| Popis: |
In the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants of the Vereenigde Ost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) were among the most important foreign minorities in Ayutthaya, as they could provide access for the Siamese to commercial networks and marfkets in maritime Southeast Asia and along the VOC’s trading routes. Ayutthaya served VOC traders as an important regional entrepot located at a crossroad between India and Japan, where goods from all over Asia were imported, stored, and exchanged. The Siamese capital was a cosmopolitan port city, hosting people from different cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Dutch traders found a society where communities of Portuguese, Peguan, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, and other groups settled in adjacent city quarters, came into contact with each other, established ongoing relations, and clashed. VOC employees were embedded in a complex setting of commercial, religious, and social practices, with different ethnic groups fulfilling distinctive economic and social functions. This chapter examines some of the legal terms and cultural conventions on which commercial and social interactions of the Dutch in Siam were based. I will then look at the life and writings of the Flemish Company officer Jeremias van Vliet, who lived in Ayutthaya between 1633 and 1642. While unknown to most Western historians, Van Vliet occupies a peculiar place in the history of Thailand. There is no other European traveller, merchant, or missionary from this period who wrote more extensively on the kingdom. His four books on Siam provide valuable insights into the various social, political, and economic entanglements that shaped a Dutch company man’s life in Siam. At the same time, Van Vliet is an exemplary case to explore both the functioning of a multinational trading community and the characteristic fragility of the position of the cosmopolitan in early modern Southeast Asian societies. |
