A Paper Empire

Abstract

This chapter discusses the circulation of information from François Valentyn’s Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first part of the chapter describes how this functioned within the central organs of the VOC in the Netherlands and the VOC establishments in the East Indies during the eighteenth century. It could be established that for several VOC directors Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën was probably an important source of information about the VOC’s trading empire, while at the same time their epistemic interest seemed to have been limited to matters of trade. Simultaneously, in several VOC establishments in the East Indies Valentyn’s work was employed for administrative purposes. The second part of the chapter discusses the circulation of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën during the nineteenth century, when the Dutch colonial empire in Asia became limited to the Indonesian archipelago. During the first half of the nineteenth century, in the absence of more recent geographical descriptions with similar coverage, Valentyn’s book remained the main reference work for the development of colonial policy and as a source of information for new publications. Since Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën was used simultaneously as a source of information by several actors, both in the Netherlands and in the East Indies, this resulted in a standardisation of operational knowledge of the East Indies within the colonial bureaucracy and beyond. The book lost its value only when more up-to-date descriptions started to appear and when there were increasing reservations about the way Valentyn’s work had been compiled, such as the unsatisfactory way in which the information it contained was accounted for.