Veevers, the town of Madras originated from within the constitutional framework of a succession of Indian polities and flourished as a result of the Company’s integration into regional political and commercial networks.4 One cannot understand the birth of Company settlements in India without taking seriously the transcultural partnerships and entanglements that shaped them and that were often driven by regional mercantile and political elites. Yet as we have seen in previous chapters, the story of the Companies’ immersion in the Indian environment was complex and often contradictory. When we focus in on Company writing, a further dimension comes into view, namely that cultural assumptions and apprehensions represented important undercurrents in the forging of Madras and other early colonial settlements. As was the case in the sphere of commerce, many of these assumptions related to trust. In January 1642, when relaying the news that Fort St. George had almost been completed, the council at Surat assured the Court of Committees that this new construction ‘may happily stand to doe you good service, for and Ger Teitler (eds.), De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie: Tussen Oorlog en Diplomatie (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2002); Gerrit Knaap, De ‘Core Business’ van de VOC: Markt, Macht en Mentaliteit vanuit Overzees Perspectief (Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 2014). 2 Population estimates for Ceylon are few and variable. A recent estimate puts the number of indigenous inhabitants the VOC recorded as living under its jurisdiction in 1684 at 278,100. By 1789, that number had risen to 817,000: De Zwart, Globalization and the Colonial Origins, 250. 3 Stern, The Company-State, viii. 4 Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, Chs. 1–3.

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without such defensible places your goods and servants among such treacherous people are in continuall hazard; the just feare wherof hath induced the Portugalls, Dutch, and Danes to frame unto themselves more safe habitations’.5 Invoking ‘just feare’ and ‘continuall hazard’, the agents’ portrayal of what it meant to reside among southern India’s ‘treacherous people’ testifies to the feelings of colonial anxiety that, as the quotation indicates, were shared by Europeans of different backgrounds. Scholars of modern empire have used the concept of colonial anxiety to explain European officials’ apprehension about real and imagined plots, fuelled by the slipperiness of information and their failure to grasp the foreign environment they sought to control.6 In the seventeenth century, their greater numerical weakness and more limited power bases made Europeans in Asia even more aware of their relative vulnerability. ‘Truly we are now a dejected handfull of people in a strange land’, the English factors in Surat sighed in 1666.7 Their testimony embodies a sentiment that, at different times and in different places, shaded into the more belligerent ‘siege mentality’ displayed by the likes of Rijcklof van Goens, the VOC’s governor of Ceylon (1662–1663 and 1665–1675) who at one point claimed that ‘no one in the entire Indies wishes us well, indeed we are extremely hated by all nations’.8 Before examining how such understandings informed Dutch and English approaches to governing multi-ethnic populations, in Chapter 8, it is first necessary to revisit the origins of the Companies’ divergent experiences of colonial settlement. 5 William Fremlen et al. to Company, Swally, 27 January 1642: EFI 1642–1645, 12. This passage is also cited by Carl H. Nightingale, whose account of urban segregation in Madras informs my analysis: Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 54. 6 Bayly, Empire and Information; Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Kim A. Wagner, ‘‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny-Motif’ and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present 218 (2013): 159–197. For an early modern example: Clulow, Amboina. 7 George Oxenden et al. to Company, Surat, 4 April 1666: BL, IOR/E/3/31, f. 192r. This particular complaint referred to the English factors’ inability to, like their Dutch rivals, ‘maintaine their grandure’ through lavish gift-giving. 8 ‘niemant in gants India zijnde die ons goet gunt, jae werden van alle Natiën doodelijck gehaet’: Leupe, ‘Rapport van Van Goens (1655)’, 177. Regarding siege mentality: Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast, 108–110; Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’. Van Goens’ colonial vision and the opposition he faced within the VOC are summarised in: Erik Odegard, ‘A Company of State: The Dutch East India Company and the Debates on the Company-State in Asia, 1660s-1690s’, in: Amélia Polónia and Cátia Antunes (eds.), Mechanisms of Global Empire Building (Porto: CITCEM, 2017), 127–143.

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‘Under Your Owne Command’: The Settling of Madras

The experience of trade in commercial emporia such as Surat, as Part 2 of this book has shown, caused resentment amongst those Company agents who regarded local government control as arbitrary and restrictive. The knowledge that their factories could be held to ransom by Mughal authorities motivated the more combative among Dutch and English Company officials to argue that the erection of defensive structures offered the only safeguard against unwanted outside interference. Writing in 1687, the EIC’s Court of Committees asserted that it had no intention of sending agents and capital to the Bay of Bengal ‘unless ye Nabob [nawab] will allow us a fortified place to secure our Persons and estates from the violence of his unjust slavish Govern[o]rs’.9 By resorting to force, the Company leadership hoped to alter the terms of its relationship with the Mughal authorities, which for the previous eighty years had relied on the latter’s willingness to allow the English to rent unfortified factories. The Anglo-Mughal War, however, ended in ignominious defeat for the English, and it was only in the context of the weakening of imperial control in Bengal due to a zamindari revolt, in 1695–1697, that the Company obtained permission to fortify its fledgling settlement in Calcutta.10 In contrast, in southern India, the disintegration of the Vijayanagara Empire and the proliferation of small successor states had created opportunities for the establishment of fortified settlements much earlier on. Hence, in territory belonging to the now much diminished Vijayanagara polity, the VOC was able to construct a fortress (Fort Geldria) at the port town of Pulicat in 1613, while the English in 1626 received the right to establish a fortified factory thirty-five miles further north, at a site called Armagon.11 Another thirteen years later, the EIC abandoned this ‘Mocke Forte’ in favour of a new plot of land at the fishing village of Madraspatnam or Chennaipattinam, some thirty miles south of Pulicat.12 While the period of English tenure at Armagon was brief, the EIC’s first attempt at fortification is significant for what it reveals about the motivations underlying the subsequent construction of Fort St. George. 9 10

Company to Bombay, London, 3 August 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 67. Farhat Hasan, ‘Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698– 1750’, Modern Asian Studies 26.1 (1992), 65–82; Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 151–152; Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, Ch. 5. 11 Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel, 20–23. 12 Andrew Cogan et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 20 September 1642: Henry Davison Love (ed.), Vestiges of Old Madras 1640–1800. Traced from the East India Company Records preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from other Sources (4 vols. London: John Murray, 1913), I, 45.

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The first plans to erect a fort at Armagon, at the north end of Pulicat Lake, were communicated in a letter written in June 1626 by Thomas Mills, the English agent in Masulipatnam. He foresaw that a garrison of thirty Englishmen would suffice to man the fortress, and prophesied that ‘infinite of all sorts of people’ would be drawn to live in Armagon once the English had assumed charge of the whole government of the place.13 Little was done initially, and in 1629 the EIC’s agents on site complained that interference from local governors would not cease until the Company chose to fortify.14 Even when completed, the Armagon fort hardly counted as an imposing structure. Still, it emboldened several English factors sufficiently to declare that its existence purchased them greater liberty in Masulipatnam some 300 miles to the north.15 If their conjecture that the rickety fort would have pressured the Golkondan authorities into granting concessions sounds far-fetched, it was consistent with opinions expressed by colleagues in other quarters. The English president in Banten argued that in the same way that Fort Geldria kept ‘those imperious Moores that governe the kingdome of Golcondah’ from disturbing Dutch trade, the fort at Armagon protected English commerce.16 The factors in Persia even speculated that if only the EIC, like the Dutch and Portuguese, had fortresses to fall back on, it would ‘make all these parts stand in awe of us’, and compel Asian authorities to accept whatever conditions of trade the English desired.17 The abundance of approving references to Dutch practice, as well as the Company’s plans to acquire Bombay or another stronghold on India’s western coast as early as 1626, further challenge the notion that the EIC in this period lacked interest in establishing colonial footholds; rather, it was the lack of resources that nipped more ambitious English schemes in the bud.18 Having lost faith in the commercial viability of Armagon, the EIC’s merchants on the Coromandel Coast jumped at the opportunity of renting the village of Madraspatnam when it was presented to them by Damarla Venka­ tadri (or Venkatappa), a nayak or tributary ruler owing fealty to Vijayanagara. Madras’ main appeal lay in its location in one of the principal regions of cotton textile production on the subcontinent. Wasting little time, a small English 13 14 15 16 17 18

Thomas Mills to Batavia, Masulipatnam, 3 June 1626: EFI 1624–1629, 135. Lawrence Henley and Nicholas Bix to Banten, Armagon, 25 June 1629: EFI 1624–1629, 342. Thomas Joyce and Nathaniel Wyche to Company, Masulipatnam, 25 October 1634: EFI 1634–1636, 48. George Willoughby et al. to Company, Banten, 31 January 1636: EFI 1634–1636, 161. William Gibson et al. to Surat, Bandar Abbas, 15 March 1633: EFI 1630–1633, 288. The Dutch were invited to participate in a joint venture against Bombay, but eventually the idea was dismissed as impractical: Thomas Kerridge et al. to Company, Surat, 29 November 1626: EFI 1624–1629, 159.

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party in March 1640 commenced the construction of Fort St. George, which was gradually extended over the following decades. According to a contemporary translation of the grant, Venkatadri transferred full rights of government over the town with the understanding that custom revenues were to be equally shared between him and the English.19 Although the initial grant clearly had the character of a revenue assignment held under the nayak’s suzerainty, repeated confirmation of English tenure by a succession of rulers meant that, over time, the Company’s de facto control of Madras would be acknowledged by each of the powers that came to control the surrounding country. Successive grants typically included some extension to Company jurisdiction, with four villages in the vicinity of Madras being leased during Golkondan rule and a further five granted by the Mughal administration.20 The latter zamindari (landholder and tax-collector) rights were authorised in the farman received from Farrukhsiyar in 1717, which also confirmed the annual rent of 1,200 pagodas, a fixed sum in lieu of customs which the Company had been liable to pay at that rate since 1672.21 ‘[G]iven us by the grant of severall Kings and soly raised and built by the R[ight] Hon[oura]ble Compa[ny’]s charge from a barren Sand’ was how the Madras Council described their claim in 1689, and the English increasingly showed a willingness to defend with military force what they regarded as their lawful possession.22 Such assertiveness had the full support of the Court of Committees, who in this period laboured energetically to establish the Company as ‘a sovereign state in India’, in conscious imitation of the Dutch.23 If we zoom in on the moment when Fort St. George (figure 14) was being built, when it still lacked official endorsement from London, it becomes clear that one of the cards played to demonstrate the desirability of the project was that of the dangers of living unprotected among unscrupulous people. Writing in late 1640, William Fremlen and the Council of Surat told the Company that some place under its own authority was necessary to protect the Indian 19 20

Grant for Madras, August 1639: EFI 1637–1641, 157. The ‘Four Old Towns’ comprised Triplicane, Egmore, Pursawalkam, and Thondiarpet. The five villages added later consisted of Tiruvottiyur, Kattivakkam, Numgambakkam, Vyasar­padi, and Shattankadu. By 1749, the total number of villages acquired by the Fort St. George administration had risen to sixteen: Patrick A. Roche, ‘Caste and the British Merchant Government in Madras, 1639–1749’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 12.4 (1975), 381–407, at 385–386. 21 Love, Vestiges II, 110. The gold coin known as pagoda in use at Madras was valued at between eight and nine shillings: Love, Vestiges I, 56, 194. 22 Such was the message delivered to the then provincial diwan, Basherad Khan: Consultation Fort St. George, 18 March 1689: RFSG, DCB 1689, 27. 23 Company to Fort St. George, London, 28 September 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 83–84.

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figure 14 View of Fort St. George at Madras, before 1754 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1932-439

workmen employed in dyeing textiles from ‘the fraequent inforcements of those tyrannous governors’, as well as to store Company goods safely outside the reach of ‘those treacherous Gentues or inhabitants of that country’.24 As we have seen, when they returned to the topic in 1642, Fremlen and colleagues claimed that the justified fear of Indian treachery had induced the Portuguese, Dutch, and even the Danes to precede the English in building forts.25 Later that year, Andrew Cogan and his colleagues in Madras likewise looked to their European rivals for inspiration. Pointing out that the necessity of having ‘a place to retire to under your owne Command’ had already been recognised by the Dutch thirty years earlier, they argued that the EIC should do the same ‘in reguard the Moores and Gentues are false and not to be trusted’.26 Once defensive walls had been constructed in order to keep strangers at bay, a secondary process commenced by which concerns about those the Company viewed as cultural outsiders became reflected in Madras’ built environment. As Carl H. Nightingale has argued, the town that blossomed beyond the walls of Fort St. George was characterised by a politics of ‘residential separation’ which ‘drew heavily on contemporary concepts of human difference’.27 Madras’ pat24 25 26 27

William Fremlen et al. to Company, Swally, 29 December 1640: EFI 1637–1641, 285. William Fremlen et al. to Company, Swally, 27 January 1642: EFI 1642–1645, 12. Andrew Cogan et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 20 September 1642: Love, Vestiges I, 45. Carl H. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York’, American Historical Review 113.1 (2008), 48–71, at 49–50.

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tern of urban segregation was in keeping with the practice in other colonial cities, including Manila, Batavia, and Colombo, as well as being reminiscent of older Asian traditions of ‘plural societies’, where different communities lived in separate wards.28 Regarding southern India, it has been observed that ‘a strict segregation of space for different social classes and economic groups’ characterised all towns and villages.29 However, what set Madras apart was that its urban development reflected evolving notions of cultural identity that placed increasing importance on skin colour, as expressed most clearly in the changing names used to refer to the town’s principal sections.30 In essence this process centred on three distinct spaces. The first of these consisted of the inner fort, or Fort St. George proper. The Company’s servants and garrison were housed partly within and partly around this structure, with these residential quarters enclosed by the walls of the so-called Outer Fort, which made up the second space. The third space comprised the sprawling Asian town which sprang up outside the fort area, as growing numbers of Indian merchants and artisans settled at some distance from the European habitations. When, in 1661, the stone walls connecting the bastions of the Outer Fort were nearing completion, the incumbent English Agent, Thomas Chamber, underlined the politics of spatial differentiation to which the walls gave physical form when he referred to them as ‘the Outworkes about the Christian Towne’.31 Twenty years after the founding of Madras, an urban structure had thus taken shape, with the part where most Europeans lived both securely walled in and separated from the adjoining Asian quarters.32 The fortifications of the “Christian Town” were improved in the 1670s, chiefly to withstand possible attacks from outside, but also because the Company’s servants felt ‘Pestered with a great Town close to them’.33 This was a reference to Madras’ Indian districts, which in addition to the “Gentue Town” – primarily inhabited by the Telugu-speaking Komati, Balija, and Beri Chettiar merchant castes, and located immediately to the east of the “Christian Town” – had also begun to spread out northward, where communities of weavers, dyers, washers, fisher28

Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 4–20; J.L. Blussé van Oud-Alblas, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Leiden: KITLV, 1986), 4–5. 29 Kanakalatha Mukund, ‘Caste Conflict in South India in Early Colonial Port Cities, 1650– 1800’, Studies in History 11.1 (1995), 1–27, at 6. 30 Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’. 31 Love, Vestiges I, 206. According to Love, Chamber was the first to explicitly distinguish the area enclosed by the outer fort as the Christian precinct. 32 Ibid., 205–206, 366. 33 Consultation Fort St. George, 2 February 1674: RFSG, DCB 1672–1678, 19.

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men, and boatmen settled alongside other labourers and artisans.34 To manage this diverse population and prevent civil unrest, the English administration, working closely with their Indian advisors, passed legislation that solidified existing demarcations between Hindu communities, which in Tamil society played out along the lines of shifting clusters known as the Valangai or righthand and Idangai or left-hand castes. For instance, in a series of rulings following caste disputes in 1652, 1707, and 1717, the Company allotted different streets in Madras to particular castes and put restrictions on their respective use of spaces for social and religious practices.35 Contemporary population estimates for the town range between 33,000 and 50,000 for the 1670s, and well over 100,000 by 1700, a figure accepted by several modern historians.36 In 1695 and again in 1706, for the purpose of raising taxes for the construction of fortifications and a new town hall, the English drew up lists containing no less than thirty different communities living in Madras. The majority bore Telugu caste names, yet they also included Gujaratis, Muslims, native Christians, Armenians, and others. Apart from the English themselves, the Chettiar community was taxed the highest amount, an indication of their wealth and numerical strength.37 From the 1660s onwards, the titular distinction between “Christian Town” and “Gentue Town” or “Malabar Town” became standard practice.38 Although segregation was never near as crude as this bifurcation suggests, at several points proposals were made that sought to shore up the ethnic and religious divisions that shaped Madras’ settlement pattern. In a questionnaire presented to the Agent and Council in 1676, the Company-appointed commissioner William Puckle enquired whether it was ‘safe or convenient’ that about half the soldiers at the fort and more than half of the inhabitants of the ‘English Town’ 34

Susan J. Lewandowski, ‘Changing Form and Function in the Ceremonial and the Colonial Port City in India: An Historical Analysis of Madurai and Madras’, Modern Asian Studies 11.2 (1977), 183–212, at 200–201. 35 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Right and Left Hand Castes in South India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 11.2–3 (1974), 216–259; Roche, ‘Caste and the British Merchant Government’, 404; Mukund, ‘Caste Conflict in South India’; Radhika Seshan, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi: Primus Books, 2012), 88–89. 36 Richards, The Mughal Empire, 240; Love, Vestiges I, 547; Richards, ‘European City-States’; Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Society, Power, Factionalism and Corruption in Early Madras 1640–1746’, Indica 23.1–2 (1986), 113–134, at 118. 37 “An Assessment proposed to ye Hon:ble Gov:r and Councill by ye Mayor and Court of Aldermen”, 28 November 1695: RFSG, DCB 1695, 154; Love, Vestiges II, 10–11. 38 See for example: Consultations Fort St. George, 7 February 1678; 13 July 1678; 1 August 1678: RFSG, DCB 1678–1679, 11, 86, 93; Love, Vestiges I, 421–422, 432.

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were Portuguese. What is more, he wondered why so many Portuguese residents had been allowed to dwell there in the first place, given that various Englishmen were compelled to rent houses ‘in ye Blac[k] Town’.39 By relabelling the city’s two core districts as ‘ye English [and the] Blacks Townes’, Puckle turned the fort area into the exclusive preserve of the English, while at the same time introducing colour into the equation. That colour prejudice may have played a role in his redefinition of nomenclature is particularly plausible given that, as indicated in the Council’s response, among the Portuguese were counted many people born in Asia, including ‘Mestizos’ and ‘Topasses’. While the first descriptor applied to people of mixed Asian–European descent, the latter group consisted of Asian Christians who claimed Portuguese ancestry and had adopted Portuguese cultural traits.40 Indeed, people of mixed descent, in all likelihood, made up by far the largest proportion of the “Portuguese” constituency, collectively referred to as ‘the mustezas’ by the Surat Council, ‘for Portugalls there are none […] or few at the least’.41 This profound ethnic diversity is insufficiently acknowledged in the older literature, where it is common to find the idea that the Christian Town was inhabited by people ‘who shared colour and race’ and that the inclusion of the Portuguese ‘helped ensure racial endogamy’.42 The Luso-Indian community of Madras had been enticed to migrate from nearby São Tomé (Mylapore) with offers of tax exemptions at the time of the town’s founding. Its numbers continued to grow as people flocked in at times of famine, while the fall of São Tomé to Golkondan forces in 1662 caused another major influx. Puckle’s estimate that Madras’ fort area was mainly inhabited by Lusophones is confirmed by the available data. A survey held in October 1678 makes clear that of 118 homeowners taxed for maintenance of the “Christian Town”, only thirty-three were English, while seventy-nine were classified as Portuguese, and three as Indian. In addition, there were seventy-five houses in the Asian town owned by Christians, most of whom bore Portuguese names.43 Ten years later, the number of Portuguese homeowners in the fort area was

39 40

Consultation Fort St. George, 29 February 1676: RFSG, DCB 1672–1678, 87–89. Ibid., 89. Topasses were also sometimes labelled “Black Portuguese”: Leonard Y. Andaya, ‘The ‘Informal Portuguese Empire’ and the Topasses in the Solor Archipelago in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 41.3 (2010), ­391–420. 41 Nathaniel Wyche et al. to Madras, 31 August 1660: EFI 1655–1660, 404. 42 Roche, ‘Caste and the British Merchant Government’, 386, 388. Compare, however, Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, for an account of the multi-racial family networks of EIC agents. 43 Love, Vestiges I, 444. See also: George D. Winius, ‘A Tale of Two Coromandel Towns: Madraspatam (Fort St. George) and São Thomé de Meliapur’, Itinerario 18.1 (1994), 51–64.

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calculated to be roughly half of a total of 128.44 While this implies a reduction of Portuguese homeownership in the most privileged town section, the total number of Lusophone inhabitants was estimated to be an impressive six times that of English residents.45 Unsurprisingly, a significant minority of Englishmen married women of Asian backgrounds, particularly among the men who made a living outside Company service. In May 1693, thirty-seven such ‘freemen’ resided in Madras, in addition to thirty-five seafaring men who were not permanent residents. Out of these seventy-two individuals, a total of fortythree were recorded as married, of whom twenty-five had English wives; seven had wives classified as mestiza; two had wives classified as castiza (the child of a European and a Eurasian parent); while other spouses were recorded as Dutch, French, Portuguese, Georgian, and in two cases as Peguan, implying origins in present-day Myanmar.46 In short, the inclusive label “Christian Town” united a diverse Eurasian population, which testified to the reality of everyday racial and cultural fluidity at the same time as it sparked concerns about ‘permitting such a medly of nations in the towne’ with their ‘many superstitions and paganismes’.47 While Major Puckle’s suggestion that Portuguese inhabitants should not be admitted to live inside the fort area was rejected out of hand by the Council of Fort St. George, his use of the term “Black Town” instigated what has been called ‘the first instance in world history of an officially designated urban residential color line’.48 Repeated references to “Black Town” in records produced in Madras and London during the last quarter of the seventeenth century reveal that this label gradually came to stick.49 By the time that a wall was constructed around this part of the city in the years following the three-month siege of Madras by the Mughal faujdar, Daud Khan Panni, in 1702, “Black Town” had definitely replaced “Gentue Town” as the standard designation. Soon thereafter 44 45 46

47 48 49

Ibid., 537–538. Consultation Fort St. George, 23 August 1688: RFSG, DCB 1688, 135. List of persons living at Fort St. George, 24 May 1693: RFSG, DCB 1693, 90–91. Note that, in a different context, the term castizo could also be applied to ‘Portuguese persons born in India without any infusion of Asian blood’: Anjana Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750–1830: The Social Condition of a Dutch Community in an Indian Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 92. Nathaniel Wyche et al. to Madras, Surat, 31 August 1660: EFI 1655–1660, 404. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 50. Examples include: Diary Fort St. George, 18 August 1679: RFSG, DCB 1679–1680, 54; Diary Fort St. George, 3 and 7 January 1686: RFSG, DCB 1686, 5, 7; Consultations Fort St. George, 13 and 29 December 1692; 20 January 1693; 23 October 1693: RFSG, DCB 1693, 3, 14, 29, 146–147; Consultation Fort St. George, 3 July 1694: RFSG, DCB 1694, 72; Consultation Fort St. George, 10 December 1695: RFSG, DCB 1695, 156–157; Company to Fort St. George, London, 16 March 1685; 14 January 1686; 22 January 1692: Love, Vestiges I, 472–473, 542.

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its obverse, “White Town”, was coined, and both names are printed side by side on a map produced around 1710 associated with President Thomas Pitt (­figure 15). Initially, the designation “White Town” was still only rarely employed in official records, yet from the 1720s onwards its usage became widespread.50 Other colonial cities soon followed suit, with residential quarters labelled “White Town” and “Black Town” also appearing in Calcutta and French-ruled

figure 15 Plan of Fort St. George and the City of Madras, before 1726. “White Town” is located on the bottom left, with “Black Town” in the bottom centre. Public domain, via Wikipedia Commons

50

Early exceptions are: Consultations Fort St. George, 24 July 1717 and 21 October 1717: RFSG, DCB 1717, 118, 170; Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 63.

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Pondichéry.51 Nightingale has suggested that the rebranding of Madras’ Christian section accompanied the gradual exclusion of Portuguese and Armenian residents, whose presence was increasingly regarded as unwelcome due to a mixture of doubts about their loyalty, religious and colour prejudice, and competition over real estate.52 As early as 1690, we find the Council of Fort St. George debating whether to remove ‘all poor Topasses and Porteguezes’ from the fort area, characterising them as ‘a great offence and Scandall to the place’.53 The matter was postponed till further consideration and allowed to linger on unresolved, although in the early eighteenth century, many Portuguese, Asian Christians, and Armenians were encouraged to move into the western sector of Black Town.54 At last, in 1749, Portuguese and Armenians were officially prohibited from settling in White Town.55 Taking into account the urban development of Madras over the course of a century, the “whitening up” of White Town can be regarded as the last step in a three-stage process designed to create ‘safe habitations’, after first erecting stone walls to protect the Company settlement, then sequestering the European quarters from those of the city’s Asian ­inhabitants, and finally excluding those ­Christians no longer regarded as sufficiently white.

‘A Permanent Colony’: Establishing Dutch Power on Ceylon

Just days after the foundations of Fort St. George had been laid, the VOC won its first major victory against the Portuguese in Ceylon. The conquest of the southern port of Galle in March 1640 was a result of the Company’s chequered alliance with Rajasinha II of Kandy, concluded in May 1638. Despite successful Dutch–Kandyan attacks on the Portuguese forts at Batticaloa (1638), Trincomalee (1639), and Negombo (1640), disputes quickly arose over the handling of the conquered possessions. Under the terms of the 1638 treaty – which accorded the Dutch exclusive, duty-free access to cinnamon and other exports – Raja­ sinha was held to compensate the Company for all costs incurred in providing military support, including the maintenance of garrisons.56 The major bone 51 52 53 54 55 56

Hasan, ‘Indigenous Cooperation’; P.J. Marshall, ‘The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies 34.2 (2000), 307–331; Agmon, A Colonial Affair, 13. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 66–67. Consultation Fort St. George, 21 July 1690: RFSG, DCB 1690, 56. Lewandowski, ‘The Changing Form and Function’, 201. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 67. Heeres and Stapel, Corpus Diplomaticum I, 308–316.

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of contention was an ambiguous article that, in the Kandyan interpretation, reserved to the king the right to dispose of captured fortresses as he saw fit, while the Dutch maintained that it allowed them to retain possession until all expenses had been reimbursed. When the expulsion of the Portuguese was complete, following the Dutch capture of Colombo (1656) and Jaffna (1658), the VOC presented an outstanding claim to Rajasinha of over seven million guilders, an incredible amount reached through the systematic inflation of the costs incurred and the undervaluation of the cinnamon paid in return.57 At this point, it had become fully clear to all parties that the Dutch had no intention of giving up their newly acquired territorial positions, and used their interpretation of the 1638 treaty as a pretext to maintain control over the island’s principal cinnamon-producing regions and the bonded labour force that cultivated them.58 Acquired through military force, characterised by territorial control, and based on large-scale exploitation of human and natural resources, the Dutch presence in Ceylon belonged to a category of colonialism very different from that of the urban settlement of Madras. When one of its early architects, Joan Maetsuycker, transferred the command of the colony after four years as governor (1646–1650), the vision he laid out for his successor stressed not only the paramountcy of retaining hold of the cinnamon-producing districts around Galle, but also an ambitious programme of cultural reform. By 1650, no less than sixteen schools (thirteen of which were former Portuguese institutions) were operating to support the spread of the Reformed religion. Although, over time, VOC policy-making in Ceylon came to be characterised by the pragmatic toleration of religious difference, Maetsuycker envisaged a role for schools in ‘stamping out Heathenism’ and ‘halting the growing cancer of the Mahometan perfidy’.59 Such measures were meant to bind the indigenous inhabitants more 57 58

59

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘J.H.O. Paulusz on the 1638 Westerwolt Treaty in Ceylon: A Rejoinder’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 138.2–3 (1982), 191–205. After Rajasinha’s death in 1687, the VOC came to regard its claims based on the 1638 treaty as void and shifted its line of argument to rights of conquest and continued possession. Both sides maintained the legal fiction that the VOC administered its territories on behalf of Kandy, until Kirti Sri Rajasinha in 1766 acknowledged Dutch sovereignty after suffering a crushing military defeat: Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Dutch sovereignty in Ceylon: A Historical Survey of Its Problems’, Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 1 (1958), 105–121. Reprinted in: Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Ceylon and the Dutch, 1600–1800: External Influences and Internal Change in Early Modern Sri Lanka (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). ‘het Heydendom uyt te roeyen, ende de voorteelende cancker der Mahometse perfidie te stutten’: E. Reimers (ed.), Memoir of Joan Maetsuyker, President and Commander-in-Chief. Delivered to his Successor Jacob van Kittensteyn on the 27th February, 1650 (Colombo: H. Ross Cottle, 1927), 39.

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firmly to the Dutch administration, hence missionary zeal acted in the service of the political project.60 Similar aims motivated Maetsuycker’s recommendation to win over the groups on whom the Company relied for support or services, particularly the lascorins or Sinhalese soldiers, the Salagamas or cinnamon peelers, and the Sinhalese headmen.61 Behind each of these policies lay pressing concerns about loyalty, intensified by the ongoing Dutch–Portuguese conflict and worsening relations with Kandy. By fostering ‘a permanent colony’ of Dutch freemen, Maetsuycker thought he had found the ideal means for ensuring a dependable citizen militia while cutting down on soldiers’ wages. This he presented as the best method for the Company to keep its possessions in a secure state of defence, arguing that no peace treaty with Rajasinha could ever be fully relied upon.62 Maetsuycker’s reasoning represented a variation on a line of argument that had been tried and tested decades earlier in the run-up to the founding of Batavia, a seminal experience that set the benchmark for the Company’s later colonisation schemes. As early as 1608, the admiral and director of the Rotterdam Chamber, Cornelis Matelieff, had proclaimed that ‘whenever one concludes any accord in the Indies, a castle instantly has to be built along with it’.63 Contained in a memorandum to Grotius, Matelieff’s plea for establishing a Dutch centre of command in Asia on a similar footing to that of the Portuguese in Goa was sprinkled with references to the ‘nature’ of ‘wild nations’, ‘barbarians’, and ‘Blacks’, a label he applied to Southeast Asians.64 His vision of a sovereign Asian capital inhabited by Dutch colonists was shared by Jacques l’Hermite, who in 1612 argued that the Governor-General should never ‘reside under the command and at the disposition of these black kings, from whom not the least amount of fidelity or friendship can be expected’.65 Based in a fortified location under the Company’s own jurisdiction, l’Hermite suggested, the Governor-General’s position of strength would serve as a check on the vulner60 Van Goor, Jan Kompenie as Schoolmaster, 2, 32, 110. 61 Reimers, Memoir of Joan Maetsuyker, 29–31, 40. 62 ‘een vaste Colonie’: Ibid., 38. 63 ‘als men in Indië eenich accoort maeckt, moeter een kasteel terstont bij gemaeckt werden’: Discourse regarding the state of the East Indies by Cornelis Matelieff, Rotterdam, 12 November 1608: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd II, 207. 64 ‘naer aert sulcker wilder natie’; ‘de barbaren haer onverstant’; ‘sijn de swarten allegader alsoo’; ‘de swarten uut der natueren sijn onachtsaem’: Ibid., 196–205. On Matelieff: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd I, 39–47. 65 ‘onder het commendement ende ter dispositie (zou staan) van dese swarte coningen, daer toch gantsch geen trouw ofte vrientschap aff te verwachten is’: Short Remonstrance about the present state of some places in the Indies by Jacques l’Hermite, Amsterdam, 20 August 1612: De Jonge, Opkomst III, 362.

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ability of lower-ranking officials stationed in the domains of Asian princes.66 Such propositions were duly noted by the Heren XVII, who in a digest of incoming letters produced in 1614 concluded that most Company fortresses, chiefly those in the Moluccas, lay all but exposed to ‘the Indians, on whose friendship one may very little depend, considering their natural and inborn unfaithfulness, as well as their enmity against all Christians’.67 With the founding of Batavia in 1619, the VOC entered a new phase in its development. From this point onwards, the prejudices manifested by its agents since the earliest voyages became expressed in suspicion directed at strangers outside the city walls, as well as those who settled within the fast-growing town itself. In March 1620, Jan Pieterszoon Coen roundly declared that Batavia Castle was built to protect the Company’s assets ‘against the force of all our enemies and feigned friends’, while a slightly later decree noted that the Dutch ‘live here amidst Moors and enemies’.68 Such rhetoric, expressing distrust of European rivals and Asian populations alike, became a recurring motif in Dutch reflections on colonial policy.69 For instance, after giving an account of recent building works and immigration, the Hoge Regering in 1637 observed that ‘Batavia is steadily increasing with people of various nations, therefore we must always be on our guard and secure ourselves against assaults both from inside and outside’, mentioning the improvement of the city walls, the maintenance of a permanent garrison, and the implementation of strict punishments as policies taken in hand.70 Such precautions were welcomed by the Heren XVII, who 66

67

68 69

70

Note that, in what foreshadowed Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s genocidal policies on the spice-producing Banda Islands, l’Hermite also cited the insubordinate natures of the inhabitants there in support of a plan to ‘fully exterminate’ them and ‘repopulate’ the islands: De Jonge, Opkomst III, 389–390. ‘d’Indianen op welcker vrientschap men hem seer weynich mach verlaten, ten aensien van haere natuerlicke aengeboren trouloosicheyt, als oeck ten aensien vande viantschap die zijluyden hebben tegens alle Christenen’. The Heren XVII ascribed this sentiment on the part of the Ternatans and Tidorese to fears of foreign conquest and forced conversion: Short digest from the latest letters from the Indies presented to the States General, undated [c. October 1614]: P.A. Tiele (ed.), Bouwstoffen voor de Geschiedenis der Nederlanders in den Maleischen Archipel (3 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1886–1895), I, 103. ‘tegens ’t gewelt van alle onse vyanden ende geveynse vrienden’: ‘hier in ’t midden onder mooren en vyanden woonen’: Resolutions Batavia, 29 March 1620 and 4 July 1622: De Jonge, Opkomst IV, 221, 248. This mixture is exemplified in Batavia’s reference to the need for employing force ‘soo wel tegen openbare vijanden als geveinsde vrunden, trotse nabueren ende perfidieuse bontgenooten’: Pieter de Carpentier et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 3 February 1626: Generale Missiven I, 196. ‘dat Batavia seer toeneempt in verscheyden natiën van volckeren, soo moeten wij emmers soowel voor interne als externe attentaten gestadich op hoede wesen ende ons daertegen

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in their General Instruction of April 1650 emphasised that current conditions of peace with the Javanese states of Mataram and Banten should not weaken Batavia’s vigilance. The directors’ allusion to ‘past examples, which may never leave your thoughts’ was a pressing reminder of the two sieges by Sultan Agung of Mataram in the years 1628–1629, a traumatic experience turned into a foundational narrative called upon to justify the Company’s aggressive attitude towards its various ‘feigned friends’.71 Just how widely such attitudes were shared is seen from the fact that, in the debate over the direction of colonisation schemes that was waged within the Company’s highest echelons, conflicting voices about the merits of relying on burgher militias were nonetheless in agreement when it came to the alleged reliability of the VOC’s Asian neighbours. ‘We sit here completely surrounded by heathenish infidel nations’, the Councillor of the Indies and soon-to-be Governor-General Carel Reijniersz wrote in 1648, hinting that any informed person was ‘well aware how little they are to be trusted’.72 His view that, as a consequence, the Company could not afford to reduce its professional garrisons and entrust its safety to citizen guards was criticised by another future Governor-General, Joan Maetsuycker. As we have seen, this former governor of Ceylon believed strongly in the potential of colonies consisting of discharged Company personnel and their descendants, yet he made it clear that he too did not envision such benefits from ‘native nations, heathens, and Moors, on whom one cannot rely, as some sustain’.73 Having referred to Antonio van Diemen and other previous Governors-General, Maetsuycker himself was cited two and a half decades later by another proponent of colonisation, Pieter van Hoorn.74 In what counts as a prime example of the archival logic of Company writing, this Councillor of the Indies repeated the view that the VOC should guard itself ‘against foreign and domestic enemies, as well as native inhabitants’, and turned Maetsuycker’s still somewhat vague claim about Asian

71 72

73

74

wel verseeckeren’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 9 December 1637: Generale Missiven I, 639. ‘voorgevallende exempelen, dewelcke noyt uyt UE. gedaghten gaen moogen’; ‘geveynsde vrunden’: Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek II, 155. ‘sittende hier allesints rontomme onder heijdense infidele Natien, die gelijck imandt kennise hebbende genouch bewust is, hoe gants weijnich te betrouwen sijn’: Advice by Carel Reyniersz regarding the founding of colonies in the East Indies, Batavia, 25 November 1648: NL-HaNA, VOC 1175, f. 182r. For another copy: NL-HaNA, Aanwinsten 69, unfoliated. ‘Inlandsche natien, heijdenen, ende mooren, op welke niet te vertrouwen is, gelijk eenige sustineeren’: Advice to the Heren XVII regarding colonies, Batavia, 18 January 1651: NL-HaNA, VOC 4808, unfoliated. See for different copies: NL-HaNA, VOC 1175, ff. 184–192; NL-HaNA, Aanwinsten 69, unfoliated; NL-HaNA, Aanwinsten 961, unfoliated. On Van Hoorn’s viewpoints: Weststeijn, ‘The VOC as a Company-State’, 13–34.

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populations into an authoritative point of reference: ‘whom, according to the assertion of Mr Joan Maetsuycker, are little to be trusted’.75 The sense of being surrounded by hostile peoples filtered through in many policies and decrees. As might be expected, VOC agents and Dutch free burghers across Asia were summoned to bear arms and be on their guard when venturing beyond the city gates. In a proclamation first published in Galle in 1646 and reissued in Colombo in 1657, this measure was explicitly linked to the presence of ‘many foreign nations, of whose loyalty we cannot be sure’.76 Conversely, outsiders were strictly forbidden from carrying weapons into Company towns. The Statutes of Batavia, issued in 1642, prohibited the Javanese from wearing a kris (dagger) within the city’s jurisdiction, as well as from leaving their lodgings after sunset; other native inhabitants were not permitted to wear any weapons after nine o’clock in the evening.77 Furthermore, in Ceylon, no subject of the Company whatsoever was permitted to sell weapons to the ‘black inhabitants of this country’.78 Even more actively than was the case in Madras, the VOC also implemented policies of spatial segregation in towns under its command. As soon as the Portuguese forces had been dislodged from their last strongholds on Ceylon, virtually all Portuguese soldiers, settlers, clerics, and many topasses were expelled from the island, although considerable numbers of women and children stayed behind. The town of Colombo itself was drastically transformed until it came to conform to a tripartite structure. Half of the area within the old town walls was used for a fort, where the VOC’s European staff and garrison were housed; the other half was to provide living quarters for the Asian Christians. Outside the town proper, separate suburbs sprang up inhabited by the Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim communities, the latter consisting mainly of Tamil-speakers.79 In 75

76

77 78 79

‘tegens buytenlandse als inlandse vyanden, ende inlandse inwoonderen, die volgens de stelling van den Heer Joan Maetsuycker, niet veel te vertrouwen syn, met competente militie sullen moeten blyven voorsien’: Preparatory considerations and advice regarding the Dutch colonies in the Indies, by Pieter van Hoorn, undated [c. 1675]. De Jonge, Opkomst VI, 140. ‘Alsoo hier te plaatse haar veelderlij vreemde natie onthouden, van wiens getrouwicheyd ons niet so zeer kunnen versekeren’: L. Hovy (ed.), Ceylonees Plakkaatboek. Plakkaten en andere wetten uitgevaardigd door het Nederlandse bestuur op Ceylon, 1638–1796 (2 vols. Hilversum: Verloren, 1991), I, 11. NIP I, 590. ‘swarte inwoonderen deses lants’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 243. Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, 23–24, 31, 102, 190. In 1662, the Dutch artist Esaias Boursse produced a visual eyewitness account of Colombo after the Dutch conquest. See: Lodewijk Wagenaar and Mieke Beumer, ‘Esaias Boursse’s ‘Tijkenboeck’: A Pictorial Catalogue of People Working and Living in and around Colombo, 1662’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 67.4 (2019), 312–331.

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1694, the number of people living in the fort and old town were calculated at 4,764, with the total population including the suburbs exceeding 13,000. The former number comprised some 1,400 Company employees housed in barracks and dormitories, while of the 3,352 other people counted in the fort and old town areas, more than half were slaves. The remainder consisted of roughly similar-sized groups classified as mestizo, Asian, European, and unknown.80 As confirmed in an instruction issued by Governor Joan Simons in 1707, each of the different “nations” was expected to live in their own quarters, with individuals not permitted to spend more than three nights in a different part of town without written permission from the colonial authorities.81 It is clear that, mainly for commercial reasons, Muslims were the group most vigorously excluded by the VOC’s government. In a set of instructions left to Dutch officials in 1661, Rijcklof van Goens wrote that the harmfulness of the Muslim presence in Ceylon was plain for all to see and that it was essential to rein it in. Besides the deleterious influence on the spread of Christianity which the “Moors” were said to have, the economic benefits they extracted from the island, or rather withdrew from the Dutch purview, troubled the superintendent most.82 In Colombo and Matara, the dessavas – European officials placed at the head of the Sinhalese administrative hierarchy – were ordered not to allow Muslims to settle outside the semi-rural area beyond the city gates, and to ensure that their number did not increase through migration from abroad.83 A succession of contemporaneous decrees prohibited ‘Moors or heathens’ from buying land, as well as from keeping shops or buying slaves from Christian owners.84 When he handed over the government of Ceylon to his son in 1675, after two decades of direct involvement with the island, Van Goens Sr again singled out the Muslim population on the island as ‘the principal corrupters of morals’ of the Dutch and Sinhalese, further characterising them as ‘a cancer in the Company’s profits’.85 Finally, in 1697, departing Governor Thomas van Rhee 80

Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, 104–106; Gerrit Knaap, ‘Europeans, Mestizos, and Slaves: The Population of Colombo at the End of the Seventeenth Century’, Itinerario 5.2 (1981), 84–101. 81 Extract from the instructions for the dessava of Colombo by Joan Simons, Colombo, 27 April 1707: François Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (5 vols. Dordrecht and Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam and Gerard onder de Linden, 1724–1726), V, bk. 8, 309. 82 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 72. 83 Ibid., 72, 100. 84 ‘Mooren ofte heydenen’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 27, 123; Considerations regarding the island of Ceylon and its subordinate factories, Gale, June 1661: NL-HaNA, Sypesteyn 3, unfoliated. 85 ‘een Cancker in ‘s Comp.s voordeelen, ende d’voornaemste bedervers der zeeden, soo wel van d’onse, als d’inlandste natie’: E. Reimers (ed.), Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens 1663–1675 (Colombo: The Government Press, 1932), 86.

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urged his successor to enforce all previous prohibitions on landownership by Muslims, a group he characterised as the most dangerous element among the local population.86 The fact that such decrees were reissued at intervals shows that concerns about ‘this evil sect’ continued to occupy the minds of Company administrators, yet also that their ability to effect change was always limited.87 Historians have argued that, in Batavia, the ‘general climate of fear’ characterising the early decades of the colony’s existence gradually subsided after the Company concluded peace with Banten in 1659.88 In contrast, in Ceylon geopolitical developments meant that the latter half of the seventeenth century saw heightened tensions. The animosity that had long been simmering between the Company and Kandy came to a head in the wake of the expulsion of the Portuguese, fuelled by persistent Dutch expansion into the Ceylonese interior during the 1660s. Open warfare broke out when Rajasinha launched a counter offensive in 1670, followed by the conclusion of an ultimately fruitless, yet to the VOC no less alarming, alliance with the French expeditionary force that arrived on the island in March 1672.89 In subsequent years, a combination of misgivings about Kandy, concerns about possible French or English interference, and frustration about commercial penetration by Muslim merchants continued to dominate letters and reports from Ceylon. Kandyan–Dutch relations slowly improved after 1679, when the VOC steered away from further expansion and adopted a policy of appeasement towards Rajasinha and his successors. By this time, the VOC’s entrenched colonial position had brought with it several sensitive issues of its own, as the walls which kept some strangers at a distance also enclosed other culturally diverse people more firmly within the bounds of Company society. Indeed, despite practices of spatial segregation, seventeenth-century Company towns bore a strong Asian imprint, with Europeans greatly outnumbered even within the most privileged sector of a town such as Colombo.90 As time went on, the cultural anxieties that had manifested themselves early on in calls to establish ‘safe habitations’ and remain on guard about outsiders would find expression more widely, in a range of responses to the realities of inter-ethnic sex and the management of pluriform populations. 86 87 88 89 90

Sophia Anthonisz (ed.), Memoir of Thomas van Rhee, Governor and Director of Ceylon, for his Successor, Gerrit de Heere, 1697 (Colombo: H.C. Cottle, 1915), 57. ‘deeze booze secten’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 100. ‘algemene klimaat van angst’: Hendrik E. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een Koloniale Samenleving in de 17de eeuw (Amsterdam: Balans, 2005), 28, 93. On the anti-Dutch expedition under command of admiral Jacob Blanquet de la Haye: Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). For Madras: Joseph J. Brennig, ‘Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel’, Modern Asian Studies 11.3 (1977), 321–340.

CHAPTER 8

Governing Pluriform Populations: Company Rule in an Asian Setting Amidst a spirited debate about the desirability of colonies waged around the middle of the seventeenth century in the highest echelons of the VOC, attention turned to the topic of mixed-race settler societies. Having conceded that marriages between European men and Asian women fostered a population whose physical condition ‘was best suited to the nature of these lands’, and conjecturing that third- or fourth-generation descendants ‘degenerate from the Indian colour, and become virtually equal to ours’, the Dutch Councillor of the Indies, Gerard Demmer, ultimately judged these unions harshly.1 Mixed-race children, he claimed, ‘through their native mothers inherit […] the nature and character traits of this native nation’, consisting in ‘great unfaithfulness, vile and dishonest living, evil-doing, and other suchlike defects’.2 Consequently, he suggested that the Dutch could not afford to trust their mestizo offspring any more than they could ‘this faithless and untrustworthy Indian nation’.3 In various ways and to different degrees, cultural assumptions about Asia and Asians such as Demmer’s informed Company policies concerning the governance of ethnically diverse populations, the Indo-European citizens who formed such a core constituent of colonial societies included.4 By analysing the attitudes to 1 ‘best mettet nature deser landen over een comende’; ‘wanneer van d’Indische coleur comen te degenereren, & d’onse genoechsaem gelijck te werden’: Advice by Gerard Demmer regarding the founding of Dutch colonies in the Indies, Batavia, 20 January 1651: NL-HaNA, VOC 1175, f. 199v. 2 ‘door d’inlantse Moeders beërven het naturel deser landen’; ‘het naturel ende eijgenschappen deser Inlantse Natie, van groote ontrouwe, vuijl ende oneerlijck leven, quade faicten, ende andere diergelijcke gebreecken’: Ibid. 3 ‘dese infidele & ontrouwe Indise Natie’: Ibid. This referred most likely to Batavia’s Javanese neighbours. 4 Official discrimination against Eurasians within the VOC’s administrative ranks is wellknown. In 1676, the Heren XVII prohibited the employment in clerical functions of men ‘born from black parents’, while decrees issued in Batavia in 1716 and 1717 forbade the recruitment of ‘blacks or natives’ (swarten of inlanderen) in Company service, and that of Eurasians (mixtiesen) if Europeans were available for the same post. See: Knaap, ‘Europeans, Mestizos, and Slaves’, 99; Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 230; Van Rossum, ‘A “Moorish World”’, 43; Van Dam, Beschryvinge I.1, 583. The Eurasian community is studied in most detail for

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“mestization” (métissage or mestizaje) expressed in VOC and EIC writing, this chapter first highlights the role of cultural and racial prejudice as it manifested in early Company societies. Subsequently, by turning to Dutch and English reflections on and practices of government in Madras and Ceylon, it shows how Company agents’ perceptions of their South Asian environment shaped their performances of colonial authority. The large male surplus amongst the Dutch and English populations sent out to Asia meant that by far the majority of their sexual partners were locally born women (Figure 16). It is no great coincidence, then, that the first still extant ordinance issued by the VOC administration in Ceylon was a prohibition on concubinage. Little over a year after Galle had fallen into Dutch hands in March 1640, Governor Joan Thijssen fulminated that the majority of common garrison soldiers and even officers were openly and unashamedly living in an unmarried state with local women. The men were ordered to end their engagements with immediate effect; however, as a concession to those who lacked ‘the gift of abstinence’, marriage was offered as an alternative.5 Among the plethora of ethical and moral reasons cited in support of this decision, reputation control stood out. The ‘filthy indecencies’ that were publicly committed were called a disgrace to Christianity and the Dutch nation as well as a dreadful example to the Sinhalese.6 Acknowledging that inter-ethnic sex could not be stopped, the VOC had tried to regulate it through the institution of matrimony from an early date. In their instruction of August 1617, the Heren XVII ruled that Dutch men wishing to marry Asian women needed prior consent from the GovernorGeneral, which would be granted only if the women in question were baptised and if the children from such unions would be brought up as Christians.7 Importantly, the VOC introduced the condition that Europeans wedded to Asian women committed themselves to staying in Asia for the lifetime of their spouse and any children they had together. Through the latter clause the Company sought to meet a second objective, as it was meant to ensure a pool of much-needed long-term residents for the colonisation schemes developed by

Batavia: ­Taylor, The Social World of Batavia; Leonard Blussé, Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publications, 2002); Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines. 5 ‘de gaven der onthoudinge’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 4. 6 ‘vuyle oncuysheden’: Ibid., 3. 7 Instruction to Governor-General and Council of the Indies, Middelburg, 22 August 1617: NLHaNA, VOC 4773, f. 29. The policy to promote marriage with Asian women originated shortly after the founding of the VOC’s settlement on Ambon in 1605: Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 27.

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figure 16 Portrait of a mestiza, before 1682. People of mixed descent attracted considerable attention in Company writing and visual ethnography alike. This image accompanied a discussion of the Eurasian population of Pulicat (South India) in Johan Nieuhof’s Zee en Lant-Reize (1682). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1878-A-744

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the likes of Coen, Maetsuycker, and Van Goens. Although occasionally relaxed, prohibitions on Asian wives going to Europe were reissued in 1650 and 1713.8 With their General Instruction of April 1650, the Heren XVII explicitly endorsed Maetsuycker’s proposals with regard to settling Dutch colonies in Ceylon through marriage between Dutch men and local women.9 It followed a change of policy initiated in the 1630s, when the VOC abandoned its earlier project of transporting Dutch migrants – including young women and girls – to populate its overseas settlements.10 A scheme tirelessly advocated by Governor-General Coen during the 1620s, it soon faltered over concerns about costs and reservations about the moral qualities of those Dutch colonists making the crossing.11 Such doubts were added to concerns about the apparent physical unsuitability of Dutch progeny to the tropics. As early as 1612, Steven Coteels had concluded from his vantage point in the Moluccas that ‘the children of whites cannot acclimatise here’.12 His views were shared by the later Governor-General, Hendrik Brouwer, who noted of the Dutch colonists on Ambon that ‘the children they produce do not acclimatise well and mostly die’, suggesting that this was ‘caused by the fact that in these hot lands they want to wrap and swaddle them as they do in our country’, possibly referring to parents’ reluctance to drape children in lighter fabrics more suited to the climate.13 The continuing growth of Batavia and incipient colonisation of Ceylon triggered a fully fledged debate about the relative merits of colonies starting in the late 1640s, when the Heren XVII ordered Batavia’s High Government to supply written advice. The question at hand was primarily economic in nature: if the Company was to be serious about populating its settlements 8

Resolutions of Batavia Castle, 23 September 1639: ANRI, K66a 860, f. 260; Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 217. Instructions against allowing ‘Indians’, ‘mestizos’ or ‘Blacks’ to travel to the Netherlands were issued in 1635, 1642, and 1657: Index on outgoing letters Heren XVII, 1614–1707: NL-HaNA, VOC 345, f. 447; Index on resolutions Heren XVII, 1602–1736: NL-HaNA, VOC 221, f. 319. 9 Instruction to Governor-General and Council of the Indies, Amsterdam, 26 April 1650: Mijer, Verzameling van Instructiën, 91. 10 Index on outgoing letters Heren XVII, 1614–1707 (27 August 1630; 19 September 1632; 5 September 1641): NL-HaNA, VOC 345, ff. 570–571. 11 Colenbrander, Bescheiden I, 484–485, 534, 555, and passim. The experiment with sending Dutch women and girls, the latter mostly from orphanages, lasted ten years (1622–1631). During this period, 379 European women were married in Batavia: Raben and Bosma, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 34–35. 12 ‘de kinderen van onse witten kannen hier niet aerden’: Steven Coteels to Heren XVII, Cambello, 24 July 1612, in: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd I, 104. 13 ‘de kinderen die se procreëren, willen niet wel aerden ende sterven meest altemael […] dat veroorsaeckt wert omdatt se in dees heete landen bewinden en bewoelen willen gelij­ cken in ons lant geschiet’: Hendrik Brouwer to Heren XVII, 27 July 1612, in: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd I, 104.

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with free Dutch colonists in a model inspired by that of the Estado da Índia, it would need to allow free burghers independent ways of making a living. Such a move required a relaxation of the VOC’s strict monopoly principles, particularly its prohibition on private participation in intra-Asian trade.14 That said, in the reflections offered in response to the directors’ request, attention inevitably also gravitated towards the colonists themselves, as both advocates and opponents viewed the feasibility of the scheme as inherently bound up with settlers’ character. As we have seen, Gerard Demmer dismissed the long-term viability of Dutch settler colonies out of hand, citing migrants’ disorderly lifestyles and high infant mortality, and expressing serious prejudice about interracial unions. Other leading sceptics included Governors-General Cornelis van der Lijn (1646–1650) and Carel Reijniersz (1650–1653).15 It was to counteract their arguments that, in January 1651, Joan Maetsuycker wrote a passionate plea in favour of colonisation. Of the six material points of criticism he set out to refute, point three was a direct response to Demmer’s claim that ‘from the children born in the Indies, having vile and unreliable natures, and even exceeding the natives in evil-doing, little good can be expected’.16 While launching energetically into an outright rejection of some of the other claims, in this case Maetsuycker began by conceding that a problem did indeed exist: ‘That thus far the Dutch children born in the Indies, particularly the mestizos, are found to be somewhat foul and licentious, cannot be denied’.17 Rather than writing them off as a lost cause, however, the former governor of Ceylon stated that the Dutch government had a moral responsibility to take care of its citizens. He argued that the fault was located in the upbringing of the children, who were left entirely to the care of slaves and as a consequence, he suggested, learned few virtues. Schools, governmental supervision, and an orderly programme of

14

15 16

17

On 7 November 1647, the Heren XVII sent a ‘concept regarding the opening up of free trade in the Indies’ to Batavia. Six members of the Hoge Regering had submitted their response by 1651: De Jonge, Opkomst VI, v. The VOC had considered establishing colonies ‘conform the order used by the Portuguese in the East Indies’ as early as 1611: Resolutions Heren XVII, 16 and 18 August 1611, in: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd I, 108. For the advices by Carel Reijniersz, Joan Maetsuycker, Gerard Demmer, Joan Cunaeus, Willem Versteghen, and Jochem Roelofsz van Deutecom: NL-HaNA, VOC 1175, ff. 177–230. Compare: NL-HaNA, Aanwinsten 69. ‘dat de kinderen in India geboren, van vuijlen ongetrouwen aerd sijnde, en selfs de Inlanders in quade faicten te boven gaende, van deselve ook niet veel goets sij te verwachten’: Advice to the Heren XVII regarding colonies, Batavia, 18 January 1651: NL-HaNA, VOC 4808, unfoliated. ‘dat tot nogh toe de Nederlandsche kinderen in India geboren, voornamentlijk de mixtisen, wat vuijl en ontugtigh van leven sijn bevonden, kan niet ontkend werden’: Ibid.

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education would be needed to prepare the mixed-race youth for participation in civil society.18 Although Maetsuycker did not specifically mention Asian mothers, his solution clearly favoured drawing the children of Dutch fathers into the orbit of Dutch culture, and therefore away from the sphere of influence in which they were typically brought up. Several of his contemporaries were more outspoken in their censure of Asian and Eurasian women. Criticism of the most vitriolic kind was expressed in the pages of the Oost-Indise Spiegel by Nicolaas de Graaff.19 Having travelled extensively in the service of the VOC between 1639 and 1687, this surgeon had ample opportunity to observe the social life of Batavia and other Company settlements in South and Southeast Asia. He asserted that the corrupting influence of the Asian environment was such that virtually all female members of VOC society, including those born in the Netherlands, partook in the vices of haughtiness, laziness, cruelty, and pomposity. Still, in his view none were as thoroughly debauched as the mestizas and castizas, be it in Batavia, Ceylon, India, or the Moluccas. He described these women as idle good-for-nothings, who due to their upbringing by slaves, spoke Portuguese, Bengali, or Tamil, rather than Dutch, spent all their days adorning themselves, chewing betel, and drinking tea, and were always on the look-out for partners with whom to satisfy their adulterous passions.20 Allegedly because of their vanity and indolence, the Eurasian wives of VOC servants also left their children entirely to the care of ‘a Black wet nurse, [or] a slave whore’, to the effect that, he claimed, mixed-race children nursed by an Asian woman ‘have also sucked in and adopted all her manners, and her entire character and nature’.21 Conflating cultural habits with inherited traits, De Graaff stands as a prime example of the tendency ‘to make what is acquired seem innate’, to use Kathleen Wilson’s phrase about eighteenth-century understandings of national identity.22 His racialised prejudice also prefigured the anxieties about sexuality and race that pervaded public policy and the domestic sphere in the late colonial Dutch East Indies.23 18 Ibid. 19 See: Marijke Barend-van Haeften, Oost-Indië Gespiegeld: Nicolaas de Graaff, een Schrijvend Chirurgijn in Dienst van de VOC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1992), Ch. 6. 20 J.C.M. Warnsinck (ed.), Reisen van Nicolaus de Graaff gedaan naar alle gewesten des werelds beginnende 1639 tot 1687 incluis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), part II: Oost-indise Spiegel, 13–17. Note that references are to the second, expanded edition of 1703. 21 ‘een Swarte min, een slaven hoer’; ‘ook al haar maniere, en haar ganse aart en natuer hebben ingesogen en aangenomen’: Ibid., 14. 22 Wilson, The Island Race, 6. Italics in original. 23 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

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De Graaff was even more virulent in his scorn of women with two ‘black’, meaning Asian, parents. With a crude wordplay (‘Hollanders, who come to hang themselves to an ugly Black’) the surgeon suggested that to marry an Asian woman was to sign a death sentence – probably a reference to the ruling that men with Asian wives were not allowed to return to Europe.24 The racism and misogyny underpinning De Graaff’s aesthetic and moral judgements about Asian women culminated in his assertion that most of these ‘children of whores’ were themselves ‘whore-like as beasts’.25 The stereotypes invoked by the surgeon were heir to a long-standing genealogy of colonial ethnography, encompassing, for instance, Linschoten’s sensational allegations about the unbridled lasciviousness of mixed-race women in sixteenth-century Goa, which would be repeated into the eighteenth century in travel accounts and compendia.26 Patriarchal concerns with controlling female sexuality, and European anxieties about what many regarded as the apex of transgressive behaviour, came most clearly to the fore in De Graaff’s assertion that the Asian spouses of Dutch men ‘would rather have relations with their own nation, or Blacks, or Mestizos, than with a Hollander’.27 Tellingly, in the 1701 edition of his book this statement was expressed in explicitly racial terms: ‘The majority of these Black women […] are so given over to lust that they turn down no one, and prefer intercourse with their own people rather than with whites’.28 Extramarital sex with Asian men was taken to be a serious enough offence for the Ceylon administration to decide that it should be punishable with 24 25 26

27 28

‘Hollanders [...] die haar selfs aan een leelijke zwartin komen te verhangen’: De Graaff, Oost-Indise Spiegel, 16. ‘hoere kinderen’; ‘so hoeragtig als beesten’: Ibid., 16–17. Other terms of abuse used by De Graaff included ‘leelijke zwartin’ and ‘stinkende Swartinne’. Linschoten described the Eurasian wives and daughters of Portuguese settlers as ‘uyter maten Luxurieus ende onkuijsch’, practising every conceivable means to indulge in adulterous behaviour: Kern, Itinerario I, 141–142. On Linschoten’s racialised portrait of Goa: José Celso de Castro Alves, ‘Rupture and Continuity in Colonial Discourses: The Racialized Representation of Portuguese Goa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Portuguese Studies 16 (2000), 148–161; Ivo Kamps, ‘Colonizing the Colonizer: A Dutchman in Asia Portuguesa’, in: Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 160–183; Arun Saldanha, ‘Whiteness in Golden Goa: Linschoten on Phenotype’, in: Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal (eds.), Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), 339–359. For an eighteenth-century version of the cliché: Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, V, 2, Ch. 18, 4–5. ‘willense nog doorgaans liever met haar eygen natie, of Swarte, of Mistise te doen hebben, als met een Hollander’: De Graaff, Oost-Indise Spiegel, 16. ‘’t Meestendeel van dese Swarthinnen [...] is so overgegeven aan haar lusten/ dat sy niets van der hand wijsen/ en willen nog liever met haar eigen volk als met blanken g­ emeenschap hebben’: Nicolaas de Graaff, Oost-Indise Spiegel (Hoorn: Feyken Ryp, 1701), 12.

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death. The considerations that preceded this 1658 verdict mention the case of the Asian wife of Lieutenant Nicolaas Jacobsen, who was charged with committing adultery with ‘a vile Black’ while her husband was away on the expedition to conquer Jaffna. Such incidents were all too common on the island, Van Goens and his colleagues declared, echoing concerns expressed by Coen when first introducing the death penalty for adulterers over three decades earlier.29 A mixture of ethnic and class prejudice characterised Van Goens’ allegations. On the one hand, the husbands in question were described as ‘honest Dutch officers and soldiers’ and their wives as ‘esteemed native women’; on the other hand, the men with whom the latter entertained sexual relations were characterised as ‘native men who are vile and base persons’.30 The official decree published in November 1659 – after Batavia had signalled its approval – confirmed that the death penalty was reserved for specific cases which involved the mestiza or Asian wife of a Dutchman who committed adultery with ‘a native, slave, or any other Black’. Dutch men found guilty of adultery would only be flogged.31 Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu men living in a state of concubinage with Christian women in theory also faced the death penalty, a ruling in line with the Statutes of Batavia.32 Furthermore, Van Goens wrote in 1663, topasses and other ‘Portuguese scum’ were to be expelled from the island because they were associated with a wide array of vices, principal among which was the ‘debauching’ of the Asian wives of Dutchmen.33 At an earlier stage, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had argued that, compared to Europe, ‘the persons of these climates are more immodest and more given to luxuriousness’. Claiming that adultery was punishable by death ‘throughout the Orient’, he winced at the thought that Christians would be thought to hold their wives’ honour in lower esteem than ‘Turks, Moors, and heathens’.34 Van Goens and his colleagues likewise cited the importance of preserving Dutch reputations in Asia, declaring that only by eradicating adultery could the Company hope to establish a Ceylonese colony 29

‘een vileynen swart’: Decree against the crime of adultery, Jacatra, 4 July 1622: De Jonge, Opkomst IV, 247–248. 30 ‘aensienelijke inlantse vrauwen getrouwt sijnde met Nederlandtse, eerlijcke offecieren ende soldaten’; ‘inlantse mannen, dat viele ende geringe persoonen sijn’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 34. 31 ‘een inlander, slaaff, ofte enich ander swart’: Ibid., 49. 32 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek 49; Van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek I, 586. 33 ‘het Portugeese Canaille’; ‘debaucheeren’: Reimers, Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens, 70. 34 ‘dat de persoonen van dese climate impudicquer en tot de luxurie ongelyck meer, als die in onse landen van Europa, zyn genegen’; ‘door gants orienten’: ‘turcken, mooren en heydenen’: De Jonge, Opkomst IV, 248.

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based on unions with ‘native women’, that is, by keeping the latter in check and easing the minds of their husbands.35 Besides punitive action, the Company administration in Ceylon also took anticipatory measures aimed at nurturing a Eurasian population with a strong Dutch cultural imprint. Principal among these were the sponsorship of missionary activity, the provision of schooling to Christian children, and the formation of a relatively closed in-group of Dutch descendants through tightened marriage norms. Even to the most ardent proponents of colonisation, mixed marriages were a practical necessity caused by the paucity of Dutch women in Asia, rather than the embodiment of a cosmopolitan ideal. Hence, whilst it was deemed acceptable for VOC personnel in the early days of the settlement to marry indigenous women ‘for a lack of others’, Van Goens decreed that the government should see to it that mixed-race girls were brought up with care in order for them to become suitable marriage partners to a future generation of Dutchmen.36 This was needed, as he put it, in order to keep the Dutch ‘nation’ from ‘degeneration and alienation’ as far as possible.37 In 1675, when a decade and a half had passed since his earlier instruction, Van Goens estimated that in Ceylon and in southern India there were at least 1,300 children over the age of three with Dutch fathers. With good policy, this figure was to increase steadily over the space of fifteen to twenty years, he prophesied, which could remove the need for the Dutch to marry ‘fully native women’, a prospect he regarded as invigorating to the Dutch nation.38 Just four years later, the decision to prohibit marriages with Asian women was announced by Van Goens Jr., who explained that by then sufficient numbers of women descended from European fathers were living on the island.39 These policies prompt the question to what extent they were about concepts of race. In the translation by Sophia Pieters, Van Goens’ statement ‘that 35 36 37 38 39

‘inlantse vrauwen’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 34–35. ‘nu bij gebreck van andere med inlandse vrouwen trouwende’: Considerations regarding the island of Ceylon and its subordinate factories, Gale, June 1661: NL-HaNA, Sypesteyn 3, unfoliated. ‘om in toekomende onse eijgen natie zoo weinig als mogelijk zij te ontaarden en vervreemden’: Ibid. ‘geheele inlandtse vrouwen’: Reimers, Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens, 84. Sophia Pieters (ed.), Memoir left by Ryclof van Goens, Jun. Governor of Ceylon, 1675–1679, to his Successor, Laurens Pyl, late Commandeur, Jaffanapatnam (Colombo: H.C. Cottle, 1910), 12. In 1684, 678 children with Christian parents lived in Colombo alone, 63% of whom had a European father and a mestizo or Asian mother, while 12% had two European parents: Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 39.

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thus our race may degenerate as little as possible’ seems unequivocal.40 However, the term ontaarden, while signifying degeneration, was more commonly used in the early modern period in the sense of a deviation from good morals. Consequently, the meaning of ontaarden shifts towards the second term used by Van Goens: vervreemden, or alienation.41 Furthermore, the seventeenthcentury usage of the term natie, translated as ‘race’ by Pieters, was primarily cultural rather than racial in character. Early modern concepts of “nation” denoted a community of people based on a shared geographic origin, religion, language, and customs, and, as we have seen in Chapter 7, were sufficiently malleable for Lusophone Asians to be counted among the Portuguese.42 Further support for a cultural reading is found in the guidelines regarding marriages between VOC personnel and ‘native Black’ and mestiza women which Van Goens left to his son in 1675. Before such unions could be approved, the Commissioner of Marital Affairs and the ministers in Company service were to examine the prospective bride’s moral character and verify whether she had mastered the basic articles of the Reformed faith.43 If consent was given for the couple to marry, the education of their future children was the next point of concern. Every effort had to be made to educate them in Dutch customs and the Dutch language, and to ensure that the influence of ‘the native, or their mother’s customs’ was counteracted as much as possible.44 Good schools and qualified teachers were to provide the key to what was envisaged as a statesanctioned acculturation programme. Its professed aim was to create a body of citizens loyal to the new regime as a means of sustaining the colonial project, to which end a superficial adherence to Dutch customs and language, and to the Reformed religion, were deemed essential. This cultural explanation does not provide the full answer, however, as it is equally clear that in the policy suggestions of Van Goens and others, the notion of heritability was prominent. As we have already seen, Demmer used the term ‘to inherit’ (beërven) to describe the transfer of cultural traits from mother to child, while De Graaff referred to a process of bodily transmission through breastfeeding. Several of their colleagues also spoke about “inborn” 40 41 42 43 44

Sophia Pieters (ed.), Instructions from the Governor-General and Council of India to the Governor of Ceylon, 1656 to 1665. To which is appended the Memoir left by Anthony Paviljoen, Commandeur of Jaffnapatam, to his Successor, in 1665 (Colombo: H.C. Cottle, 1908), 6. Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), consulted online at (last accessed: 1 October 2020). On early modern understandings of “nation”: Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, 10–18. ‘inlandtse swarte’: Reimers, Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens, 84. ‘soo weynigh, als doenel.k de inlandtse, ofte haer moeders zeeden na te volgen’: Ibid., 84.

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characteristics when describing ethnic groups. Such comments coexisted with references to climate, as in Coen’s statement about Asian sexuality, and with allusions to geography. An example of the latter is found in Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede’s instruction to the schoolmasters of Jaffna issued in 1690, which claimed that children educated by the Company ‘will be less tainted by the deficiencies that are attached to this country and to the character of the natives’.45 Rather than a discourse about human difference reliant on a single overarching framework, for instance climate theory or race, late seventeenthcentury VOC agents employed a combination of cultural, geographical, and biological concepts to explain differences between peoples. To determine how the VOC’s seventeenth-century approach to mestization related to developing racial thinking, therefore, a two-sided response is needed. As Remco Raben has noted, the VOC’s marriage politics in Ceylon were in the first instance about a closing of the ranks of the hegemonic group, whose tightened entrance criteria crystallised around considerations regarding religion, culture, and class.46 However, a hierarchy of skin colour was grafted onto social hierarchies, with fair skin denoting European descent and a privileged position in Company society, and dark skin denoting Asian descent and, in the case of Asian Christians, often a low social origin. Consequently, ‘colour became a function of status’.47 In other words, the cluster of notions related to religion, class, and adherence to Dutch cultural standards which motivated VOC policies with regard to mestization was already bound up with colour prejudice and concepts of heredity, and as such provided fertile ground for evolving ideas regarding race. The EIC and Mestization Writing about the late eighteenth-century EIC, Margot Finn has argued that ‘[s]uccessful reproductive regimes lay at the heart of Company capitalism, and these regimes in turn rested on women’s labour’.48 As the preceding discussion made clear, concerns with reproduction and women’s roles as mothers and carers were integral to the earliest colonisation schemes of the VOC as well. The situation of the seventeenth-century EIC was somewhat different. Like its Dutch counterpart, EIC writing from this period contains copious references 45 46 47 48

‘minder besmet sullen wesen van de gebreecken die aen dit land en den aard den inlanderen vast zijn’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakaatboek I, 259. Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, 284–285. Ibid., 278–279, 286. Finn, ‘The Female World of Love & Empire’, 11.

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to inter-racial unions and their offspring. In contrast, it contains comparatively few reflections on their perceived merits and ills, and a widespread debate about the suitability of English settlers to the Indian climate only emerged in the nineteenth century.49 An early exception to this trend is the account of John Fryer, whose description of Bombay states the following of the EIC’s settlement policy: ‘[T]o propagate their Colony, the Company have sent out English Women; but they beget a sickly Generation; and as the Dutch well observe, those thrive better that come of an European Father and Indian Mother’.50 Fryer suggested that immoderate alcohol consumption ‘inflames the Blood, and spoils the Milk in these Hot Countries’, a problem not experienced by the abstinent ‘Natives’. Yet in addition to issues of lifestyle, the English surgeon also thought that English constitutions were less suited to life in India, writing that: ‘I believe rather we are here, as Exotick Plants brought home to us, not agreeable to the Soil’, thus providing a learned justification for the growth of a Eurasian community.51 Records from Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta confirm that the English in South Asia approached mixed marriages no less opportunistically than their Dutch colleagues. As had been the case with the VOC garrison in Galle, the English soldiers in Fort St. George virtually at once found partners among the Luso-Indian population of São Tomé, located just three miles to the south. Striving to eradicate the practice of concubinage, Andrew Cogan argued that marriage ‘must necessarily bee tolerated, or the hotshots will take liberty to coole themselves’.52 Cogan himself was among the men with Indo-Portuguese wives, as were most other chief agents in Madras in the first decades of the settlement, including Edward Winter, Henry Greenhill, and Thomas Chamber.53 Regarding Bombay, senior officials likewise informed the Company that ‘for want of Eng[li]s[h] women’, EIC soldiers had frequent intercourse with ‘Portugese mestise women native of ye Island’ and with ‘the Country women’, explaining that they forced such couples to marry.54 As early as 1669, just several years after Bombay came under English control, Gerald Aungier complained that children of Protestant fathers had through the latter’s neglect been brought

49 Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 18–19, 136. 50 Fryer, A New Account, 69. 51 Ibid. 52 William Fremlen et al. to Company, Swally, 27 January 1642: EFI 1642–1645, 12. 53 Foster, EFI 1642–1645, 402–403; Veevers, Origins of the British Empire, 65–66. 54 ‘Proposals Touching Bombay Island’, Surat, 5 February 1671: MSA, Surat Factory Outward Letter Book 1A, f. 108; Gerald Aungier to Company, Bombay, 15 January 1674: BL, IOR/E/3/34, f. 342r.

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up in the Catholic faith of their mothers. In order to prevent this in the future, severe penalties were announced for Catholic priests baptising such children.55 If around the turn of the century it was less common for senior EIC staff to marry (rather than co-habit with) non-English women, it remained customary among soldiers and sailors.56 As can be seen from a directive issued in 1688, this discrepancy was related to issues of economics and class. Addressing the President and Council of Fort St. George, the EIC’s Court of Committees instructed them to ‘[i]nduce by all meanes you can Invent our Souldiers to marry with the Native women, because it will be impossible to get ordinary young women, as we have formerly directed to pay their own passages, allthough Gentlewomen sufficient do offer themselves’.57 As a further incentive, the directors proposed paying the Indian mothers of Eurasian children a small one-off subsidy upon their child’s christening.58 Some years earlier, when debating the question of whether inter-faith marriages between Protestants and Roman Catholics were in the Company’s interest, the Madras government had already ruled that such unions were not opposed in Scripture, and that because Roman Catholics in India were ‘the Offspring of Forraigne Nations’, they were not subject to the anti-Catholic laws promulgated in England. Interestingly, as a third consideration it was noted that ‘ye Common Soldyers cannot maintaine English Weomen and Children with their Pay as well as they can the weomen of the Country, who are not soe expensive’.59 The matter was concluded in March 1680 with the decision that, in the event of interfaith marriages, both parties had to solemnly promise to bring up any children as Protestants.60 Despite such widespread pragmatism, cultural prejudice about Eurasians was common. This further dispels lingering images of the early phase of AngloIndian intimacy as ‘a golden age in which racial hierarchies and boundaries were unimportant’, an idealised view challenged by Ghosh for the eighteenth

55 56

57 58 59 60

‘Proposals Touching Bombay Island’, Surat, 5 February 1671: MSA: Surat Factory Outward Letter Book 1A, f. 108. In addition to the data on late seventeenth-century marriages at Fort St. George discussed in Chapter 7, early eighteenth-century lists of marriages conducted in Calcutta also contain multiple references of soldiers and sailors marrying ‘a blackwoman’ or ‘a Country Woman’: W.K. Firmingar (ed.), ‘Marriages in Calcutta, 1713–1754’, Bengal: Past & Present 9.2 (1914), 217–237. Company to Fort St. George, London, 25 January 1688: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1690, 113. Company to Fort St. George, London, 8 April 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686– 1690, 47. Consultation Fort St. George, 22 March 1680: RFSG, DCB 1680–1681, 18–19. Consultation Fort St. George, 25 March 1680: RFSG, DCB 1680–1681, 19.

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century.61 Here too, parallels with the Dutch in Asia support the argument that discourses about cultural Others cut across institutions and national affiliations. References to ‘ill nurtured musteezes or mungrells’, or exhortations to send English families to Madras in order to develop ‘a brood of our owne and not a mixt Načon’, show how terms derived from animal breeding (mongrel, a dog of mixed offspring) seeped into discourses about people of mixed descent, as well as how unfavourably the latter were often regarded in EIC circles.62 President Gerald Aungier, in his proposals for the development of Bombay, suggested that it would be best to have the island ‘planted’ with Englishmen and other Protestants, preferably Germans, Danes, and Swedes. From such people, he maintained, the Company could expect ‘more fidelity, service; and improvem[en]t of trade’ than from the Asian descendants of the former Portuguese rulers, whom he described as ‘these proud, lazy, and poore hearted Mestiza’s of India’.63 In the case of Madras too, the benefits of ‘permitting such a medly of nations in the towne’ had been questioned early on. In 1660, the President and Council of Surat ordered the as yet subordinate Agency of Fort St. George to expel the French friars responsible for the spiritual care of the Roman Catholic population, condemning the idea of catering to the mestizo community: ‘If the mustezas will stay without them, they may; if not, wee cannot judge it [a] loss to the Honourable Company’.64 Unwilling to compromise on their own familial and commercial connections, Thomas Chamber and his colleagues retorted by arguing that the strength of a town lay in its numbers, that the Luso-Indian population of Madras was beneficial to the Company on account of the customs revenues they brought in, and that their contribution to the town’s defence was essential.65 Since the shortage of English soldiers remained a constant factor into the eighteenth century, the force of the latter argument continued unabated. Particularly in the mid-seventeenth century, the number of Englishmen in the garrison often 61 Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 1. 62 Thomas Ivy et al. to Surat, Fort St. George, 4 January 1647: EFI 1646–1650, 70; Edward Winter et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 9 January 1666: Love, Vestiges I, 247. Compare: ‘mongrel’, in Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition, September 2002. Consulted online at https://www.oed.com/ (last accessed: 1 October 2020). On the origin of concepts of race in discourses about animal breeding: Charles de Miramon, ‘Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the Late Middle Ages’, in: Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West, 200–216. 63 Gerald Aungier to Company, Bombay, 15 January 1674: BL, IOR/E/3/34, f. 341r. 64 Nathaniel Wyche et al. to Madras, 31 August 1660: EFI 1655–1660, 404–405. 65 Thomas Chamber et al. to Surat, Fort St. George, 24 May 1661: EFI 1661–1664, 38–39. See also: Veevers, Origins of the British Empire, 83–85.

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dropped below thirty, and was sometimes as low as ten. Apart from the erratic and insufficient character of the supply from Europe, the crippling mortality rate of newcomers drove Fort St. George towards a reliance on ‘Portugalls, mestizoes, and blackes’.66 In January 1665, Edward Winter remarked that the Lusophone soldiers could not be dispensed with, a shipment of new recruits notwithstanding: ‘[W]ee may expect, according as tis usuall, that most of them freshmen will dy’.67 Eurasian, topas, and Indian soldiers were needed but never highly appreciated. Countless documents claimed that little service could be expected from them and that their martial prowess was limited.68 Their pay was only half that of European soldiers, and they were treated as the most flexible workforce – usually the first to be dismissed when the size of garrisons was scaled down. Outright alarm at the penetration of so many strangers into the heart of the EIC’s military is present in the exclamation by George Oxenden, then Governor of Bombay, that the lack of Englishmen in the garrison left ‘the throats of the small partie remayning exposed to be cut by the blacks; of which there is no small feare, in regard the number of those wee are forced to entertaine’.69 Although Oxenden’s sensational vision of murdering ‘blacks’ was an extreme example, it played upon sentiments of discomfort with and distrust about the Company’s non-European soldiery that were shared more widely. Intriguingly, as part of their plea to allow the Luso-Indian population to remain in Madras, Chamber and his Council had also mentioned ‘the terrour and awe that many white men in the towne strikes to our neighbours’.70 In several ways, this statement shines light on the development of colonial ethnographic discourses. First, it presupposes a qualitative difference between whites and non-whites, one which is assumed to be acknowledged as such by outsiders. Secondly, and this puts the first observation into perspective, the inclusion of Eurasians in the category of ‘white men’ underscores the malleability of colour concepts at this date. And thirdly, it confirms that whilst “white” as a self-designation may not have entered English classification systems in Asia before the eighteenth century – as Nightingale has argued – it 66 67 68 69 70

Henry Greenhill and Thomas Chamber to Company, Fort St. George, 28 January 1657: EFI 1655–1660, 98, 104; Edward Winter et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 10 January 1663: Love, Vestiges I, 210. Edward Winter et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 12 January 1665: EFI 1661–1664, 381. For example: George Oxenden et al. to Company, Surat, 2 November 1668: EFI 1668–1669, 81; Consultation Fort St. George, 2 February 1674: RFSG, DCB 1672–1678, 19; Consultation Fort St. George, 4 August 1686: RFSG, DCB 1686, 60. George Oxenden et al. to Company, Bombay, 15 January 1669: EFI 1668–1669, 95. Thomas Chamber et al. to Surat, Fort St. George, 24 May 1661: EFI 1661–1664, 38.

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had certainly become part of common parlance well before that.71 Particularly when describing military personnel, the dichotomy of ‘Whites’ versus ‘Blacks’ was frequently used in EIC and VOC documents as a proxy for “European” and “Asian”.72 The shift in the use of colour categories that occurred from the time of the earliest Dutch and English trans-oceanic voyages – when travellers called upon various shades of brown and yellow, as discussed in Chapter 1 – reveals how seventeenth-century colonial encounters drove the evolution of a discourse of human difference based on skin colour, and not just in the context of Atlantic slavery, where this development is traditionally located.73 However, while assumptions regarding phenotype and hereditary traits started to take root more firmly, throughout the early modern period they continued to coexist with older notions related to culture, social status, and religion. It is this fusion of ideas which helps to explain the ambiguous position of people of mixed descent in EIC and VOC settlements, where they were integral to European society while being identified as Other at the same time.

Cultures of Governance: The Case of Madras

When discussing Batavia’s rapid growth due to Asian migration, in 1637, Governor-General Van Diemen and his colleagues noted their policy of ‘punishing all insolences severely’, describing this method as ‘what these Indian nations are accustomed to and how they wish to be governed’.74 The Dutch were not alone in justifying styles of governance with reference to what they held to be local standards. Aspiring to follow ‘the Dutch wisdom of governing in India, but in a 71 72

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Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 60–63. For example: Consultation Fort St. George, 4 July 1673: RFSG, DCB 1672–1678, 14: ‘1200 white men & 120 blacks’; Company to Fort St. George, London, 28 September 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 88: ‘your free Merchants Whites or Blacks’ and ‘soldiers, Whites or Blacks or Lascars’. A Dutch proclamation issued at Galle on 1 June 1643 announced punishment for anyone causing injury to another person ‘whether white or black’ (‘‘t zij blanck off swart’): Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 6. Compare the conventional view that ‘[p]erhaps more than any other set of ideas, race was Atlantic’: Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Race’, in: David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 173–190, at 173. To cite one example, Linschoten reported that the inhabitants of Gujarat and the Deccan were ‘altogether of yellowe colour, and some of them somewhat whiter, others somewhat browner’: Linschoten, Discours, 20. ‘alle insolentiën hert te straffen, gelijck dese Indiaense natien gewoon ende alsoo gegouverneert willen sijn.’ Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 9 December 1637: Generale Missiven I, 639.

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gentler manner than they do’, the EIC’s Court of Committees likewise gave serious thought to ruling in an Asian setting.75 To make their government agreeable to its subjects, the directors argued, it would not work to export English institutions wholesale: ‘[Y]ou must make great Alteracons according to the nature of ye place, & ye people, & the difference of Lawes, Customs & almost every thing elce between England & India’, Fort St. George was informed in 1687.76 Five years earlier, the Court of Committees had already noted that the manner of raising taxes in Madras should be ‘agreeable to the humours of that people’, allowing their servants the freedom to copy ‘Dutch, Portugueze, or Indian Methods’.77 Whilst the EIC’s urban administration of Madras differed markedly from the VOC’s territorial rule in Ceylon, both cases reveal how the Companies’ cultures of governance took shape through engagements with and borrowings from their South Asian environment. Furthermore, both cases bear testimony to the crucial role of local populations in the co-production of colonial societies. In Madras, the English entered into a system of indirect rule through community leaders, with whom they negotiated on a range of issues, from taxation to the maintenance of public order. Local offices such as that of the kanakkapillai or accountant, responsible for keeping land registers and revenue accounts; the peddanaik or chief watchman, assisted by the talaiyaru or subordinate watchmen; and the adigar or town governor, who originally also sat as a judge at the ‘choultry’ (from Tamil: chavadi) or town hall, all retained their prominence under EIC rule.78 Indeed, it has been argued that the English did little to alter the ‘internal social or political arrangement’ of Madras, whose ‘basic urban pattern’ resembled that of other South Indian port cities.79 Emblematic of the deeply felt need to involve representatives of the town’s communities in civil administration was the fact that, with the creation of the Corporation of Madras in 1688, its twelve Aldermen included a Frenchman, two Portuguese, three Jews, and three Hindus – the powerful merchants Chinna Venkatadri, Muddu Viranna, and Alangatha Pillai.80 In similar vein, the Armenian mer75

Company to Fort St. George, London, 9 June 1686: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686– 1692, 10–11. 76 Company to Fort St. George, London, 28 September 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 90. 77 Company to Fort St. George, London, 20 September 1682: Vestiges I, 511. 78 Love, Vestiges I, 126–127. 79 Appadurai, ‘Right and Left Hand Castes’, 246. 80 Love, Vestiges I, 498. Alangatha Pillai succeeded Chinna Venkatadri as chief merchant upon the latter’s death in 1689. Muddu Viranna was the adopted son of Kasi Viranna, who had acted as the EIC’s chief merchant in Madras from 1669 to his death in 1680. S­ ee:

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chant Gregorio Paroan and the Company’s chief merchant, Alangatha Pillai, were among the four men appointed as judges of the Court of Judicature in 1690. The former was selected ‘to enquire into causes that happen from his own Nation and all other foreigners’, and the latter ‘to appear for the Natives, as well Jentues, Moores and Mallabars’.81 Whilst the proportion of Englishmen among the Aldermen increased over the next few years, and the representation of ‘Moores & Gentues’ remained below that originally proposed by the Court of Committees, the Company at least officially remained committed to its original intention of ensuring a diverse representation.82 As the directors saw it, involving ‘the Heads of all Casts’ in civic government would help to ‘enduce all the Inhabitants to contribute cheerfully to some publick workes’.83 However, despite repeated instructions from London, Muslims were deliberately excluded by the Madras administration, probably due to concerns that they might become an instrument for the expanding Mughal Empire to gain influence in the town. The decision was framed in the by this time formulaic language of trust: ‘[I]t’s not thought safe to introduce Moor men into any part of the Government, and its our opinion they are never to be trusted’.84 With this important exception, then, the administration of justice, law enforcement, and collection of revenues in Madras followed hybrid arrangements based on South Indian convention. The merging of English authority with Tamil and Telugu traditions played out clearly in Madras’ legal proceedings. Starting in 1648, the Company appointed European officials as justices of the choultry to hear disputes involving damages valued up to fifty pagodas, leaving weightier cases to be judged by the President and Council. From 1678 onwards, the latter responsibility shifted to the newly established Court of Judicature.85 Unlike the Dutch in Ceylon, the EIC also concerned itself with settling legal disputes involving only its Asian Kanakalatha Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in the Coromandel (Chennai: Orient Longman, 1999), 109–115; Balachandran, ‘Of Corporations and Caste Heads’. 81 Love, Vestiges I, 495. 82 Consultation Fort St. George, 23 September 1689: RFSG, DCB 1689, 79. The directors originally proposed that of the thirteen members in total (Mayor plus Aldermen), ‘there should never be above 3 English ffreemen, 3 Portugueez, the other 7 to be Moores & Gentues’: Company to Fort St. George, London, 28 September 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1682, 9. 83 Company to Fort St. George, London, 22 January 1692: RSFG Despatches from London 1686– 1692, 184–185. 84 Nathaniel Higginson et al. to Company, Fort St. George, 17 February 1694: Love, Vestiges I, 559. 85 Love, Vestiges I, 128, 273, 405.

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subjects.86 The latter were to be judged in accordance with their own laws, with ‘the Cheif men of the Cast’ invited to give their opinions based on their respective ‘Customs and Cerimonies’. If they belonged to different castes, each party appointed three arbitrators, whose advice guided the court to reach a sentence and carry it out.87 The effect of this arrangement was an adjustment of English legal principles to their South Asian setting. In November 1694, a Brahmin found guilty of robbery and sentenced to be hanged by the Court of Judicature was spared upon the intercession of several prominent Hindu citizens. Acknowledging the custom that Brahmins were exempted from the death penalty, the English judges ordered the officers of the choultry to have him punished ‘in the most disgracefull way [practised] among the Jentues in like cases’.88 Even during a lawsuit between the Company and former President Elihu Yale, the influence of local practice was eminent. Since Yale objected to the way that Hindu witnesses swore oaths, a dozen Brahmins were summoned to testify to South Indian practice. Their declaration was recorded in the Consultation Book as follows: [T]he way of swearing the Gentues: hath been in the Court before the Judg[e], by causeing water and flowers to be brought from the Pagodo [temple]: the fflowers are put upon their heads, and they drink some of the water before or in the Court and both are given and done by the Bramine of the Pagodo and in the presence of the eternall God, who they believe in a more Perticular manner to be in all Courts of Justice.89 A decade earlier, the directors in London had already ruled that ‘the Oaths of all native Indians of good fame & credit within the Agency of ffort St. George Shalbe admitted in all trayalls of law and Equity, aswel betwixt Natives and Natives, as Natives and Englishmen’, stipulating that Indians would be ‘Swearing by the living and Eternall God who created the Heavens and the Earth’, and that ‘in case of great concernment their Oaths be likewise taken in their owne Pagodes’.90 These statements throw light on what must have been a common scene in the EIC’s courtroom in Madras, which emerges from the pages as an eclectic cross-cultural forum. 86 Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce, 294–296. 87 Consultation Fort St. George, 19 August 1695: RFSG, DCB 1695, 108. See also: Elihu Yale et al. to Fort St. David, Fort St. George, 21 July 1691: RFSG, DCB 1691, 35. 88 Consultation Fort St. George, 15 November 1694: RFSG, DCB 1694, 129. 89 Consultation Fort St. George, 25 January 1693: RFSG, DCB 1693, 34. 90 Company to Fort St. George, London, 27 October 1682: RFSG, Despatches from England, 1681–1686, 19.

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Permeating the Company’s ruminations about colonial governance was a highly self-congratulatory view of its own tax regime and dispensation of justice. As part of continuing attempts to make their Asian subjects pay for expanding Madras’ defence works, the EIC directors argued that ‘ye Inhabitants […] do live easier, under our Government then under any Governm[en]t in Asia, or indeed under any Governm[en]t in ye known part of ye World’.91 Their self-legitimising discourse centred on acting out “just” rule, as opposed to the “tyranny” allegedly practised by the Muslim and Hindu rulers in bordering localities, and was already present in visions about the future growth of Armagon, as discussed in Chapter 7.92 The ‘liberty’ accorded to Asian traders and ‘the great Justice we would have you Impartially exercise’ were regarded by the Court of Committees as pillars on which to build ‘a great and famous Superstructure’.93 Expectations ran so high that, in 1687, the directors proclaimed that ‘[w]ee cannot see but that City of Madrass may in a few years come to be the greatest City in Asia for strength, as well as for Commerce, Cleanness and ornament’.94 Fairness, moderation, and religious tolerance were to be key principles, and the legal system had to be ‘pleasing & suiteable to ye Inhabitants’.95 In 1705, addressing their agents in Calcutta, the English directors stressed that ‘[a]n impartiall administration of Justice to all your Inhabitants’ was the key to establishing ‘the difference between the mild English Government and the Arbitrary tyranny of the Moors’.96 That such rhetorical distinctions must be taken with a large pinch of salt had already been pointed out by Sinnappah Arasaratnam, who noted that abuse of authority by EIC agents was so common ‘that it makes a mockery of the claim of good and just government made by some contemporary officials and later historians’.97 There was arguably more truth to the EIC’s assertion that it accommodated the legal system to local norms and expectations. In 91 92 93 94 95

96 97

Company to Fort St. George, London, 31 May 1683: Ibid., 72. Thomas Joyce and Nathaniel Wyche to Company, Masulipatnam, 25 October 1634: EFI 1634–1636, 45–46. Company to Fort St. George, London, 14 January 1686: Vestiges I, 473. Company to Fort St. George, London, 22 March 1687: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686– 1692, 39. Company to Surat, London, 27 March 1668: BL, IOR/E/3/87, f. 80v. In 1687, the Court of Committees wrote to Madras that ‘We must always recommend to you to use ye Natives that are obedient to our Laws, with all justice, humanity and Kindness, giving them an Assurance, that We will never oppress them nor their posterityes’: RFSG, Despatches from England 1686–1692, 39. Company to Bengal, London, 18 January 1705. Cited in: Stern, The Company-State, 182. Arasaratnam, ‘Society, Power, and Factionalism’, 128. See also: Arasaratnam, Merchants, 293.

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February 1695, following a period of famine, a woman whose name is recorded as ‘Latchima’ confessed to drowning her child in a well to save it from the sufferings of starvation. Although she was initially sentenced to death, the Council of Madras decided to revoke the sentence after considering how the town’s Indian population might ‘reflect [on] our Justice for hanging an old woman under such pitifull circumstances’.98 In seeking to demonstrate the justness of its rule to Madras’ Asian population, the Company also did not hesitate to threaten public punishment to any of its military personnel found guilty of causing bodily harm to ‘any of the Natives or Towne Inhabitants’. The punishment, a flogging, was to be executed at the choultry or openly in the streets, ‘to the end the Natives may be satisfied of the Justice done them’.99 If the EIC’s merchant administration did not refrain from publicly chastising Europeans as part of its manifestation of a discourse of just rule, the idea of appearing as debauched in the eyes of non-Christians was consistently held up as a spectre to its merchants and soldiers. According to a disciplinary code published in 1633, appearing drunk in public meant ‘prostituting the worthines of our nation and religion to the calumnious censure of these heathen people’.100 Considerations of reputation control were clearly at play here, a subject the EIC took extremely seriously as part of its performance of legitimate authority. It was for these reasons that, in the context of a sodomy case (apparently involving the sexual abuse of Richard Asterly by the English carpenter Samuel Huxly), the Council of Madras took care not to punish the culprit locally. The sensitive nature of the offence, which witnesses claimed had taken place onboard the ship Armenian Merchant in early 1694, was felt to compromise both English masculine and Christian values. Wishing ‘to avoid the scandall and reproach of the Nation by bringing an Englishman for so beastly a crime before the Heathen natives’, the unanimous decision was made to send Huxly home to England to face his sentence there.101 The importance attached to outward appearances also found expression in the personal enactment of authority by higher Company officials. From an early date, the amounts of money spent on sumptuous display met with sharp reproach from London, yet to little effect. Like the Portuguese before them, the English and Dutch in India drew on local languages of symbolic legitimacy in their adoption of regalia. Even occupants of minor offices, such as the chief 98 99 100 101

Consultation Fort St. George, 20 February 1695: RFSG, DCB 1695, 23. Articles and Orders to be observed at Fort St. George, 28 October 1678: RFSG, DCB 1678– 1679, 130. Act for the Reformation of Abuses, Surat, 4 May 1633: EFI 1630–1633, 303. Consultation Fort St. George, 3 May 1694: RFSG, DCB 1694, 46.

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of the small Coromandel Coast factory of Petapoli, endeavoured to surround themselves with large throngs of Indian servants. Thomas Grove, who held this post in the late 1630s, pleaded that the local Dutch representation entertained sixty peons, besides palanquin-bearers, parasol-bearers, and other native staff. Unimpressed, his superiors in Masulipatnam responded that the low volume of English trade at Petapoli could not justify such expenses, and told Grove to make do with a cook, a horse-keeper, two gardeners, two soldiers, two writers, a peon, and the washerman who lived at the factory with his family.102 As the only Englishman at this outpost, it is perhaps unsurprising that Grove aspired to a style of authority based on his perception of local conventions – and to be sure, many colleagues shared his perspective.103 Thomas Smyth, when writing home to his father on Christmas Eve of 1658, underscored ‘the state and multiplicity of servants we strangers are constrained to keep’, explaining that in India each man was ‘respected according to his train and habit’.104 Having expressed his desire for ‘a good cloth coat with a large silver lace, which is all the wear here and the badge of an Englishman’, he pointed out that ‘[t]he chiefest thing needful is a good hat’.105 Yet another example exhibiting the belief that pomp was integral to the performance of authority in the Indian environment comes from the pen of Sir Edward Winter, whose term of office as Agent of Madras was terminated in 1665. Winter resisted his dismissal and even imprisoned his successor George Foxcroft, but eventually had to relinquish his position. In a letter teeming with complaints, he pointed out that ‘so small a retinue of blacks’ was allowed to him after his deposition that he could no longer uphold his former splendour, arguing that this was done intentionally ‘to make me contemptible among the natives’.106 Winter’s grievance gestures at the deliberate manner in which the EIC’s government in Madras sought to regulate the use of symbols of authority. The employment of attendants to carry umbrellas over one’s head, to name the privilege which received most attention, was a jealously guarded prerogative only permitted to those in the higher echelons of Company personnel and their wives.107 The use of this iconic Asian status symbol, rapidly adopted in 102

Thomas Clark et al. to Thomas Grove, Masulipatnam, 12 and 18 February 1638: EFI 1637– 1641, 45, 48. 103 The senior officials at Masulipatnam formed no exception. It was rumoured that they entertained up to eighty local servants while using all the conventional Indian paraphernalia, such as palanquins, banners, and umbrellas of state: EFI 1637–1641, 48, n. 2. 104 William Smyth to John Smyth, Viravasaram, 24 December 1658: EFI 1655–1660, 261. 105 Ibid. 106 Edward Winter to Lord Arlington, Fort St. George, 19 January 1669: EFI 1668–1669, 161. 107 Consultation Fort St. George, 31 January 1678: RFSG, DCB 1678–1679, 8–9; Love, Vestiges I, 499.

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colonial loci of power from Goa to Batavia, was thereby placed firmly beyond the reach of Madras’ Indian majority. Exceptions were made only for certain prominent individuals, such as the chief merchants employed by the Company, although their right to have servants carry ‘Rundells’ was revoked as soon as they lost their official appointment.108 An example from 1717 indicates just how far the EIC by the early eighteenth century had developed into a legitimating source of authority in the South Asian tradition. Having acquired zamindari rights over several villages in the vicinity of Madras, the Company in turn started farming them out to Hindu entrepreneurs. One of them was a Brahmin named Venkanna, whose contract to rent two paddy fields for the sum of 710 pagodas was confirmed in writing by the Madras administration in a ‘Cowle’ (kaul). Among its terms, the lease stipulated the precise conditions under which Venkanna was allowed to carry an umbrella of state.109 Broadening out into a general policy directive, the Council decreed that ‘no other black persons shall wear a Roundell in the English town or in presence of any of the Councill, except Nairo Verona [Neru Viranna] who is one of the Aldermen of the Mayor’s Court’.110 This ruling neatly captures the hybrid and ambiguous nature of Company governance, which combined Indian grants and status symbols with English civic institutions, and instituted a colour bar that was negotiable in practice, as it allowed for exceptions based on function in society.

Governing “Others”: Voc Rule on Ceylon

Instead of indigenous participation in town government – as the EIC implemented in Madras – the VOC in Ceylon adopted indirect rule to govern large provinces in which Dutch involvement remained limited. In the words of Arasaratnam, ‘the Dutch appear as a foreign power grafted on to the superstructure of Sinhalese/Tamil society’.111 The Company inherited a complex administrative system from its Portuguese predecessors and left it almost entirely intact. This system was based on land tenure and service requirements. Indigenous nobles were assigned lands and villages for their maintenance, and in return held responsibility for the collection of revenues, the extraction of service labour, and the recruitment of a lascorin (military labour) force. Above 108 109 110 111

Consultation Fort St. George, 24 February 1681: RFSG, DCB 1681, 8. Mukund, ‘Caste Conflict in South India’, 16–17. Consultation Fort St. George, 6 February 1717: Love, Vestiges II, 126. Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘The Indigenous Ruling Class in Dutch Maritime Ceylon’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 8.1 (1971), 57–71, at 70. See also: Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention, Ch. 2.

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this hierarchy, the Company installed commandeurs in its three core districts of Galle, Jaffna, and Colombo, and a gouverneur to oversee the entire Dutch government on the island. Apart from in these most senior posts, European officers were placed only at the head of the largest indigenous political unit, the dessavony. There were three dessavas on the island (in Colombo, Jaffna, and Matara) who were responsible for the maintenance of law and order, the collection of land rents, and the extraction of obligatory services at the village level. They communicated with the indigenous officials who remained in charge of the smaller administrative units known as korales, pattus, and vidanes, as heads of provinces, districts, and villages.112 Further, Dutch Governors, Commanders and dessavas, like the Portuguese before them, depended strongly on the counsel of mudaliyars, senior Sinhalese officials who often were converts to Christianity. Their pivotal position as land-holders, revenuecollectors, and military chiefs, as well as advisers to the Dutch government, put much power into the hands of these noblemen.113 Finally, in the northern provinces known as the ‘Vanni’, semi-autonomous chiefs called Vanniyar ruled with little interference from the Dutch, apart from their collection of an annual tribute of elephants as tithe to the sovereign.114 The VOC’s reliance on indigenous elites – a group whose co-operation was indispensable, although their loyalty was constantly being questioned – was particularly apparent in the mobilisation of the Ceylonese labour force. Having appropriated the title of ‘Lord of the Land’, the VOC claimed the right to receive the compulsory services which the local population had been liable to render to its kings according to the customs of their respective castes. In addition, the Muslim, Chettiar, and Christian Paravar communities, who due to their foreign origin stood outside the Ceylonese caste system, were made to perform a set number of days of unpaid labour each year, a custom known by the Tamil term of uliyam. Since the production and export of cinnamon was the raison d’être of the Dutch presence in Ceylon, the exploitation of the cinnamon peeler caste was at the forefront of colonial policy. About 7% of the population of Ceylon belonged to the Salagama or chalias, of whom only the lowest sub-caste performed the actual peeling of the bark of the cinnamon tree.115 According to age and physical ability, males over the age of twelve were required to pay an 112

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘The Administrative Organisation of the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon’, Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 8.2 (1965), 1–13. 113 Arasaratnam, ‘The Indigenous Ruling Class’, 58–64. 114 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘The Vanniar of North Ceylon: A Study of Feudal Power and Central Authority, 1660–1760’, Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 8.2 (1969), 101–112. 115 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, xciv–xcv.

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annual poll tax of between one and eleven units of approximately sixty Dutch pounds of cinnamon, besides an additional quantity of circa 600 pounds, which they provided against a price set by the Company. Cinnamon peelers lived grouped together in villages and were given certain lands to cultivate as a reward for their labour. A European official was appointed as Captain of the Cinnamon Department, yet the everyday organisation of the harvesting was in the hands of Sinhalese officials known as vidanes and duriyas, who oversaw the four cinnamon-growing districts (Negombo, Colombo, Kalutara, and Galle) and set numbers of chalias, respectively.116 The enormous quantities of cinnamon required by the Company each year put an excessive strain on the chalias, who practised various means to evade the immense burden imposed on them. Some fled into Kandyan territory, while others sought to marry members of higher sub-castes to free their offspring from chalia obligations. To the Company’s chagrin, no other communities were prepared to perform the peeling of cinnamon, resulting in the prospect of a dwindling force of near-free labour. VOC administrators responded by tightening registration methods and the issuing of decrees that sought to freeze social mobility. The extreme importance placed on the collection of cinnamon by the Dutch motivated them to intervene in traditional caste relations in unprecedented ways. In 1682–1683, Laurens Pijl ordered that none of the chalias ‘may be elevated or decreased by birth and [that] the fruit will have to follow the womb’. As the proclamation explained, whenever a duriya or lascorin came to marry the daughter of a cinnamon peeler, the sons from this marriage would have to be brought up as cinnamon peelers. Any illegitimate children of the aforementioned groups would suffer the same fate.117 The concept of “the fruit following the womb” was a well-known tenet of slavery laws, which ensured that the children of enslaved women followed their mother’s legal status.118 Hence there were close affinities between the VOC’s conception of authority over its two principal groups of involuntary labourers. The crucial difference was that, in comparison to the enslaved, cinnamon peelers had greater freedom of movement, which many of them used to escape to the Kandyan-held highlands. Furthermore, the chalias knew as well as the Dutch that the Company could not harvest their most prized cash crop without them. As late as 116 Arasaratnam, Dutch Power, 184–186. 117 ‘niemandt onder de voormelde chialias in zijn geboorte zal mogen verhooght ofte vercleynt werden ende de vrucht de buyck moeten volgen’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 207–208, 220. 118 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 309–310. Besides claiming all children of female slaves as lawful ‘property’, the VOC also, in its capacity of ‘Lord of the Land’, laid claim to the firstborn children of its male slaves: Anthonisz, Memoir of Thomas van Rhee, 21.

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the 1760s, Governor Jan Schreuder complained that the chalias ‘are people who not only know that they are indispensable but are also naturally lazy, impertinent, discontented and mutinous’.119 These views and circumstances sustained a paternalistic discourse which sought to demonstrate the need for a firm hand, whilst recommending fairness and protection. When discussing the “Company’s children”, as the chalias were sometimes patronisingly called, no Dutch administrator failed to mention that they had to be treated with the utmost consideration in order to reap the full benefit of the duties they were compelled to fulfil.120 The imperialist vision behind such advice was most pronounced in the writings of Van Goens senior, for many years the chief architect of the VOC’s expansionist policy in the region. In a letter to the Heren XVII written in 1670, the governor described Ceylon as the Company’s ‘own island, which is inhabited by people who we could very easily accommodate to our customs and maintain in perpetual obedience, as long as we continue with leniency, righteousness, and the proper administration of justice’.121 Envisaging a role for the Dutch as champions of the poor against oppression by indigenous elites, Van Goens prefigured a line of argument used extensively by nineteenth-century colonial administrators in the Dutch East Indies.122 Ethnographic assumptions appear at every turn in his instructions and reports. In 1662, he warned the dessava of Jaffna that the inhabitants of that province were ‘poor-hearted yet sly’ and that among them were ‘many wicked people who put much pride in their caste’, and who despised and abused members of lower castes. To counteract this, he argued, the poor had to be discreetly supported and maintained in their rights.123 The following year, when temporarily vacating the office of Governor in favour of Jacob Hustaert, Van Goens decried what he saw as the avaricious character of some 119

Cited in: Lodewijk Wagenaar, ‘The Apparition of the Cinnamon Peelers: Dutch Colonial Presence in Eighteenth-Century Ceylon and its Reflection in Non-Literary Prose’, in: Jeroen Dewulf, Olf Praamstra and Michiel van Kempen (eds.), Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 112–127, at 120. 120 Arasaratnam, Dutch Power, 187. See for example: Anthonisz, Memoir of Thomas van Rhee, 48; Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 78. 121 ‘UEd. eygen eylandt, ‘t welck bewoont is van menschen, die wy seer lightelijck sullen kunnen tot onse zeden wennen en in eeuwige gehoorsaamheyt behouden, soo wy met sagtmoedigheyt, reghtveerdigheyt en goede justitie te administreren voortgaan.’ Rijcklof van Goens to Heren XVII, Colombo, January 1670: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.2, 406. 122 Van Goor, Kooplieden, 154. 123 ‘de inwoonderen deser landen zijn armhertige ende nogtans listige en daeronder veel quaedaerdige menschen van bezondere impressie op haer kastos’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 103.

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Company servants and almost all of the Sinhalese, and ordered that dessavas should be recruited from men free of greed. About the ‘poor and miserable’ service castes, he noted that while they were ‘humans and God’s creatures’, their superiors often treated them worse than animals.124 One of the officers who Van Goens believed was too hard on the common people was Dom Manoel Andrade, the principal Sinhalese adviser of the Jaffna administration. In a passage which clearly brings out the Janus-faced character of the VOC’s ethnographic approach to colonial rule, Van Goens instructed commandeur Antonio Paviljoen to mitigate Andrade’s inclination towards harshness, while in the same breath asserting that: …the nature of the inhabitants sometimes demands strong measures. Their character is cowardly, timid, and slavish, but also greedy, cunning, and thievish, reasonably intelligent and predisposed towards change, but with prudence they may be very easily ruled.125 This statement clearly reveals how, by the time that the VOC expelled the Portuguese from Ceylon, leading Dutch policy-makers had arrived at a point where assumptions about the character of South Asian people could be authoritatively employed to provide discursive legitimacy to the colonial project. It was in their oral as much as their written communications that these stereotypical views were reiterated and reaffirmed. Hinting at a shared understanding among the upper strata of VOC administrators, Van Goens remarked to the dessava of Colombo that ‘it cannot be unknown to anyone who deals with the Sinhalese how unfaithful and vicious they are by nature’.126 In his memorandum to Hustaert, the departing Governor noted: ‘The character and nature of the Sinhalese we have sufficiently discussed in person, so that it will not be necessary to write much about it’.127 This active process of the joint creation, 124 125

126 127

‘dat se zoo wel menschen, als wy, en Godts schepselen synde’: Reimers, Memoirs of Ryck­ loff van Goens, 70. ‘dat ook de nature den landsaaten somtijts scherpe middelen vereijssen, zijnde haar aart wel bloode, cleijn, en slaafs, maar weder gierich, listig, en diefagtig, van redelijk goed verstand en genegen tot veranderinge, maar die nogtans med voorsigtigheijt zeer light te regeeren zijn’: Instruction Rijcklof van Goens to Antonio Paviljoen, Mannar, 31 October 1658: NL-HaNA, Sypesteyn 3, unfoliated. ‘Hoe ontrouw en vals den aardt der Singalezen is, kan niemand die met haar omgaat onbekent wesen’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 72–73. ‘Van den aart, ende nature der Singaleesen hebbe met UE by monde genough gesproocken, ende daerom niet nodich daar van veel verhaal te doen’: Reimers, Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens, 70.

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archiving, and reproduction of information and assumptions continued after Van Goens released his iron hold on the affairs of the island. In 1679, Laurens Pijl expressed his conviction that the new commandeur of Jaffna, Ruthgaart de Heyde, already possessed full knowledge of ‘the nature of these people, the methods to rule them’, and the duties they owed.128 Finally, at the close of the century, Hendrick Zwaardecroon opened his memoir by stating that he believed that the Council of Jaffna possessed all the knowledge required to govern its district, in particular given that locally produced reports dating back nearly forty years were available for consultation.129 As observed in Chapter 2, by explicitly endorsing Pijl’s then eighteen-year-old advice regarding Jaffna’s ‘vicious, cunning, and deceiving people’, Zwaardecroon offered a prime example of the corporate institutionalisation of ethnographic ideas and the policies they inspired.130 The issue of trust, unsurprisingly, seeped into advice on cooperation with native officials in all parts of the colonial administration. When compiling instructions for the dessava of the southern district of Matara, in June 1661, Van Goens conceded that for information about daily occurrences the administrator would have to depend on Sinhalese clerks, who possessed a much richer understanding of local affairs. With Dutch authority still thinly spread and relations with Kandy unsteady, Van Goens, who had more than the usual dose of colonial anxiety, was quick to spot the potential risks in this arrangement. He strongly urged the dessava ‘not to trust said writers too much in matters of importance, because they are Sinhalese, whose vicious natures lead them to nothing but betrayal of their fellow men, yes even their own father and mother, whenever this brings them even the smallest benefit’.131 By always maintaining a watchful eye, taking pains to familiarise themselves with local customs and practices, and learning the Sinhalese language, Van Goens believed VOC agents could reduce what he saw as their unwelcome dependence on people of questionable loyalty.132 The issue was still very much alive in 1707, when 128

‘de nature deser menschen kend, de methoode om haar t’Regeren en wat se betaalen en doen moeten ten vollen is bewust’: Memoir Laurens Pijl to Ruthgaart de Heyde and Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 9 November 1679: NL-HaNA, VOC 1351, ff. 2429r-v. 129 Pieters, Memoir of Hendrick Zwaardecroon, 1. 130 ‘dese valsche, listige, en bedriegelijke menschen’: Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 884v. 131 ‘in zaeken van belang gezegde schrijvers niet al te veel te vertrouwen, alzoo het Singaleesen zijn, welkers valschen aert nergens anders heen strekt dan om haer evennaesten ja zelfs haer eygen vader en moeder te bedrigen, ingevalle zij daerdoor maer eenig voordeel tegemoed sien’: Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 101. 132 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 92, 101; Reimers, Memoirs of Ryckloff van Goens, 70.

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Governor Simons referenced Van Goens and Pijl’s earlier statements about the purported untrustworthiness of the VOC’s Sinhalese subjects. Acknowledging the latter’s continued loyalty towards the kings of Kandy, Simons placed his hopes in the potential of Christian education for fostering attachment to the colonial regime.133 Apart from vigilance and discernment, tact and the flexibility required to handle the ‘peculiar humours’ of the local population were deemed necessary qualities in Dutch administrators.134 Instructions issued in 1661 and 1707 prescribed that the Captain of the Cinnamon Department should strike the right balance between upholding his authority – by not showing too much leniency – and ensuring that the vidanes and duriyas were not alienated by overly strict measures.135 In the Tamil districts in the north, senior VOC officials likewise counselled moderation as the key to a functional relationship with the semi-autonomous chiefs ruling the mainland Vanni territories. ‘Experience has sufficiently taught us that the harder these people are dealt with, the less pliable they become, while in contrast, the more one caresses them, the more willingness and contentment they show’, Governor Thomas van Rhee concluded in 1697.136 Albeit grudgingly, because this general policy line did not correspond to his personal tastes, Zwaardecroon confirmed that with regard to the Vanniyars, he could merely advise the Council of Jaffna ‘to observe the old lessons of practicing kindness, caresses, and suchlike sweet-sounding words’.137 These last examples reveal the importance of political realism, as the Dutch were well aware that their authority in the densely forested Vanni lands was extremely fragile, and that altercations could both weaken their hold on that part of the Jaffna dessavony and destabilise its southern frontier. The tensions between the pragmatic acknowledgement of the limits of colonial power and an ideology of sovereign rule buttressed by ethnic prejudice are clearly brought out by Zwaardecroon’s memoir. The departing commandeur 133

Extract from the instructions for the dessava of Colombo by Joan Simons, Colombo, 27 April 1707: Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, V, bk. 8, 305. 134 ‘dit wonderlijk humeur van menschen’: Memoir Rijcklof van Goens Jr. to Laurens Pijl, Jaffna, 3 December 1679: NA: VOC 1351, f. 2421r. 135 Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek I, 79. 136 ‘d’ervarenth:t genoeg geleert hebbende dat hoe men dese menschen harder valt, hoe minder wil men van haar heeft, en integendeel, hoe meer caressen men haar aandoet, hoe gewilliger, en vergenoegder zij hun tonen’: Memoir Thomas van Rhee to Gerrit de Heere, Colombo, 25 February 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1590, f. 330v. 137 ‘die oude lessen van minsaamheijt, carressen, en diergelijcke soetluijdende woorden te observeeren’: Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 789r.

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advocated firmness in dealings with the Tamil and Sinhalese population, believing that the character of the people in Ceylon called for uncompromising policies. For example, he argued that dessavas had to insist that the Company’s tithes from harvests and forest cultivation should be fully collected and delivered, stressing that ‘the shamelessness of these natives in stealing, and keeping back [their dues], is unimaginable, unless they are kept in perpetual fear of punishment’.138 Elsewhere, the future Governor-General claimed that the people living in Jaffna province were ‘conceited, arrogant, and stubborn’, ‘by nature lazy and indolent’, and of ‘a twisted lineage’, asserting that, when given the slightest encouragement, they were quick to bring all sorts of false complaints against their superiors.139 In an apotheosis steeped in Machiavellian reason-of-state thinking, and echoing views expressed by Van Goens no less than forty years earlier, Zwaardecroon concluded that Jaffna was a district ‘of which the inhabitants, who may be as deceitful and cunning as they wish, are easy to rule, as long as one is able to continue it with absolute authority, because they fear punishment as a consequence of their cowardice, and out of fear of punishment they sometimes refrain from vice, albeit never out of love of virtue’.140 As a whole, Zwaardecroon’s plea was aimed at drawing more authority into the hands of subordinate Company officials, which was necessary, in his view, to prevent them from becoming ‘a laughing stock to these people’.141 He discussed two methods employed by the Company to assert its authority and prevent local elites from becoming too powerful. The first was ensuring that appointments to positions of influence were not monopolised by members of the same caste, a version of the tried-and-tested technique of divide and rule. Immediately after conquering Jaffna, the Dutch had consciously favoured the dominant Vellala caste. Having been less closely involved with the Portuguese administration than, for example, the Karaiyar and Madapalli, the Vellalar seized the opportunity presented by the change of regime to assume leading 138 139 140

141

‘de onbeschaamtheijt van dese inlanders om te steelen, en agter de hand te houden, is onbedenkel., soo zij door een perpetueele roede niet mogen worden in vrese gehouden’: Ibid., f. 831r. ‘opgeblasen, assurant en wrevelmoedig’; ‘uijt haren aard luije, en trage menschen zijnde’; ‘dit verdraijde geslagte’: Ibid., ff. 842v, 846r, 886v. ‘waer van de ingesetenen, zij mogen soo valsch en listig zijn als zij willen, met gemak sijn te regeeren, als men daermede maer absolutel.x magh doorgaen sonder verhinderingh, want sij vreesen door hare bloohertigheijt bijsonder de straffe, en uijt vreese van die straffe soo laten sij ook somwijlen het quaad, dog noijt uijt liefde tot het goede’: Ibid., ff. 941r-v. ‘onder dit volck eijndelijk niet t’eenemaele ten spot zullen worden gestelt’: Ibid., f. 843r.

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positions in the indigenous administration.142 In 1658, Van Goens had ordered that the Vellalar, being the highest caste as well as ‘the most obedient’, should be accorded most privileges, whilst the Madapalli, whom he described as ‘audacious, proud, and inclined towards change’, had to be punished for even the smallest offences.143 However, starting in the 1690s, the Dutch decided to counteract the increased influence of the Vellalar by introducing a policy whereby members of the Madapalli and other castes were appointed to senior posts. Although the dominance of the Vellalar was never broken, the ambition behind the policy was clear. As Zwaardecroon put it, by exploiting the differences between castes, the Company would be in a position to exercise control over Ceylonese affairs.144 The various strands characterising the VOC’s culture of governance in Ceylon came together in the institution of the paresse, the second method of rule discussed by Zwaardecroon. This custom, which had its roots in the tradition of Sri Lankan kingship and was continued by the Portuguese, amounted to a ceremonial staging of sovereignty and vassalage. As Zwaardecroon observed, twice yearly the mudaliyars, village chiefs, arachchi (commanders over lascorins), and other headmen appeared in a general audience before the commandeur in Jaffna Fort, where they represented the community at large. On these occasions, this Dutch senior merchant assumed the role of indigenous ruler, receiving reports about the various districts, hearing complaints and granting requests, and accepting gifts from native officials and heads of castes as a sign of submission.145 A much larger paresse took place each year at Colombo Castle at the start of the main cinnamon harvest, usually in May. Up to several thousand cinnamon peelers and their chiefs would line up before the Governor, accompanied by Sinhalese dancers and musicians. After hearing reports on harvest conditions and rebuking those who failed to meet their targets, well-performing headmen might be rewarded with gold medals.146 Writing 142

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Social History of a Dominant Caste Society: The Vellalar of North Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the 18th Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 18.3–4 (1982), 377–391, at 383. 143 ‘de gehoorsaamste’; ‘zijn vrij vermetelen, ende van trotsen impressie, genegen tot nieuwigheijd’: Instruction Rijcklof van Goens to Antonio Paviljoen, Mannar, 31 October 1658: NL-HaNA, Sypesteyn 3, onfoliated. 144 Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 839r. 145 Ibid., f. 940r. As Pijl pointed out, these symbolic tokens consisted of products of the land or crafted goods produced by the various castes: Memoir Laurens Pijl to Ruthgaart de Heyde and Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 9 November 1679: NL-HaNA, VOC 1351, f. 2444r. 146 Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention, 47; Wagenaar, ‘The Apparition of the Cinnamon Peelers’.

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about the paresse in Jaffna, Zwaardecroon noted that it promoted the interest of the Company ‘as sovereign of these lands’, and that therefore the custom should be kept up. Laurens Pijl had made a similar recommendation, underlining that the paresse counted as an invaluable ‘sign of subjection’.147 It was precisely because their century-long experience with diplomacy and trade had made the Dutch deeply familiar with the place of ceremony in South Asian enactments of sovereign rule that they so ardently insisted on its continuation. Every bit as hybrid as the Company-states that implemented them, the cultures of governance characterising VOC and EIC settlements drew on European notions of civic authority, looked towards Portuguese and other colonial examples for guidance, and were profoundly shaped by South Asian customs. Company agents intentionally adapted their ruling style to what they thought of as local norms and expectations, and justified the harsher practices of colonial exploitation with reference to indigenous political culture. Yet for all their significance as precursors to the more extensive forms of imperial power established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early colonial projects of the East India Companies remained on the whole limited in scope and reach. In Madras, the English left the execution of daily government outside the fort area to a cadre of local officers, in accordance with South Indian tradition, while the VOC in Ceylon relied for its administration of the provinces on a system of indirect rule through existing Tamil and Sinhalese hierarchies. The fact that the numerically small and comparatively ill-informed body of European officials depended for most of their information supply, as well as for the execution of authority and the maintenance of order, on indigenous informers, interpreters, headmen, officials, and soldiers, provided one of the strongest impulses to the sense of colonial anxiety that left its mark on Company policies. Indeed, calls for the erection of fortifications, policies of spatial segregation, and the methods employed to govern the diverse populations of nascent Company settlements betrayed, each in their own way, security concerns induced by the colonial encounter. To a much greater extent than in the spheres of trade and diplomacy, the respective experiences of colonial settlement of the seventeenth-century VOC and EIC were characterised by divergence. The Dutch pursued policies of fortification on a much larger scale than their English rivals, employing a degree of force against European and Asian competitors that the EIC would not match 147

‘tot dienste vand’E. Comp. als souvereijn vander landen zijnde’: Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 940v; ‘een teecken van onderdanigh.t’: Memoir Laurens Pijl to Ruthgaart de Heyde and Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 9 November 1679: NL-HaNA, VOC 1351, f. 2444r.

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until well into the eighteenth century. Driven by imperialists such as Coen and Van Goens, the VOC also established settler colonies in a wider range of locations, and several decades before the EIC first pondered schemes for populating Madras and Bombay through migration from Europe and marriages with local women. The persistent attention to free burghers in Dutch colonial society generated an equally sustained interest in the development of mixed-race communities, occupying the minds of VOC officials in Colombo, Batavia, and Amsterdam, more than it seemed to concern their EIC counterparts in Madras and London. Finally, along with their ruminations about inheritable character traits, and as a result of their greater investment in colonial government, seventeenth-century Dutch Company writers also went much further than their English contemporaries in linking what they saw as the collective nature of specific Asian peoples to the appropriate means for ruling them. While this list of differences reaffirms the point that the settlement projects of the EIC in Madras and the VOC in Ceylon were on many counts markedly distinct, it is also true that important similarities existed in the manner in which English and Dutch agents perceived and dealt with questions of security, identity, and authority in an Asian environment. Some of the more interesting parallels become more readily apparent when viewed as part of a longer timeline. For instance, Van Goens’ claim that Ceylon’s inhabitants were ‘very submissive, obedient, and, compared to the Javanese, Makassarese, and other Muhammadans, very easy to rule’ had no counterparts in seventeenth-century EIC writing, yet it is reminiscent of rhetoric about naturally submissive colonial subjects employed during the British Raj.148 Likewise, one of Van Goens’ harshest critics, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, argued that the only way to keep the Sinhalese in subjection was to govern them ‘according to their ancient laws, ordinances, privileges, and customs’.149 This strand of thought, though in keeping with contemporary EIC attempts to formulate modes of governance that respected local tradition, would likewise attain its greatest prominence following the British conquest of Bengal.150 It is by attending to such discursive continuities that we gain a clearer understanding of the links between later colonial projects and their smaller-scale, seventeenth-century precedents. 148

149 150

‘vermits die Landaard ons zeer onderdanig, gehoorzaam, en zeer licht, in vergelyking van de Javaanen, Macassaren, en andre Mohhammedaanen, te regeeren is’: Extract from the Description of the State and Situation of the Island Ceylon by Rijcklof van Goens, Batavia, October 1675: Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien V, bk. 8, 245. ‘hen te houden by hun oude Wetten, Inzettingen, Voorregten, en Gewoontens’: Extract from the considerations by Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede regarding Ceylon, Batavia, 23 November 1677: Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien V, bk. 8, 267. See: Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Conclusion A century after their first forays into the Indian Ocean world, the Dutch and English East India Companies had become firmly rooted in South Asia’s commercial and political structures. Their familiarity with different Asian peoples had vastly increased since the 1600s, while the shifting commercial, diplomatic, and colonial encounters surveyed in this book had left their mark on the ways in which various Others were represented in writing. Propped up by institutional routines of recording, communicating, and record-keeping, the EIC and VOC each developed recognisable corporate discourses that at the level of ethnographic concepts and terminologies were characterised by remarkable consistency. The framing of cross-cultural encounters in relatively stable ways also produced greater uniformity in the Companies’ responses to contact situations, as conclusions drawn from past experience served to guide future decisions. Citing the importance of ‘knowing how one has behaved and ought to behave’ when suffering ‘unreasonableness, wrongs and abuses’ at the hands of Mughal officials, Pieter van Dam mused in his Beschryvinge that ‘it has been experienced since olden times that the more one gives in to the Moors’ evil desires, the more they persist therein and become aggravated’.1 His claim followed an overview of the key disputes that had arisen between the local Mughal administration and the two Companies in the space of ninety years, covering English maritime predations in the 1620s and 1680s, the Dutch blockade of Surat in 1649, and the piracy affair that was ongoing as he wrote. As a means to exemplify ‘what type of people these Moors are, and how quickly one can scare and astonish them’, Van Dam recalled how the arrival of four Dutch men-of-war in Surat in 1675 had induced its mutasaddi, Ghiyasuddin Khan, to agree to the VOC’s demands.2 His survey would have been read by the Heren XVII as an endorsement of their position that the Dutch ‘ought to show [their] teeth’ to obtain the cancellation of the muchalka (bond) disputed at the

1 ‘te weten hoe men sigh had en behoort te gedragen, wanneer ons sodanige of diergelycke onredelijckheden, verongelyckingen en gewelden worden aangedaan’; ‘Men heeft doorgaans al van oude tyden ondervonden, dat hoe men de Moren in hare quade begeerte meer toegeeft, hoe sy daartegens meer en meer komen uyt te spatten en erger te worden’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 20, 36. 2 ‘te tonen, wat soort van menschen dese Moren sijn, en hoe haast men haer een schrick en verbaastheyt kan aanjagen’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 34. For the agreement between Ghiyasuddin Khan and Willem Volger: Heeres, Corpus Diplomaticum II, 536–540. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004471825_011

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time of writing.3 As a whole, it captured the two-pronged outlook of the directors and their personnel in Asia at the Company’s centenary: prudence and modesty were required when dealing with the formidable Mughal administration, yet periodic shows of force were deemed necessary ‘to keep the Moors in devotion’.4 It was no coincidence that Van Dam listed English disputes with the Surat government alongside those of the Dutch. The EIC and VOC engaged in an analogous set of relationships with the Mughal authorities, and agents in both organisations displayed a comparable spectrum of approaches to cross-cultural encounters: cautious as a rule, combative from time to time, but most often accommodative and adaptive. What reinforced these correspondences was the fact that agents of both Companies experienced their Asian environment in similar terms, no doubt heightened by mutual observations and exchanges. Most of all, despite differences between the two organisations and their respective commercial and colonial trajectories, EIC and VOC writings make clear that English and Dutch Company agents held ideas about Asian peoples that had much in common. Behind such shared images, as the chapters in Part 1 have argued, we detect pan-European frameworks of knowledge. When labelling groups of people as “barbarians”, conjecturing about their “humours”, or ascribing effeminacy, craftiness, and a range of other stereotypical character traits to them, VOC and EIC writers drew upon and perpetuated ethnographic discourses common across early modern Europe. Besides transmission through manuscripts and print, the oral transfer of concepts and terminologies resulting from contacts between various entangled trading groups in the Indian Ocean world and beyond was undoubtedly significant. This book’s tour through a variety of contexts of encounter has shown that cultural assumptions about Asian people were important in shaping VOC and EIC approaches to cross-cultural contact of any type, whether fleeting engagements during stopovers on the outward voyage or long-term relationships with the pluriform populations in areas under Company control. However, as its survey of different categories of encounter has made clear, the specific form which interactions took did depend strongly on the particular social and political setting – above all on local configurations of power. When trading in the port cities of Gujarat or other parts of the subcontinent, as shown in Part 2 of this book, the attitudes of VOC and EIC agents with regard to Indian merchants and government officials were marked by a 3 ‘onse tanden behoren te laten sien’: Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 60. The muchalka affair of the 1690s and 1700s is discussed in Chapter 4. 4 ‘om de Moren in devotie te houden’: Ibid., 36.

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persistent undercurrent of distrust. Mutual commercial advantage and mutual dependence created a framework for polite everyday interactions, and in many cases interpersonal contacts were harmonious, demonstrating that the problem of trust in cross-cultural trade was partly overcome through the creation of personal networks and routines of social and political interaction. Nevertheless, Company writing suggests that many VOC and EIC representatives submitted only grudgingly to the rules and expectations of their powerful hosts. Asian actors whose political or commercial interests interfered with those of the Companies were habitually denounced as treacherous or tyrannical, while Dutch and English agents felt morally vindicated when using force by drawing on ideas regarding Indian duplicity or the supposed need for strong-arm tactics when dealing with Muslims. Such rhetoric was in the first place selfjustificatory, yet the perpetuation of negative imagery also made aggressive action seem more natural, and hence more likely to be repeated. In this way, corporate traditions of ethnographic stereotyping had a lasting impact on VOC and EIC activities and help explain how the readiness to enact violence persisted as a normal part of Company operations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vigorous attempts at “showing one’s teeth” to Mughal authorities in Surat or Bengal always sat uneasily with the Companies’ formal submission as humble subjects of the Mughal sovereign.5 The survey of diplomatic interactions in Part 3 of this book has highlighted a side of European–Mughal interactions where the power asymmetry was not only most profound, but where, as a consequence, the Europeans in their role as supplicants also went furthest in adapting to their host environment. Company agents came to incorporate ever more elements of Indian social and political traditions into their everyday behaviour, following a pattern of cultural appropriation that revealed itself in commercial and colonial encounters as well. Such acculturation proceeded from a deepening engagement between Company agents and members of the host culture, rendering the diplomatic strategies of VOC and EIC representatives more akin to South Asian practice. However, the embrace of foreign customs did not necessarily equate to a greater appreciation of cultural difference. While routinely citing their understanding of local conventions in support of 5 This was a recurrent phrase in VOC writing. See for instance, in reference to relations with Mughal officials in Bengal and Surat, respectively: ‘Wij vertrouwen, als onse tanden toonen, beter tractement genieten sullen’ and ‘Wij vertrouwen [...] onse tanden eens gethoont hebbende, hun soo lichtvaerdigh tegens ons niet vergrijpen sullen’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Company, Batavia, 9 December 1637: Generale Missiven I, 627; Antonio van Diemen et al to Company, Batavia, 18 December 1639: Generale Missiven II, 45.

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using social customs, gift-giving practices, and representational strategies in accordance with Mughal imperial culture, stark ambiguities remained present in the responses of Company envoys, many of whom mimicked the social comportment of the very Mughal nobility they dismissed as base and greedy. As I have argued in Part 4, it is by turning the lens beyond the bounds of Mughal imperial control, to regions where indigenous power was weaker, that we recognise how the VOC and EIC from an early date developed settlement projects of differing size and scale. Assuming a position of authority over growing numbers of subjects, the personnel of trading corporations increasingly began to think of themselves also as officers of political bodies wielding territorial control. Though the general impact which the seventeenth-century Companies had on South Asian societies remained weak and uneven, it was within the limits of their fortified settlements that cultural attitudes made the clearest impression. While merely a problem of taxonomy for travellers and cosmographers, cultural diversity and the relative permeability of identity categories posed concrete challenges to colonial administrators. Decrees concerned with overseeing the diverse populations residing in Company towns displayed a desire for differentiation and compartmentalisation, as cultural, religious, and colour prejudices became inscribed in colonial policies. Although the physical and mental boundaries thus erected were constantly traversed and did little to prevent transculturation, the Companies’ early experiences with governing Asian people were important in hardening the discursive distinctions between self and other, now increasingly expressed as a white/ black dichotomy. Colonial anxieties may have originated as defensive postures reflecting Europeans’ relative weakness vis-à-vis Asian states and feelings of unsettledness in an unfamiliar environment, yet the discourses generated by them had long afterlives. Hence, if the alleged perils of living unprotected amongst “Moors” and “heathens” were already cited in favour of the founding of Fort St. George, in later years the perceived threat of Mughal encroachment was frequently alluded to as a pretext for expanding the English territorial foothold. As is evident when reviewing Madras’ early history alongside the contemporary development of Dutch rule in Ceylon, it was in their respective colonial trajectories that the seventeenth-century VOC and EIC differed most strongly. Unlike the VOC in Ceylon, parts of Southeast Asia, and even the Malabar Coast (Kerala), the EIC in this period did not seek to expand its territory by force of arms, nor did it by other means acquire the sizeable territorial holdings the VOC laid claim to. Likely as a consequence, no English equivalent existed of the fully fledged debate over the merits of colonisation waged in the higher

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echelons of the VOC, at least not during the seventeenth century.6 That said, meaningful parallels nonetheless existed in areas such as the security concerns and colonial rhetoric expressed by officials in both organisations. In debates over the governance of Asian settlements, the Dutch example was approvingly cited by English advocates, in the same way that Dutch policy-makers looked towards Portuguese precedents.7 It certainly was not uncommon for English writers to decry the ‘old and accustomed ambition of Empire and Dominion’ put into practice by the VOC in Asia, or to contrast the ‘Tyranny used in their Conquests’ with their own supposedly mild and pleasing government.8 Yet it is worth noting that the Dutch employed the same self-legitimising rhetoric when comparing their ‘just, benign, and lasting government’ with ‘the tyrannical rule’ of the ‘cruel’ Portuguese, drawing on a well-worn anti-Iberian discourse employed by the upstart Dutch Republic to wrap its colonial ambitions in the language of liberty.9 For all their differences, then, the Companies’ early engagements in colonial settlement also point to prominent similarities between Dutch and English attitudes towards governing in an Asian setting. Each of the case studies analysed in this book is reflective of patterns that underpinned the Dutch and English presence in South Asia more widely: the dynamics of accommodation and conflict that characterised trade relations between the Companies and the Mughal administration, first worked out in Gujarat; the Companies’ adaptation to South Asian diplomatic norms, as mani­ fested most clearly in their embassies to the Mughal court; and their gradual entrenchment as colonial administrators governing pluriform populations, as witnessed most fully in Ceylon and Madras. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. Yet by attending to the logic of Company writing, this book has centred processes that have bearing on VOC and EIC operations throughout South Asia and indeed beyond, as the ethnographic language employed in specific 6 For the emergence of such a debate in the 1820s, see: Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, Ch. 3. 7 For instance, as early as 1611 the Heren XVII commissioned senior officials to submit advice on the desirability of dispatching Dutch colonists ‘conform de order die bij de Portugesen in Oost-Indiën wort gebruyckt’: Rietbergen, De Eerste Landvoogd, I, 108. On the EIC’s pursuit of ‘Dutch-style imperial aggrandisement’ in the 1680s, see Vaughn, ‘John Company Armed’, 133. 8 Diary Fort St. George, 24 July 1678: RFSG, DCB 1678–1679, 91; Gerald Aungier to Company, Bombay, 15 January 1674: BL, IOR/E/3/34, f. 339v. Aungier prophesied that the ‘Tyranny’, ‘violence’, and ‘hardshipp’ practised by the Dutch ‘may in time cause them to sinke under their owne weight’. 9 ‘regtvaardige, goedertieren en langdurende regeeringe’; ‘de tyrrannijcke regeringe, der wreede specken’: Instruction Rijcklof van Goens to Antonio Paviljoen, Mannar, 31 October 1658: NL-HaNA: Sypesteyn 3, unfoliated. About Dutch self-legitimisation: Schmidt, Innocence Abroad; Weststeijn, ‘Empire of Riches’.

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locales was both produced and consumed within wider networks of communication. Even a cursory glance at regions that fell outside the scope of this study confirms that a similar repertoire of concepts and stereotypes structured ethnographic descriptions regarding Gujarat or Ceylon as for southern India. For instance, Jacob Hustaert declared that the inhabitants of the Malabar Coast were to be considered ‘the most malicious and faithless in the world’, which was echoed in Alexander Grigby’s claim that there was ‘noe fast or certeine foundation to bee built upon Mallabarrs promises, being the inconstant[e]s[t] and perfidiousest people in the world’.10 One of the most evocative examples of such hostile ethnographic stereotyping is contained in a 1677 report by Adolf Bassingh, a VOC agent whose assessment of the ‘character and nature’ of the inhabitants of Madurai exemplifies the discourse of servility and untrustworthiness employed by Company writers in relation to peoples throughout South Asia: ‘They are servile by nature, slow, crafty, distrustful, dishonourable, cunning, deceitful, incompassionate, shameless, and faint-hearted.’11 Such claims need to be examined within their specific contexts of production, yet cannot be understood fully unless we consider them in relation to the broader institutional culture of writing, reading, and archiving from which they derived and in which they operated. By situating the study of the VOC and EIC within a framework that draws insights from studies of cultural representations, I have sought to show how historians’ understanding of seventeenth-century Dutch and English enterprise in Asia can be enriched by paying closer attention to the discourses produced by the agents involved in forging cross-cultural links. The study of Company writing demonstrates that, rather than constructing a single Oriental Other, agents in overseas contact zones devoted much effort to coming to grips with a whole array of different Others. Most VOC and EIC agents were aware of the finer ethnic and social divisions existing in the locality in which they were stationed, and attempted, however imperfectly, to convey this complexity in letters and reports. Hence, authors such as Pelsaert and Geleynssen de Jongh differentiated between various different groups of “heathens” and “Moors”, contrasting brave and warlike Rajputs and Pathans with cowardly and 10

11

‘de vuijlaerdigste ende trouwlooste ter weerelt’: Jacob Hustaert to Heren XVII, Cochin, 2 February 1664. In: H.K. s’Jacob (ed.), De Nederlanders in Kerala 1663–1701: De Memories en Instructies betreffende het Commandement Malabar van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), lx; Alexander Grigby et al. to Surat, Calicut, 20 October 1668: EFI 1668–1669, 117. Cited in: Vink, Mission to Madurai, 309. Compare: ‘dat zy uyt zich zelfs slaafachtig, traag, listig, wantrouwig, oneerbaar, trouwloos, leugenagtig, onbermherttig, schaamteloos, en kleinmoedig zyn’: Ibid., 353.

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docile, yet commercially astute, banias.12 Yet whereas VOC and EIC discourses always retained a degree of internal variety and inconsistency, the diverse ethnographic “group profiles” which Company agents compiled nevertheless ended up having much in common. Prejudice against Muslims, to recall one example, was transferred across contexts and inflected the portrayal of groups as different as the Mughals and Javanese, even if it was not uncommon for writers from Geleynssen to Van Twist, Van Dam, and Valentyn to repeat positive characterisations of the Mughals as good-natured, polite, and sophisticated.13 My reading of Company writing does not suggest, then, that from a seventeenth-century European viewpoint ‘a “faithless Moor” was always and everywhere the same’, as James Tracy has argued.14 Yet the suggestion made by Gerald Maclean and Nabil Matar that EIC factors refrained from denouncing Islam and Muslims is also misguided.15 Even if Dutch and English merchants and administrators devoted relatively little space to religious polemic, a wealth of evidence shows that Muslims were habitually associated with a specific set of moral shortcomings, including deceitfulness, arrogance, and tyranny. Such generic tropes coloured context-specific observations and merged with the latter to produce durable composite images whose application could be surprisingly wide-ranging. It is in reflections on the diverse body of people living within Dutch and English areas of jurisdiction that we see most clearly how assumptions about the character of different groups of cultural Others were at work in the worlds of the VOC and EIC. An implicit hierarchy of perceived trustworthiness emerges from many letters and decrees; this is perhaps best visualised as a mental scheme consisting of concentric circles. The inner core was formed by covenanted Company servants of the higher and middle ranks; which was followed by lower personnel and free persons belonging to the same “nation”, that is, English or Dutch burghers. One degree removed one finds Christian subjects of other states, who could be severely mistrusted in times of national rivalry and conflict, but otherwise formed an integral part of Company society. Confessional differences appear to have been smoothed over as long as they were not deemed to represent a political threat. Hence, if Roman Catholics met with 12

This distinction, which foreshadowed discourses about “martial races” under the Raj, was echoed in print by writers such as De Laet: Hoyland and Banerjee, The Empire of the Great Mogol, 83. 13 Caland, Remonstrantie, 68; Van Twist, Generale Beschrijvinghe van Indien, 54; Van Dam, Beschryvinge II.3, 71; Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien V, bk. 3, 109. 14 Tracy, ‘Asian Despotism?’, 256. 15 Gerald Maclean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8–11.

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more suspicion than members of the Reformed confessions, this was mainly because they were regarded as a potential fifth column for the Estado da Índia. The numerically strong group of Eurasian and Asian Christians were, in this mental scheme, located on the edge of European society. Although forming an integral part of Company towns, Asian Christians were subject to cultural and colour prejudice as well as mounting official discrimination. Finally, the Companies entertained their strongest misgivings about the reliability of Asians who were non-Christian. The realisation that the latter’s principal cultural and political allegiance, not to mention their economic interest, was often not with the Europeans, rendered them a perpetual security risk in the eyes of Company administrators, particularly those of the VOC. Differentiations within this generic category depended strongly on place and circumstance. In Ceylon in areas under Dutch administration, Muslims were certainly the least favoured group, yet against such blatant discrimination one could set examples of amicable social interactions with Islamic elites in Mughal India. As I have argued, comparison of records produced in Ceylon, India, and other parts of Asia tells us that the cultural tropes and attitudes expressed in Company writing were often not specific to particular cultural groups. Rather, their correspondences hint at processes of intra- and inter-institutional diffusion of ideas that help explain how across the Indian Ocean world experiences of trade, diplomacy, and colonial settlement could be conceived of in broadly comparable terms. Attending to the logic of Company writing, then, can throw further light on the connections between VOC and EIC operations in far-flung parts of Asia that are seemingly governed by disparate dynamics. The study of Company writing also carries rich potential for anchoring the history of the VOC and EIC more firmly within comparative histories of European colonialism. Studying Dutch and English ethnographic discourses in tandem, this book has shown that the attitudes and ideas regarding Asian peoples displayed by agents of the two Companies were closely aligned. Yet there is also reason to highlight the transfer of terminologies and continuities of practice between the Estado da Índia and the two East India Companies, an exercise that helps us to question further traditional distinctions between allegedly modern northwest European, and supposedly medieval Iberian forms of expansion.16 The case studies of Madras and Ceylon provide additional correctives to the remarkably resilient cliché that whereas the Portuguese conqueror of Goa, Afonso de Albuquerque (c. 1453–1515), instigated a policy of intermarriage between Portuguese soldiers and Indian women, 16

For a challenge to such distinctions: Vink, ‘Between Pofit and Power’. On ‘the Portuguese heritage under the Dutch’: Van Goor, Prelude to Colonialism, 49–66.

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‘[t]he Dutch and English would take care not to follow Albuquerque’s lead’ but ‘abstained almost entirely from racial mixing’.17 The myth of northwest European aloofness versus unbridled Lusitanian intermingling – both components of which have been challenged in recent studies – testifies to the power of nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of empire, yet it has little grounding in seventeenth-century realities.18 Beyond facilitating synchronic comparisons, the analysis of seventeenthcentury EIC and VOC writing also throws the links between earlier and later forms of colonial encounter and their attendant discourses into greater relief. Reflecting on the role of ideology in the British conquest of Bengal from the 1750s, Robert Travers has noted that ‘[t]hroughout the period of expansion, versions of the thesis of Asiatic despotism and native depravity gave meaning and justification to the Company’s territorial ambitions.’19 Indeed, as he argued elsewhere, ‘British notions of Asiatic corruption gave ideological coherence and momentum to the Company’s own dramatic militarisation and territorial conquests after 1757, as the Company fought to disarm what it thought of as hostile despots’ and ‘establish its own sovereignty as the necessary remedy for a broad corruption of Indian governance’.20 While mentioning the ‘conceptual inheritance’ of writing about India, Travers, Thomas Metcalf, and other historians concerned with identifying the discursive roots of British imperial ideologies have tended to locate these outside the Company’s own institutional history.21 As a result, when late eighteenth-century Company officials propagated views about effeminate and slavish Hindu subjects submitting out of fear or natural disposition to indolent but oppressive Muslim rulers; or claimed that Indians were uniquely predisposed to treachery, intrigue, lying, and mendacity, historians have generally detected in such statements the

17

Saldanha, ‘The Itineraries of Geography’, 165; Urs Bitterli, Ritchie Robertson (trans.), Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 68. See also: Kamps, ‘Colonizing the Colonizer’. 18 On the persistent though largely discredited ideas of ‘Lusotropicalism’ and ‘racial democracy’: Francisco Bethencourt and Adrian Pearce (eds.), Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19 Travers, Ideology and Empire, 53. 20 Robert Travers, ‘Ideology and British Expansion in Bengal, 1757–72’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33.1 (2005), 7–27, at 18. 21 Travers, Ideology and Empire, 43; Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj: The New Cambridge History of India III.4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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influence of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), or the writings of earlier travellers such as Bernier.22 As my analysis of Company writing has made clear, eighteenth-century ideas and stereotypes deployed to justify the British conquest of Bengal were also heirs to constructs dotting the letters and reports of EIC and VOC agents that went back as far as the early seventeenth century, many of which were themselves derived from older Renaissance models. Hence, while Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers are rightly credited with theorising and popularising the nexus of eighteenth-century ideas about forms of government, climate, and the character of peoples, when we focus on India such notions may well have been reflective rather than constitutive of a discursive tradition nurtured by merchants and administrators on the ground. Peddled by EIC and VOC officials to explain commercial challenges or mask their own sense of anxiety in the fluid and unstable environment of early colonial settlements, stereotypes of different Asian peoples as dishonest and duplicitous, and base and servile, had long proven their rhetorical value by the time they were put to use under the British Raj or in the colonial Dutch East Indies. In the latter context, Schrikker has argued, ‘[t]he VOC archives had an afterlife as institutional memory that informed men in the nineteenth century about how to write, think, and act while at work’.23 This book has detailed how this institutional memory took shape and informed institutional habits of writing, thinking, and acting in the Company era. A degree of discursive continuity can be detected even in an area where late eighteenth-century understandings of governance in an Asian setting appear as most distinctive of that particular historical juncture, that is, in the widespread conviction that colonial rule should accord with the customs and conditions of its subjects, particularly the latter’s so-called “ancient constitutions”.24 Starting in the mid-1760s, the re-evaluation of ancient rights and forms of rule in a land supposedly characterised by lawlessness enabled British officials to turn the concept of despotism from a rhetorical weapon deployed to delegitimise the nawabi government of Bengal into a justification of their own paternalistic and authoritarian rule, as one historically suited to native tradition.25 In arguments 22 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 8–9, 24, 139; David Arnold, ‘Race, Place, and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Historical Research 77.196 (2004), 254–273; Travers, ‘Ideology and British Expansion’, 10, 19–20; Travers, Ideology and Empire, 48–53, 62–68. 23 Schrikker, ‘Institutional Memory’, 123. 24 On ‘the language of ancient constitutionalism’: Travers, Ideology and Empire, 8 and ­passim. 25 Travers, ‘Ideology and British Expansion’, 20.

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for the need ‘to adapt our Regulations to the Manners and Understandings of the People, and the Exigencies of the Country’ – here expressed by the EIC’s Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, in 1772 – we nonetheless recognise the same strand of thought which induced the Court of Committees a century earlier to command that laws implemented in early Company settlements should be based on ‘a perticuler knowledg of the Nature, Condition & quallity of the people there’ and be both ‘agreable to foundations of Justice & Righteousnes’ and ‘pleasing & suitable to ye Inhabitants’.26 Much less benevolent in tone, the line of thinking that associated particular forms of government with the “condition” of certain people also extended to characterisations of Bengalis as ‘thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke’, which served nineteenth-century aims of naturalising British rule through reference to Mughal precedent.27 Early modern traditions of Company writing reveal how potent doctrines of this kind first came to circulate amongst Europeans in Asia against a backdrop of everyday encounters in the spheres of trade, diplomacy, and governance. Where justifications of colonial rule are concerned, however, the principal seventeenth-century antecedents were Dutch, not English. The VOC’s Hoge Regering in the 1630s argued that ‘Indian nations’ are used to and want to be governed with an iron fist; the traveller Johan Nieuhof explained the Governor-General’s use of pomp by claiming that Asians ‘never serve more willingly, than when they are astonished by the costly splendour of their rulers’; while Rijcklof van Goens in the 1670s praised the character of the Sinhalese as ‘very submissive, obedient, and very easy […] to rule’.28 Besides the lasting impact such imagery had on Company agents’ own understanding of their place in the Indian Ocean world, as bolstered by corporate routines of communication and archiving, they also left their mark on representations of Asia that were circulated publicly in print. The most distinguished of these publications was undoubtedly the five-volume Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, compiled by the for26 27 28

Warren Hastings’ 1772 statement is cited in: Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 10. Compare: Company to Surat, London, 27 March 1668: BL, IOR/E/3/87, f. 80v. The statement is by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Cited in: Arnold, ‘Race, Place, and Bodily Difference’, 255. Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 9 December 1637: Generale Missiven I, 639; ‘noit dienenze gewilliger, als wanneer zy tot verbaastheit gebracht worden door den kostelijken praal des bestierders’: Nieuhof, Het Gezantschap, 29; ‘zeer onderdanig, gehoorzaam, en zeer licht [...] te regeeren’: Extract from the Description of the State and Situation of the Island Ceylon by Rijcklof van Goens, Batavia, October 1675: Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien V, Bk. 8, 245.

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mer Calvinist minister on Ambon, François Valentyn. Published between 1724 and 1726, this magnificent compendium introduced reports by Maetsuycker, Van Goens, Van Rheede, and countless other VOC documents verbatim to a European readership, thereby ensuring that seventeenth-century corporate views of the Ceylonese attained public currency upwards of fifty years later.29 In a remarkable loop from corporate writing to print and back to administrative practice, nineteenth-century Dutch colonial officials would turn to Valentyn as part of their training.30 A further field of analysis to which examination of Company discourses contributes is that of the racialisation of human difference. The period under discussion, as Rebecca Parker Brienen has argued in relation to Albert Eckhout’s paintings of 1640s Brazil, marked ‘an important transitional stage in the development of ethnographic representation’.31 Perched between the sixteenth-century practice of differentiating people based on clothing, attributes, and hairstyle; and the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century preoccupation with biological concepts of race; the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are recognised as a period in which important strands of ‘proto-racial’ thought gained prominence.32 Still, compared to the wealth of studies about European views of Africans and Afro-descendants, the role played by colour concepts and ideas about heredity in European–Asian encounters remains underexplored. Writing about the modern construct of race, Joyce E. Chaplin has argued that ‘if race is a perceived physical difference that is assumed to be inherited, is strongly associated with skin color, and is crafted to support systems of human subjugation, this idea was peculiar to the Atlantic world created by European colonization’.33 Most other analyses also firmly ground the development of racial thinking in the context of Atlantic slavery, stressing 29

On Valentyn’s representation of Asians: Jörg Fisch, Hollands Ruhm in Asien: François Valentyns Vision des Niederländischen Imperiums im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1986), Ch. 3. Fisch (47–48) notes the prevalence of negative character assessments by Valentyn, particularly his blanket statements about ‘all Asians’ (alle Indianen) in general. What should be recognised here is the extent to which the characterisations contained in Valentyn are not simply his own but were directly borrowed from, or a reflection of, his sources, and as such should be seen as expressive of the ethnographic content of the VOC archive as a whole. 30 Schrikker, ‘Institutional Memory’, 124. 31 Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 74. 32 Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 9, 42; Wilson, The Island Race; Rubiés, ‘Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?’. 33 Chaplin, ‘Race’, 173. Compare the earlier discussion in: Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’.

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its Iberian origins in particular.34 Yet the prevalence of particular discourses of human difference in one sphere of colonial encounter should not prevent us from examining how comparable ideas operated elsewhere. In Company settlements across Asia, concerns about supposedly inheritable traits and differentiation based on skin colour gave rise to new forms of classification based on perceived physical difference, which were used in support of colonial policies and institutions – including slavery and forced labour – that were just as discriminatory and exploitative as their Atlantic counterparts.35 If one accepts the argument that racism existed before the invention of a biological notion of race, for instance by following the broader definition of ‘prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action’ proposed by Francisco Bethencourt, there can be little doubt that the early modern cultures of colonial governance of the VOC and EIC should be included in this discussion.36 The writings of Dutch and English Company agents emphasise the need for a flexible understanding of early modern thinking about physical variation, one that recognises that embodied characteristics were not necessarily held to be fixed or immutable, even if they were accorded great significance in the construction of social hierarchies.37 VOC policies regarding inter-ethnic sex and attitudes towards Eurasians and Asian Christians reveal that complex 34

35

36

37

See for instance: Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, ‘Introduction’, in: Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (eds.), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Differences in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–24, at 2; James H. Sweet, ‘The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought’, The William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (1997), 134–166. Historians have increasingly shown that colonial slavery in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds were less distinct in nature than previously assumed: Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen, Bram van den Hout, and Merve Tosun (eds.), Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). See also: Markus Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History 24.2 (2003), 131–177; Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire; Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014); Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe (eds.), Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020). Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–10, 211–213. For a recent argument in favour of a cultural notion of race and racism, not one that hinges on stable, innate, and immutable physical differences, see: Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Compare the account of Spanish colonial attitudes to bodily difference by Rebecca Earle, who suggested that ‘racial thinking is concerned not so much with a belief in indelible, embodied differences, as with a desire to believe in them’: Rebecca Earle, The Body of the

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and multi-shaded notions of cultural identity were called into play as colonial societies developed their social and racial stratification. Moreover, the reality of close daily interactions and bodily exchanges between people of different ethnic backgrounds meant that the boundaries between groups were porous and shifting. The largely cultural basis for differentiation between peoples is reflected in the importance attached to such mutable markers as religious adherence and cultural affiliation, expressed through items of dress and insignia, and through social customs and language. However, the emergence of a colour binary and the rise of discourses about hereditary or “inborn” character traits are evidence of changing European conceptions of Self and Other during the seventeenth century. The EIC’s labelling of the European and Asian districts of Madras and Calcutta as “White Town” and “Black Town” is only the most evocative instance of the growing importance attached to skin colour as a marker of difference, yet one could also cite Zwaardecroon’s assertion that the members of Jaffna’s garrison had to be ‘divided into sorts, because they are of different colour and descent’.38 In the period covered by this book, ideas regarding skin colour, descent, and supposedly innate traits did not crystallise into a fixed concept of “race”.39 The term itself did make a hesitant entry in the vocabularies of Company agents, though it was used extremely sparingly and then only in a similar way as more favoured categories such as “nation” or “lineage”. For instance, in a passage about Surat that referenced ‘the evil maxims of the nations of these lands’ and ‘the Moors’ pride and unbearableness’, the Hoge Regering in Batavia expressed the need to ‘prevent this arrogant race from putting its foot on our neck’.40 Elsewhere, with regard to the Mughal administration in Bengal, the same governing body asserted that ‘it seems that this race should not be caressed’, thus echoing earlier claims by Van Ravesteyn and George Ball that Mughal charac-

38

39

40

Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 214. ‘welk men in soorten diend te verdeelen, want zij zijn van diversche coleur, en afcomste’. The categories Zwaardecroon listed were Europeans, mestizos, and Topasses: Memoir Hendrick Zwaardecroon to Council of Jaffna, Jaffna, 1 January 1697: NL-HaNA, VOC 1591, f. 920v. The application of the pre-existing term “race” to categorise human beings is traced to a 1684 publication in the Journal des Sçavans by François Bernier, the French traveller in India and author of the widely read Histoire de la derniere Revolution des Etats du Grand Mogol (Paris: 1670). See: Siep Stuurman, ‘François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), 1–21. ‘de boose maximen deser landen natiën’; ‘der Mooren trots ende onverdraeghlijckheyt’; ‘voorcomen, dese superbe race ons den voet op den neck niet setten’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, 18 December 1639: Generale Missiven II, 43.

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ter was such that forceful action rather than docile forbearance was needed in response, an article of faith enshrined in the VOC’s corporate history by Van Dam.41 Like such beliefs themselves, the concepts used to express them were never confined to one particular group or location. Concerning the development of colour discourses in different colonial settings, Nightingale has argued that a ‘trans-hemispheric’ circulation of ideas was at work. His suggestion was that the nascent concept of a black/white dichotomy was ‘traded principally within a single empire, the British one’.42 The present comparison of Dutch and English discourses, as well as recent research concerning the entangled nature of empires and the proliferation of informal trans-imperial links, suggests that this is too restrictive a view.43 Instead, it would seem to be most productive to envisage the development of early modern European discourses of human difference as a multi-centric phenomenon characterised by trans-imperial cross-fertilisation, with the Dutch and English building upon notions developed in the Iberian empires, and European experiences of cross-cultural contact in Asia, Africa, and the Americas jointly influencing attitudes concerning colonial government in all parts of the world.44 Such a comparative approach links the seventeenthcentury East India Companies to the discursive traditions to which they were heirs – including the colour consciousness of a Valignano or Linschoten and the wider Renaissance ethnographic tradition. What is more, it should enable us to better understand how the diverse record of early modern cross-cultural encounters fed into and facilitated the structures and processes of domination and exploitation that increasingly came to define European-Asian relations from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. 41 42 43 44

‘’t Schijndt, dat die race niet gelieffcoost moghen werden’: Antonio van Diemen et al. to Heren XVII, Batavia, 9 December 1637: Generale Missiven I, 627. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered’, 50. Antunes and Polónia, Beyond Empires; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (ed.), Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). An important factor was the mobility of individuals within wider imperial networks, thereby bridging the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. See: Games, The Web of Empire; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Michiel van Groesen, ‘Global Trade’, in: Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 166–186.

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Index Abdul Ghafur (Mulla) 127–128 Abdul Rahim, Khan-i-Khanan 156 Abdullah Qutb Shah 179 Abu’l-Fazl 151–152 Abul Hasan Qutb Shah 160n67 Aceh 42, 74, 128 Adami, J. 89n73 Adams, John 91n83 Aden 22, 73 Adrichem, Dircq van 157–159, 161, 166–167, 180, 182, 189–191, 194 Africa cross-cultural contact in 268 East 22, 100 southern 47, 51, 202 sub–Saharan 152 Africanus, Leo 52 Afro-Eurasia 149 Agha Raza 125 Agra 25, 85–86, 102, 110, 117, 123, 125, 136, 144, 154, 167, 183, 187n61, 188, 191 Ahmadnagar 125 Ahmedabad 89, 98, 100n6, 102, 113, 125, 139 Ajmer 194 Akbar (r. 1556–1605) 23, 100, 151–152 Alangatha Pillai 237–238 Albuquerque, Afonso de 261–262 Ambon 89, 222n7, 224, 265 America(s), (the) 47, 50n63, 81, 268 Amsterdam 1n1, 7, 253 Andrade, Dom Manoel 247 Andrade, Tonio 6 Anjouan 46n48 Antheunisz, Lucas 92n83 Arabian Sea 23, 123 Arasaratnam, Sinnappah 240, 243 Aristotle 48–49, 53, 54n83, 61 Armagon 24, 204–205, 240 Asad Khan 160, 165, 170n113 Asaf Khan 123 Asia Aristotle on 49 colonial governance in 240, 258 Dutch trade with 1, 17, 32, 36, 97 early Dutch voyages to 35, 39, 91n83

early English voyages to 37, 39, 41 EIC–VOC interaction in 91, 114 elite consumption in 178–179 English trade with 32, 36, 97 ethnic classification in 70, 210 European ideas and understandings about 2, 5, 14n45, 18, 21, 44n34, 70, 221, 264, 268 European knowledge production regarding 8n19, 18, 21, 37n10, 71, 75, 77, 80, 86, 264 European migration to 222, 229 European presence in 5, 14, 45, 79, 100, 150, 203, 228, 234, 259, 261, 268 European records produced in 1, 16, 45, 72, 86, 114, 261, 264 gift–giving in 174, 183, 185, 191 historiographical perspectives centred on 6 merchants and authorities from 22, 25, 100 organisation of the EIC in 18 organisation of the VOC in 17, 87, 215, 218, 255 racial classification in 62, 26 trade in maritime 23, 41 VOC expansion in 17, 31, 84, 87 Asterly, Richard 241 Athar Ali, M. 145n11 Atlantic (world), the 30, 36, 265, 266n35, 268n44 Aungier, Gerald 118, 232, 234, 258n8 Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) 31–32, 105–106, 127–130, 143–146, 155–159, 163, 165–166, 169, 171–173, 180–182, 187, 191, 192n77, 193, 195 Australia (Terra Australis) 47, 84 Avity, Pierre d’ 50 Bacherus, Johannes 143–146, 150, 157–158, 167–172, 178, 182, 193 Bahadur Khan 157 Bahadur Shah (r. 1707–1712) 106n34, 159, 165, 167, 173, 180, 182 Bakker, Leenderd 83n51

306 Balasore 191 Baldaeus, Philippus 9 Bali 40 Ball, George 122, 267 Banda 46, 216n66 Bandar Abbas 132 Banten 39–42, 46, 70, 74, 122, 178, 205, 217, 220 Barbados 30 Barbosa, Duarte 69 Barker, Edmund 41 Basherad Khan 206n22 Basra 178 Bassingh, Adolf 259 Batavia (Jakarta)  correspondence to and from 58, 77, 88–90 Dutch settlement in 75, 87, 137, 208, 215–216, 220, 224, 226, 243 English factors in 74 Eurasian community in 221n4, 226 Hoge Regering (High Government) in 12, 17, 75, 88–89, 114, 122, 128, 129n44, 130, 137, 165, 181n36, 195, 216–217, 224, 228, 253, 267 instructions issued from 47, 50, 84, 131, 221n4 population of 216, 224, 236 racial discrimination in 221n4 reception of Asian envoys in 181n36 Statutes of, the 218, 228 use of racialised language in 62 Batticaloa 213 Bay of Bengal 23, 100, 204 Beeckman, Andries 82n42 Beerenaerd, Rogier 167 Bharuch 85, 98, 102, 113, 135–136 Bengal Anglo–Mughal conflict in 31, 129 British conquest of 253, 262–264 Company writing about 114 East India Companies in 24, 29, 103n19, 104n22, 104n24, 105n32, 133n64, 194, 256 EIC correspondence from 91 fortified factories in 101n12, 204 gift–giving in 156, 162, 178, 190 Mughal government in 23, 114, 143, 156, 162, 178, 204, 267 Nawabi government of 263

Index VOC correspondence from 89 Berckhout, Joan 154, 182, 186 Beri Timana 116 Berlu, John 167 Bernier, François 55, 156, 191, 192n77, 263, 267n39 Best, Thomas 45, 101 Bethencourt, Francisco 266 Bezuyen, Cornelis 165, 187n61 Bhagwandas 116, 165 Bickford, James 139, 192 Biedermann, Zoltán 27n85 Bihar 24 Bijapur 31, 125 Blake, Stephen P. 144–145 Blanquet de la Haye, Jacob 220n89 Bodin, Jean 53–54, 59 Bogaerde, Cornelis van der 168–170 Bombay 30–31, 90, 104n24, 129, 163, 192, 201, 205, 232, 234–235, 253 Botero, Giovanni 53–55 Both, Pieter 75–76 Boursse, Esaias 218n79 Brazil 265 Bresson, Arnold 25 Breton, Francis 26n82, 135 Bridges, Shem 191 Brienen, Rebecca Parker 265 Broecke, Pieter van den 46n48, 107n40, 113, 123, 130–131, 133, 136–137, 139 Brook, Timothy 22 Brouwer, Hendrik 224 Browne, John 111, 113 Bruton, William 64, 114 Buckler, F.W. 153–154 Budaq Beg 155–156 Burhanpur 102 Cabot, Sebastian 36, 44 Caerden, Paulus van 80–81 Cairo 66 Calcutta 32, 90, 104n24, 161, 163, 187, 197, 201, 204, 212, 232, 233n56, 240, 267 Calicut 22, 80 Cambay 22, 69, 73, 98, 100n6, 102, 108–109, 112, 125 Cannanore 38, 123 Cape of Good Hope, the 1, 35, 39, 51–52, 84, 90n75 Cape Verde 62

Index Carletti, Francesco 69 Caron, François 80, 85, 156–157 Central Asia 23, 68, 179 Ceylon Company writing about 85, 139, 219, 222, 226, 246–247, 250, 253, 259, 261 direct shipping link between Dutch Republic and 80n75 Dutch colonisation schemes in 224–225 Dutch–Kandyan conflict in 220 Dutch–Portuguese conflict in 213, 218 elephants from 180 European colonialism in 23n72, 31, 100, 139, 179, 214, 217, 237 map of 200 mixed marriages in 224–225, 229, 231 Muslim presence in 219 population of 202n2, 226, 229, 244, 250, 253 racialised understandings of human difference in 31  VOC correspondence from 89, 220 VOC government of 12, 23–24, 30–31, 88, 201, 203, 213–214, 217–219, 222, 225, 227, 229, 237–238, 243–244, 246–247, 250–253, 257–258, 261 See also Sri Lanka Chamber, Thomas 208, 232, 234 Chaplin, Joyce E. 265 Chaudhuri, K.N. 91n80 Chaul 123–125, 131 Chennai 30n90, 204 See also Madras Child, John 163 China 21, 23, 37, 55, 70, 80n33, 152, 202 Chinna Venkatadri 237 Cochin 38 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 122–123, 133, 216, 224, 228, 231, 253 Cogan, Andrew 207, 232 Cohn, Bernard S. 147 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 191 Colombo 88, 90, 208, 214, 218–220, 229n39, 244–245, 247, 251, 253 Commelin, Isaac 57, 80 Comoros, the 41, 46 Coromandel (Coast)  Company writing about 39, 112, 139 Dutch presence on 92n83, 101–102, 164, 168, 193 EIC correspondence from 91

307 English presence on 104n24, 114, 188, 205, 242 European settlements on 24, 101, 139 population of 19 textiles from 102 VOC correspondence from 89, 193 Coryat, Thomas 62n125 Coteels, Steven 224 Court of Committees, the and governance in Asia 206, 237–238, 240, 264 correspondence by 63n130, 90, 204, 237 correspondence to 26, 70, 91, 117, 138, 202 governance by 17, 46, 90 Richard Hakluyt’s advice to 37n13 instructions issued by 45–46, 73–75, 233 Cuddalore 167 Cunaeus, Joan 158n58, 225n15 Curley, David 189 Curtin, Philip D. 108 Da Gama, Vasco 22 Dabhol 122–125, 131 Dam, Pieter van 1–2, 13, 30, 53, 58–59, 120, 254–255, 260, 268 Daman 129 Damarla Venkatadri 205–206 Danishmand Khan 156n48 Das Gupta, Ashin 11, 107, 125 Das, Nandini 35 Daud Khan Panni 211 Davidge, Richard 186 De Laet, Johannes 13, 57, 260n12 Deccan, the 13n41, 120, 122, 169, 171–172, 236n73 Defoe, Daniel 111n57 Delhi 118, 128, 143–144, 154–155, 157, 173, 186, 190, 193–194 Della Valle, Pietro 133 Delmas, Adrien 37n13 Demmer, Gerard 221, 225, 230 Deshima 182 Deutecom, Jochem Roelofsz van 225n15 Deynsen, David van 102 Dhaka 187, 193 Dias, Bortolomeu 35n3 Diemen, Antonio van 217, 236 Diodati, Jean 165 Diu 123, 125, 127 Dodsworth, Edward 60n116

308 Does, Franck van der 35–37, 40–41, 60n116 Dutch East India Company see: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) Dutch East Indies, the 21, 87, 226, 246, 263 Dutch Republic, the 12, 17–18, 39, 91, 258 See also Netherlands (the), United Provinces East India Company (EIC), the and brokerage relations 28, 115–118 and colonial governance in Madras 32, 202, 234–235, 237–243, 252–253 and colonialism 3, 25, 30–32, 201, 203, 205, 231–232, 252–253, 257–258, 261–264, 266 and conformity with local norms  133–134 and convoying of Gujarati shipping 105, 127 and dialogues with the VOC 91 and diplomacy 29, 104, 127, 129, 132, 143, 146, 148–150, 159–160, 162, 172–175, 185, 196, 256 and disputes with Mughal authorities 28, 31, 107, 120, 122, 124–130, 204, 254 and early modern ethnography 3, 7–8, 21, 27–28, 31, 39, 55, 236, 255–256, 268 and fortification 24, 101, 139, 204–205, 255 and freighting Indian-owned goods  131–132 and gift-giving 173–181, 185–186, 189–196 and integration into Indian political structures 202 and knowledge production 7 and mestization 222, 231–234, 236 and Mughal interaction ritual 186, 188–190, 194, 196 and parallels with the Estado da Índia 61–62, 261 and parallels with the VOC 2, 7, 16–18, 23, 25, 91–92, 253, 255, 261 and petitioning 163 and racialisation 236, 266–268 and settlement in Madras 30, 160, 197, 204–209, 213, 257 and soldiers of Asian descent 235

Index and trans-imperial elite sociability 132, 137–138 and trans-oceanic networks of exchange 178 and trust 27, 97, 109–110, 112–114, 139, 207, 256, 260 and visual ethnography 81, 82n42 and women of Asian descent 210n42, 232–233, 253 approaches to cross-cultural contact of 2–5, 14, 20, 26–28, 32, 43, 45, 93, 97, 99, 132–133, 137, 139, 254–256 chaplains of 11n32 corporate culture of 15 cultural perspective on 4 ethnographic discourses of 2–5, 9–14, 17, 19–21, 27, 32, 36, 39, 41–43, 51, 53, 62, 64, 66–67, 69–70, 93, 97–98, 102, 118, 122, 139, 192–193, 236, 253–256, 259–261, 263–264 founding of 4 historiography on 5–6, 8, 15n47, 25, 98n2, 109, 202 horses supplied by 179 in South Asia 18, 22–24, 26, 28–29, 32, 97, 99–102, 104, 114, 254, 258 in Surat 101, 105–106, 124 in the Indian Ocean world 25 incorporation into the Mughal imperial framework of 29, 105 institutional writing practices of 2, 8–9, 15–16, 19–21, 27–28, 36–39, 43, 70–75, 86, 91–93, 254 instructions issued by 43–45, 73–74, 233 management of 15, 17, 75, 90 marginalisation of women in the archives of 10n27 mimicking of local elites by agents of 26, 133–134 Richard Hakluyt’s advice to 17, 37n13 rise as a military power of 32 rivalry with the VOC 16–17, 23 use of maritime force by 27–28, 101, 119–122 Earle, Rebecca 266n37 Eckhout, Albert 265 Edo 150 Elpen, Joan 158

309

Index Enggano Island 40 England 18, 37, 39, 59n108, 61, 70n164, 98, 110, 116, 148n21, 175, 188, 233, 237, 241 Ethiopia 54 Erikson, Emily 16 Estado da Índia 8, 24, 37, 61, 225, 261 Eurasia 162n80, 177 Europe  comparisons of Asia with 228 concept of “nation” in 20n63 concept of despotism in 54n83 conceptions of human difference in 19, 255 concepts of skin colour in 61–62 cross-cultural diplomacy beyond 149 cultural stereotyping in 14n45 EIC–VOC interaction in 91 gift goods from 176, 178–179 gift-giving in 174–175, 177 informal means for acquiring government support in 136 instructions for travellers in 36 migration from 235, 253 religious coexistence in 26 representation of South Asia in 11 restrictions on VOC agents and their Asian wives going to 224, 227 South Asian perspectives on 14n44 travel writing from 9, 72n7 Farewell, Christopher 64–65 Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–1719) 163, 173, 181, 197, 206 Fazil Khan 158 Federici, Cesare 67–68, 108 Femell, Lawrence 45, 73 Fenner, George 62 Finch, William 109–111 Finn, Margot 231 Fisch, Jörg 265n29 Fitch, Ralph 70 Flores, Jorge 26n81 Floris, Peter 92n83 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 61 Fort St. George built environment of 206–208 English settlement of 24, 202, 204, 206n20, 213, 257 instructions to 237, 239 mixed marriages at 232–233

mortality of soldiers at 235 plan of 212 President and Council at 161, 211, 213 records produced at 202 Roman Catholics at 234 view of 207 See also Madras Foxcroft, George 242 Fremlen, William 25–26, 206–207 Friedrich, Susanne 58 Fryer, John 70, 118, 133, 157, 232 Galen 59 Galle 213–214, 218, 222, 232, 236n72, 244–245 Geleynssen de Jongh, Wollebrant 11, 56, 57n102, 58, 65–69, 85, 107, 115, 135–136, 259–260 Ghiyasuddin Khan 254 Ghosh, Durba 31, 233 Goa 38, 65, 69n158, 82, 116, 215, 227, 243, 261 Goens, Rijcklof van (Jr.) 229 Goens, Rijcklof van (Sr.) 19, 203, 219, 224, 228–230, 246–251, 253, 264–265 Gogha 125 Golkonda 31, 39n15, 58, 69, 120, 160, 168, 178–180, 192–193, 205–206, 210 Goor, Jurrien van 201n1 Gordon, Stewart 152, 154 Gourney, John 70 Graaff, Nicolaas de 226–227, 230 Greenhill, Henry 232 Grigby, Alexander 259 Groebner, Valentin 60 Grootenhuys, Joan 165 Grotius 215 Grove, Thomas 242 Guangzhou 22 Gujarat Asian merchants in the ports of 100 Company writing about 57, 65–66, 80, 236n73, 259 East India Companies in 24, 29, 97–98, 101–102, 104, 120, 169, 255, 258 markets of 104, 112 Mughal authorities in 102, 109, 125, 127, 157, 258 Mughal conquest of 28, 100 VOC correspondence from 89

310 Hagenaer, Hendrick 80 Hakluyt, Richard 17–18, 37, 63 Hall, Joseph 186 Hasan, Farhat 29, 105 Hasel, Jan van 133, 137 Hastings, Warren 264 Havart, Daniel 164, 165n93 Hawkins, William 52–53, 56–57, 101, 110, 156, 192–193 Hearne, John 62 Hedges, William 187 Heren XVII (Gentlemen XVII), the advice to 52n74, 136 assumptions about Asia of 216–217 colonial marriage policies of 222, 224 colonisation schemes of 224, 258n7 corporate knowledge-making of 1, 58, 77–78, 80–81, 83 correspondence by 90n75 correspondence to 246 discrimination of Asian personnel by 221n4 endorsement of maritime force by 254 instructions issued by 75, 87, 131, 217, 224 management by 17, 58, 63, 90 Heuten, Wouter 107, 115, 121, 123, 136, 178 Heyde, Ruthgaart de 248 Hippocrates 59 Hoorn, Pieter van 217 Hormuz 22, 137, 175 Hostetler, Laura 9n24 Houtman, Cornelis de 44 Hughli 104n24, 162, 186 Huri Khanam 154, 166 Hustaert, Jacob 246–247, 259 Huxly, Samuel 241 Hyderabad 168 Iftikhar Khan 157–158 Île Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha) 40 India British reliance on knowledge and skills from 118 Company settlements in 202, 204 Company writing about 19, 39, 55, 66, 114n76, 112, 259, 261–263 currency use in 126n35 demand for rarities in 177

Index EIC correspondence to and from 90–91 EIC governance in 18, 206, 236–237 EIC presence in 23, 26, 30, 45, 98, 101, 104, 133–134, 176–177, 191, 206, 232–234, 236–237, 241–242 ethnographic discourses concerning 263 Eurasians in 226, 229, 232, 234 European adoption of local status symbols in 241 European classifications of the inhabitants of 64–66 European language-learning in 167 European travel accounts about 55, 65, 70, 75n20, 188, 226 European travellers to 25, 70, 188, 267n37 French writings about 8n21, 113 gift-giving in 191 gifts of paan in 188 markets and production centres of 23, 28, 100 Mughal conquest of 23, 31 Portuguese presence in 26n81, 30 practices of social segregation in 208 religious interactions in 11n31 Roman Catholics in 233 Thomas Roe’s stay in 176 Thomas Roe’s voyage to 46 use of pomp by Company agents in 133–134 VOC correspondence to and from 89, 90n75 VOC presence in 12, 23, 26, 30, 98, 101–102, 133–134, 159, 167, 177, 191, 229, 241 William Norris’ stay in 188 See also Mughal India Indian Ocean, the commercial expansion in 6 Company writing about 39, 72, 89, 93, 255, 261 cross-cultural encounters in 39 East India Companies in 1, 17–18, 25, 27–28, 103, 105, 120, 131, 179, 254, 261, 264 European presence in 5, 23 imperial networks in 268n44 information flows in 16 map of xviii, 96

311

Index merchant communities in 69, 103 social categories in the world of 19–20 trading world of 22, 100n8, 179 Indian subcontinent 1, 12, 23, 28, 32, 97, 101, 179, 202, 205, 255 Indonesia(n) (archipelago) 23, 100, 181n36, 182, 202 Isfahan 74 Ishaq Beg 137 Islam Khan 193 Istanbul 54, 150 Italy 175 Jacobsen, Nicolaas 228 Jaffna 88, 90, 214, 228, 231, 244, 246, 248–252, 267 Jahanara Begum 154, 186 Jahandar Shah (r. 1712–1713) 106n34, 163 Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) 62n125, 123, 145n8, 146–147, 154n42, 164n86–87, 166, 175–178, 182, 187n61 Jamaica 30 Jambi 178 James I (r. 1603–1625) 164n86–87, 166, 177 Japan 1, 80, 84–85, 87n64, 182–183, 202 Java 40, 74, 182n43 Jesson, William 117 Jhabua 190 Jinji 23 Johnson, Robert 54 Jourdain, John 42, 51–52 Kabul 23, 179 Kalutara 245 Kandahar 179 Kandy 24, 58, 180, 197, 213, 214n58, 215, 220, 245, 248–249 Kashmir 178 Kasi Viranna 116, 237n80 Keeling, William 73–74 Kerridge, Thomas 114, 121, 138, 177 Ketelaar, Joan Josua 167, 173, 180, 183–185, 190, 194 Khalilullah Khan 154 Khurram (Prince) 102, 124–125, 146, 176n12 See also Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1657) Kirti Sri Rajasinha 214n58 Kishor Das 189

Knipe, Edward 117, 132 Knox, Robert 58 Kruijtzer, Gijs 13n41, 170, 172 Kutch 123 L’Hermite, Jacques 215, 216n66 Lahore 144 Lahori Bandar 125 Lancaster, James 41, 46 Laver, Fernandinus de 158, 189 Le Roy, Louis 49, 53 Leiden 35 Lijn, Cornelis van der 225 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van 17–18, 37–38, 52, 60, 62, 65, 67–69, 80n33, 227, 236n73, 268 Lodewycksz, Willem 40–41 London 7, 15, 18, 73, 90–91, 124, 130, 188, 192–193, 206, 211, 238–239, 241, 253 Lord, Henry 9, 11n31 Louis XIV (r. 1643–1615) 157 Lucasz, Philip 85 Lunsingh Scheurleer, Pauline 170 Maclean, Gerald 260 Madagascar 40, 41n23, 42–43, 60n116 Madras and relations with the Mughal government 159–161, 173, 197, 211 Black Town of 211, 267 built environment of 207–208, 213 Corporation of 32, 237 correspondence from 91, 168, 207 currency use in 206n21 English government in 24, 116, 202, 222, 233, 237–238, 240, 242–243, 252, 257–258 English migration to 234, 253 English performance of authority in 242–243 English settlement of 30–32, 90, 101, 104n24, 197, 201–202, 204–206, 214 founding of 204–206 Indian merchants in 116, 237n80 legal proceedings in 238–239, 241 map of 212 mixed marriages in 211, 232, 253, 261–262

312 Madras (cont.) population of 24, 63n130, 208–211, 213, 234–235, 241, 243, 258 President and Council of 113 Roman Catholics in 233 urban segregation in 203n5, 208–209, 218 See also Fort St. George Madura 40 Madurai 11–12, 259 Maetsuycker, Joan 88–89, 159, 166, 214–215, 217–218, 224–226, 265 Mahabat Khan 154, 160 Makassar 43 Malabar (Coast) 38, 257, 259 Malay Peninsula 43, 128 Malik Ambar 124 Malik Qasim 186 Manila 81, 208 Manucci, Niccolao 188 Marlowe, Christopher 146 Master, Streynsham 66, 69, 191n76 Masulipatnam 39n15, 70, 74, 104n22, 187, 192–193, 205, 242 Matar, Nabil 260 Matara 219, 244, 248 Mataram 217 Matelieff, Cornelis 215 Mauss, Marcel 174 Mecca 28, 66, 100, 166 Melaka (Malacca) 22, 87n64 Mestdagh, Pieter 89 Metcalf, Thomas 262 Methwold, William 26n82, 39, 58, 69, 127, 161, 166 Mewar 183 Meyer, Albrecht 81 Middelburg 83n51 Middleton, Henry 101 Milde, Willem de 123, 130 Mills, Thomas 205 Mir Jumla (Mu’azzam Khan) 166, 180 Mir Musa 129 Mir Nizam 130 Mirza Nathan 160 Mocha (al-Mukha) 58, 123–124, 131 Mohéli 46 Moluccas (Maluku Islands), the 17, 39, 216, 224, 226

Index Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de 63, 263 Mossel Bay 35, 40 Moucheron, Balthasar de 44 Mozambique 67 Muddu Viranna 237 Myanmar 211 Neru Viranna 243 Mughal Empire, the Company writing about 57, 67, 114, 136 East India Companies in 98, 102, 104, 114, 136, 202 European travel writing about 52, 55, 57 expansion of 23, 28, 100, 238 founding of 1 Hindi/Urdu spoken in 167 map of 142 See also Mughal India Mughal India Company writing about 58, 86 diplomatic encounters in 196 East India Companies in 28–29, 73–74, 129n44, 138, 146, 155, 177, 181n36, 185, 192, 196, 261 elite culture in 175 English diplomacy in 146 European responses to diplomacy in 155 François Bernier’s account of 55 gift-giving in 174, 177, 183, 185, 192, 195–196 gifts of paan in 189 social interactions in 261 status-symbols in 169 subordinate position of Europeans in 23, 100 the Companies’ reliance on local credit in 132 See also Mughal Empire Muhammad Kam Bakhsh 160 Muhammad Said 187 Mukhtar Khan 129 Mundy, Peter 188 Muqarrab Khan 109–110, 113 Muscovy 54 Nagapattinam 104n24 Navarro, Abraham 130 Negombo 213, 245

313

Index Netherlands, the 17, 37, 89, 164, 224n8, 226 See also Dutch Republic, United Provinces New (English) East India Company 104n22, 188 New England 30 New Guinea 47, 63n128, 182 New Julfa 117n87 Nieuhof, Johan 21, 223, 264 Nightingale, Carl H. 203n5, 207, 213, 235, 268 Norris, Sir William 104n22, 170n113, 173, 181, 187–190, 192

Pitt, John 188 Pitt, Thomas 159–160, 173, 212 Polo, Marco 51n71 Pondichéry 213 Pory, John 63, 67 Prague 182n43 Prakash, Om 24 Puckle, William 209–211 Pulicat 24, 101, 104n24, 179, 204–205, 223 Purchas, Samuel 39n15, 52

Ogborn, Miles 91n79 Oldenburgh, Marcus 167 Orissa 24, 64, 162 Ottoman Empire 7, 23n73, 54, 103–104, 124n25, 181, 194 Ovington, John 26, 64, 134 Oxenden, George 157, 235 Oxenden, Henry 192

Raben, Remco 231 Rajasinha II (r. 1629–1687) 24, 31, 58, 180, 213–215, 220 Rastell, Thomas 130, 133, 138 Ravesteyn, Pieter Gillis van 55–56, 58, 107n40, 111, 121, 267 Ray, Indrani 113 Red Sea, the 89, 100–101, 122, 124, 127, 131 Reijniersz, Carel 193, 217, 225 Rhee, Thomas van 219, 249 Rheede, Hendrik Adriaan 231, 253, 265 Riebeeck, Jan van 52n74, 84 Risikdas 116, 165 Roe, Sir Thomas 46, 52–53, 104n22, 113, 121, 134, 146–150, 153, 155–156, 158, 164n86, 172–173, 175–178, 187, 195 Rogerius, Abraham 9 Roques, Georges 112–114, 118 Rotterdam 215 Rubiés, Joan-Pau 9, 48 Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) 182n43 Ruoss, Andrew 16, 18n58 Russell, John 163 Russia 55, 194 Rustamji Manakji 189

Pacific, the 47 Pagden, Anthony 50n63 Palmer, Thomas 50, 59, 82–83 Parekh, Bhimji 115–116, 118 Parekh, Kalyandas 115 Parekh, Kishandas 116 Parekh, Mohandas 116 Parekh, Tapidas 110–111, 115 Parekh, Tulsidas 115 Parekh, Vanmalidas 115 Paroan, Gregorio 238 Patani 43 Patna 173, 188, 190 Paviljoen, Antonio 247 Pelgrom, Gerardo 129, 166, 195 Pelsaert, Francisco 56, 57n101, 85, 136, 259 Persia 23n73, 68, 89, 90n75, 117, 131, 158n58, 178, 181, 202, 205 Persian Gulf 100 Petapoli 242 Philippines 82 Pieters, Sophia 229–230 Pietersen, Jan 123 Pijl, Laurens 88, 245, 248–249, 251n145, 252 Pires, Tomé 68 Pit, Laurens 166

Qazi Ibrahim 130 Quast, Mathijs 84

Sa’dullah Khan 154, 186 Safi Khan 113, 125 Said, Edward 5 Saif Khan 126n36 Salbank, Joseph 113 Sangram Singh II (r. 1710–1734) 183–185 São Tomé (Mylapore) 210, 232 Sarhad, Khwaja Israel 173 Schmidt, Benjamin 18n57

314 Schouten, Joost 80 Schreuder, Jan 246 Schrikker, Alicia 21, 263 Schwarz, Stuart B. 10 Scott, Edmund 42, 59, 70 Shah Abbas II 155, 158n58, 181 Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1657) 102, 114, 128–129, 137, 146, 154, 160–161, 177n18, 178, 180–183, 195 See also Khurram (Prince) Shah Shuja 186 Shah Sultan Husayn 181 Shaista Khan 156, 162, 187 Sharpeigh, Alexander 73 Shivaji Bhonsle I 157, 192 Siam 80 Sierra Leone 62 Simons, Joan 219, 249 Sindh 23, 125 Smyth, Thomas 242 Sood, Gagan 165 South Africa 35, 202 South Asia Europeans in 20 Dutch and English approaches to encounters in 28, 39 racial classification in 63, 235 religious classification in 64, 67 custom of khil’at in 152 gift-giving in 189, 192 VOC settlements in 226 mixed marriages in 232 this book’s focus on 3, 23 Company writing about 14, 28, 39, 52, 58, 64, 85, 87, 114, 259 the East India Companies in 18, 22–24, 26, 28, 32, 192, 201, 254, 258 South China Sea 22 Southeast Asia 23, 39, 63n129, 100, 102, 129, 178, 182, 189, 226, 257 Sri Lanka 12, 30n90, 201–202 See also Ceylon Sriranga III 179 Standish, Ralph 45, 51 Stern, Philip J. 18 Stoler, Ann Laura 20, 31 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 9, 12, 120 Sumatra 40, 178, 202 Surat arrival of the Hector in 99

Index attack on a caravan travelling to 125 brokerage relations in 107, 110, 115–118 ceremonial gifts presented to Dutch directeur in 154 ceremonial gifts presented to English President in 157, 186 ceremonial reception of VOC ambassador in 161 Christian community in 20, 92, 124 commercial interactions in 101, 106–107, 110–113, 115, 131, 204 Company writing about 55–56, 58, 64, 66, 98, 102, 107, 110–113, 117–118, 121–122, 136, 139, 177, 195, 254, 267 diplomatic gifts sent from 193 Dutch factory in 13, 55, 102–104, 107, 113, 115–116, 123–124, 128–129, 131, 133, 136–137, 165–166, 193, 195 EIC correspondence from 25, 30, 74, 157, 202–203, 206, 210, 234 English cemetery at 135 English factory in 25, 39n15, 45, 73–74, 90, 101–102, 104, 113, 117–118, 122, 124–127, 129, 135, 138–139, 176–177 English–Portuguese conflict outside 101 European piracy against ships from 127 European travel accounts about 64, 118, 133–134 gift goods transported to 178 local diplomacy in 164–166 merchant community of 100, 124, 126, 128–132, 138, 189n69 mimicking of local elites by Company agents in 133–134 Mughal authorities in 13, 56, 105, 109–110, 124–130, 137–139, 191, 256 Mughal port city of 13n42, 28, 99–100, 104 Mughal–European disputes in 28, 31, 118, 121–130, 139, 254–256 plunder of Dutch factory in 128–129 population of 58, 100n6 robe of honour presented to Mughal governor of 161 Shivaji’s sack of 157 social interactions in 136–138, 161 view of 99 VOC blockade of 128, 254 VOC correspondence from 89 William Norris’ audience tent outside 188

Index Surman, John 146, 168, 173, 181, 190, 196 Suvali (Swally) 99 Swan, Claudia 181 Sweers, Salomon 89 Sztompka, Piotr 29n87 Tack, Joan 128, 154, 168, 180, 183, 186 Taiwan 202 Tasman, Abel 47, 50, 84 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 70, 118, 156–157 Teltscher, Kate 147 Terry, Edward 134, 161, 164n87 The Hague 89–90, 182n43 Thijssen, Jan 85, 222 Tracy, James D. 13, 44n34, 56, 260 Travers, Robert 262 Trincomalee 213 Trivellato, Francesca 109 Truschke, Audrey 148 Twist, Johan van 57, 80, 100, 112, 260 Udaipur 183–185 United Provinces 15, 136 See also Dutch Republic, Netherlands (the) Vadodara (Baroda) 85, 102 Valensi, Lucette 54 Valentyn, François 260, 265 Valignano, Alessandro 61–62, 268 Veevers, David 202, 210n42 Verburgh, Jacob 162 Verburgh, Nicolaes 183 Versteghen, Willem 225n15 Viallé, Cynthia 181n36 Vijayanagara Empire 24, 55, 81, 179n28, 204–205 Vink, Markus 11–12 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the and brokerage relations 28, 115–117 and Ceylonese elephants 179–180 and colonial rule in Ceylon 24, 30–31, 139, 197, 213–215, 218–220, 222, 224, 229–231, 237, 243–253, 257 and colonialism 3, 17–18, 24–25, 30–31, 75, 201, 203, 215, 217, 220–222, 224–226, 231, 252–253, 257–258, 261–264, 266 and conformity with local norms  133–134

315 and dialogues with the EIC 91 and diplomacy 29, 104, 127–129, 132, 143–144, 146, 148–150, 154, 158–160, 162, 165–168, 172, 174–175, 183, 185, 196–197, 256 and disputes with Mughal authorities 28, 107, 120, 122–123, 127–130, 137, 254–255 and Dutch migration to Asia 224 and early modern ethnography 3, 7–8, 21, 27–28, 31, 39, 55, 78, 81–82, 236, 255, 268 and forced labour 245 and fortification 101, 204 and freighting Indian-owned goods 131 and gift-giving 158, 173–175, 177–182, 185, 191, 193–195 and integration into Indian political structures 202 and knowledge production 7 and lack of power vis–à–vis the Mughal Empire 136 and mestization 221–222, 226, 229–231, 236, 253, 266 and Mughal interaction ritual 186, 194, 196 and parallels with the EIC 2, 7, 16–17, 23, 25, 91–92, 253, 255, 261 and parallels with the Estado da Índia 61–62, 225, 261 and petitioning 163 and Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge 1, 58 and racialisation 230–231, 236, 266–268 and siege mentality 203 and spatial segregation 218–219 and the founding of Batavia 75, 87, 216 and trans-imperial elite sociability 132 and trans-oceanic networks of exchange 178 and trust 27, 97, 109, 111–112, 139, 217–218, 256, 260–261 and visual ethnography 11n31, 81, 82n52 and women of Asian descent 226, 229–230 approaches to cross-cultural contact of 2–5, 14, 20, 26–28, 32, 43, 93, 97, 99, 132–133, 136–137, 139, 254–256 Asian rarities gifted by 183

316 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the (cont.) convoying of Gujarati shipping by 105, 127 corporate culture of 15 cultural perspective on 4 ethnographic discourses of 2–5, 9–14, 17, 19–21, 27, 32, 36, 39, 41, 43, 53, 56, 64, 66–70, 79–81, 93, 97, 122, 139, 192–193, 221, 226, 231, 247–249, 253–256, 259–261, 263–265, 268 founding of 4, 35 founding of the Cape colony by 52 historiography on 5–6, 8, 15n47, 17n54, 25, 98n2, 109, 201 horses supplied by 179 in South Asia 18, 22–24, 26, 28–29, 32, 97, 100–102, 104, 114, 254, 258 in Surat 55–56, 101–106, 112, 128 in the Indian Ocean world 1, 25 incorporation into the Mughal imperial framework of 29, 105 institutional writing practices of 2, 8–9, 15–16, 19–21, 27–28, 36–39, 43, 63, 70–73, 75, 78–84, 86–89, 92–93, 259, 263 instructions issued by 43–44, 47, 59, 75–77 management of 12, 15, 17, 75, 90 marginalisation of women in the archives of 10n27 maritime passes policy of 128, 130

Index mimicking of local elites by agents of 133–134, 168–170 relations with Kandy of 24, 31, 197, 213–214, 220 reliance on Ceylonese elites of 244, 248–249, 252 rivalry with the EIC of 16–17, 23 use of maritime force by 27–28, 101, 119–120, 122–123, 130 Virginia 30 Virji Das 170 Virji Vora 126n36, 131–132 Volger, Willem 193, 254n2 Watson, I. Bruce 120n3 Waymouth, George 73 Weldon, George 130 Weylandt, Cornelis 180 William III (r. 1689–1702) 187–188 Wilson, Kathleen 226 Winter, Edward 232, 235, 242 Worms, Johann Gottlieb 181 Yale, Elihu 160, 239 Yemen 58 Zeeland 15, 91n83 Ziyauddin Khan 173, 187 Zulfiqar Khan 160 Zwaardecroon, Hendrick 88, 116, 164–165, 248–252, 267