IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB912163578

Debating Natural Law in the Banda Islands: A Case Study in Anglo–Dutch Imperial Competition in the East Indies, 1609–1621 (2016)

Martine Julia van Ittersum (Author)

History of European Ideas
Volume: 42
Issue: 4
Pages: 459-501

DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2015.1101216

URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1101216

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

This article examines Anglo–Dutch rivalry in the Banda Islands in the period from 1609 to 1621, with a particular focus on the process of claiming initiated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and English East India Company (EIC). Historians have paid little attention to the precise legal justifications employed by these organisations, and how they affected the outcome of events. For both companies, treaties with Asian rulers and peoples were essential in staking out claims to trade and territory. Because so many different parties were involved, individual documents had to serve multiple purposes, both on the ground in the East Indies and at the negotiating tables back in Europe. Whenever a VOC or EIC official presented a treaty to a Bandanese leader, he had to recognise local power structures in the Spice Islands, but also needed to consider his European competitors in the area, his superiors in Batavia or Bantam, and the company directors back in Amsterdam or London. Consequently, the safest and most reliable course of action was to make as many arguments as possible, piling them on top of one another. The result was an inherently messy process of claiming, yet one that was also clearly intelligible to most parties involved, including Asian rulers and peoples. A constantly changing legal suite extended to freedom of trade and navigation, contracts and alliances with native peoples, just war, conquest, actual possession, and the (perceived) surrender of native sovereignty to European authorities.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB912163578/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Anna Winterbottom; (2016)
Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (/isis/citation/CBB551587576/)

Article Ertsen, M. W.; (2007)
Irrigation Design in the Netherlands East Indies (/isis/citation/CBB001180594/)

Book Ertsen, Maurits; (2010)
Locales of happiness: Colonial irrigation in the Netherlands East Indies and its remains, 1830--1980 (/isis/citation/CBB001180584/)

Thesis Moon, Suzanne M.; (2000)
Constructing “Native development”: Technological change and the politics of colonization in the Netherlands East Indies, 1905--1930 (Indonesia) (/isis/citation/CBB001562686/)

Book Robert-Jan Wille; (2019)
Mannen van de microscoop: De laboratoriumbiologie op veldtocht in Nederland en Indië, 1840-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB335385064/)

Article Pyenson, Lewis; (2011)
The Enlightened Image of Nature in the Dutch East Indies: Consequences of Postmodernist Doctrine for Broad Structures and Intimate Life (/isis/citation/CBB001022672/)

Article Martin Hugh Fitzpatrick; (2016)
From Natural Law to Natural Rights? Protestant Dissent and Toleration in the Late Eighteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB233484914/)

Book Christine Petto; (2015)
Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production (/isis/citation/CBB153352848/)

Chapter Penman, Leigh T. I.; (2011)
The Wicked and the Fair: Changing Perceptions of Terra Australis through the Prism of the Batavia Shipreck (1629) (/isis/citation/CBB001201516/)

Article Kinukawa, Tomomi; (2013)
Learned vs. Commercial? The Commodification of Nature in Early Modern Natural History Specimen Exchanges in England, Germany, and the Netherlands (/isis/citation/CBB001320518/)

Article Boomgaard, Peter; (2008)
Technologies of a Trading Empire: Dutch Introduction of Water- and Windmills in Early-Modern Asia, 1650s--1800 (/isis/citation/CBB000850073/)

Chapter Matteo Revolti; (2015)
Dallo stomaco al cervello: l’ipocondria in Bernard Mandeville (/isis/citation/CBB347995325/)

Book Stedall, Jacqueline A.; (2011)
From Cardano's Great Art to Lagrange's Reflections: Filing a Gap in the History of Algebra (/isis/citation/CBB001321014/)

Article Degroot, Dagomar; (2014)
“Never Such Weather Known in These Seas”: Climatic Fluctuations and the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 1652--1674 (/isis/citation/CBB001421410/)

Chapter Jorink, Eric; (2012)
In the Twilight Zone: Isaac Vossius and the Scientific Communities in France, England and the Dutch Republic (/isis/citation/CBB001200297/)

Chapter Caroline O. Fowler; ()
7. The Point and Its Line: An Early Modern History of Movement (/isis/citation/CBB005997448/)

Article Ian Hunter; (2013)
The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in ‘Enlightenment’ Natural Law: Pufendorf and Vattel (/isis/citation/CBB579257393/)

Article Christian Maurer; (2016)
Archibald Campbell and the Committee for Purity of Doctrine on Natural Reason, Natural Religion, and Revelation (/isis/citation/CBB162756479/)

Thesis Meghan Daly Costa; (2017)
Early Modern Knowledge Problems: Race and Epistemology in the Seventeenth-Century English Imagination (/isis/citation/CBB201527757/)

Article Vogel, Brant; (2011)
The Letter from Dublin: Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001034576/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}