Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T13:59:39.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Retrospect on J.C. van Leur's Essay on the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Asian History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

P.J. Marshall
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 45 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 ‘Evenals er tijdens den groei van alle levende wezens overgangsvormen bestaan, is de achttiende eeuw er een in de wordingsgeschiedenis van Nederland als koloniaal rijk, verschillend in samenleving, staatsordening, moraal, verantwoordelijkheidsgevoel […] De compagniesgeschiedenis in de achttiende eeuw is het spiegelbeeld van die van het vaderland, ja van het Europa dier dagen […]‘Molsbergen, E.C. Godée, Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, edited by Stapel, F.W. (Amsterdam 1938) 7Google Scholar.

2 All quotations are from Van Leur, J.C., Indonesian Trade and Society. Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (2nd ed.; Bandung 1960) 268–290Google Scholar.

3 Chaudhuri, K.N., Asia before Europe (Cambridge 1990) 98Google Scholar.

4 Gupta, Ashin Das, ‘India and the Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century’, in: Gupta, A. Das and Pearson, M.N. eds., India and the Indian Ocean (Calcutta 1987) 132Google Scholar.

5 Immanuel, , The Modern World system III: The Second Era of the Great Expansion of the Capitalist World Economy, 1730s–1840s (New York 1989)Google Scholar.

6 Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power; War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London 1989)Google Scholar.

7 Schama, Simon, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London 1977) 58Google Scholar.

8 Boxer, C.R., Jan Compagnie in War and Peace, 1602–1799 (Hong Kong 1979) 73–107Google Scholar; Gaastra, F.S., De geschiedenis van de V.O.C. (Leiden 1991) 97Google Scholar.

9 Marshall, P.J. ed., The Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke, VI: India: The launching of the Hastings Impeachment (Oxford 1991) 296Google Scholar.

10 Black, Jeremy, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550–1800 (Basingstoke 1991)Google Scholar.

11 Ricklefs, M.C., Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi (London 1974)Google Scholar.

12 Byng, J.L. Cramer ed., An Embassy to China (London 1962) 213Google Scholar.

13 For military relations between Europe and Asia in general, see Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution (Cambridge 1988)Google Scholar. Also Marshall, P.J., ‘Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion’, Modern Asian Studies 14 (1980) 28–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolff, D.H.A., ’The End of the Ancien Regime. Colonial War in India 1798–1818’, in: de Moor, J.A. and Wesseling, H.L. eds., Imperialism and War; Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa (Leiden 1989) 22–49Google Scholar.

14 For a strong statement, see Washbrook, David, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988) 5796CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Perlin, F., ‘Proto-industrialisation and pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present 98 (1983) 30–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Braudel, F., The Perspective of the World, trans. Reynolds, S. (London 1984) 484Google Scholar.

16 Chaudhuri, K.N., Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe.

17 Eg. Arasaratnam, S., Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast (Delhi 1986) 164–165Google Scholar. Bayly, C.A., Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge 1988) 32–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Wallerstein, The Modern World System III, chap. 3

19 Gaastra, Geschiedenis van de V.O.C, 139.

20 Bayly, C.A., Imperial Meridian (London 1989) chaps. 1 and 2Google Scholar.

21 Bayly, C.A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge 1983) chap. 1Google Scholar.

22 Wink, André, ‘“Al Hind”, India and Indonesia in the Islamic World-Economy, c. 700–1800 AD’, Itinerario 12 (1988) 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialisation’, 64.

24 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, chap. 6.