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- About the Author
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Few authors have as much to say about Singapore and Johor in the early 17 th century as Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge (c.1570?1632). This admiral of the Dutch East India Company sailed to Asia in 1605 and besieged Portuguese Melaka in 1606 with the help of Malay allies. A massive Portuguese armada arrived from Goa to fight the Dutch at sea, break the siege and relieve the Portuguese colony. During his Asian voyage and on his return to Europe in September 1608, Matelieff penned a series of letters and memorials in which he provided a candid assessment of trading opportunities and politics in Asia.
He advised the VOC and leading government officials of the Dutch Republic to take a long term view of Dutch involvement in Asia and fundamentally change the way they were doing business there. Singapore, the Straits region, and Johor assumed a significant role in his overall assessment. At one stage he seriously contemplated establishing the VOC’s main Asian base at a location near the Johor River estuary. On deeper reflection, however, Matelieff and the VOC directors in Europe began to shift their attention southward and instead began to prefer a location around the Sunda Strait. This was arguably a near miss for Singapore two full centuries before Thomas Stamford Raffles founded the British trading post on the island in 1819.
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“All in all, this is an exciting new set of translations, which will provide a valuable reference for historians of both Southeast Asian and world history for years to come.”
– Robert Batchelor, author of Selden’s Map“This collection of Dutch sources is a valuable volume for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the history of early Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia, the state of Johor politics in the first decade of the seventeenth century and the geopolitics of the Singapore-Johor-Melaka nexus during this era. Although they prove that in the early seventeenth century the Singapore-Johor area was a nodal point in communications and commerce, rather than a ‘backwater’, these documents also reveal that there were economic and political limitations which caused the VOC to look elsewhere in its earnest quest for an appropriate stronghold in Southeast Asia.”
– Dhiravat Na Pombejra -
Peter Borschberg is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and teaches history at the National University of Singapore. He is a also a Visiting Professor at the Asia-Europe Institute at the University of Malaya as well as a Guest Professor in Modern History at the University of Greifswald. He has authored The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the 17th Century, The Memoirs and Memorials of Jacques de Coutre: Security, Trade and Society in 16th- and 17th-century Southeast Asia, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese, and Free Trade in the East Indies and Journal, Memorials and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge: Security, Diplomacy and Commerce in 17th-century Southeast Asia.
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