CANCELLED- Erasmus Lecture Series Part II: "A Burgherly Life on the Banda Islands: Land, labor and ecology in the 1621 genocide"
Date and Time
Location
The 2020 Erasmus Lectures on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders:
The world as a garden: War, land and dispossession in 17th-century Dutch expansion
Part II: "A Burgherly Life on the Banda Islands: Land, labor and ecology in the 1621 genocide"
Pepijn Brandon
WIGH Fellow 2017-2018; Assistant Professor, VU Amsterdam; Senior Researcher, International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands; 2020 Erasmus Lecturer, Department of History
Abstract:
In 1621, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) under the leadership of its Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered the Banda Islands, securing the highly coveted nutmeg-monopoly for the Company. In the process, Coen’s soldiers killed, expelled or enslaved almost all of the islands’ 15,000 inhabitants. Often treated as an excess driven by the individual character of Coen as a military leader, this lecture will show how a decade of debates over the best ways to control land, labor and ecology prepared the ground for genocide. It will thus continue the lecture series’ theme of the relationship between the Dutch Republic’s highly urbanized commercial capitalism and the global countryside.