Journal, Memorial, and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jong: Security, Diplomacy, and Commerce in 17th-Century Southeast Asia By Peter Borschberg, and: Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks, and Institutions, 1600–2000 ed. by Catia Antunes and Jos Gommans (review)

The history of the United Dutch East India Company, more widely known as the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), has become the focus of an increasing number of works that have sought to bridge the disciplinary and methodological gaps separating the study of Europe from the study of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Two recent works that have taken critical steps in this regard are Peter Borschberg’s Journal, Memorial, and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jong: Security, Diplomacy, and Commerce in 17th-Century Southeast Asia and Catia Antunes and Jos Gommans’s Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks, and Institutions, 1600–2000. Among the many contributions of Borschberg’s work is the way the volume connects European legal and diplomatic history with the study of regional trade relations, local politics, and security in Southeast Asia through a comparative investigation and presentation of a carefully selected set of documents that the author makes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Like Borschberg’s volume, Antunes’s and Gommans’s offers a picture of the global reach and significance of Dutch activities in a way that also elucidates the interplay between Dutch and local agents, networks, and institutions.

Peter Borschberg’s Journal, Memorial, and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jong: Security, Diplomacy, and Commerce in 17th-Century Southeast Asia fills a critical gap in the field by its close analysis of a set of original source materials that illuminate the earliest episodes of Dutch maritime expansion. These documents, which Borschberg has carefully analyzed and translated for inclusion in the central sections of the volume, comprise a collection of the writings of Cornells Matlieff de Jonge, a director in the Rotterdam chamber of the VOC in the early seventeenth century. Matlieff was, in a sense, the architect of Dutch political and commercial presence in Southeast Asia. In an introduction to the texts, Borschberg examines how Matlieff and the VOC established a maritime presence in Southeast Asia through both diplomacy and force in a powerful challenge to the Portuguese and other local actors. One of the most significant contributions of Borschberg’s analysis is the focus on previously overlooked information about how the Dutch encountered and navigated the agency of Malay political actors who were articulating local expectations and values. Borschberg’s analysis also sheds light on the clashing political interests of VOC administrators in Southeast Asian trade, which inspired long-lasting debates about the role of private citizen-traders in the reach of the company. The documents Borschberg contextualizes and translates in this volume challenge researchers to understand how a variety of sources, both European and Southeast Asian, should be read in conjunction with one another in order to gain access to multiple sources of information about the political, economic, and social structures of Asia. This approach facilitates Borschberg’s examination of how these structures in Asia both informed and were shaped by the global administrative policies of the Dutch throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The documents Borschberg translates and analyzes in the study include, for example, epistolary reports and memoranda that Matlieff wrote in the Netherlands in 1608, following voyages to Portuguese Melaka, Johor, and Ternate. What makes these kinds of documents an invaluable resource to researchers of the field is the detailed image they paint of Matlieff’s influential plan for Dutch expansion. Specifically, the documents show that Matlieff articulated a vision that the Dutch should invest in military and commercial infrastructure, appoint a resident governor-general vested with plenipotentiary powers in Asia, select a rendezvous location for optimizing profits and reducing...