This book deals with the origins of the present-day National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and covers the period from 1816 to 1883.

With the foundation of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague in 1816, a transformation took place from mainly private collections to national state-owned collections. The founding of the Royal Cabinet was one of the first attempts to create something like a National Museum. This book traces the purposes and motives of private collecting and the emergence of cabinets of curiosities, the composition of the collections, and the move towards a National Museum. At the time of its establishment, the Royal Cabinet of Rarities consisted of a bequest of mainly Chinese objects, objects from the Royal House, and objects concerning the national history of the Netherlands. However, the first director of this Royal Cabinet, R.P. van de Kasteele, actively stimulated civil servants and travellers to collect for the cabinet and before long, the focus moved to Japan. Through the VOC settlement at Deshima, VOC officials had a unique access to things Japanese. The three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century were Jan Cock Blomhoff, Johannes van Overmeer Fisscher, and Philip Franz Von Siebold.

Von Siebold established himself and his private collection in Leiden in 1832. This collection was considered a branch of the cabinet in The Hague, initially known as Rijks Japansch Museum Von Siebold. Conrad Leemans, then director of the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities), took over the management from Von Siebold in 1859. In 1864, the name changed to Rijks Ethnographisch Museum (National Museum of Ethnography). Leemans concentrated on the Netherlands East Indies, present-day Indonesia. His successor, Serrurier, who took over in 1880, was the first director with an ethnological background. Meanwhile, The Royal Cabinet in The Hague was popular with the public until its closure in 1883 when the ethnographic collections were finally united in Leiden, and where they still form the basis of the National Museum of Ethnology.

 

Rudolf Effert studied Cultural Anthropology in Leiden and obtained his Ph.D. in 2003. His research concerns the history of Dutch Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on which he has published several monographs and articles, including Vol. 7 in the CNWS Publications Series. This book is based on extensive research in the archives of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities. In this book, Effert proposes new perspectives on the relationship between the three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century and he argues that the scholarly contributions of two of them, Cock Blomhoff and Overmeer Fisscher, have been seriously underestimated.

(In English, 340 pp. ill., incl. index, bibl. and annexes)

Technology and Ethical Idealism investigates a pivotal intellectual and political moment in twentieth-century Indonesian history, the establishment of “development” as both an ideal and a practice. The focus of this study is on technological development as a central concern of colonial political life from 1900 to 1942 in the Netherlands East Indies. The foundations of developmentalist thinking and practice in the turn-of-the-century colonial reforms were called the Ethical policies. Tracing the interplay of Ethical politics at the highest levels of the Netherlands Indies colonial government with the technical practices of development taking place in the fields of ordinary Javanese farmers, it shows how and why technological development became such an enduring part of political and material life in the archipelago.

  This study offers a new history of the Ethical policies that focuses on their often-neglected technopolitical character, and the formative influence they exercised on development thinking in Indonesia among both Dutch experts and members of the community of Indonesian activists known as the pergerakan. In startling contrast with many histories of development, it shows how the interaction of colonial idealism and scientific practice led the Dutch to commit to small-scale change in their “development of the native peoples.” As experts tailored technical solutions to ecological, social, and economic conditions of local areas, they eschewed high modernism in their search for colonial moderni-zation, unexpectedly prefiguring the appropriate technology movements that arose decades later. Based on extensive research in the colonial archives in The Hague, the National Library in Jakarta, and the Bogor Library of Biology and Agriculture, this study draws on official documents and scientific research of the era, as well as public discussions in both Dutch and Indonesian language newspapers and journals in order to capture not just the official plans, but also a wide range of public critiques and responses to development, and the day-to-day practices that shaped the productive lives of ordinary farmers. Offering a new exploration of politics and technology in colonial Indonesia, this book will interest historians of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, historians of technology, and those seeking to understand the complex colonial roots of international development.

(In English, 186 pp. ill., incl. bibliogr. and index)

The IIAS Newsletter (Autumn 2008) has published a review of this book. You can read it here.

About the author

Suzanne Moon is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, where she also studied in the Southeast Asia Program.

For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago.
Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee - and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 85% of the total turnover.
This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the merchants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

(In English, 474 pp. ill., incl. tables, notes, bibliogr. and index)

Prior to her present position as secretary-general of the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, Els M. Jacobs (PhD. Leiden 2000) taught maritime and Dutch national history at Leiden University for almost twenty years. As guest curator at the maritime museums in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, she has been in charge of several major projects, including the National Anniversary Exhibition The Colourful World of the VOC 1602-2002, as well as a well received television series on the history of the VOC for Teleac/NOT, the Dutch educational broadcasting company. Among her earlier works is In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company (1991). Merchant in Asia was published in Dutch in 2000 as Koopman in Azië.

The rivalry between the Dutch and Portuguese in Asia is one of the classic themes of the early history of European expansion overseas. Yet it is often forgotten that until the end of the sixteenth century the seafarers and traders of Portugal and The Netherlands were the best of friends and close trading partners in Europe. This collection of essays seeks to explain the abrupt change in the relationship by analyzing the European interaction with the maritime world of Monsoon Asia. Portuguese as well as Dutch interests, political, commercial and personal, became closely interwoven with those of the indigenous rulers, merchants and financiers. The final outcome of the conflict in Asia was mainly determined by the different ways in which both parties were able to cope with the intricacies of Asian politics. ‘European Expansion in the Indian Ocean’ was far from a one-sided affair and its history can only be understood in terms of the interaction of both Europeans and Asians involved.

Contributors: Ernst van Veen, Jacques Paviot, Mafalda Soares da Cunha, Walter Rossa, João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, Arie Pos, Francisco Bethencourt, Om Prakash, Pius Malekandathil, Rui Manuel Loureiro, Peter Borschberg, Arend de Roever, René Barendse, Marcus Vink, Cátia Antunes and George Bryan Souza.

(In English, 382 pp. incl. figs. & index)