Geschichte

El presente artículo tiene por objeto hacer un examen preliminar de un manuscrito, hasta la fecha desconocido e inédito, del gran humanista y abogado internacional holandés Hugo Grocio. En dicho manuscrito, Grocio se ocupa, esencialmente, de la formación de una sociedad civil basada en un arreglo contractual, y a su vez, examina los derechos y las obligaciones que emanan de ese pacto o contrato voluntario.

"In 1602, the United Netherlands East India Company, better known by its historic initials from the Dutch V.O.C.,  was formed from six smaller trading firms known as the voorcompagnieën or predecessor companies.  The immediate objective of this merger was to stabilize the prices – and consequently also the revenues from taxation – linked to produce from the East Indian trade, spices such as nutmeg, cloves, mace and also pepper. But the merger had another ostensible objective: to project the Dutch war against the Iberian powers of Spain and Portugal from the European theatre into Asia, thus creating a private “arm” in the broader war effort.
This paper traces the early steps in the transition from employing force or violence in self- defence (1590s) though key resolutions and developments that sought to transform the VOC into a privately-financed privateering and plundering machine. It will be shown that pressure was stepped up between the formation of the company in March 1602 and the resolution of the Dutch States General in early November 1603, after which VOC fleets departing from Europe were issued with express and detailed instructions that contained both commercial and military objectives. The geographic focus of this paper will be placed on attacks on Iberian targets and privateering activities around peninsular Southeast Asia, including significantly also the Singapore and Melaka Straits.
The paper is divided into three principal parts. The first explores the related but legally distinct concepts of piracy, privateering and freebooting, and how these evolved and became “inflated” in the course off the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The formation of the Dutch VOC and the stepped up violence exerted against the Iberian powers of Spain and Portugal in Asian waters straddles the first and second parts. Of particular interest will be the interaction of formal policy formulated in Europe with actual events on the ground in Asia.  Instructions to Dutch fleet admirals departing after November 1603 feature a mixture of commercial and military objectives. The third part explores the views of other historians in the Netherlands and beyond to come to terms with the evolving modus operandi of the Dutch company from its foundation in 1602 up to the conclusion of the Twelve Years’ Truce (April 1609) and the dispatch of a first permanent governor-general (1609-10) for Asia.
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Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge who also served as a director in the Dutch East India Company’s Rotterdam chamber for three decades during the early seventeenth century, set sail from the Dutch Republic in 1605. He launched an attack on Portuguese Melaka in 1606 and signed landmark treaties with Johor and Ternate in the same year. On his return to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1608 he began to write a series of epistolary reports and memoranda which were received and carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic at the time, including Hugo Grotius and Jan van Oldenbarnevelt. This paper provides an overview of the materials that survive in Dutch archives and specifically delves into his evolving conclusions about security, trade, and diplomacy in Singapore, Batu Sawar and the Johor River Region at large.

This paper revisits conventional knowledge about the textual origins of the Sejarah Melayu and argues that it was crafted in its current textual form in or around 1612-13 as a joint project of Raja Bongsu, Tun Sri Lanang as well as possibly the latter's son

The present paper explores the shifting roles and understandings of the Singapore Straits from the latter Middle Ages until the opening decades of the eighteenth century. In pursuing this task, I will develop a set of basic questions that historicize and problematize the roles, functions and understandings of the Straits across the centuries, and also tease out historical and historiographical paradigms shaping and underpinning the understanding of the region’s past. In pursuing this programme I will make use of a broad range of sources including chronicles and histories, letters and treaties, navigational instructions and travel literature, as well as (European) cartography of the 16th to 18th centuries. In order to gain deeper appreciation of the multi-faceted roles and understandings of the Singapore Straits across the longue durée, I  not only adduce and evaluate materials of European colonial origin, but importantly also heed special attention to sources of Asian origin in general, and specifically to materials that have originally been written in Arabic, Malay, Chinese and have been made accessible to the wider reading public in various contemporary translations. The modes of enquiry and the insights brought to paper here differ both in terms of scope and objectives from my earlier findings expounded in The Singapore and Melaka Straits published in 2010.