Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760-1830

321 Pages·2013·1.15 MB·English

by  Peter Boomgaard

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Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in
Comparative Global Perspective, 1760–1830
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Empire and Science in the Making
Dutch Colonial Scholarship in
Comparative Global Perspective,
1760–1830
Edited by
Peter Boomgaard
EMPIRE AND SCIENCE IN THE MAKING
Copyright © Peter Boomgaard, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
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ISBN: 978–1–137–33401–5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Empire and science in the making : Dutch colonial scholarship
in comparative global perspective, 1760–1830 / edited by Peter
Boomgaard.
pages cm.—(Palgrave studies in the history of science and technology)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–1–137–33401–5 (hardback : alkaline paper)
1. Science—Netherlands—Colonies—History—18th century.
2. Science—Netherlands—Colonies—History—19th century. 3. Learning
and scholarship—Netherlands—Colonies—History—18th century.
4. Learning and scholarship—Netherlands—Colonies—History—
19th century. 5. Imperialism—Social aspects—History—18th century.
6. Imperialism—Social aspects—History—19th century. 7. Netherlands—
Colonies—Intellectual life. 8. Great Britain—Colonies—Intellectual life.
9. Spain—Colonies—Intellectual life. 10. Russia—Colonies—Intellectual
life. I. Boomgaard, P., 1946–
Q127.N2E56 2013
509.171(cid:2)249209033—dc23 2013035038
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to my wife, Raquel Reyes, and my children,
Pim, Ga ï a, and Cosmo
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Contents
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments x iii
Introduction
From the Mundane to the Sublime: Science, Empire, and
the Enlightenment (1760s–1820s) 1
Peter Boomgaard
Chapter 1
Science and the Colonial War-State: British India, 1790–1820 39
David Arnold
Chapter 2
Collecting and the Pursuit of Scientific Accuracy:
The Malaspina Expedition in the Philippines, 1792 63
Raquel A. G. Reyes
Chapter 3
Empire without Science? The Dutch Scholarly World and
Colonial Science around 1800 89
Klaas van Berkel
Chapter 4
Why Was There No Javanese Galileo? 109
Gerry van Klinken
Chapter 5
For the Common Good: Dutch Institutions and Western
Scholarship on Indonesia around 1800 135
Peter Boomgaard
Chapter 6
“A Religion That Is Extremely Easy and Unusually Light to
Take On”: Dutch and English Knowledge of Islam in
Southeast Asia, ca. 1595–1811 165
Michael Laffan
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 7
A Moral Obligation of the Nation-State: Archaeology and
Regime Change in Java and the Netherlands in the
Early Nineteenth Century 185
Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff
Chapter 8
Meeting Point Deshima: Scholarly Communication
between Japan and Europe up till around 1800 207
Peter Rietbergen
Chapter 9
Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Dutch Cape Colony at
the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: D e Kaffers aan
de Zuidkust van Afrika (1810) by Ludwig Alberti 231
Siegfried Huigen
Chapter 10
Intellectual Wastelands? Scholarship in and for the Dutch
West Indies up to ca. 1800 253
Gert Oostindie
Index 281
Contributors
David Arnold is emeritus professor of History at the University of
Warwick, UK, having previously taught at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, London. A founder member of the Subaltern Studies
group, he has written on the history of disease and medicine in colo-
nial India, on crime and policing, environmental history, and the his-
tory of science. His published work include Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993),
Gandhi (2001), and Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of
India’s Modernity’ (2013).
Klaas van Berkel is Rudolf Agricola professor of History at the
University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has published books
on the history of science and the universities in the Netherlands and
its colonies from 1500 to the present, including a two-volume his-
tory of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008–
2011). His most recent book is Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion:
Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (2013).
Marieke Bloembergen (PhD University of Amsterdam, 2001) is a
cultural historian specialized in Dutch and Indonesian colonial and
postcolonial history. She works as senior researcher at the Royal
Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in
Leiden (KITLV). As a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University,
she completed a monograph on policing and perceptions of security
in the Dutch East Indies (published in 2009, Indonesian translation
in 2011). Currently she is finishing, together with Martijn Eickhoff,
a research project on archaeology and heritage formation in colo-
nial and postcolonial Indonesia, in the context of the NWO-funded
research project “Sites, Bodies and Stories.”
Peter Boomgaard is senior researcher at KITLV, Leiden, professor
(emeritus) of History, University of Amsterdam, and, during 2012/13,
fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich. Among his sole-authored
books are Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World,
1600–1950 (2001), and Southeast Asia: An Environmental History