Perhaps the best way to sum up the nature of the Dutch experience in Japan is by briefly expanding the picture to consider how the company’s relationship with the shogun compared with the situation in other parts of Asia. In their important study of VOC activity, George Winius and Markus Vink divide the company’s development into three periods: an aggressive phase of expansion from 1600 to 1680, a competitive period from 1680 to 1748, and a period of “disengagement and decline” from 1748 to 1795.
1 During the first period, which has been the focus for this study, the VOC expanded very rapidly, establishing a string of factories and colonies across Asia while, in the process, engaging with a wide array of states ranging from tiny port polities to vast empires. Given this diversity, it is not surprising that the subsequent relationships were extremely varied, and, as we would expect, the outcome was very different depending on whether the VOC confronted a small city state in Southeast Asia or a regional superpower like Mughal India.
On one side of the scale were relationships in which the company came to occupy a more dominant position, gradually accruing power until it was able to dictate the terms of engagement. This category was populated primarily by Indonesian states such as Mataram, Banten, and Makassar, all of which started off the seventeenth century as formidable rivals but were eventually subsumed into the company’s empire in a subordinate role. While there were frequent (and sometimes devastating) setbacks along the way, the VOC succeeded in all three cases in maneuvering itself, across the long period of aggressive expansion laid out by Winius and Vink, into a ascendant position. The company’s relationship with the sultanate of Mataram in central Java, briefly discussed in an earlier chapter, provides one example of the slow growth of VOC power. Over time, Mataram, which under Sultan Agung (r. 1613–46) had come close to conquering Batavia, was forced into an increasingly subordinate role, becoming by 1677 reliant on VOC military support to suppress internal dissent.
2 In the same period the company gained increasing influence over another former rival, the port polity of Banten, which was eventually compelled in 1684 to sign a one-sided treaty acknowledging the governor-general’s authority.
Batavia’s dealings with the Sultanate of Gowa or Makassar in South Sulawesi followed a similar trajectory. Emerging as a commercial and military power in the late sixteenth century, the sultanate became one of company’s most persistent opponents during the first half of the seventeenth century, an enemy capable of mustering ten of thousands of troops and boasting in the city of Makassar a thriving center that was as large as many European capitals.
3 The company opened a factory in Makassar in 1607, but relations soon deteriorated, and the Dutch withdrew in 1615. The subsequent clash, which lasted on and off for over five decades, centered primarily on control over trade. Makassar flourished in the face of the company’s determined attempts to establish a monopoly over precious spices by providing a haven for foreign traders, including the Portuguese, seeking to evade VOC restrictions.
4 Indeed it was the ruler of Makassar who famously protested that “Allah created the earth and sea. The earth he divided among the people and the sea became common to all. It has never been heard that anyone prohibited navigation.”
5Batavia responded to the challenge represented by the sultanate by making full use of the weapons at its disposal and particularly by the aggressive deployment of both its diplomatic as well as its military apparatus. In an effort to gain control over trade, the company exchanged a series of letters and embassies with successive sultans who addressed the governor-general as an independent political actor in his own right as the ruler of “all the land and forts, ships great and small and all the subjects of the Hollanders below the winds.”
6 When persuasion failed, the company was quick to resort to force, sending ships, as it had done in Japan, to assault Portuguese shipping in Makassar’s waters and later engaging in a string of wars with the sultanate itself in 1653, 1660, and again in 1666.
7 The last of these proved decisive, and in 1667 Sultan Hasanuddin (r. 1653–69) was forced to sign the treaty of Bungaya, which effectively turned Makassar into a VOC vassal.
In all three cases the company came, over time, to control the terms of the relationship, gradually increasing the pressure until it was able to exert significant influence over its former rivals. This dynamic was, however, far from standard, and there are numerous examples of other relationships in which the company was forced onto the back foot and where it came to occupy a far more precarious position. This broad category, in which VOC power proved far more elusive, included some of the most important states in early modern Asia such as Ming and then Qing China, Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and the Ayutthaya kingdom of Siam, all of which wielded military resources far in excess of what the company could muster. The relations that developed between Batavia and these states were predictably varied. In some cases, to cite the most obvious difference, the company succeeded in establishing enduring ties while other interactions proved far more sporadic.
The VOC engaged intermittently with China, for example, during the seventeenth century, but it never succeeded in establishing a durable relationship. Indeed, its two attempts to entrench itself on the peripheries of the Chinese realm both ended in military repulse, in 1624 when the Dutch were forced from the Penghu Islands by a Ming fleet and in 1662 when the VOC banner was hauled down from Taiwan by Zheng Chenggong’s armies. Given China’s size and potency, the company was, even in a period characterized by considerable domestic turbulence and the collapse of one domestic regime, never in a position to dictate terms, but it behaved nonetheless with a surprising degree of aggression by making full use of the powers granted to it in article 35 of its charter. Thus in 1622, the VOC, as previously discussed, effectively declared war on China in a determined attempt to use the power of its ships’ guns to pressure Ming officials into opening trade with the Penghu Islands, which the company had recently colonized.
8 But while such tactics had been used to great effect in Southeast Asia, they proved far less successful in bullying Chinese officials who, the Dutch discovered, were prepared to respond with an overwhelming display of military strength. Indeed, one result of Batavia’s campaign was to draw the full attention of Chinese coastal officials, who proceeded to assemble troops to eject the Dutch from the Penghu Islands. In this way the company’s first protracted engagement with Ming China ended not in a settlement but with a VOC retreat to Taiwan, a territory that lay beyond the boundaries of the Chinese state.
After the collapse of the Ming, the company was faced with a more complex political environment in which it was compelled to manage relations with two rival Chinese polities, the Qing regime, which had control over most of mainland China, and a de facto maritime state under Zheng Chenggong. Its preferred tool for dealing with the former was the official embassy, a number of which were dispatched to Beijing equipped with letters and gifts from the governor-general in an attempt to secure a military alliance in return for commercial concessions.
9 While this was happening, the company faced a growing threat from Zheng Chenggong, who was increasingly interested in using Taiwan as a base from which to wage his campaign against the Qing. The tipping point came, as it had in 1624, when Chinese authorities, in this case Zheng Chenggong, decided that the Dutch presence was no longer tolerable and assembled a large force to expel them from their stronghold on Tayouan. The result was another repulse for the company, which was never in a position to fend off a concerted assault from Chinese forces, and the effective end of the VOC presence on the Chinese coast.
In Siam, by contrast, the company succeeded in establishing an enduring relationship with the Ayutthayan kingdom (1351–1767). The VOC opened a factory in Siam in 1608 and operated there with sporadic breaks for over 150 years until 1765. The longevity of this connection hinged in large part on a generally favorable relationship with the Ayutthayan court, which engaged enthusiastically with the Dutch. Bhawan Ruangsilp, who has provided one of the best studies of the Dutch presence in Siam, argues that a partnership developed between Batavia and the kings of Siam, although she is careful to point out that it was always conditional.
10 At the heart of the relationship was a flourishing diplomatic engagement first between the princes of Orange and the Siamese monarchs, but later with Batavia as regular embassies transited between VOC headquarters and the capital city of Ayutthaya.
11 The company’s ability to make use of diplomacy in this way was strengthened by the fact that it was seen not only as a commercial and diplomatic partner but also as a valuable military ally. Indeed, the kings of Siam repeatedly pleaded with Dutch officials for naval assistance in various campaigns against enemies and recalcitrant vassals.
12As was the case in China, the company was never in a position to dictate to Siam, which its employees described as a “famous and potent Kingdom,” but it was prepared to act aggressively and possessed the necessary tools to force a shift in Ayutthayan policy on key issues.
13 This is most clearly evident in 1663 when Batavia decided that, to quote Ruangsilp, a series of “accumulated problems between the VOC and the Siamese crown had to be solved on its terms.”
14 Its chosen mechanism to do this was to make use of a well-worn tactic, the naval blockade. From November 1663 to February 1664, the company’s ships sealed off the Chao Phraya River, seizing Siamese junks until the crown gave in to Batavia’s demands. The result was a treaty concluded, according to one contemporary Dutch report, “out of fear and awe of the Company’s might and weapons” that secured for the VOC a series of important concessions.
15 The overall effect of this short but highly effective campaign was thus to reset the company’s relations with Siam on far more advantageous terms for Batavia.
This brief discussion brings us back to the question of Japan and the company’s experience there. There is, of course, an obvious difference between the enduring ties that Batavia developed with Tokugawa Japan, which lasted for over two centuries, and the intermittent interaction that took place in China. But the Japanese example also has surprisingly little in common with the relationship that developed with the Ayutthaya kingdom in Siam, where the VOC did succeed in establishing a durable presence. Most noticeably, we see in Japan very little evidence of the conditional partnership that Ruangsilp has described. Instead this was a decidedly unequal relationship in which the VOC found itself forced into a consistently subordinate role. While this was certainly due in part to the relative strength of the Tokugawa Bakufu, one of the more formidable regimes in early modern Asia, simply pointing to this fact does not account for why things developed in the way they did. This study has attempted to offer some explanation for this by focusing on a series of contained conflicts involving the company and the Tokugawa regime that took place in the seventeenth century during a period of aggressive VOC expansion.
When it arrived in Japan in 1609, the VOC, a hybrid organization that combined the attributes of both corporation and state, came equipped not simply with ships and merchandize but with a set of sovereign powers derived from its charter that it was determined to exercise. The company’s subsequent assertion of its rights over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty triggered a series of clashes with the Bakufu. Within the confines of these conflicts—over whether the company could engage in high-level diplomacy with the shogun, over its rights to deploy maritime violence either in Japanese waters or against Japan’s trading partners, and over its claims to full sovereignty in Tayouan—the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun were, I have suggested, largely determined. In each case it was the VOC rather than the Tokugawa regime that was compelled to give ground, albeit always in different ways, and to retreat from its insistence on its proper rights and sovereign privileges. By the time this process was complete, the company found that it had lost access to tools that it took for granted in other parts of Asia.
Whereas in Siam a lavish embassy or carefully planned maritime campaign, such as the one that took place on the Chao Phraya River in 1663, offered the chance to swing the balance back toward the company, no such weapons of leverage were available in Japan. That this was the case was apparent by 1632 when the VOC, faced with no other alternative, elected to take the extraordinary step of handing over a high-ranking official, Pieter Nuyts, to reopen relations with Japan. It can also be seen in a range of comments made by Dutch officials in this period. In December 1638, for example, the governor-general clearly explained the company’s strategy in Japan: “The Japanese must not be troubled. You must wait for the right time and opportunity and with the greatest patience to obtain something. They will not suffer being spoken back to. Therefore the smaller we make ourselves, pretending to be small, humble and modest merchants that live because of their wishes, the more favor and respect we can enjoy in their land. This we have learned from long experience…. In Japan you cannot be too humble.”
16In the United Provinces the company’s directors embraced a similar message. When they turned to the topic of Japan in their famous general instructions, which were issued in 1650, the Heeren 17 observed that “we can give our officers no other instructions than to satisfy this arrogant, grand and punctilious nation in everything.”
17 VOC officials should, the directors insisted, “go armed with modesty, humility, courteousness and friendship,” seeking never to dictate to the regime but always to bend to its wishes.
But it was not simply that the company lost access to effective tools that it relied on in other parts of Asia. Rather it was also the case that the Dutch in Japan were incorporated into the domestic system in a way that was quite distinct from the Ayutthayan example. Some sense of this divide can be obtained by looking at two separate military campaigns in which Batavia offered its support first to the king of Siam and later to the Tokugawa shogun. Beginning in 1633, King Prasatthong of Siam (r. 1629–56) attempted to lure the Dutch into participating in a war against his former vassal state of Patani by promising lucrative trade concessions in return for naval support.
18 These pleas eventually bore fruit and in 1634 the company dispatched a small fleet to take part in military operations. Although the actual impact of VOC involvement was negligible, Batavia’s willingness to provide aid earned the Dutch a raft of new privileges that significantly improved their position in Siam.
19 The Shimabara campaign, which took place three years later, played out very differently. Rather than being drawn into participating by the promise of rewards, the Dutch, trapped by their own rhetoric and past promises, were compelled to volunteer alongside the shogun’s domestic subordinates for service against the rebels.
The difference between these two campaigns speaks to the distinctive nature of the company’s relationship with the shogun. In Japan the company was domesticated, confined within a self-designated role as vassal, and saddled with a raft of attached responsibilities. Abandoning their claims to represent a powerful external figure, whether the Stadhouder or the governor-general, the Dutch were, for all their obvious foreignness, transformed into domestic subordinates. As part of this, VOC representatives were subjected to a tailored version of the sankin k
ōtai system; required to render military service (either directly or in the form of intelligence reports); forced to give up key rights (most notably related to the deployment of maritime violence) while accepting the shogun’s legal authority (as least as it related to certain offenses); and compelled, like other vassals, to play their part in theatrical displays of submission. It was a role they would become intimately familiar with, acting it out year after year until the boundaries between performance and reality became irrevocably blurred. Whether the Dutch were real vassals or were simply playing the part became largely irrelevant; they behaved, to all intents and purposes, like the shogun’s loyal servants and, as the inclusion of a separate section,
hōkō, or service, in
Tsūkō ichiran makes clear, were recognized as the sole occupants of a unique category in the Tokugawa order.
This study has not attempted to document the history of the Dutch in Japan. Rather, by focusing on a series of contained conflicts, its goal has been to chart a process of socialization, in which the Dutch were forced to adapt to find a place in a Tokugawa order. Given that these clashes were almost uniformly resolved in the Asian partner’s favor, it should be clear that company’s relationship with the Tokugawa shogun was not entirely typical, but nor was it so far removed from the more general experience of Europeans in Asia that it should be seen as a historical outlier with no relevance beyond Japan. While there has been an understandable tendency to focus on places where direct colonization occurred or on relations—like those between the company and Mataram, Banten, or Makassar—where the European impact was greatest, these were not the norm, and the more common scenario was one in which Europeans struggled to manage the terms of their engagement with Asia. Arguably no other encounter better illustrates this point than the one that took place between the Dutch and Tokugawa Japan.
If, following the work of Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and others, we accept the enduring power of Asian states in the early modern period as a fact, then it is surely incumbent on historians to better chart the long process of integration in which Europeans were assimilated into Asian orders. The Dutch experience in Japan shows that European footholds in Asia did not invariably morph from isolated trading posts into fortified bases before finally becoming full colonies. Rather the presence of formidable Asian states meant that even the most forceful of European organizations could be confined to enclaves from which they never escaped. Japan provides the emblematic dead end for Europeans enterprises in Asia, a site of total containment, and thus serves as a valuable counterpoint to those studies that assume that the “rise of Europe” began with the voyages of exploration in 1492 or 1497 and continued, marching according to the relentless beat of some great drum, in subsequent centuries.