Peter Borschberg

Ongoing Research II

 

Security, Diplomacy and Commerce in 17^th Century Southeast Asia: the Memorials, Letters and Treaties of VOC Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge

Edited with an introduction by Peter Borschberg

(Forthcoming with NUS Press, Singapore. ISBN: 978-9971-69-527-9)

Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge, a director in the Rotterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) 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 the rulers of Johor (1606) and Ternate (1607). After his return to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1608 he wrote a series of epistolary reports and memoranda that were carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic, among them the famous jurist Hugo Grotius, and landsadvocaat Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.

These materials contributed to the formulation of early VOC policy for the Southeast Asian region in the period 1605-1620, and they yield candid insights into key issues of trade, security and diplomacy of regional polities and their relations with Spain and Portugal. Here translated into English for the first time, this collection of treaties, reports and excerpts from his travelogue will be of considerable interest to students of Southeast Asian and early colonial history and of the history of international law.

 

Portrait of VOC Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge

Edition of the Memorials, Letters, and excerpts from the Travelogue of VOC Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge

Date: 24/February 2010