Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Table of Contents 5
3. Indian Ocean c. 1700 (Map courtesy of Inox Spatial Data and Services) 7
4. Introduction 9
5. Chapter 1. The Republic, Its Stage, and Its East India Company
6. Introduction 25
7. The Dutch East India Company 30
8. The Dutch East India Company: The Merchant and Manufacturer of Information 33
9. The Amsterdamsche Schouwburg 50
10. Dutch Drama and the Orient 54
11. Chapter 2. When Vondel Looked Eastwards: Joost Van Den Vondel’s Zungchin (1667)
12. Introduction 61
13. “One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd”: Representation in Zungchin 64
14. Historicity in Vondel’s Zungchin 67
15. Two Playwrights, One Tale 70
16. The Benefits of Extensive Reading: Vondel and the Sources for Zungchin 72
17. Batavian Holidays and Information Packages: Martino Martini and the VOC 74
18. News Channel Formosa 79
19. Discourses, Dispositions, Despotisms: Imagining the Middle Kingdom 85
20. Discerning Oriental Dispositions: Tartar Bloodbaths and Chinese Bookishness 89
21. Begetting Sinister Children: Benevolent and Oriental Despotisms 95
22. Arms or Amiability: To Talk or Terrorize the Chinese into Trade 100
23. The Playwright Sorts and Sieves: Motives behind the Scripting of Zungchin 105
24. Conclusion 113
25. Chapter 3. Casting Despots in Dutch Drama: The Case of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan (1745)
26. Introduction 117
27. The Plot (The Historical and the Literary) 118
28. Van Steenwyk, Dryden, and their Sophies 126
29. Passage to (Mughal) India: Information Transfer and Its Resultant Discourses 129
30. The Mughal Discourse 136
31. The Company Discourse of the Dutch Factory in Hoogly (Bengal) 138
32. The European Correspondence 146
33. The Politics of Representation in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan 148
34. Conclusion 155
35. Chapter 4: Swimming against the Tide: Onno Zwier Van Haren’s Agon, Sulthan Van Bantam (1769)
36. Introduction 159
37. Bad Blood over Banten: The English and Dutch Hostilities in Print 163
38. Antecedents to Agon’s Anti-Colonial Indictment 169
39. Accounts of Travel and Travelling Company Correspondence 173
40. Making the Other’s Business One’s Own: Information Gathering and Intelligence Acquisition 177
41. Salacious and Sordid Spectacles: Representation of Banten’s Women and Sultan Abdul 181
42. Anxieties over Apostasy: The Company and Its Renegades 186
43. The Other Side of the Story: Banten’s View of Batavia 193
44. Intentions, Influences, and the Inevitable Scholarly Tussles 201
45. Van Haren, Fence-sitting, and the Other Side 205
46. Closing in on Van Haren’s Intentions 208
47. Conclusion 216
48. Conclusion 219
49. Acknowledgements 227
50. Bibliography
51. Archival Sources 229
52. Primary Sources 229
53. Secondary Sources 237
54. Index 255