Drawing on extensive new research, and bringing much new scholarship before English readers for the first time, this wide-ranging volume examines how knowledge was created and circulated throughout the Dutch Empire, and how these processes compared with those of the Imperial Britain, Spain, and Russia.

This is an odd book. An extensive and sometimes annotated bibliography, it is not a book in the sense of a narrative. However, if treated as a book in the traditional sense it leads the reader through a broad spectrum of feelings of amazement, curiosity and desire: amazement about the sheer volume, richness and detail of theliterature on Batavia/Jakarta; curiosity about the contents of certain publications or series of publications with attractive titles; and a feeling of desire immediately to begin an investigation into one of the appealing subjects stumbled upon while leafing through. The bibliography contains over 5000 titles classified into 42 broad subject categories. The vast majority of the publications consists of books, but the number of articles is also very substantial. Most of these titles (3500) were produced after 1950. The larger part of the publications are written in Indonesian, Dutch, and to a lesser extent English. But also publications in such languages as French, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, and many others were listed. Indexes of authors, of subjects and of titles make this bibliography easily accessible.

Het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, opgericht in 1778, is de voorloper van het Nationaal Museum en de Nationale Bibliotheek van de Republik Indonesia en geldt als de belangrijkste cultureel-wetenschappelijke organisatie van Nederlands-Indië in de VOC-tijd en de koloniale periode. In deze studie naar de vroege geschiedenis van deze eerbiedwaardige instelling komen aan de orde: de oprichting, het programma en het werkterrein van het genootschap, het ledenbestand en de leiding, groei, verval en wederopstanding, maar vooral de relatie tot de overheid van deze formeel private onderneming, die soms eerder een overheidsinstelling leek te worden. Het archief van het Genootschap, dat bewaard wordt in het Nationaal Archief van de Republik Indonesia, is hiertoe de belangrijkste bron geweest. Het is sinds 1878 nauwelijks beschikbaar geweest voor onderzoekers buiten de kring van het genootschap. Voor historici, linguïsten, antropologen, archeologen en anderen is het genootschapsarchief en de geschiedenis van het genootschap van groot belang.

Situated along the line that divides the rich ecologies of Asia and Australia, the Indonesian archipelago is a hotbed for scientific exploration, and scientists from around the world have made key discoveries there. But why do the names of Indonesia’s own scientists rarely appear in the annals of scientific history? In The Floracrats Andrew Goss examines the professional lives of Indonesian naturalists and biologists, to show what happens to science when a powerful state becomes its greatest, and indeed only, patron. With only one purse to pay for research, Indonesia’s scientists followed a state agenda focused mainly on exploiting the country’s most valuable natural resources—above all its major export crops: quinine, sugar, coffee, tea, rubber, and indigo. The result was a class of botanic bureaucrats that Goss dubs the “floracrats.” Drawing on archives and oral histories, he shows how these scientists strove for the Enlightenment ideal of objective, universal, and useful knowledge, even as they betrayed that ideal by failing to share scientific knowledge with the general public. With each chapter, Goss details the phases of power and the personalities in Indonesia that have struggled with this dilemma, from the early colonial era, through independence, to the modern Indonesian state. Goss shows just how limiting dependence on an all-powerful state can be for a scientific community, no matter how idealistic its individual scientists may be.

This groundbreaking work studies the Arabic literary culture of early modern Southeast Asia on the basis of largely unstudied and unknown manuscripts. It offers new perspectives on intellectual interactions between the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the development of Islam and especially Sufism in the region, the relationship between the Arabic and Malay literary traditions, and the manuscript culture of the Indian Ocean world. It brings to light a large number of hitherto unknown texts produced at or for the courts of Southeast Asia, and examines the role of royal patronage in supporting Arabic literary production in Southeast Asia.