Search

Besides trading, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and its Western Indian counterpart (WIC) also sought to expand their dominant position by establishing and managing colonies. Central to this strategy was to stimulate an orderly, self-producing colonial population, with a European elite at the top and a sharp distinction between free citizens and people in slavery. The reality was less orderly, however: in disparate colonial settlements such as Batavia, Cochin, Ceylon, Elmina, Suriname, Curaçao and Berbice, people from different backgrounds, religions, and social positions encountered one another and formed relationships – formal and informal, coercive and consensual – which could either challenge or reinforce the social divisions on which colonial hierarchies rested. Regulating Relations, focusing on the abovementioned settlements in the eighteenth century, investigates how norms around marriage, family, and sexuality formed in this complex world: how did colonial authorities attempt to regulate the intimate relations of populations under their control, and how did men and women of various backgrounds give shape to these norms through their own behavior and use of institutions?

This dissertation studies the changes in the rural economy and society of south-eastern Panjab during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This region was an ecological and political frontier, where nomadic-pastoral and agrarian ways of life overlapped, and effective power lay in the hands of different husbanding communities, which were each represented by warlords from established clans. This research seeks to understand the impact of colonization upon south-eastern Panjab, where the British East India Company first acquired a foothold in 1803. The Company faced two main challenges. First, the large number of princes, chiefs, and warlords whose domains dotted the region, and whose authority posed a challenge to that of the British. Second, the itinerant ways of local agro-pastoral populations, which made them difficult to monitor and tax. How did the state’s attempts to counter these challenges impact local populations? In particular, how did it affect the households of the husbandman, the warlord and the preceptor, the three key figures in rural society? It is these questions that this thesis seeks to answer. It suggests that while the region was impoverished by colonization, the household-based rural order survived into the twentieth century.

The dissertation examines the life and work of G.B. and A. Salm, father and son. Their body of work embraces a wide diversity of architectural styles. Although they occupied a central position within the principal architecture associations at the time they do not seem to have taken a clear position in the polemics on style and material use that architects of the time were engaging in. Their buildings are at first sight difficult to place within the architectural history of the nineteenth century, as a result of which they are all too readily classed among the ‘eclectics’, the group of architects who presented a mixture of styles as a contemporary alternative to the perceived ‘impasse’ in architecture. The question that this dissertation addresses is whether this label is correct. Very little is known about the ideas that form the basis of the designs of this father and son. A further study and analysis of their ideas and their body of architectural work has therefore been carried out to determine the true place of both G.B. and A. Salm in the architecture of the nineteenth century. This study includes a review of the networks and clientele of both father and son.

How did early modern Dutch people relate to distant suffering? As charitable relief is as much a thing of the present as it is of the past, the question is still relevant in modern aid campaigns. This dissertation engages with the scholarly debate on early modern solidarity which presupposes that solidarity was confined to one’s own social or religious group. Therefore, aid to foreign fellow believers is commonly explained as religious brotherhood and long-distance solidarity with domestic disaster victims is thought to be absent, especially in the decentralised and particularistic Dutch Republic. This thesis demonstrates, first, that transnational aid to persecuted foreign fellow-believers was not just about confessional brotherhood but also about political interests and, second, it shows that long-distance solidarity with disaster victims was fairly common in the Dutch Republic. By analysing the arguments put forward by the victims in their aid requests, the reasons underlying the decisions of the civil authorities to support of reject these pleas, and the way in which the general public was persuaded to donate, this study reveals the multifaceted character of early modern aid. Furthermore, it provides insight into the emergence of humanitarian argumentation long before the Enlightenments ‘humanitarian revolution’.

When thinking about criminality, it is generally not a female protagonist that first comes to mind – especially not in early modern Italy, where women’s scope of action is commonly portrayed as heavily restricted. This dissertation examines the influence of gender on recorded crime in the city of Bologna, and reveals two distinct features: the prominence of violence among recorded crime, and a consistently low share of formally investigated female offenders. Rather than seeking to explain this crime pattern through the stereotypical notion of women’s restricted agency alone, this dissertation distinguishes three other important mechanisms for cities like Bologna: the tendency to institutionalise rather than criminalise ‘problematic women’, judicial paternalism, and, importantly, the pervasive culture of peace-making. While all of these mechanisms withdrew women from formal criminal prosecutions, a close-reading of hundreds of complaints alongside the formal investigations allows us to uncover women’s far more prominent roles in crime. Not only were women’s shares among offenders much higher than the formal investigations alone would suggest, the fact that female victims of crime actively and strategically employed the criminal court to their own ends speaks to the notion that women’s scope of action was far more significant than was commonly assumed.

This thesis looks at the representation of violence in Dutch newspapers during the rise of the mass media in the Netherlands, from 1880 to 1930. Newspaper circulations shot up and newspapers increasingly targeted women readers and the working class. The thesis examines how these changes affected press coverage of sexual and family violence, crimes that involved women either as the victim or the perpetrator. A key question was whether public condemnation of male violence against women increased during this period, as has been argued by some historians.I find that newspaper reporting on partner violence and sexual violence increased after 1880, and the reports became more sympathetic to the women involved. I argue that this was in part because such human-interest stories were thought to appeal to the new target segment of women readers. However, journalists never treated such violence as a social problem and they often romanticized or trivialized assaults by men. Moreover, crime news was mediated by the sources and shaped by distinctive features of the Dutch criminal justice system.

This dissertation points out the stark inequalities of segregated criminal justice in nineteenth-century Java and analyses this unequal system in practice, shown by an actor-focused approach and through a framework of legal pluralities. Ravensbergen searched for the conflicts occurring around the green table of the 'pluralistic courts'(landraden and ommegaande rechtbanken) where the non-European population was tried by Javanese and Dutch court members, and Islamic and Chinese legal advisors. The pluralistic courts, the only places in Java where all regional power structures met and actively worked together, were courtrooms of many conflicts. The courts were also in interaction, and conflict, with other state institutions, together all furthering the project of colonial state formation. By taking this approach, Ravensbergen shows how it was not only inequality, but also uncertainty and injustice, that were central to colonial criminal justice imposed on the local population.

Tussen hamer en aambeeld is a social economic study into several aspects of the goldsmiths profession in Friesland during the seventeenth century. The study, based on comprehensive research in archives, describes the influence of monetary laws, guilds and trade patterns on the lives and the works of the goldsmiths in Bolsward and Leeuwarden. During the Golden Age the craft was confronted with problems caused by the rigid monetary policy of the Frisian States. The Frisian goldsmiths became evermore depended on the import of silver from Amsterdam. The price of this silver rose while the selling price in Friesland remained fixed. In order to keep the profession exclusive the goldsmiths took protective measures and searched for creative solutions. Around 1672 many of the craftsmen were confronted with financial mishap. Some goldsmiths with a solid reputation, based on objects that survived the ages, set up a trade network with jewelers from Amsterdam. What are the consequences of this trade for the reputation of Frisian silver? The book contains biographies of the goldsmiths from Bolsward and new information about their marks.