No European country enjoyed such long-standing relations with the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya as the Netherlands. This study focuses on the perceptions of the merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) of the Thai royal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Basing herself on a wealth of Dutch primary sources, the author shows how trade, politics, and diplomacy shaped a unique relationship based on ‘partnership’ and a ‘sense of differences’. The book contributes to expanding the study of the history of Ayutthaya—known for its scarcity of sources— with the help of contemporary Dutch views.

This book deals with the early modern Dutch-Thai interactions as told by the merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who concurrently tried to find a balance between their 'partnership' with and 'sense of differences' from the Thai elite.

The VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company) was the largest of the early modern European trading companies operating in Asia. Its operations produced not only warehouses packed with spices, coffee, tea, textiles, porcelain and silk, but also shiploads of documents. Data on political, economic, cultural, religious, and social conditions spread over an enormous area circulated between the VOC establishments, the administrative centre of the trade in Batavia, now the city of Jakarta, and the Board of Directors in the Netherlands. The co-operation between the National Archives of Indonesia and the Netherlands resulted in this extensive catalogue of fifteen archives of VOC institutions in Jakarta. The VOC records are included in UNESCO ́s Memory of the World Register.

Chris Nierstrasz’ In the Shadow of the Company, offers us an insight into the relation between the Dutch East India Company and its servants as it slipped into decline. This relationship altered dramatically in the eighteenth century under internal and external pressures.

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

The first full history of a great commercial and political center that rose in Asia over almost five centuries.

The Dutch East India Company was a unique, hybrid organization acting as both company and state, aggressively intervening in Asian political matters in which it had no place. This study focuses on the company’s clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.