Author: Peter Borschberg Publisher: NUS Press ISBN: 9814722189 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 115
Book Description
Few authors have as much to say about Singapore and Johor in the early 17th century as Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge (c.1570‒1632). This admiral of the Dutch East India Company sailed to Asia in 1605 and besieged Portuguese Melaka in 1606 with the help of Malay allies. A massive Portuguese armada arrived from Goa to fight the Dutch at sea, break the siege and relieve the Portuguese colony. During his Asian voyage and on his return to Europe in September 1608, Matelieff penned a series of letters and memorials in which he provided a candid assessment of trading opportunities and politics in Asia. He advised the VOC and leading government officials of the Dutch Republic to take a long term view of Dutch involvement in Asia and fundamentally change the way they were doing business there. Singapore, the Straits region, and Johor assumed a significant role in his overall assessment. At one stage he seriously contemplated establishing the VOC’s main Asian base at a location near the Johor River estuary. On deeper reflection, however, Matelieff and the VOC directors in Europe began to shift their attention southward and instead preferred a location around the Sunda Strait. This was arguably a near miss for Singapore two full centuries before Thomas Stamford Raffles founded the British trading post on the island in 1819.
Author: Peter Borschberg Publisher: NUS Press ISBN: 9971694670 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 510
Book Description
This book considers the background to the treatises, their content and significance, and what Grotius actually knew about Southeast Asian polities or Portuguese institutions of trade and diplomacy when he wrote them. --
Author: Peter Borschberg Publisher: NUS Press ISBN: 9971694646 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
The Singapore and Melaka Straits are a place where regional and long-distance maritime trading networks converge, linking Europe, the Mediterranean, eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent with key centres of trade in Thailand, Indochina, insular Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. The first half of the 17th century brought heightened political, commercial and diplomatic activity to this region. It had long been clear to both the Portuguese and the Dutch that whoever controlled the waters off modern Singapore gained a firm grip on regional as well as long-distance intra-Asian trade. By the early 1600s Portuguese power and prestige were waning and the arrival of the Dutch East India Company constituted a major threat. Moreover, the rapid expansion and growing power of the Acehnese Empire, and rivalry between Johor and Aceh, was creating a new context for European trade in Asia.
Author: Peter Borschberg Publisher: NUS Press ISBN: 9971695278 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 699
Book Description
Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge was a Director in the Rotterdam chamber of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) for three decades in the early 17th century. In May 1605 he set sail from the Dutch Republic with a fleet of 11 ships, and in the following year launched an unsuccessful attack on Portuguese Melaka. After visiting various locations in the region and signing landmark treaties with the rulers of Johor (1606) and Ternate (1607), he returned to the Netherlands in 1608. There he wrote a series of epistolary reports and memoranda that were carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic, among them the renowned jurist Hugo Grotius, and the politician and diplomat Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Early VOC policy for south-eastern Asia drew heavily on Matelieff's submissions, and the materials reproduced in this volume provide candid insights into key elements of VOC strategy, trade, security and regional diplomacy, as well as Dutch relations with Spain and Portugal. Here translated into English for the first time, this collection of Matelieff's writings is an invaluable resource for students of business history, early colonial history, and the history of international law.
Author: Shaun Adam Publisher: Gerakbudaya Enterprise ISBN: 9670311969 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
A new retelling of the “Million Dollar War” When British colonists first arrived in Malaya, they considered Naning, a small village about 30 miles from Malacca, to be under their jurisdiction. The incumbent penghulu of Naning, Dol Said, resisted, claiming that Naning was an independent sovereign state with its own traditions and laws. Intending to follow in the footsteps of their Indian conquest, a military campaign was sanctioned by the British East India Company to seize Naning and to arrest its chief in 1831. What ought to have been a simple campaign turned out to be one of the empire’s greatest blunders in what is now modern-day Malaysia. Some would argue that Dol Said’s anti-colonial stance was replicated for more than a century afterwards, with different actors fighting the land’s colonial masters. Shaun Adam’s narrative ties in archival records with folk narratives and oral histories, thus creating a richer and more comprehensive narrative of the infamous Naning War that sparked off a history of unjust conquest – and resistance. "As academic historical research seems to be in decline in Malaysia, this labour of love - using traditional and unconventional sources and methods - is especially welcome." Prof Dr Jomo Kwame Sundaram "Truthfully, this book has achieved an international standard due to its immense amount of research and academic contents." Luqman NulHakim ".... a masterful retelling of the so-called 'Naning War'." Dr. Richard A. Engelhardt "... in comparison to those secondary school textbooks which make no distinction between facts, fiction and bias ... Acts of Resistance is far superior." YAM Tunku Zain Al-'Abidin
Author: Mariana Isa Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd ISBN: 9814893005 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
The peoples of Southeast Asia have a long history of cultural commonalities. From Sumatra to Vietnam, the inhabitants built wooden houses on poles whether they lived in flooded coastal plains or in the highlands. Their diet consisted mainly of rice and fish. They believed in common folk deities such as the rice-spirit. They chewed betel and engaged in pastimes such as cockfighting and sepak takraw. How did such features come to spread across an area of 4.5 million square kilometres? Southeast Asia – for all its diversity of ethnicity, language, religion – can best be understood as a region that has been knit together by a network of trade routes over land and sea. This revelatory new book traces the diffusion of cultures across Southeast Asia from the last few centuries BCE, by looking at trade goods such as Indian beads, Vietnamese Dongson drums, Chinese ceramics, and spices from the Indonesian archipelago. The authors take us through a host of ancient port cities, such as Srivijaya, whose fortunes were intimately tied to these trade routes, pointing out striking similarities in architecture, writing systems, and everyday customs. Richly illustrated with maps, drawings and full-colour photographs, Between the Bay of Bengal and the Java Sea is an illuminating slice of history that reveals in beautiful detail the longstanding mercantile links and cultural kinship among the disparate peoples of Southeast Asia.
Author: Jacques de Coutre Publisher: ISBN: 9789971696832 Category : Johor (Malaysia) Languages : en Pages : 453
Book Description
Jacques de Coutre was a Flemish gem trader who spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia at the turn of the 17th century. He left history a substantial autobiography written in Spanish and preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Written in the form of a picaresque tale, with an acute eye for the cultures he encountered, the memoirs tell the story of his adventures in the trading centres of the day: Melaka, Ayutthaya, Patani, Pahang, Johor, Brunei and Manila. Narrowly escaping death several times, De Coutre was inevitably drawn into dangerous intrigues between the representatives of European power, myriad fortune hunters and schemers, and the rulers and courtiers in the palaces of Pahang, Patani, Siam and Johor. In addition to his autobiography, De Coutre wrote a series of memorials to the united crown of Spain and Portugal that contain recommendations designed to remedy the decline in the fortunes of the Iberian powers in Southeast Asia, particularly against the backdrop of early Dutch political and commercial penetration into the region. Annotated and translated into English for the first time, these materials provide a valuable first-hand account of the issues confronting the early colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and deep into the societies De Coutre encountered in the territory that today makes up Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. The book is lavishly illustrated with 62 maps and drawings of the period, including many examples not previously published.
Author: Devinder Raj Publisher: Devinder Raj ISBN: 9671510736 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 126
Book Description
This is not an ordinary guide to Melaka. This book weaves together history, cultures, architecture and cuisine to tell a more multifaceted story of Melaka, once a great trading port fought over by various colonial powers, resulting in a rich heritage that is still salient today, resulting in a multicultural city reflecting its cosmopolitan journey over the centuries. Journey along the old streets of Melaka and past its ruins, where its rich history, reflecting hundreds of years of Asian and European influence, remains alive and evolving to this day.