In the Company of Global History

Global history has in the last decades developed as a popular approach in history writing. The history of the Dutch East India Company (voc) is inevitably a global one. But how perceptive are histories of the voc to trends in global history? Does conceptualizing voc history as a global history bring any value to the exercise? This essay argues that global history will encourage historians of the voc to ask new questions and pursue new lines of research. It will prod historians to put voc archives to innovative use and integrate the Company into writing more inclusive comparative and connected histories of the Indian Ocean and early modern world.


In the Company of Global History manjusha kuruppath
Global history has in the last decades developed as a popular approach in history writing. The history of the Dutch East India Company (voc) is inevitably a global one. But how perceptive are histories of the voc to trends in global history? Does conceptualizing voc history as a global history bring any value to the exercise?
This essay argues that global history will encourage historians of the voc to ask new questions and pursue new lines of research. It will prod historians to put voc archives to innovative use and integrate the Company into writing more inclusive comparative and connected histories of the Indian Ocean and early modern world.
In de geschiedwetenschap heeft een globale benadering de laatste decennia aan belangstelling gewonnen. De geschiedenis van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (voc) is onmiskenbaar een globale geschiedenis. Maar hoeveel aandacht is er in de huidige geschiedschrijving van de voc voor deze trend inzake wereldgeschiedenis? Wat is de waarde van de conceptualisering van de geschiedenis van de voc als een wereldgeschiedenis? In dit essay wordt beargumenteerd dat een mondiale benadering historici van de voc aanmoedigt

Introduction
In the last two and a half decades, global history has become an immensely popular approach in history writing. This period has also experienced a significant amount of self-reflection about the identity of global history, its purpose, methodology and benefits. According to Patrick O'Brien, global forum history seeks to 'represent the past in ways that might promote cross-cultural conversations recognized as useful for the future of mankind'. 2 In other words, the purpose of global history, in the spirit of the globalised world we live in, is to remove fences and promote inclusiveness. It seeks to tear down the boundaries set up by the national and regional histories and point to the vibrant connections and startling similarities in the human condition in different parts of the world. Global history is thus, in many ways, post-national history and therefore very similar if not the same as world or transnational history.
The second aim of global history is to distance itself away from Eurocentrism.
Histories of the world emerging from the western historical tradition have commonly told the story of Europe's exceptional progress which since the mid-twentieth century has drawn inspiration from the modernisation theory.
This conception of history is based on the late nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury theorisations of Karl Marx and Max Weber who sought to understand Europe's present in their times. Marx identified stages of production that Europe would undergo before the overthrow of capitalism and Weber studied the development of institutions and practices such as constitutional government, secularism and capitalism which he regarded as representative of and responsible for Europe's modernity. 3 The impact of modernization theory in evaluating our period in history has meant an emphasis on the history of European expansion and on finding the seeds of modernity in the thought processes and practices of Europe in the wider world. A critique of such histories articulated by schools of history such as postcolonialism and subaltern studies has fed into the general objectives of global history which aims to tell the story of how the world came together instead of the tale of the advancement of one part of the world at the expense of another. One such work which pursues these wider aims is Charles Parker's Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400-1800. 4 It takes attention away from European expansion in the early modern period by working with a chronology which does not give the 1490s special treatment kuruppath and reminds us that the assumption of European hegemony in this period is an anachronism. Parker, in addition, emphasises the idea that the Qing, Romanovs, Mughals, Safavids and Ottomans also counted among the empire builders of the early modern period. This is often forgotten in our anticipation of the later creation of colonial empires in Asia. Comparative history, which is the second method, teases out the similarities and differences in the responses of polities or communities to historical experiences. Victor Lieberman's monumental work Strange Parallels, an oftquoted example of comparative history, is symptomatic of recent comparative global histories which seek not so much to emphasise the differences and divergences between the units of enquiry, but to stress the commonalities involved. 7 While Lieberman's work is clearly a large-scale history asking big questions about a sizeable part of a globe over a dauntingly wide time frame of a millennium, not all global historians believe that global histories should be blanket, all-encompassing histories.
On the contrary, global history comes in various kinds of packaging and historians argue that successful global histories can and should be able to actively converse with micro, local and regional histories. One such work which reveals the immense potential and versatility of global history is John Paul Ghobrial's The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon which traces the life of a seventeenth-century traveler. 8 As a global micro-history, this work effectively marries the genres of micro-history and biography to plot the global life of an Eastern Christian turned Catholic named Elias whose travels took him from his homeland in Mosul in present-day Iraq to Europe and South America.
Ghobrial's protagonist is a non-European which is a strong counterpoint forum to the idea that itinerancy of global proportions was a peculiarly European accomplishment, even though he was travelling through maritime routes opened up by Europeans. Ghobrial, in addition, shows how global histories are not incompatible with local histories, but that most histories are often complex entanglements of the two.
How do histories of the voc sit in discussions of global history? The history of the Dutch East India Company is inevitably a global one and there can hardly be any debate about the extent of the Company's operations or its place in the history of the early modern Indian Ocean. The voc spread its tentacles from South Africa to Deshima in Japan, with settlements of varying sizes and influence across the breadth of maritime Asia. This diverse and enduring two century presence in the region has meant that there is little wonder that the history of the voc, like the Dutch Republic, has for many decades been associated with the idea of modernity, and notions of Company dynamism have for long been woven into the 'rise of the West' narrative. Niels Steensgaard, for instance, regarded the voc's financial model as characteristically modern. 9 In a similar vein, Jonathan Israel wrote in the preface to his landmark work Dutch Primacy in World Trade, '(...) no one has ever disputed, or is ever likely to, the centrality of Dutch maritime and commercial activity for over a century in the making of the early modern world'. 10 Both works reveal and reinforce a 'classic' image of the Company that has strongly influenced academic perspectives of the enterprise. These views have also bled into popular imagination and, even for an informed outsider, the Company is often seen as representative of modernity.
Some histories of the voc therefore demonstrate the same Eurocentrism that recent historians, including global historians, seek to combat. Yet, how congenial is voc history to the writing of global histories? If we consider the movement of humans, commodities and ideas to constitute the backbone of global connective histories, it is hard to miss the extent of migration that the Company facilitated, either in terms of voluntary or forced movement, of people between Europe and Asia and between its settlements in the Indian Ocean. The Company's intra-Asian and intercontinental trade in a staggering range of commodities is equally noteworthy, as is the role of the enterprise in the circulation of ideas, such as the spread of Christianity, art, science and technology. Connectedness and diversity, it seems therefore, are ingrained in the very nature of the Company. The potential for writing comparative and connected histories can also be realised quite easily because the wide range of Company settlements in various parts of the Indian Ocean world functioned not merely as chroniclers of Company history but also as kuruppath observatories from which they witnessed and reflected on the polities and people they interacted with. This makes the voc archives a veritable goldmine of information about the Indian Ocean world and as the website of unesco puts it: 'the voc archives make up the most complete and extensive source on early modern world history anywhere '. 11 The vast size of the archive sets to rest the chief criticism addressed to global history, namely that it has to contend with the paucity of primary sources that mars its writing.
We might then agree that the history of the voc and the available archives of the Company chronicle phenomena that global historians seek to engage with, but how do voc histories fit in with the objectives of global history? As we saw before, global history aims to contest the twin tyrannies Dutch-Vietnamese relations. 19 Where such histories of impact, encounter and interaction escape the clutches of the nation-state, they become more localised and devote themselves to studying these processes within regional spaces such as Java, Malabar or Ayutthaya. The foci of such histories can be problematic for several reasons. Histories of the voc written in relation to nationstates impute anachronistic spatial categories into the early modern past.
Institutional histories, on the other hand, might be cognisant of the voc's geographical domain of activity and adopt this space as their field of study.
However, without engaging in a comparative exercise, they are vulnerable to uncritically accepting the voc, to use Jos Gommans' phrase, to be 'a unique enterprise of courageous Dutchmen'. As James Belich usefully reminds us, 'comparative history may be the best way to test, and if necessary undermine, grand narratives.' 20 This should encourage us to think about how comparative and connected global history can transform ways in which we write Company histories.

Comparative histories
It would be an error to think of comparative history, in the context of

Connected histories
The experimentation with connected history in the context of voc histories has been a bare minimum. It is perhaps this trend that has caused Remco