M & D

[David Morris]

http://entoen.nu/voc/en

Mauritius, Hollandia and Amsterdam, these were the names of the three
merchant ships that set sail from Texel for “the East”, together with the
small ship the Duyfken, on 2 April 1595. It proved to be an exciting
adventure. Only three of the four vessels returned in August 1597 and only
87 of the 249 man crew. The revenues were modest. But still, this first
Dutch sailing expedition to Asia was a success because it opened a trade
route to the East.

Other expeditions followed. With their strong and heavily armed trading
vessels the merchant traders from Zeeland and Holland out-performed the
Portuguese who had used the route for some time, and the English became
jealous. The ships returned heavily laden with colonial goods like pepper
and nutmeg. To limit internal competition, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt took
the initiative of setting up the Dutch East India Company (VOC). On 20
March 1602 the company acquired the Dutch monopoly on all trade in Asian
waters from the Cape of Good Hope onwards. The company was empowered to
sign treaties in the name of the Republic, to wage war and administer
conquered territories.

The VOC developed into a power to be feared. ‘This can lead to something
big,’ wrote Jan Pieterszoon Coen to the Heren XVII, the board of the VOC in
the distant fatherland. In 1619, he conquered the town of Jayakarta and
founded Batavia there. Coen wrote that ‘*Jacatra’ *would become ‘the most
important place in all the Indies’ and that the reputation of the Dutch had
increased through their conquests. ‘Everyone will now seek to become our
friend’. Parts of Java were occupied, Ambon and Ternate in the Mulluccas
were subjugated and the population was forced to cultivate spices.
Elsewhere in Asia too the VOC gained ground with either persuasion or
violence. Forts were built in South Africa, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and
Makassar in Indonesia. China was visited and when in 1641 the Shogun of
Japan closed his country’s borders to foreigners, the VOC alone received
his permission to continue to trade from the island of Decima near Nagasaki.

In this way, the VOC not only stocked Dutch warehouses with colonial goods
and filled the houses of the bourgeois with curiosa from foreign lands, but
they also played an important trading role within Asia. Textiles, spices,
coffee, tea, tobacco, opium, tropical wood, iron, copper, silver, gold,
porcelain, dyes, shells – an endless array of goods was transported by the
Dutch East India fleet.

In 1799, in the time of the French, the VOC was dissolved. Today, the
archives of the VOC are regarded as world heritage, a *memory of the world*.
The daily reports of the merchants who organised trade from the forts, the
reports of the travels of VOC officials to royal courts of rulers with whom
they traded, ships’ bills of lading … together the documents are an
important source of information about two centuries of Asian-European
history.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 9:47 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What is mathematically a Necessity? From the dialogue my guess is that
> Dixon is talking about the VOC. And, his quip about the Deistic God,
> by analogy, suggests that Dixon is alluding to the philosophical and
> religious, and also mathematical, and logical, arguments for and
> against God's / VOC's infinity, omnipresence, and so on. The grim joke
> here is that, from Aristotle through to Berkeley, such questions were
> of God, but now they are of VOC. That an entity as ubiquitous and as
> powerful as VOC exists needs no proof, but the infinity of it,
> mathematically, logistically, and with P we know that the anachronism
> of such questions often point to Wittgenstein, is a far more complex
> question when God is gone and uncertainty remains, necessity,
> mathematical or any other kind, is indeterminate.
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 8:49 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > MK> And why does Dixon say this is  "by Mathematical Necessity?
> >
> > I think it's a (mostly) anachronistic allusion to a cluster of
> mathematical
> > and physical ideas about dynamical flows and fields: that (except in
> > unrealistically ideal circumstances) there are always backwaters, dead
> > zones, singularities, eye-of-the-hurricane places where generally
> prevalent
> > influences don't act or cancel out. See also the discussion of the Eleven
> > Days as a vortex, 555-556.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_theorem
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 6:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> p. 69....D; "there do remain, beyond the reach of the V.O.C., routes
> >> of escape, pockets of Safety"---Markets that never answer to the
> >> Company, gatherings that remain forever unknown, even down in
> >> Butter-Bag Castle""....
> >>
> >> Butter--Bag = Opprobrious epithets for a Dutchman...(maybe because of
> >> of the high production of butter)...sez an 1811 Slang Dictionary.....
> >>
> >> And why does Dixon say this is  "by Mathematical Necessity?
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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