The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Intersections, 14)

For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks.

Contributors include: Paul Arblaster, Hans den Besten, Frans Blom, Britt Dams, Adrien Delmas, Alette Fleischer, Antje Flüchter, Michiel van Groesen, Henk de Groot, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Grégoire Holtz, Siegfried Huigen, Elspeth Jajdelska, Maria-Theresia Leuker, Edwin van Meerkerk, Bruno Naarden, and Christina Skott.

Siegfried Huigen is Associate Professor of Dutch Literature and Cultural History at the University of Stellenbosch, in South Africa. His research interests are early modern travel writing and the history of colonial science and scholarship. He is the author of De weg naar Monomotapa (1996) and Knowledge and Colonialism; Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa (2007 and 2009), and (co)editor of several books on South African politics of memory and colonial discourse. He is currently researching eighteenth-century Dutch representations of the ‘East Indies’.

Jan L. de Jong did his Ph.D. at Leiden University and now teaches Italian Renaissance art at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He has published numerous articles on Italian painting and has a manuscript on papal propaganda in the Renaissance set for publication. He edited several volumes of Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture. His current research focuses on reports of visitors to Italy in the sixteenth century.

Elmer Kolfin studied art history and modern western literature at the University of Utrecht. He got his Ph.D. in art history at Leiden University and currently teaches art history at the University of Amsterdam. He publishes mainly on seventeenth century Dutch painting, prints and book illustration. He has initiated and edited a volume on political prints of the Dutch stadtholders (2007) and co-edited the exhibition catalogue Black is Beautiful. Rubens to Dumas, on the representation of blacks in Dutch art.