Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author's own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author's lifestory I would've gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

It's not for lack of sources that this subject has been neglected for so long: the Dutch East India Company's (VOC) archives are largely complete and extensive, recognised as long ago as 1939 by D. G. E. Hall of being a rich source of informaetion of the VOC's trade with Burma. It's this data that forms the basis for this book, painstakingly gathered by Wil O. Dijk for her dissertation. This is the sort of tedious, labour intensive research that's sometimes dismissed as beancounting by more trendy historians, but which is essential as a foundation for further research. It does perhaps make Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 somewhat dry at times therefore, but that can't be helped.

The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602 as a monopoly for the Dutch trade with Asia. Its mission was to exploit the trade potential there to establish itself in the lucerative spices trade with Europe and to muscle out the enemy, Spain and Portugal. In this early stage it was not yet the colonising power it would become in later centuries, depending more on intra-Asian trade to finance the spice trade, which is where Burma came in. Burma was both a place where the VOC could sell (e.g. clothes and textiles from India) and buy (gold, long peppers, tin, rice, various kinds of wood) and make a profit at both ends. What's more, getting into the Burmese trade would also win one over the Portuguese, who had been in the Gulf of Bengal for decades. In fact, one Portuguese adventurer had carved out its own kingdom in Burma, but came to a sharp end and was impaled, once this kingdom was reconquered by the Burmese.

The Burmese trade promised rich rewards to the VOC, but trade was never straightforward. The kingdom of Pegu, as the VOC knew it, was ruled by strong kings who kept trade restricted and who at all times were concerned about the stability of their own power, determined not to undermine e.g. the royal monopoly on rubies. They kept prices for import goods artificially low, prices for export products high, quantities of many goods restricted and on the whole the VOC was very much dependent on the sometimes arbitary decisions of the Burmese king.

Which is why it was hesitant at first to get into Burma, despite its rich potential, as it could not be certain of steady, year on profits. After the first few hesitant years though this worry was no longer a concern and while the trade did decline somewhat in later years, it wasn't this that got the VOC to withdraw in 1680, but more the increased competition of other European (and other) trading companies and more importantly, its own internal restructuring. In the later part of the seventeenth century the VOC more and more focused on the direct trade with Europe, rather than the intra-Asian trade, starting to become a true colonial power with imperial holdings in Indonesia and the Spice Islands. While the Burma trade was very profitable, it no longer fitted its strategy, so it was abandoned. Some halfhearted attempts would be made a few decades later to reopen it, but this came to nothing.

When I normally think about the VOC and Dutch exploration in Asia, the picture I get is one of imperialism and colonalisation, with the native civilisations as the inferior, exploited party. But what Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 shows is a situation in which the Burmese, far from inferior, are actually the superior power, with the VOC as just one of many trading parties, neither particularly welcome, nor particularly feared, quickly replaced by others once it upped sticks. The Burma trade for a few decades was very important to the VOC, but the VOC was never all that important to Burmese trading...

So all in all, Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 does well both in sketching what these five-six decades of Dutch-Burmese trade looked like, its impact on VOC and Burma both and in presenting the data that support these conclusions.