Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World

Anna Winterbottom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137380203
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new interpretation of the development of the English East India Company between 1660 and 1720. The book explores the connections between scholarship, patronage, diplomacy, trade, and colonial settlement in the early modern world. Links of patronage between cosmopolitan writers and collectors and scholars associated with the Royal Society of London and the universities are investigated. Winterbottom shows how innovative works of scholarship – covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid multi-directional struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The role of non-elite actors including slaves in transferring knowledge and skills between settlements is explored in detail.

1

Curious Collectors and Infamous Interlopers: Samuel Baron and the EIC Settlements in Southeast and East Asia

Introduction

In 1686, Samuel Baron wrote from Fort St George, the Company headquarters in Madras, to Robert Hooke and Robert Hoskins of the Royal Society, enclosing a draft of his Description of the Kingdom of Tonqueen. The manuscript was not published immediately, but appeared in an early-eighteenth-century collection of voyages and is still considered a valuable source of information about early modern Vietnam.¹ Baron informed his correspondents that he would shortly be embarking on a journey to China, from where he would send any ‘curiosities’ worthy of their notice.² Shortly thereafter, Baron left Madras as head of a mission to establish a ‘factory’, or trading post, in Amoy (modern Xiamen). However, on hearing of his appointment, the London Directors wrote to the Governor and Council of Fort St George, ordering them to dismiss Baron, as ‘no servant of ours, but a deserter, the history whereof is too long to tell’.³

In this chapter, I tell the story of Samuel Baron, the son of Dutch and Vietnamese parents who became a ‘naturalised Englishman’. Baron was central to the EIC’s attempts to gain a foothold in the lucrative trade between China and Japan: negotiating their settlement in both Tonkin (Northern Vietnam) and Taiwan and briefly heading the Amoy factory. He also played a key role as a provider of information, not only to the EIC and scholars in England but also in the courts of Southeast Asian rulers. I aim to explore in detail the shaping of the identity of a provider of ‘useful’ information to the EIC and the Royal Society, to examine the formation of national and ethnic identities in the course of contacts between different cultures and to produce a reading of natural histories or geographic and ethnographic ‘descriptions’ that goes beyond ‘Orientalist’ perspectives to consider in detail the circumstances of their production and the ends for which they were intended.

Baron’s lifetime, the second half of the seventeenth century, was a time of transition in Southeast and East Asia. The rise of the Qing dynasty and the period of expansionism that followed saw new territories and ethnic groups integrated into China.⁴ The trade of East Asia in the 1660s centred on the exchange of high-quality silk from China for Japanese silver. The Ming empire’s earlier prohibition of direct trade with Japan had left smaller states and foreign actors – including the European trading companies in Asia – scrabbling for roles as intermediaries.⁵ It also encouraged the diversion of the trade through the entrepôts discussed in this chapter: Taiwan (also called Formosa in this period), Siam (modern Thailand), and modern Vietnam (then divided between Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin-China), as well as the port cities of the Malay Archipelago discussed in Chapter 2.⁶ During the period of Qing expansion, these areas also provided refuge for Ming loyalists, and thus the maritime world became briefly important to the centre of the Chinese empire.⁷ In each place, rulers faced the task of using the interest of foreigners in trade and settlement to their advantage while preventing any one faction from assuming too much power. It was against this background that the EIC, in competition with international rivals, attempted to establish bases in Siam, Tonkin, and Taiwan during the late seventeenth century.

Such experiments in managed multiculturalism meant it was crucial for all these groups of competing traders and rulers to gather information about one another. One way to do so was by amassing collections of foreign ‘novelties’ or ‘curiosities’. These included scientific instruments and weapons: telescopes, watches, burning and perspective glasses, as well as firearms and gunpowder, often sent to Asian rulers by representatives of the European trading companies.⁸ Meanwhile, Chinese compasses and Japanese steelyards (weighing scales) were in demand among the intelligentsia of Europe.⁹ Maps and pictures were also exchanged,¹⁰ as were animals (alive or dead), plant specimens, and drugs.¹¹ More bizarre items were also involved: during the 1680s, King Narai of Siam perplexed the English factors by demanding ‘A Chrystall branch & amorous representations in wax work’,¹² while Hans Sloane later attracted ridicule for his interest in Chinese ear-pickers.¹³ Cook has drawn parallels between the early modern interest in such curiosities and the emerging concept of scientific ‘objectivity’ as a type of knowledge founded on a detailed acquaintance with material objects.¹⁴

The display of exotic objects, and even people, was a means of exhibiting one’s comprehension and command of the world. For example, the Ming official Zheng Zhilong, at one time commander of Amoy and an important mediator with the Dutch, displayed his power with rarities including a collection of Christian objects and a bodyguard of African slaves.¹⁵ The display of the ‘painted prince’ Jeoly or Giolo by William Dampier (1651–1715) validated the latter’s status as a famous buccaneer.¹⁶ Written accounts were another means of exchanging information: many different cultures produced natural histories, ethnographic writing, and maps as a result of voyages of ‘discovery’ in all directions.¹⁷ These descriptions functioned as both justifications and manuals for colonialism and, as such, shared many features across cultures, while at the same time being intended to satisfy particular needs and interests.

To manage these exchanges, which were often crucial to the process of negotiating trade and settlements, people who could mediate between two or more languages and cultural systems were essential. Studies of early modern South Asian states and the colonial powers that displaced them have emphasised that in both, the maintenance of power was dependent on accumulating various types of knowledge through ‘spies, informants and collators of gossip’.¹⁸ Those who could mobilise and deploy such information have been described as ‘brokers’, ‘go-betweens’, or passeurs culturels.¹⁹ They bridged gaps between competing imperial networks of diplomacy and trade as well as between subaltern and elite cosmopolitanism in the early modern world.²⁰ Such people fulfilled a number of roles, being specialists in language, law, navigation, mapping territory, explaining the manners and customs of foreign peoples, or collecting medicinal plants. They often worked in several of these fields and are difficult to define because they cannot be assigned to any fixed social group: indeed, their roles depended on their insight into other worlds, either by changing allegiances or by prolonged contact with another group.²¹ In the process of mediating between different systems of knowledge, such go-betweens created new form of knowledge.²²

Bénat Tachot and Serge Gruzinski’s term ‘passeurs culturels’ is expressive of the mixing and moulding of personal identities.²³ This brings us close to Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of ‘self-fashioning’, drawn from his reframing of Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 thesis concerning the rise of individualism in the European Renaissance. Greenblatt describes the ‘self-fashioning’ of writers as an ‘artful process’, suggestive of ‘hypocrisy or deception’.²⁴ In many ways, this description recalls the common depictions of interpreters or go-betweens as duplicitous individuals, expert in crafting their identities for their political or social ends. Indeed, in his later work, Greenblatt describes the cultural go-between, who managed encounters in the course of travel and colonial conquest, as the ultimate creator of selves: one ‘who passes from one representational form to another, who mediates between systems, who inhabits the inbetween’.²⁵ Anthony Pagden relates Greenblatt’s thesis to other developments in the early modern world by arguing that encounters with lands and peoples that could not be explained with reference to traditional authorities forced the creation of new personal identities.²⁶ The same might be said of the encounter with unfamiliar aspects of the natural world that took place in the same period. Although he does not use the term ‘self-fashioning’ and while his emphasis is on the creation of truth as opposed to fantasy, Shapin employs a similar approach to Greenblatt in understanding how Robert Boyle’s crafting of his personal identity interacted with his claims to present credible information in the realm of natural philosophy.²⁷

Despite recent scholarly interest in the go-between, there have been few detailed studies of the self-fashioning of early modern intermediaries of non-European origin. One exception is Natalie Zemon Davis’ account of al-Hasan al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus), which explores how the author of Description of Africa negotiated his Muslim and Christian identities, using the idea of the ‘trickster’ to reveal the ambiguities and double meanings of his work.²⁸ Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s case studies of three early modern ‘aliens’ emphasise the ‘friction and discomfort’ involved in traversing cultural identities. The role of mixed-race people in the history of early modern Asia has been particularly neglected,²⁹ especially in comparison to the extensive literature on métissage in the American context.³⁰ However, as an investigation of Baron’s life will reveal, these people were in an ideal position to span cultures. Métissage was multi-directional. As well as the importance of Eurasians like Baron in both the settlements of European companies and the courts of Asian rulers,³¹ contemporaries like Zheng Chenggong (1624– 1662, known as Coxinga or Koxinga to the Europeans), Zheng Zhilong’s son by his Japanese consort, who bridged Asian cultures were also vital to intercultural contacts.

Focusing on people who spanned cultures can highlight connections as well as disjunctures between the techniques of gathering and using knowledge in different cultures in this period. Using the framework of one man’s life to explore the wider history of imperial expansion and conflict in this period can allow us to move beyond narratives focusing on particular nations and their ideologies towards a picture of the connections between the underlying concerns and practices of different competing actors in this period of increasing global contact.³² Investigating the lines of communication established by the particular connections and spaces of exchange created by go-betweens can also demonstrate the fragility and contingency of both colonial expansion and scientific knowledge.³³ The biographical investigation that follows emphasises both the importance of individual circumstance in determining the connections and misunderstandings that emerged from the multidirectional contacts of this period and to illustrate commonalities in ways of representing oneself and others across national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries.

Self-fashioning I: Becoming English

Baron’s background is obscure, partly, I will suggest, a result of his own efforts to mould his ethnic and personal identity. Previous accounts almost all mistake his origins, and none give an account of his life after despatching his account of Tonkin to Hooke and Hoskins. Salomon Baron, as his name is given in early records, was born in the mid-1640s in the capital of Tonkin: then called Thâng Long and popularly known as Ke Cho (Chachao or Cacho in European documents), now Hanoi.

Tonkin had been a Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transcription and Transliteration
• Introduction: Patronage and the Politics of Knowledge
• 1. Curious Collectors and Infamous Interlopers: Samuel Baron and the EIC Settlements in Southeast and East Asia
• 2. Linguistic Landscapes: Early English Studies of Malay and the EIC in Maritime Southeast Asia
• 3. Toleration and Translation: English Versions of Two Hindu Texts from Bengal
• 4. Botanical and Medical Networks: Madras through the Collections of Two EIC Surgeons
• 5. Bio-Prospecting and Experimentation: Producing and Using An Historical Relation of Ceylon
• 6. Transportation and Transplantation: Slave Knowledge and Company Plantations
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index