Exploring the Dutch Empire

Agents, Networks and Institutions, 1600-2000

Catia Antunes, Jos Gommans

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781474236447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

In 1602, the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands chartered the first commercial company, the Dutch East India Company, and, in so doing, initiated a new wave of globalization. Even though Dutch engagement in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans dates back to the 16th century, it was the dawn of the 17th century that brought the Dutch into the fold of the general movement of European expansion overseas and concomitant globalization. This volume surveys the Dutch participation in, and contribution to, the process of globalization. At the same time, it reassesses the various ways Dutchmen fashioned themselves following the encounter and in the light of increasing dialogue with other societies across the world. As such, Exploring the Dutch Empire offers a new insight into the macro and micro worlds of the global Dutchman in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The result fills a gap in the historiography on empire and globalization, which has previously been dominated by British and, to a lesser extent, French and Spanish cases.

PART ONE

Agents

CHAPTER ONE

South Asian Cosmopolitanism and the Dutch Microcosms in Seventeenth-Century Cochin (Kerala)1

Jos Gommans

For if a universalist secular ethic is indeed superior on rational grounds to other moralities, this means there must be multiple intellectual and cultural sources of such ideas whether European, Asian, American, or African.

JONATHAN ISRAEL²

The belief that we are destined to live in a universal civilization is a commonplace in societies shaped by Enlightenment thinking. Yet it has scant support in history. In truth, it is not a result of historical inquiry, but rather the product of a discredited philosophy of history.

JOHN GRAY³

Introduction

In the past two or three decades there has been a growing public and academic debate about the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism. After 9/11, this debate gained a new sense of urgency. Even historians could not stay aloof and some of them felt the need to tackle the now burning issue of the historical antecedents and alternatives to what seemed to be(come) a devastating clash of civilizations. Who or what was to blame for this sudden polarization? Was it really brand new or was this just the most recent eruption of a much older but sadly neglected religious conflict? The issue of cosmopolitanism seems to be the latest avatar of a much older discussion about the meaning of the Enlightenment. Since the advent of the Enlightenment, three basic questions crop up all the time: is there just one Enlightenment? Is there just one trajectory leading to it? Is it a blessing or a curse to humanity?⁴ With the risk of losing nuance, I would suggest that most postcolonial and postmodernist scholars – very much in line with the slightly older penchant of the Frankfurt School – would be inclined to see present-day fundamentalism and communal conflict as an unintended Frankenstein created by European Enlightenment. Hence, from their point of view, we should not try to save this so-called Enlightenment by strengthening it, but we should instead get rid of it and look for inspiration from some more open and more tolerant pre-Enlightened societies within or beyond the borders of its supposedly European cradle.

Meanwhile, in the background of this grand debate, some historians rediscovered cosmopolitanism as an antidote to the rising tide of fundamentalism. Fortunately, a growing number of both defenders and detractors of the Enlightenment recognized the need to historicize cosmopolitanism as the neglected backbone of conviviality and tolerance. One of the most persuasive representatives of this group is the American historian Margaret Jacob, who just recently studied the emergence of cosmopolitanism in early modern Europe. For Jacob, to be cosmopolitan means the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds and colours with pleasure, curiosity and interest, and not with suspicion, disdain or simply a disinterest that could occasionally turn into loathing. In tracing the origins of this ‘benign posture’, she looks to various social practices in early modern Europe, but particularly those pertaining to science, trade and freemasonry. For Jacob, the city was the natural habitat of the cosmopolitan – and since she only discusses the West, we could perhaps add the adjective ‘European’ to the statement.⁵ An equally articulate argument that Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism go together and should be seen as Western phenomena is offered by the British historian Jonathan Israel. Although Israel does not use the label of cosmopolitanism, it comes very near to what he defines as ‘comprehensive toleration’, which is an integral aspect of what he calls the Radical Enlightenment. Israel convincingly argues that although it is a universal phenomenon, it has a specific European trajectory with, interestingly, the Dutch Republic as its earliest epicentre. Although he stresses its European genesis and turns a blind eye to the non-Western contributions to the latter, he accepts that there is no reason why we should search only in Western philosophical traditions to find its intellectual roots.⁶ This is an important desideratum to which I will return later.

Whereas Israel focuses on the history of ideas, another British historian, Harold Cook, has similarly stressed the importance of the Dutch Republic in the making of modern science. Although his work does not specifically deal with the issue of cosmopolitanism, it implicitly proposes that modern science could only emerge under the unique conditions of global trade as it converged in the highly cosmopolitan Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. By neatly following in the footsteps of the Dutch polymath Casparus Barlaeus (1584–1648), Cook aims to demonstrate that knowledge (sapienta) and commerce (mercatura) are closely intertwined activities that spring from the same mental category. According to Cook, ‘to gain their true ends, both the sage and the merchant had to act according to the dictates of natural virtue: to moderate their desires, to cultivate honest conduct in all things, and to value all matters in helping them to their ends’.⁷ More than Israel and most other Enlightenment historians, Cook is highly sensitive to the way the Republic’s cosmopolitanism grew out of its intensified confrontation with the wisdom and the commodities of other non-Western societies. More so than Jacob, both Cook and Israel argue that much of the modern world that we know today originates from the highly cosmopolitan Dutch Republic and, as an offshoot of this, that the latter imposed a significant cosmopolitizing impact on their overseas colonies, in particular on their Atlantic colonies. Lately, this second aspect has been (perhaps a bit too) enthusiastically embraced by the American journalist Russell Shorto, who claims that the American idea of universal civil rights actually has Dutch roots although, in his test case, the ‘magic touch’ occurred somewhat earlier and more directly at a time when New York was still New Amsterdam.⁸ Although all these historians seem to agree on the manifold blessings that Dutch cosmopolitanism brought to at least part of the Atlantic world, they are also very much aware that through slavery and the slave trade these same Dutchmen also played a far more sinister role in global history. Obviously this paradox is grist to the mills of those who are more sceptical about the fruits of European Enlightenment and for whom the contrast is hardly a surprise.

An influential sceptic is the American philosopher Stephen Toulmin. He feels that something went terribly wrong after the Renaissance. Toulmin is referring to the seventeenth-century dawn of modernity, this ‘inexhaustible cornucopia of novelty’ as he calls it, with new ways of thinking about nature and society. This involved a transition from a more relativistic humanism à la Montaigne to a more radical enlightenment à la Descartes. The latter view accepts matters of universal, timeless theory as being entitled to an exclusive place in the agenda of philosophy. So respect for complexity and plurality (we read cosmopolitanism) – the local, the oral, the particular and the timely – gave way to abstract, timeless, universal theory, divorced from concrete problems. According to Toulmin, this paradigm shift was actually a reflection of the European crisis of religious persecution or, as the leading Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has it, ‘it was the peculiarly violent wreckage of pre-modernity in the West that produced its modernity’.⁹ In other words, at a time when no one else saw anything to do but continue fighting an interminable war, intellectuals were reasoning their way out of political and theological chaos. By 1620 people in political power and theological authority in Europe no longer saw Montaigne’s pluralism as a viable intellectual option: scepticism (we read cosmopolitanism’s cultural relativism) had become unacceptable, certainty was more urgent now.¹⁰

Interestingly, Toulmin’s argument ties in well with the debate on Orientalism in which scholars have questioned the almost timeless context of Edward Said’s approach by looking for some meaningful historical breaks. For example, the well-known German historian Jürgen Osterhammel observes an almost Toulminian shift from an open-minded to a more systematic, orientalist perception of Asia as the essential other. Not surprisingly, for Osterhammel, all this occurs slightly later at the dawn of real colonial domination in the nineteenth century.¹¹ Indeed, in arguments like this, not so much Enlightenment but colonialism is to blame for what seems to be a growing epistemological and ethical divergence between not only the past and the present, but also the East and the West.

With the discussion about Enlightenment raging on, there has been a discussion about the inception and the meaning of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’. Although it was used a bit earlier, it is only in the eighteenth century that being cosmopolitan becomes one of the professed ideals of the Enlightenment. This happens at a time when, in the context of emerging nationalism, it is also increasingly used in a defensive mood. This is particularly true for European communities that lived abroad and necessarily had to interact with other religious and ethnic communities.¹² For someone like Toulmin, by the time cosmopolitanism was turned into an ideal of the Enlightenment, it had already ceased to be social practice.

Interestingly, several historians of South Asia have recently reiterated a similar argument, but by giving it a spatial dimension. Along with Toulmin, they generally agree that cosmopolitanism is not some known entity existing in the world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant, something that simply awaits more detailed description at the hands of scholarship. These authors, aiming at ‘provincializing’ Europe, seek cosmopolitan genealogies from the non-European world by simply exploring how people have thought and acted beyond the local. For them, this particular modernity – as a product of European Enlightenment – duplicitously undermines true cosmopolitanism, because it seeks to separate and purify realms. So we should do without modernity. Though we may not always have known it, we already are and have always been cosmopolitan. It is the task of the historian to explore these cosmopolitan practices beyond the Western genealogy of the Enlightenment.¹³ Following this line of reasoning we should seek cosmopolitanism as a social practice b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Agents
• Part Two Networks
• Part Three Institutions
• Conclusion: Globalizing Empire: The Dutch Case
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright