Among historians, Southeast Asia's Overseas Chinese have never enjoyed much popularity. They are in many respects a “People without a History,” having left behind no substantial deposit of experience and having failed to produce a school of historians to write their own history from an insider's perspective. Apart from their ethnic and cultural background, what distinguishes the hua-chiao from the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia is the intermediary role that these immigrants have continued to play within the different territories, colonies or states of the area over the last few centuries. Acting as middlemen and brokers – and therefore necessarily discreet in the handling of personal relations – they have traditionally hidden their own aims and motives from the “outer world”, and thus eluded the understanding of their contemporaries.

When on the morning of 4 May 1616, after having been received in state by cavalry, noblemen and citizens, Pieter van den Broecke descends from the splendidly caparisoned mount with which he has been presented; when his feet sink into the carpets of the audience-hall of the Castle of Sana's, then he realizes, striding along between two rows of dignitaries standing with crossed arms, that a crucial moment in his voyage to the court of the “Governor-General” of the Ottoman province of Yemen has come. Djacfar Bāshā is sitting enthroned on a platform, dressed as if he were “the monarch of the entire world”. The Dutch opperkoopman (”upper-merchant”), in his black suit, greets him with reverence, whereupon the beglerbegi commands him to sit down. What! Sit down, on the carpet, on the floor, he, Captain of the Dutch? What else could that mean, in this formal entourage, but his submitting to the wālī? Then his interpreter retrieves the situation: “Sir, may Allāh bless You! The Dutch captain cannot sit in the way we are accustomed to do …”

There is a certain irony in including a picture of an intriguing but officially respected ‘black sheep’ (in terms of the VOC monopoly game) in a series of articles on more or less purely VOC personalities and VOC matters. As we shall see, the vermaarde reijsiger Samuel van. de Putte, who never was a Compagnies dienaar, travelled widely, mainly over land, in (Central) Asia occasionally arriving in and leaving VOC territory under the mighty auspices of official Company's backing, despite the formal regulation of the VOC that no Dutchman was allowed to set out for the East if he was not under contract of the Company.

The organization of the Dutch Wast India Company (Verenigde Oostinische Compagnie, VOC) is in many respects comparable with the government bureaucracies of the 17th and 18th century. Like the officials in the administration of the state, the servants of the Company used their position to enrich themselves in a way that nowadays would be called corrupt. But it has been stressed that it would be incorrect to apply modern moral standards on the bureaucracy of the ancien regime. It is in fact impossible to draw a sharp line between what was allowed to the Company's servants overseas and what was forbidden to them. The directors or bewindhebbers of the VOC themselves were not very consistent in these matters. On the one hand, they appointed members of their families and their clients to honourable positions in order to provide them with a moderate salary and a well-spread “free” table during their stay in Asia. On the other hand, the directors tried to keep the monopoly of the VOC intact, which meant that no other Dutch merchants, not even Company's officials, were allowed to carry any trade in Asia on their own account.

In the accounts of the Dutch voyage to the court of the Shogun in Edo, 1661, when Hendrik Indijck was chief-merchant is the item: “a palankin for Gerrit.” When I found this, I could not at first explain it since none of the travelling Dutchmen bore this name. The Deshima diary brought the solution. The review of the new personnel of the Dutch factory mentioned 19 Dutchmen, including “my son and daughter.” No mention of a mother was made, but only women of a specific type were allowed to visit the island.

One of the paradoxes of early modern European expansion history is that the archives of Rome are not necessarily the richest source for information about the Catholic overseas missions. Nor, as one might hope, are they ideally suited for affording an independent view of the workings of the Iberian colonies. Moreover, there are puzzling gaps in the most valuable of the collections, those of the Society of Jesus, no doubt due to the dissolution of the first phase of order in the 1760s. As a consequence, researchers who concentrate primarily upon secular history, but who often use ecclesiastical sources, tend to gravitate toward Lisbon, Madrid and Seville, and to ignore the archives and libraries of the Vatican almost entirely, except for the excellent printed documents published by the Jesuits. In a way, this approach – or, rather non-approach – is justified.

In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.