M & D

[David Morris]

VOC images
https://www.google.com/search?q=v.o.c.+dutch&rlz=1C1EODB_enUS601US601&espv=2&biw=1159&bih=877&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=S3rbVPr2IcjQoATm_YKgCw&sqi=2&ved=0CEwQsAQ&dpr=1

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 9:53 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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