Abstract
Guido van Meersbergen, Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 316 pp.
As a scholar who began work in the Dutch Algemeen Rijksarchief (today Nationaal Archief) in the Hague in the early 1980s, my recollection is of being surrounded by historians who were usually mining the massive tomes of the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren for economic data from different parts of the Asian maritime world, be it the Red Sea, Safavid Iran, India, Sri Lanka, Burma or Indonesia. There were two exceptions to this rule: Japanese specialists of rangaku studies, interested in the knowledge interface between the Dutch and the Tokugawas; and some scholars, such as Dhiravat na Pombejra from Thailand, who were intent on using Dutch materials against the grain to analyse the intricate politics of the Ayutthaya kingdom. By the late 1990s, however, this picture had begun to change appreciably. A new generation of scholars, whether based in Asia, the United States or the Netherlands itself, turned away resolutely from the bills-of-lading, shipping lists and tabulation of current prices in various port cities, to examine the convoluted and hybridised prose that the Dutch East India Company’s officials were setting down. Taking a leaf from the book of cultural historians, and even scholars of comparative literature, they turned to such issues as the ‘mode of discourse’ used by the Company and its employees. Two decades later, much water has flowed under that bridge too, and the challenge now lies in saying something new about these discursive themes.
The book under review appears to be the revised version of a doctoral thesis done at University College, London. The author is an up-and-coming Dutch scholar who was apparently ‘trained as a historian of the VOC’ but then progressively widened his interests to take into account the texts and archives of the English East India Company. The end product is a book that moves frequently—and at times disconcertingly—between the two Companies and their materials, over the course of eight rather loosely organised chapters, which are divided into four parts. These parts are entitled (i) Corporate Ethnography; (ii) Accommodation and Conflict; (iii) Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange and (iv) The Birth of Company Settlements. As for the space that is covered, it includes the Mughal empire, parts of southern India and even ventures into Sri Lanka. This means that the archival materials involved potentially run into tens of thousands of pages in the Dutch case alone, with the English Company’s archives prior to 1700 being more modest in dimensions. There is, thus, a real methodological challenge involved in how to deal with this archival ocean and extricate from it, insights on such broad organising themes as ethnography, conflict, diplomacy and settlement.
In the first place, it must be said that the author Meersbergen has done an admirable job in terms of surveying secondary literature. His bibliography is quite thorough and even takes into account relatively minor works that might have been dispensed with. In a similar vein, his knowledge of the published primary sources in both Dutch and English is impressive and will make that section of his bibliography a valuable tool for students. One can imagine that this body of published sources alone would have been adequate for a textual analysis in the tried and tested style of the ‘New Historicists’. It is the presence of archival materials that complicates matters. Despite his extraction of archival titbits and their periodic use, one does not have the impression that Meersbergen has ever chosen to systematically follow a seam of archival materials, whether with regard to an urban space such as Surat, or a Dutch or English embassy, or even an extended conflict like that between the Dutch and the Madurai Nayakas. As the reader is moved ceaselessly from one episode to another, and from one Company factory and employee to another, there is an undeniable urge to slow down and try to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on. Who are these people after all? Can we know more about what lies behind the perceptions of Peter Mundy or Daniel Havart, both of whom make a ‘cameo appearance’ (to use a Hollywood phrase), provide a quote or two, and then promptly disappear? Did all these writers not have differences in terms of their class, education, religious background and family, social and professional networks? Did these not change appreciably over the course of a century, which the neglect of the diachronic dimension serves to obscure?
It is clear that the methodological choices of the author are, thus, behind a process of flattening the materials that are treated. The central conceit is that the ‘encounter’ between these two Companies and a variety of South Asian polities and societies witnessed the production of something termed ‘corporate ethnography’. Though introduced early on in the book, this concept is never defined properly. At one stage, it is suggested that it is an intermediate stage of development between ‘Renaissance ethnographic traditions’ and ‘modern colonial ideas and practices’. But what precisely is ‘corporate’ about this ethnography other than the fact that it resides in the archives of a corporation, which at times provided guidelines and regulations on how letters and reports were to be written (just as many other institutions did)? How does it help us to understand what Henry Lord wrote about religion or Herbert de Jager wrote about grammar to be told that they were employed by a joint-stock company? It is possible that there are real answers to these questions, but they remain to be articulated.
As an exercise in comparative history, Meersbergen’s work also leaves the reader somewhat perplexed. A century after Marc Bloch, no one should need to be instructed that the real purpose of comparison cannot be to ‘demonstrate prominent similarities’ between the two (or more) spaces or institutions that are being compared. This is all the more the case when we know that the Dutch and English Companies had enormous underlying differences in their organisation, weight, stability and political situation in the seventeenth century. Despite his undeniable research skills and his command over the bodies of material at his disposal, one is left wishing the author of this book had tried to do more with less and had considered his historical actors and their writings with more sustained attention.