Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference
Volume 11 Article 3
2020
John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis: Anglo-Dutch Exchange and the John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis: Anglo-Dutch Exchange and the
(Re)Printing of China (Re)Printing of China
Carol Mejia LaPerle
Wright State University - Main Campus
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17
John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis: Anglo-Dutch Exchange
and the (Re)Printing of China
Carol Mejia LaPerle, Wright State University
“They are Novices, and ignorant in Affairs, and obstinate in refusing to accommodate
themselves to the Customs of the Country.”
-English translation of a Portuguese priest witness to a
Dutch ambassadorial attempt in China
rom the second edition of John Ogilby’s compilation of
European encounters in China, the epigraph is an excerpt of
Father Balion’s letter to his fellow Portuguese priest Father
Adams. The statement encapsulates the Catholic priest’s judgment of why
the second Dutch embassy failed in China. By calling the Dutch “novices”
and “ignorant,” Balion highlights his expertise on Chinese conventions
even as he withholds any approval of those customs. Contrary to Dutch
insufficiencies, the “accommodation” Father Balion makes to the “customs
of the country” is as an insider. And yet to accommodate Chinese mores
and rituals is quite different from full assimilation into the host country,
delineating the agent’s astute performance of custom from his heartfelt
acceptance of them. The statement is a miniscule yet revealing testament
to the nuances essential to successfully navigating cross cultural exchanges
in the period. Scholarship recovering early modern global encounters
reveals the seventeenth century as a time of transnational cultural
exchange and economic interdependency between various state systems.
But as the epigraph shows, global encounters are not only transnational
and multi-directional, they are also the product of various levels of
linguistic and cultural translation. That they are mediated by translation,
however, hardly diminishes the emphatic and seemingly urgent
investments of the many agents participating in such encounters. This
project is about agents who represented and mediated European interests
in China, drawing particular attention to how global encounters were
compiled, translated, and disseminated through print circulation in
Western Europe.
I argue that John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis, an English translation of
Dutch accounts about China compiled by the printer Olfert Dapper in 1670
F
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
18
as Gedenkwaerdig bedryf der Nederlandsch Oost-Indische
Maatschappye, op de kust en in het keizzerrijk van Taising of Sina, reveals
the investments of multiple agents of seventeenth century travel and trade:
travelers, ambassadors, witnesses, state representatives and, perhaps less
obviously, book producers. While providing a structure to organize the
amalgamation of stories, engravings, inventory lists, maps, personal
letters, company reports, and ethnographic observations about China,
Atlas Chinensis also offers a way to trace Anglo-Dutch relations in the
latter part of the seventeenth century as these relations emerge through the
traffic between dominant print houses in London and in Amsterdam. What
emerges is a process of dilation and compaction that manages to convey
the scale of the Dutch experience in China: the book simultaneously
provides detailed dilation of specific rituals and expectations unique to
Chinese commercial opportunities while compacting a vast array of
representations of China cobbled from various European outlets. A
comprehensive account of this process is beyond the scope of a single
study, but a close analysis of the third Dutch embassy in China—the topical
occasion of Dapper’s 1670 compilation— provides a useful glimpse of the
means and the motives for the repeated interpellation of China for
European consumption. Occupying a central place within Atlas Chinensis’s
expansive treatment, accounts of the embassy condense two years’ worth
of effort in which the Dutch train travelled from the marginal provinces to
the imperial palace in Peking and back, attempted commerce in coastal
regions and in cities, prepared and conferred gifts including horses and
oxen, banqueted, practiced ceremonial rituals, and waited for a private
conference with the Emperor that was never granted. Despite the
frustrations plaguing Dutch efforts in China, the embassy’s topical
significance for Dapper’s compilation emerges as crucial to understanding
the role of print beyond the actual encounter. Book producers and
translators like Dapper and Ogilby expand the audience of cross-cultural
contact and thus serve as mediators, indeed enablers, of global
interactions. So while the Dutch embassy described in Atlas Chinensis
reveals a historically specific encounter via political maneuverings and
trade negotiations, detailing interactions between the Dutch and the
Chinese, it is the book’s compilation, translation, and dissemination that
present, for its various European audiences, broader conditions for
European engagement in Asia. The English translation of the third Dutch
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
19
embassy in China enacts the inclinations of an emergent print medium that
was, from its inception as a product for mass consumption, transnational
in orientation and mercantile in function.
The London publication of Atlas Chinensis in 1671 is one of many
instances documenting Europe’s fascination with China in the early
modern period, though it was a fascination experienced by the English
vicariously and unrequitedly. The rather inauspicious opening of the
volume highlights the key complaints of European interaction with the
Chinese:
Many years are past since several Europeans, especially the English,
Spaniards, Portuguese and Hollanders, have with indefatigable
Endeavors persevered towards the acquiring a free and unmolested
Trade in China. Yet though they have variously attempted what
might seem probably to this Effect, their whole Undertakings have
proved little better than a Labor in vain; for the Chinese priding in
the substance of their own Product, and too strictly observing an
Ancient law, prohibiting the Admission of any Strangers into their
Country, excepting such only as bringing Tributes from the adjacent
Borders, paid Homage to their Emperor, as Supreme Lord of the
World, or else Foreign Ambassadors abhorred, all Correspondency
abroad.
1
This passage blames the obstacles of contact to a strict Chinese foreign
policy, a policy subjected to cultural antiquity and disdainful of foreigners
except when they “pay homage.” But the underlying complaint is not
simply the frustration with wasted resources—money, time, and lives—that
yield no concrete gain. The tension, rather, is between decades of
frustration pitted against the potential for endless riches. “Free and
unmolested trade” would render China, as well as most of South Asia, open
for business. Ambassadorial attempts by the Dutch seek to establish
commercial storehouses and a small military garrison in coastal provinces
such as Canton and Hockfieu, modeled after the Dutch stronghold in
Batavia. But such hope gives way to the reality of a deeply subordinate
position as “strangers” (a term often used by the Chinese to describe
Europeans) who must take the year-long round trip to the royal palace in
Peking from the coast in order to offer tributary gifts to the “Supreme Lord
of the World” and to perform the extensive bureaucratic gestures essential
to ingratiating themselves to the various government representatives along
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
20
the way. Although Atlas Chinensis is filled with materials that describe
Chinese social and religious customs, chart geographical descriptions of
the land and provinces, and record local attitudes about everything from
children to fashion, these materials are ancillary to the larger venture of
Euro-Sino trade relations. It is within this context of eagerness and
frustration that the last and most ambitious Dutch embassy was launched
in 1666.
Andrew Hadfield formulates European approaches to the Far East
as one in which “trade and profit were the principal goals, not colonization
and conquest.”
2
The emphasis on trade is especially notable in the book
industry, often cited as the rationale for translations of travel narratives for
an English audience, or in the words of the translator of Alvarez Semedo’s
The History of the Great and Renowned Monarchy of China (1655): “to
satisfy the curious and advance the Trade of Great Britain.”
3
Ogilby’s
translation is part of a tradition of equating China with material gain rather
than a location for missionary outreach as per the Jesuits who retained a
place in court as theologians and academics. Adele Lee argues:
English translators interpreted China as, and reduced it to, a
storehouse of material goods. It is also highly indicative of how the
English nation was increasingly defining itself in this period as a
nation of merchants, that is, as a producer and consumer of goods.
In contrast to the theologically and academically laden
underpinnings of the Jesuits’ encounter with the Chinese, England’s
attitude toward the same is, therefore, fundamentally shaped by
economic interests.
4
A formidable cultural and commercial power in East Asia, China could
deliver the region to any number of European nations competing with each
other across the globe. Yet Chinese trade remained elusive, and so was
perceived as the ultimate Golden Fleece. Robert Markley notes in his
assessment of “mercantile capitalism in the period,” China presented a
fantasy of abundance that erased the difficulties inherent in investments
that have yet to yield any tangible profit:
The Far East thus serves as a fantasy of space for mercantile
capitalism because it allows for the rigorous externalization of costs:
profits can be tallied (or future profits imagined) without
calculating (to take only two examples) either the value of lost lives,
ships, and cargoes, or the value in devastated local ecologies, of the
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
21
deforestation necessary to build ships for the British navy and East
India Company fleets.
5
And so Atlas Chinensis participates in a larger fantasy of commercial
promise of the Far East, one that the English sought to advantage but could
only access vicariously through the Dutch who, in 1666, were in the best
position to breach the isolationism of Chinese foreign policy.
6
One of the most prominent European powers in Southeast Asia in
the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company
considered an exclusive trade agreement with China necessary and, with
the right diplomatic exertions, inevitable. Despite the commercial
potential, justification for the expensive venture emphasizes the “long
desired Free trade” in the context of “long” deliberations. The Lord General
of Batavia, in consultation with the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagni of
the Netherlands (also known as the VOC or Dutch East India Company),
came to this conclusion:
Yet after long referrings, debates, and serious considerations, it was
last again concluded, on the twenty eighth of May, Anno 1666, by
the Lord General and Council of India, to send a Magnificent
Embassy, with rich Presents to the Tartars Court, to the great
Emperor of China and East Tartary, that if possible, they might at
last attain to their so long desired Free trade through the whole
realm of China.
7
Deeply familiar with the previous two embassies and thus aware of the
limited success of even the most extensive efforts, the General of Batavia
John Maatzuiker presents himself as a counterpart to the Emperor of
China, since only those of royal blood would be seen as appropriate
recipients of the imperial court’s direct correspondences. While the VOC’s
previous two embassies were far from profitable, the General of Batavia
sought a reversal of previously bad investments; that is, by investing even
more. The written correspondence between Ambassador Pietre Van Hoorn
and Constantine Nobel, whose experience in the previous embassies made
him the main arbitrator of trade in this one, reveals the importance of
spectacle: “Nothing more concerned him, than the promoting and making
the Embassy more Honorable, that it might be performed with all fitting
Splendor and Magnificence, of which there were fair appearances. But
because nothing could be assured from the Chinese looks, therefore time
must produce it.”
8
The hesitation that emerges from the lack of assurance
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
22
“from the Chinese looks” gives way to the eagerness of performing and
promoting the “fair appearances” of the Dutch. Trade through awe: a
massive investment in creating magnificence.
There are indications that Ambassador Van Hoorn was not the most
suitable leader for this venture. Indeed, his unsuitability offers a glimpse
at the difficulties of global trade in the seventeenth century. Upon arrival
at the coastal city of Hokfieu, Van Hoorn barely sidesteps hostilities that
would end the embassy even before commencing the requisite trip to the
imperial court in Peking. The Ambassador eagerly vocalizes his desire for
commencing profitable exchanges between his men and the local
merchants. However, no such agreement can occur without first
embarking on the year long journey to pay tribute to the Emperor. John E.
Willis, Jr. explains that
All rulers who wished to communicate formally with the imperial
court had to acknowledge that they were subordinate to the Son of
Heaven, dependent on his appointment or confirmation as a
successor, received at the imperial capital as tributaries, their
ambassadors as pei chen, ministers of ministers.
9
Van Hoorn’s journey, therefore, can only occur when representatives of the
coastal province in which he is docked and the central advisors of the
Emperor in Peking approve Dutch travel. This approval hinges on the gifts
that the Ambassador brings as tribute to the court. Therefore, important
figures in this coastal region of Fokien, Vice Roy Singlamong and General
Lipovy, must inventory and inspect all merchandise so as to obtain
permission to travel. Anthony Cutler highlights gift exchange in his study
of early modern state negotiations. He argues, “Gifts have been consigned
by historians to that special oubliette where they keep the evidence they
consider unhelpful to the understanding of political and economic
events.”
10
Cutler’s attentiveness to the social and political significance of
gifts is especially relevant in not only representing political and economic
intentions, but also in discerning the conditions for any European
interactions with seventeenth century China. Ambassador Van Hoorn’s
mishandling of this bureaucratic necessity is most evident in his inability
to provide a definitive differentiation between “presents” and “goods for
sale”; instead, he mixes them together and claims to the officials “That the
goods which were to be sold, lay upon the presents”
11
erroneously thinking
the symbols of both might occupy the same space. The importance of
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
23
sifting through what is for sale and what are gifts—so important to the
Chinese and so little attended to by Van Hoorn—indicates the risks of being
ignorant of Chinese protocol.
12
Emphasizing the importance of the presentation of gifts, the first
engraving accompanying the English translation conveys a visual and
textual explanation of the diplomatic rituals needed to facilitate a more
favorable consideration of the embassy. The illustration manages the scale
of the encounter on two fronts: first, by providing a compacted
representation of the hierarchically organized, symbolically relevant,
ethnographically suggestive depiction of the Vice Roy Singlamong’s court
and two, by dilating the itemized specifics of gift inventory and
presentation. The folio size engraving, like all the illustrations of the
embassy, uses the same plates of Dapper’s compilation shipped from
Amsterdam to Ogilby’s London print shop. Set inside the Vice Roy’s court
(Figure 1), the illustration records the presentation of goods to Vice Roy
Singlamong so he can send the report to Peking and therefore obtain
approval for travel. In the foreground is the shadowed movement of people
carrying the merchandise to be meticulously inventoried. The engraving is
accompanied by the following account:
Figure 1
13
The chests and packs with the presents being opened, the goods
were taken out in several parcels, brought and laid before their
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
24
Highnesses [the Vice King and General] to see them; seeming to be
well pleased with them, especially some curious lanthorns and
celestial and terrestrial spheres and globes: having satisfied their
longings, and pleased their curiosity with viewing and reviewing,
they commanded them to be laid up handsomely, and in good order
again.
14
Identifying which gifts generated the most attention, among the many
under consideration, contributes to an understanding of what “well
pleas[es] the Chinese.” Beyond confirming the widely reported lavishness
of Chinese palaces, the illustration and accompanying text indicate the
appropriate movement and placement within those spaces. Depicting the
interior of the palace participates in the larger imperatives of travel writing
of the age: offer access to royal spaces, convey opulent wealth, and mark
the details that indicate social hierarchy. The seating arrangement
highlights the mirroring images of Dutch emissaries to the left and Chinese
royalty to the right. This mirroring characterizes almost all the depictions
of Dutch-Sino encounter in the Atlas. However, this is its most formal and
equal articulation. A less egalitarian representation of the encounter can
be found in the central figures beyond the vista of seated witnesses.
Ambassador Van Hoorn and his 13 year old son Joan present gifts to Vice
King Singlamong who stands on a large platform (Figure 2). Not only is
Singlamong elevated, the body stances of the men are stark. Van Hoorn
looks up while in the midst of a curtsy, his unseen arm presumably
touching his breast or reaching forward, both signs of deference. By
contrast, Singlamong’s arm rests on his hip, his bent leg and lifted heel,
Figure 2: close up of figure 1
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
25
his leaning against the back wall of the royal stage, all culminate to depict
a figure that is best described as casual. The detail of the engraving is
remarkable in showing how the urgency of the embassy’s success depends
upon the cooperation and goodwill of a seemingly indifferent bureaucrat.
When the trip to the imperial palace in Peking is approved, the
journey is carefully documented in a mix of detailed accounts of challenges
and of broader depictions of China’s landscapes and waterways. The long
trip generated visual accounts of a vast, natural countryside and highly
developed cityscapes of numerous Chinese provinces, while also producing
cartographic engravings for future travel through those states. But once
closer to Peking, the illustrations shift focus to emphasize people rather
than landscapes (Figure 3).
Figure 3: engraving after page 318
The gloss of this engraving indicates that the meeting is located half an
hour outside of Peking, when the Dutch party is welcomed by an official of
the “board of ceremonies.” This master of ceremonies instructs the Dutch
of appropriate protocol in the imperial palace. Even more so than in the
provincial port of Hockfieu, access to centralized power is mediated by
ritualistic exchange and the highly controlled movement of goods and
people. The Dutch form a formal procession as they approach Peking’s
formidable wall and narrow entrance, watched by well-armed Lipu guards.
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
26
After completing months of arduous travel, Van Hoorn is immediately
required to relinquish the keys to the chests of gifts so that appropriate
officials could “inspect” the offerings and decide if they are worthy of the
Emperor’s attention. With little respite after the long trip, the Dutch are
expected to have gifts to the Emperor— including oxen and horses— ready
for presentation to the Emperor within one day.
Once within the walls of Peking, the Dutch emissaries are led to a
palace courtyard to inventory the offerings (Figure 4). At the center of the
illustration, a commander of the court is showing the “Hollanders
particulars of presents.” The courtyard is a formidable structure and sets
the stage for social, diplomatic, and commercial interactions. The royal
palace “is likewise surrounded with three high stone walls, between the two
first and the outward wall are the emperor’s guard and eunuchs; and the
grand Mandarins or Councellors come thither to negotiate their affairs.”
15
This scene is one of multiple and highly ritualized ceremonies of reverence
to follow while in Peking. The gloss indicates that by the door stand “the
table where said presents are orderly distributed.” The levels of mediation
Figure 4: engraving after page 322
in the courtyard indicate a meticulous order of custom that the Dutch must
acknowledge, and that the English translator carefully reiterates. While the
details of the description have an ethnographic function of documenting
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
27
the social mores of Peking, the emphasis on the traffic of goods and gifts
provides crucial information about Chinese rituals and attempts to manage
the scale of global exchange through the dilation of trade details.
Foregrounded are the physical materials of a commercial negotiation—
disseminated, translated, and valued for its repeatability for future
European readers potentially expected to engage in such rituals.
Arguably the most important ritual to be mastered should Dutch
diplomatic exertions be successful, imperial banquets occupy much of the
embassy’s account. Atlas Chinensis itemizes three formal feasts in the royal
capital of Peking in July 1667 (Figure 5). The placement of tables are
Figure 5: illustration after page 334
according to rank, with indication that the Dutch do not hold a privileged
position in this hierarchical setting. Presentation before the Emperor or
the Emperor’s seal required participants of the banquet (Chinese nobles as
well as foreign visitors) to “kowtow.” The account of this procedure is
elaborately described as follows:
Voice bidding them ‘Ascend’; having passed on about fifteen paces
they heard the same voice crying ‘Kneel’; and afterwards again, ‘Bow
your heads three times together, which done you may rise’, soon
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
28
after it said, ‘Kneel down again, and once more bow your Head
three times’; so they were to bow eighteen times and kneel six; all
which being passed over, they cried, ‘Stand up, and go to your
Lodgings’ which accordingly they did.
16
The curtness of the demands prove peculiar for the Europeans, little
apprehending the perceived honor there is in being allowed to bow before
the Emperor’s seal. The orders come by a disembodied voice, devoid of the
niceties expected of a diplomatic exchange. The lack of equality between
state officials is deeply felt by the Dutch embassy. When not occupying a
subjugated position in court interactions such as banqueting, Van Hoorn
and his embassy are reduced to waiting in suspense for another urgent,
unexpected beckoning. As elaborated in the premise to the embassy:
yet whatever Ambassadors they be, though the Negotiation be ever
so serious, and of greatest import, nay, though they come loaden
with Treasure, to be pour’d into the Emperors Exchequer, and be
ancient Friends and Allies, yet they are entertained like Spies and
Enemies, not suffered in their Journeys to see the Countries but
hood winked, have no more Prospect than the Road they treat upon;
and in like manner are as close Prisoners, locked up on their inns,
and Places of purpose for such Reception; and when come to Court,
not only secured but never permitted to Public Audience, or to see
the Emperor, but manage all their Business by the Mandarins, or
Officers of State.
17
Anxiously anticipating the Emperor’s response to gifts, Van Hoorn hopes
for a private conference with anyone above the Mandarin messengers and
the guarding Tatars. The party left Foochow in 1668 with a sealed imperial
edict addressed to the Governor General at Batavia and instructions not to
be opened by Van Hoorn. In the edict was not only a rejection of the
conditions of trade proposed by the Dutch, but also a reversal of any
previous trade arrangements thus effectively ending all hope of Dutch
commerce in China.
Why would a Dutch diplomatic trip—a failed one— be of any interest
to an English audience? Part of the answer to this question involves the
role of print in representing and mediating global encounters in the
seventeenth century. Atlas Chinensis— as an English translation of the
work of the prolific bookmaker Dapper—depicts an immense and complex
series of cultural mores within a portable scale, collating and systemizing
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
29
expectations, behaviors, and rituals that are just as important to navigating
China as the physical geography made accessible by cartographers. As
Richard Barbour rhetorically formulates regarding English traders, “Must
each new voyage err perpetually, or might a working knowledge of the East,
transferrable to unseasoned mariners and factors, accumulate in London?
How might such transfer be optimized?”
18
The book marks a transnational
European effort of establishing free trade with China, uniquely dependent
upon the book industry to assess and amend gestures of accommodation.
S.H. Lim expands on the importance of print material in assessing trade
strategies:
It appears it is not always assumed that obtaining firsthand
knowledge of foreign lands, peoples, and cultures through actual
voyaging to foreign shores is necessarily superior to learning or
reading about distant places made available in published books.
Literal voyaging across the seas may be not only exceedingly
difficult but also error prone, leading to cultural engagement with
the question of whether it may make more sense first to get
acquainted with distant lands via the printed text before deciding to
submit to the rigors of ocean travel.
19
The importance of getting “acquainted” with distant places is especially
important when engaging with complex political rituals and ingrained
cultural traditions of a well-established civilization. The delineation of the
natural world through cartographic representation is indeed a crucial
aspect of globalization, but the illustrations of how to behave and what to
expect in the unfamiliar spaces in which Europeans find themselves in
China are similarly useful to navigating global engagements. This is
especially true of the highly ritualized procedures of the Chinese imperial
court which Europeans must accommodate (to recall Father Balion’s
terms), or risk apathy and even dismissal. The information generated by
the translation from the Dutch source to the English printing house
therefore reveals an important contribution of book makers as agents of
early modern globalization. A first-hand account can record movements
and engagements across the globe, but a translation initiates trajectories
and deploys knowledge beyond those published in the original.
Granted royal favor by Charles II as “His majesties cosmographer,
geographic printer, and master of the revels in the Kingdom of Ireland,”
John Ogilby is an English publisher set to capitalize on his audience’s
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
30
appetite for accounts of foreign lands.
20
Ogilby specialized in translating
the travels of other Europeans, creating a series of atlases featuring foreign
lands beyond Europe’s borders.
21
His London printing house frequently
compiled pirated information from other book makers, often wholly
recreating English versions of books emerging from prolific publishers
located in the Netherlands.
22
Because of the frequency, range, and beauty
of the volumes emerging under Ogilby’s purview, Harriet Crawley
applauds the publisher as “the greatest and most modern publisher in
Europe.”
23
Despite the high quality and relative popularity of Ogilby’s
atlases, they have often been passed over by scholarly analysis.
24
Instead,
the attention given to Ogilby’s legacy focuses mainly on his publication of
original maps of English cities, towns, and travel routes. Indeed, Katherine
Van Eerde’s monograph on Ogilby’s opus categorically dismisses some of
the most compelling aspects of the atlases as trifle: “Such items as
reprinted letters, suggested treaties and lists of gifts exchanged between
the two parties could hardly have been significant to many English readers
and might have been placed in an appendix, if they were included simply
to swell the size of the volume.”
25
Rather than simply swelling the size of
the volume, details of foreign exchange offer a glimpse of the global
networks mobilizing economic, political, and cultural encounters and
anticipate European interest and interaction in China. Ogilby’s careful
reiteration of trade attempts is just as crucial as cartographic reproduction
in successfully navigating a foreign land. Furthermore, and despite the
failure of the Dutch embassy, Atlas Chinensis emerges as a valuable
English resource for conceiving of the extent and the nature of commercial
trade in Asia. The engravings and descriptions, far from simply recording
global encounters, shape the initial conception and manipulation of a strict
tributary system shaping all inter-state contact —trade or otherwise—in
the region.
To this end, Atlas Chinensis represents and mediates the difference
between “Trade” and “Tributes” played out through Van Hoorn’s
interactions with the Chinese.
26
Joseph Escherick notes of the rituals of
the Chinese court:
[they] were designed to establish a clear hierarchical relationship
between the Chinese emperor as Son of Heaven and the rulers of
subordinate neighboring states. In this respect, foreign relations
were no different from any other Chinese social relations, where
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
31
hierarchies of age, gender, social position, and official rank were
understood as the natural order of things.
27
As Emperor of China, the “Supreme Leader” expects gifts from
representatives of subordinate nation states in Asia. Developing the
relevance of this system for trade, David Kang argues that “the emphasis
on status and hierarchy pervaded not just states' relations to China but
extended to all foreign relations of the time. The tribute system was the
region-wide political framework that allowed for diplomacy, travel, and
official and private trade between all the states in the region."
28
Episodes
of the embassy’s frustrated approach to seeking “unmolested Trade” prove
the incompatibility of Dutch ambitions for unrestricted commerce on the
one hand, and an inter-Asian tributary system on the other. But in pointing
out the incompatibility of these paradigms, Atlas Chinensis documents the
rituals that comprise the complex commercial and political negotiations
expected when paying tribute to the Emperor in Peking. Indeed, careful
attention to the movement of gifts and the adherence to rituals are relevant
to future mediations between European commercial aspirations and
Chinese tributary demands. Historians have noted the subordinate
position held by Europeans when embarking on religious missions or
commercial exploits in China. I want, instead, to point out that the
subordination experienced by the Dutch in the Chinese court, as compiled
and translated by book producers, has a function beyond pointing out that
subordination. Reiterating complaints about the supplication expected of
Europeans in Asia is not the primary function of the book’s production and
translation. Instead, subordination is presented as the tactical position
Europeans must negotiate within the logic of an inter-Asian tributary
system. Therefore, Ogilby’s detailed translation of Dutch-Sino encounters
has less to do with the fate and treatment of the embassy and more to do
with iterating the rituals, behaviors, and negotiations essential to
navigating a Chinese tributary system. Atlas Chinensis is evidence of the
role of the book in arbitrating the fundamental irreconcilability between
trade and tribute. Through dilation of specific court rituals experienced by
the Dutch and by compacting amalgamated knowledge cobbled from
various European accounts of China, the book producer not only
represents, but also shapes, global commerce. While granting that the book
hinges on “the ways in which the descriptions of Chinese practices were
shaped by assumptions based on European experience”
29
and therefore no
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
32
way guarantees success in the region, the record, by virtue of its movement
across Europe’s borders and its effect on different agents interested in
success in China, engages a cross-cultural and transnational collaboration
that transcends the hostilities between two competing nations.
The English were fully aware of the global dominance of the
Netherlands at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Of particular note
was Dutch economic power, especially the trading company’s, VOC’s,
success in East Asia.
30
Arthur Weststeign’s analysis of Dutch expansion
emphasizes the extent of the republic’s worldwide triumphs: “Dutch
vessels dominated global trade, while soldiers and settlers of the East and
West India Companies occupied extensive territories from Java to the Cape
of Good Hope and from Recife to the estuary of the Hudson.”
31
Outlining
the Dutch VOC commercial dominance, Claudia Schnurmann remarks:
Like the Portuguese before them, the Dutch could get a foot in the
door only by remaining to live in, and trade from, permitted
restricted places .... [T]he limited Dutch success nevertheless
bestowed prestige on the VOC and evoked envy, especially in
England, where less successful rivals in London nicknamed the
Dutch ‘the Chinese of Europe’ because of their trade with the Far
East.
32
Schnurmann highlights the disparagement of the Dutch in English culture,
a disdain that involves envy as well as resentment. The contentious
relations between the Dutch and English in Asia were made notoriously
evident by the Amboyna Massacre in March 1623, wherein Dutch officials
executed English and Japanese factions in Amboyna. Although Atlas
Chinensis was published in London almost 50 years later, the impact of the
Amboyna Massacre continued to inform Anglo-Dutch relations.
33
As Karen
Chancey argues, “the occurrence played an important role in English
politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for
a century.”
34
Within a century of heated tensions in Asia between two
competing naval powers vying for leverage in the spice trade, it is possible
to see the book not as an intersection of interests but as an English
cautionary projection of Dutch failure.
35
Adele Lee emphasizes the
antagonism provoked by the book industry, examining English
shortcomings in the face of Dutch ambitions: “In forcing the English to rely
on the accounts of the despised [Dutch], China, then, served as a pointed
reminder to the English of just how much they lagged behind rival
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
33
Europeans in terms of overseas achievement.”
36
But in Atlas Chinensis, the
embassy’s representation of a failed Dutch embassy underplays past
confrontations and topical tensions. Rather than emphasizing England’s
lack of influence on the global stage, the atlas presents a narrative of Euro-
Asian geopolitics that aligns English interest with Dutch experience and so
anticipates Dutch failure as a precursor to English success.
While political and mercantile hostility fuels the Anglo-Dutch trade
wars of the seventeenth century, Atlas Chinensis codifies an
interchangeability that effaces a history of mutual aggression between the
European global traders. Despite the critical field’s emphasis on China as
the grounds for European rivalry and antagonism, the textual and visual
materials about China flowed across competing nation states, particularly
between print houses in Amsterdam and in London, with little resistance.
Accounting for the traffic of materials historians note “an excellent internal
distribution system centered on Amsterdam…which meant that merchants
and travellers, products and ideas, from across the continent and around
the globe could enter the Dutch Republic and contribute, in various ways,
to the business of books.”
37
The book is thus evidence of the way print
media has the potential to mediate—or at least present the overlapping of
shared commercial interests— between competing European states.
Printed materials contribute to the commercial agenda underwriting
global exchange, revealing how discord does not constitute or characterize
all of the traffic between England and the Low Countries. Marjorie
Rubright’s discussion of “Dutchness” in England reveals that at least in
patterns of commercial interaction, association and kinship, rather than
difference and conflict, are more productive models for understanding
Anglo-Dutch relations.
38
Although textual and visual accounts of the Van
Hoorn embassy are Dutch narratives, these transnationally consumed
printed materials—such as the traffic of information from Dapper’s
printing house to Ogilby’s—downplays Anglo-Dutch differences in order to
emphasize the intersection of these countries’ interests in China.
Antagonism against the Dutch was an inevitable offshoot of global
competition. But at the time of the book’s publication, it was possible to
see the Dutch not exclusively as a hostile rival, but also as an advantageous
source for navigating global commerce.
In his comprehensive study of print production’s role in shaping
early modern exoticism, Benjamin Schmidt traces the emergence of a less
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
34
provincial, more broadly European perspective, a “new way to see, read,
consume, and comprehend the non-European world. It marked a
significant shift from earlier modes of description, characterized by intense
contestation—national, confessional, colonial, imperial—to modes that
allowed a generically ‘European’ consumer to enjoy a generically ‘exotic’
world.”
39
I track a very early and foundational iteration of this in Atlas
Chinensis. The translation from Dutch to English marks a burgeoning
sense of affiliation across competing interests—an affiliation motivated by
the promise of trade in China and the need to comprehend a tributary
system to be navigated before ambitious, and as yet unrequited,
commercial advances can even begin.
40
Furthermore, Schmidt
contextualizes the upsurge of printed material from Amsterdam within a
larger geo political struggle that contributed to the shift of focus from
participant in world affairs to producer of written accounts of world affairs.
He states,
the [Dutch] Republic was becoming less and less engaged in
conquering the world as it became more and more vested in
describing it… [T]he Dutch could afford to step aside and operate
the concession stand, as it were, of European expansion, offering
images of the world to those fast entering the competition.
41
Building on Schmidt’s analysis of the innovation and profusion of Dutch
printed material for European consumption, I argue that Dapper’s
compilation provides an auspicious function at the time of Ogilby’s
translation and dissemination in 1671. No longer seen by the English as
competitors for East Asian strongholds, no longer a rival in the race to
colonize Americas, the Dutch emerge as representational surrogates for
European agents of trade in China. As representational surrogates, Dutch
trade embassies (even failed ones) function to provide a global advantage
for English readers.
The proficiency of traffic between print houses, furthermore, speaks
to the implicit benefit of itemizing the immediate experiences of one group
in order to create a body of knowledge shared across a diverse audience.
Atlas Chinensis confirms the advantageous position of the Dutch as a
legitimate source of knowledge based on previous, first-hand interactions;
but the translation also projects a potential advantage for the English as a
well-positioned naval power eager to maximize Asian encounters.
Representing credibility on one hand and potential on the other, the book
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
35
enacts the cooperation between otherwise competing European powers.
The documentation of China, in which Dutch attempts are presented for
the consumption of an English reader, dangles the immense wealth and
unimaginable promise of commercial opportunities in Asia. And it does
this precisely by making that immensity navigatable, by dilating the rituals
essential to success, and by compacting the amalgamation of knowledge
within a manageable volume. Beyond bringing back foreign customs for
local consumption, Ogilby’s translation contributes to the development of
a globally inclined commercial model in which the English are better able,
due to Dutch accounts of trade aspirations in China, to cultivate an
understanding of, and potentially participate in, global encounters in the
seventeenth century.
42
The book industry in Europe thrived in its ability to capture the
intertwined nature of mercantile ventures, military tensions, and political
accommodations experienced in various locales beyond the reader’s reach.
The traffic between Dutch-English printing houses, and their effects on the
formation of alliances both material and ideological, is a fruitful object for
the study of the history of print and its role in the realization of mercantile
interests and global tactics in that distant region.
43
Ogilby’s translation
marks the process of lingering representation beyond the global
encounter—a process that manages the scale of Chinese trade rituals
within a tributary system and so serves a particular function in the
repeated interpellation of China for European consumption. The
interpellation of China to pique and to satisfy English interests, and
therefore its representational value at points when geopolitics and textual,
visual depictions intersect, hinges not on the participants of the global
encounter but on those who produce the encounter for consumption,
dissemination and, in the case of China, assessment of approaches to
possible commercial strategies. For the interest of economic success in
China, Anglo-Dutch hostilities seem less important than English
knowledge generated by Dutch firsthand, detailed accounts. The surrogate
function of the Dutch construction of Chinese customs and rituals fashions
an English anticipation of the shape and the scale of future global
engagements. The China of European publications too often represents
frustration for those hoping to profit. But to the degree that ventures to
China withhold economic gratification, the representation of these
ventures console with the ocular proof of prosperity and the aid of detailed
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
36
instruction. The careful detailing of the tributary system and the inventory
of exchanges, along with illustrations to meticulously depict the spatial
orientation and cultural expectations of trade rituals, is enabled by the
print networks of the period. In the process, the imperatives of a shared
commercial goal efface national differences in order to deliver access to
what is out of reach. To refer back to the epigraph is to recognize that as
risky and unlikely an Anglo-Chinese trade alliance would seem in the
middle of the seventeenth century, the close account offered by Atlas
Chinensis warrants that should the opportunity ever arise the English
would not be accused, as Balion derides of the Dutch, of being “ignorant of
affairs.”
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
37
ENDNOTES
1
1Title page: Being a Second Part of a Relation of Remarkable Passages in two Embassies
from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Vice-Roy Singlamong and
General Taising Lipovi and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East Tartary…Englished
and Adorned with above a hundred several sculptures, by John Ogilby, Esq. Master of
his Majesty’s Revels in the Kingdom of Ireland. London, Printed by Tho. Johnson for the
Author, and are to be had at his House in White Fryers. 1671. I regularize spelling and
punctuation of quotations from Atlas Chinensis.
2
Andrew Hadfield, Ed. Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial
Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
189.
3
This phrase is taken from the title page of Alvarez Semedo’s account: The history of
that great and renowned monarchy of China. London, E. Tyler for John Crook and to
be sold at his Shop at the Sign of the Ship in S. Paul’s Churchyard, 1655. After the title
and author summary, the title page continues with a justification for the translation into
English: “Now put into English by a Person of quality, and illustrated with several
Mapps and Figures, to satisfy the curious and advance the Trade of Great Britain.”
4
Adele Lee traces the contested nature of English accounts of China, analyzing
English travel writers’ suspicions about Jesuit experiences in China, in “ ‘Counterfeiting
Mandarins’: Early Modern English Marginality/ia in Western Encounters with China,”
Early Modern Literary Studies 15 (2010-11): 1-32, 13. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/15-
2/leemand2.htm
5
Robert Markley, The Far East and the English imagination 1600-1730
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.
6
For more information on the internal politics of China at the time, particularly
in the transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing in 1644, Asia in the Making of Europe.
Volume III: A Century of Advance, Book 4, Eds. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). For a cross cultural analysis of the fall of the
Ming dynasty, see Jack Goldston, “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political
Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 30.1 (1988): 103-142 and Edwin J. Van Kley, “News from China;
Seventeenth-Century European Notices of the Manchu Conquest,” The Journal of
Modern History 45.4 (1973): 561-582. For Dutch assistance in Ch’ing conflict against
Cheng dy, see John Willis Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company
and China, 1662-1681 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
7
Atlas Chinensis, 203.
8
Ibid., 212.
9
Willis Jr. concludes, regarding this strict protocol that the Dutch were subjected
to, that in the seventeenth century “Foreign relations were more exhaustively
bureaucratized—trade only in connection with embassies, strict rules on the frequency of
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
38
embassies, the size of their suites, the presents they were to bring, and those they would
receive.” John E. Willis Jr., Ed. China and Maritime Europe: 1500-1800: Trade,
Settlement, Diplomacy and Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.
10
Anthony Culter, “Significant Gifts: Patterns of Exchange in Late Antique,
Byzantine and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38
(2008): 79-101, 81.
11
The account of Van Hoorn’s statement continue: “but he would give order to
Novel to fetch them up, that they might be seen, and if they were damnified [destroyed],
they should immediately be shown to his highness, which said his highness was well
satisfied, saying, that he would then write concerning it to the Court at Peking. The
Ambassador also desired his highness’s advice, because he knew not the customs and
fashions of the country” (214).
12
Once on shore, the ambassador makes a jarring error of asking the General to
inspect the presents himself, which was seen by the general as an insult to person and to
protocol.
13
All of the engravings were originally created by an artist employed by Van
Hoorn’s embassy, printed in Amsterdam by Olfert Dapper. While pirated illustrations
were often copied in London by one of the artists working for a publishing enterprise (like
John Ogilby’s), Atlas Chinensis engravings of the embassy were from the same plates
used in Dapper’s compilation.
14
Atlas Chinensis, 232.
15
Ibid., 479.
16
Ibid., 325.
17
Ibid., 2.
18
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1576-
1626 (Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2003), 104.
19
S. H. Lim, “Introduction”, The in Debra Johanyak and S.H. Lim (eds.) English
Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan 2010), 7.
20
Ogilby is part of the prolific travel book industry in London, most notably
represented by Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and
Discoueries of the English Nation (1589–1600) and Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus
Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). In terms of representations of China,
Richard Hakluyt’s expanded edition of Principle Navigations in 1599 includes “An
Excellent Treatise of the Kingdome of China, and of the Estate and Government Thereof:
Printed in Latine at Macao a Citie of the Portugals in China 1590.” Purchas’s Hakluytus
Posthumus greatly extends the entries on Euro-Asian encounters by including English
maritime adventures and travel narratives set in Asia, as well as translated foreign
accounts of the East.
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
39
21
For a general assessment of Ogilby’s publishing ventures, see chapter five of
Katherine S. van Eerde, Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (London: Chatham, 1976). A
royalist of Irish descent, Ogilby opens his world atlases with the following self-
description as “His majesties cosmographer.” Rightfully, as he was famed to be the most
comprehensive cosmographer in England at the time, creating extensive maps and
accounts of travels for the reading public.
22
Ogilby wrongfully attributes authorship to Arnoldus Montanus, stating in the
title page that the materials are “Collected out of their Severl Writings and Journals by
Arnoldus Montanus. While Montanus is the source of Ogilby’s Atlas Japannensis, he is
not the source of the Dutch embassy to China found in Atlas Chinensis. Rather, it is Olfert
Dapper’s 1670 Gedenkwaerdig bedryf der Nederlandsch Oost-Indische Maatschappye,
op de kust en in het keizzerrijk van Taising of Sina compilation that is the source of
Ogilby’s materials on China. Dapper was a very active figure in Dutch publication in the
17
th
century, and is the source of other Ogilby translations on Asia, Africa, and America.
Adam Jones attempts to show the methods of compilation, synthesis, and translation in
this important Dutch printer’s books in “Decompiling Dapper: A Preliminary Search for
Evidence,” History in Africa 17 (1990): 171-209. For more information on the Dutch book
industry, see Kees Boterbloem, “The Genesis of Jan Struys's Perillous Voyages and the
Business of the Book Trade in the Dutch Republic,” Publications of the Bibliographical
Society of America 102.1 (2008): 5-28.
23
Harriet Crawley continues: “The texts were filled with elaborate illustrations,
copperplate engravings based on travellers’ sketches. At the time, illustrated books were
a great rarity, but Ogilby maintained that seeing was believing. In an age before television,
photograph, radio or national newspapers, he provided a key source of knowledge” (98).
“John Ogilby, China publisher,” Arts of Asia 12 (1982): 96-99, 96.
24
For a general assessment of Ogilby’s publishing ventures, see chapter five of
Katherine S. van Eerde, Ogilby and the Taste of His Times. In chronological order, the
atlases published by Ogilby are: Embassy to China (1669), Africa (1670), Atlas
Japannensis (1670), America (1671), Atlas Chinensis (1671), Asia (1673), Embassy to
China 2
nd
Edition (1673). The specifics of Ogilby’s subscription arrangements for the
atlases are discussed in Sarah Clapp, “The Subscription Enterprises of John Ogilby and
Richard Blome,” Modern Philology 30.4 (1933): 365-379.
25
Katherine S. van Eerde, Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (London: Chatham,
1976), 117.
26
For trade history and role of tributary system in China, see David C. Kang, East
Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010) and Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Arbitrage, China, and
World Trade in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of
the Orient 38.4 (1995): 429-448. To historicize the tributary system in seventeenth
century China, see J. K. Fairbank and S. Y. Têng, “On The Ch'ing Tributary System,”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 6.2 (1941): 135-246.
27
Joseph Escherick, “China and the World: From Tribute to Treatises in Popular
Nationalism” in Brantly Womack (ed.) China’s Rise: In Historical Perspective (UK:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 19-38, 20.
SELECTED PAPERS of the OVSC Vol. XI, 2018
40
28
Kang, 71.
29
Gerritsen, A and Mcdowall, S. “Material Culture and the Other: European
Encounters with Chinese Procelain, ca. 1650-1800” Jounral of World History (2012): 87-
113, 100.
30
As Jane Hwang Degenardt notes, “the Dutch took over the Eastern monopoly
[of trade] from the Portuguese and with it the import of porcelain to Europe.” Jane Hwang
Degenhardt, “Cracking the Mysteries of “China”: China(ware) in the Early Modern
Imagination” Studies in Philology 110 (2013): 132-167, 147. She locates her study “when
Chinese commodities were just beginning to enter English domestic spaces through
Mediterranean trade and European re-export” (133).
31
Arthur Weststeijn, “Republican empire: colonialism, commerce and corruption
in the Dutch Golden Age.” Renaissance Studies 26.4 (2012): 491-509, 492.
32
Claudia Schnurmann, “The VOC, the WIC, and Dutch seventeenth-century
globalization” in Daniel Carey (ed) Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 149-168, 158-9.
33
See Vincent C. Loth, “Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry
in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century”, Modern Asian Studies 29 (1995): 705-
740. Anti-Dutch sentiment was readily apparent throughout the seventeenth century in
England, as captured by Dryden’s play Amboyna (1673). See Robert Markley’s The Far
East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006) and Karen Chancey, “The Amboyna Massacre in English Politics, 1624-
1632”Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 30.4 (1998): 583-598.
For analysis of Dryden’s dramatic depiction of the event, see Candy B. K Schille, “'With
Honour Quit the Fort': Ambivalent Colonialism in Dryden’s Amboyna.” Early Modern
Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 4.1-30 http://purl.oclc.org/emls/12-1/schiambo.htm
34
Chancey, 584.
35
For a comprehensive account of Dutch-Asian relations, see Kristof Glamann,
Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740 (Copenhagen, 1958. Reprint, The Hague and
Copenhagen, 1981). See also F. S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion
and Decline, trans. Peter Daniels (Zutphen: Walburg Press, 2003) and Jonathan Israel’s
Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For
particular focus on the complexities of Dutch-Asian commerce, VOC trade policies, and
overall Dutch maritime dominance in the Pacific, see John Willis Jr., Pepper, Guns, and
Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662-1681. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1974) and Ryuto Shimada, The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese
Copper by the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, The
Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijoff Publishers and VSP, 2006).
36
Lee, 10.
37
Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s
Early Modern World (Philadelphia: U of Penn Press, 2015), 46.
ANGLO-DUTCH EXCHANGE AND THE (RE)PRINTING OF CHINA
41
38
In Doppelganger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English
Literature and Culture (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Marjorie
Rubright accounts for a range of texts that negotiate the resemblances between England
and the Low Countries.
39
Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 9.
40
Benjamin Schmidt recognizes the Netherlands as a provider of printed
knowledge about non-European parts of the globe: “The Dutch, more generally, produced
the leading accounts of Asia, Africa, and America, and made them widely available in
English, French, and Latin.”Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Exotic World: The Global
Project of Dutch Geography, circa 1700”, in Felicity Nussbaum (ed) The Global Eighteenth
Century (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 21-37, 22-3.
41
Schmidt, “Mapping an Exotic World,” 23, 26.
42
For a comprehensive account of Euro-Asian encounters in the seventeenth
century, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley. Asia in the Making of Europe. Volume
III: A Century of Advance Book I, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). To
contextualize the impact of Euro-Asian encounters in the establishment of global
commerce and cultural exchange, see Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Vol. 2,
Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia
in Global Context, c. 800-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Andre
Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1540-1680
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 1993), and Southeast Asia in the Early Modern
Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, Ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
43
For a more thorough discussion of the diplomatic negotiations occurring at the
end of the 17
th
century between England, France and the Netherlands, see Clyde Leclare
Grose, “The Anglo-Dutch Alliance of 1678,” The English Historical Review 39 (1924):
526-551.
