Présentation : Thomas David (Université de Lausanne) et Pierre-Yves Saunier (CNRS – Université Laval)

1L’ouvrage de Romain Bertrand – L’Histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident – a été abondamment recensé et commenté depuis sa parution. En octobre 2012, il a été consacré par la remise à son auteur du Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’histoire de Blois. Toutefois, cette réception enthousiaste du livre dans l’Hexagone – voir à cet égard les comptes rendus, notes de lecture et entretiens dans Le Monde des Livres, La Vie des Idées, Mediapart ou encore sur les ondes de France Culture – a surtout été le fait d’historiens plus habitués à étudier de première main d’autres parties du monde, ou d’autres époques que celles qui sont au centre de L’Histoire à parts égales. Tous ont particulièrement apprécié l’angle d’attaque de l’ouvrage et sa contribution à une réflexion sur la manière d’écrire une histoire « de grand vent » en France, soucieuse de toucher de nouveaux publics et de traiter l’autre et le lointain en leurs propres termes.

2Ne resterait-il donc rien à dire de ce livre ou à partir de ce livre ? Les spécialistes de l’Insulinde, ceux du bassin de relations et de circulations de l’océan Indien, et à un moindre degré les historiennes et historiens de la présence européenne dans ces mondes insulindiens, n’ont pas encore pleinement participé à la conversation publique autour de l’ouvrage, même si le livre et la recherche dont il est issu ont été présentés et discutés dans de nombreux séminaires spécialisés. Gageons donc qu’il reste des éléments à comprendre et à disputer dans le travail de Romain Bertrand.

3Dans le cadre de ce numéro consacré aux Inventions des continents, le comité de rédaction a estimé que Monde(s) pouvait contribuer à cet approfondissement. Conformément à nos orientations rédactionnelles, nous avons demandé à deux historiens étrangers une lecture critique de l’ouvrage. Matt Matsuda est un historien qui enseigne à l’Université de Rutgers (États-Unis d’Amérique). Il travaille sur l’Océan Pacifique et les situations de rencontre (Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, 2012). Carolien Stolte est une historienne de l’Asie du Sud-Est basée à l’Université de Leidenaux Pays-Bas. Elle a récemment publié un recueil de sources consacrées à l’Asie du Sud (Carolien Stolte, ed., Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava mythology from manuscript to book market in the context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600-1672, 2012). Enfin, Romain Bertrand a très aimablement accepté de parler de son livre, une nouvelle fois, et de réagir aux remarques de ces deux collègues. C’est à cet échange, en anglais, que nous invitons nos lectrices et lecteurs à se joindre.

Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ : When Histories Do Not Take Place

4Global or transnational history writing is a vexing challenge of balancing scale, scope, and perspective, and scholars across a range of specialties have approached the issue by drawing together the deep, bounded ethnographic detail of monographs, or by proposing large “world-systems” and conceptual frameworks to order the transformations of trade, politics, and cultural shift resulting from contacts and commerce between peoples. Another approach might be apparently quite traditional in its originality— that is, to tell the same story from multiple perspectives, and to open up a historical record (and access to sources) where established narratives already exist. So it is with Romain Bertrand’s L’Histoire à parts égales, which like its title, is less about a new optic or critical methodology, than what the author asserts: an attempt to rectify “equal parts” to the telling of a story.

5L’Histoire à parts égales is a work of erudition and ingenuity. Some 450 pages of text and an additional 200 more of notes, appendices, documentation, and glossaries testify to a remarkably textured vision of encounters between the early modern world of today’s Indonesia and European—particularly Dutchand Portuguese—traders and empire-builders. The ingenuity of the work lies in its deceptively simple, yet profound central argument: the initial imperial encounter between the Dutch and the Javanese n’a pas eu lieu—it did not take place. While Dutch chronicles mark a significant moment at which Cornelis Houtman brought his ship into the waters of “the Indies”, Bertrand, a savant of Malay and Indonesian history, makes note that « ce qui “fit événement” pour les hommes de la Première Navigation – leur arrivée à Java – ne suscita pas le moindre mouvement narratif chez les poètes de cour et les chroniqueurs de Banten ou de Mataram » (p. 445). In effect, what is celebrated as a pivotal moment in histories of “European expansion” is an affair of dramatic unconcern for the history of Java.

6Much has been researched and written about early modern European impacts in Asia, but Bertrand hastens to point out that « on ne trouve pas, à proprement parler, de traité malais ou javanais spécifiquement dédié à un inventaire raisonné des choses et des coutumes d’Occident » (227). In fact, Bertrand suggests, there really was no “West” as a reference point for historiographic thinking. There seemed to be no particular interest in the formation of the basis of “a project of universal history” (227-230). The “curiosité insulindienne” was “specific” to particular objects and techniques. For the erudites of the Indies, all privileged places were in Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, China, India, and Siam. The Dutch and Portuguese—indeed, the “Europeans”—hardly figured at all.

7Two assertions here regarding Bertrand’s work bear elaboration. One is that his originality derives from being “apparently quite traditional”, and the other that the book’s key argument rests in explaining how the initial encounter between the Dutch and Javanese n’a pas eu lieu. The “traditional” designation comes from a question: to what degree does an “equal” history depend upon equal sources? More, what is the status of these sources? If European perspectives can be reconstructed through archives, letters, accounts, and chronicles, will a Javanese understanding be historically coeval when it can be similarly constituted through such parallel or analogous written records?

8In published interviews, Bertrand has made known his skepticism regarding non-documented encounter histories, particularly in the Oceanian Pacific:

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« On a des sociétés qui n’ont pas ou plus de versant documentaire autonome par rapport aux Européens. Autrement dit, il n’y a d’inscription écrite des faits de contact qu’à partir du moment où les Européens (les missionnaires, les aventuriers-voyageurs, les administrateurs coloniaux) prennent en charge cette inscription » [1].

10As such, these histories can only be told—even if with extreme critical awareness—through the problematic distancing of European voices. This is important, yet it seems less a question about whether valuable historical work can be done, and more a contention about what constitutes the proper boundaries of historical investigation in the recovery of distinct, originary voices.

11Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrestled with such questions for seeking out early modern European peasant testimonies in church and legal proceedings, found the transcripts deeply implicated in relations of power and representation, and made the institutions themselves the core of the research. Carlo Ginzburg famously queried Michel Foucault to ask what could be said about unlettered lives, and reconstructed a heretical cosmos while abjuring the notion that the historian could only contemplate “astonished silence.” James Scott has searched out “hidden transcripts” in everyday performances of humor, theater, and gossip across multiple cultures, particularly in Southeast Asia. Marshall Sahlins has also pursued archaeological histories of practical reason and critical forms parallel to mentalités for Oceanian peoples with his work on James Cook and the kahunas in the Hawaiian Islands. [2]

12Bertrand has expressed his concerns with “against the grain” readings of colonial sources, and analyses drawn from post-facto accounts, though does find useful methodologies deriving from Clifford Geertz’s thick description. Fundamentally, Southeast Asia and certainly Java remain a case apart because they seem to participate in a continuity between past and present—« Aujourd’hui encore, on parle javanais à Java, et on le parlait à l’époque où les Portugais et les Hollandais sont arrivés » [3]. It is unclear what this demonstrates. Certainly it testifies that the Javanese have not been overrun by European institutions, but it also testifies to a privileging of a narrative of the “unchanged” specific to this approach.

13Foregrounding inscribed language as vital to establishing the legitimacy of historical reconstruction is key here. No serious historian would dispute the fundamental existential value of primary source documentation. But as historical writing is a process of selection, what does this approach then deliberately exclude? Bertrand is sensitive to this issue in other works:

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« Parce que sinon, on passe par pertes et profits trente ans d’histoire africaniste, trente ans d’études asiatiques qui ont essayé de comprendre, au plus près des documentations vernaculaires, ce qu’a représenté la colonisation dans les pratiques, les entendements et les discours locaux » [4].

15This question of « discours locaux » interjects itself into a register that seems to suggest “alternative documentation”, yet the citation of « pratiques » et « entendements » suggest additional possibilities. Where to go with these? Fully elaborated, the moment of encounter becomes encapsulated in the second point of discussion, the event that n’a pas eu lieu. This is more than a clever formulation. The critical weight of thinking through “placeness” as a form of history is the foundation of Pierre Nora’s massive multivolume interrogation into French historical memory, Les lieux de mémoire, a work that also inspired Marc Augé’s relevant essay, Non-lieux. In dialogue with a concurrent historiography, Bertrand has himself released Mémoires d’empire : la controverse autour du « fait colonial », an investigation of the politics and intellectual issues around post-colonial and nationalist recommemorations of a selective history. [5]

16The lieu/mémoire core of L’Histoire à parts égales is a singular idea elaborated to demonstrate that the reincorporation of Malay, Javanese, and Chinese sources into stories of “contact” trouble the ways that moments of encounter invariably favor a particular temporal-historical scheme by appropriating the authority to choose and name events. The result of such practices has often been an “asymmetry of ignorance” and “a selective forgetting”, implicitly driving “the superiority, innate or acquired of ‘Europe’ over the rest of the world” (12). What Bertrand seeks, then, is a “truly decentered” history, one that is “polycentric” in not only describing its subjects, but selecting and elaborating them (14).

17As such, there are no meetings between “Europeans” or “Natives”, but only between the collective particulars of remarkably diverse and contested parties. As Bertrand notes, remarking on the legacy of pity and condescension of European commentators from the time of Tomasso Campanella (1635) towards local peoples, « les Javanais, toutefois, n’étaient pas de pauvres et innocents Indiens ». Rather, they were sophisticated societies with royal institutions, the practice of debate in assembly, the judicial regulation of trade, the military use of horsemanship, the mastery of writing and literacy (135). As an example, discussions of military battles for the territory that would become the Dutch capital of Batavia do not take place between the aforesaid Europeans and indigenous peoples, but in the context of an array of Japanese warriors from Hirado, French and Swiss mercenaries, metis urban dwellers with Indian heritage, Danes and Germans, Chinese from Macao, and any number of rajas and Ambonese waterborne forces from around the archipelago (435).

18In case after case, Bertrand avoids reductive shorthands, and his work complicates not only the politics of the archipelago, but those of the “Europeans” themselves who are put under as much an ethnographic lens as any other parties. Thus a close examination of the tensions and adherences of religion and faith in the sixteenth century pays a great deal of attention to getting away from the framing of “Christianity or Islam.” Instead, the reader is pulled into the particularities of Calvinism and the messianic Manuelian fervors of Catholicismin Portuguese bases in India (231), while the Dutch are framed in terms of the Great Revolt against the Spanish crown.

19Yet Bertrand, for his part, does not seem to join his parts égales and mémoire work, focusing on a more spatially oriented “restitution of multiple, plural versions” of history and the recognition of the absence of a common « scène historiographique », for which « au centre, rien » (308). Rather than containing the interactions within a history of a shifting teleology, Bertrand creates a counter and parallel narrative through the Sejarah Melayu of Tun Sri Lanang, whose structure is that of choice for the chronicler “between the multiple traditions and local legends available”, a deliberate selection of which seems “the most reliable to weave his sejarah, his ‘true history’.”

20The terrain of investigation grows laterally, and the lieu/non-lieu dyad is spatially expanded to encompass matching and paired sources, filling the narratives with unfamiliar voices and new characters, speaking on their own accounts. This is wonderfully done. Yet, what seems less of interest to Bertrand are the possibilities of thinking through lieu/mémoire so that the project is intentionally about reconstitution of narratives over time as well as space. The n’a pas eu lieu question would then be not principally about presence or absence, but writing and re-writing so that the history becomes not an account of the past, but an account of what has survived—and why—and the temporal process of its adoptions, and commemorations into meaning. Here, the parts égales seem separated from the uneasy struggles over la mémoire d’empire.

21Bertrand does gesture in this direction by seeking out the creation of an “Orangist historiography” that suited Dutch national thinking in what he calls an « imbroglio calendaire » over « régimes d’historicité » (293). He has indeed been “polycentric” in his approach by incorporating new voices and restoring elements lost to “selective forgetting.” But what of elements lost that cannot be restored through the recovery of the document, or that have had no documents? Here is where the pratiques and entendements would be gainfully reemployed.

22Suppose that we begin by reconsidering attempts to relate the moment or “event” by wondering about the status of the evidence? Rotuman scholar Vilsoni Hereniko has indicated his own historical and cultural identity as a product of “the oral histories, imaginative literature, and the visual and performing arts of the Pacific Islands.” Further,

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“many of the myths, legends, chants, and songs of the Pacific contain complex accounts of sea exploits and navigational feats that suggest a dynamic period of contact between islands, conflict, and settlement…conquests by successive groups of people from outside, with accompanying changes in social practice and the introduction of new skills and knowledge.” [6]

24The archive in this case incorporates practices, performances, and arts and the boundaries of the “history” are reinscribed.

25It would be salutary to know how the history of parts égales might intersect with the practice of performed histories by which debates over what did or did not take place are resituated into a register of persuasive reenactment. One thinks of the replica Polynesian deep water canoes like the Hokule’a since the 1970s that have sailed by traditional astral wayfinding as more than mere projects of popular fancy, but experimental attempts carrying tremendous cultural and historical legacies about determining what did or did not take place: whether Polynesian navigation to multiple island groups could have been by intention and navigation, or only by chance and shipwreck. Such practices also have destabilized narratives about who sailed to whom, and who was “discovered” or encountered.

26In fact, the precision of focus on the moment of Houtman’s landing seems to concentrate the argument on the synchronicity of places, whereas much of the compelling argument contained in L’Histoire à parts égales emanates from long transformations over time as different strands of knowledge are re-braided across centuries. Spiritual matters are a strong example, as Bertrand notes that “the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms still made themselves strongly felt in the Javanese hinterlands” (261). Mystical divine Sufi-inspired traditions grew in adherents, while scholarly Islam spread among literate orders and underscored larger connections with the Arab world and the Indian Ocean.

27What might be considered religious encounter was thus always multiple and fragmented, at times overlapping, but characterized by tension and debates. Theological arguments indicate a « preuve flagrante du fait que l’océan Indien est bien, à l’âge moderne, une mer de murmures – un espace résonnant de mille et une conversations au long cours entre les sociétés et les religions » (252).

28Themémoire aspect is keen here, for it also seeks a restorative project—hence the focus in “memory” studies on restitution, reparation, redress, compensation, and sometimes reconciliation. In this, the project of fashioning a narrative of parts égales is complementary. The latter is concentrated in the comparative archival and documentary excavation of evenly measured pasts, while the former is very much the resonant and actual space of a “thousand conversations” across time, realized as a dialogue between past and present.

29In describing with Houtman an event that did not take place, we understand a moment that is constituted retroactively—historically— yet which may also be composed of qualities as described as a non-lieu. [7] This is a borrowed term from Marc Augé as applied to the memory-history, and past-present formulations of Michel-Rolph Trouillot. As Trouillot has suggested,

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“If memories as individual history are constructed…how can the past they retrieve be fixed? The storage model has no answer to that problem. Both its scholarly and popular versions assume the independent existence of a fixed past and posit memory as the retrieval of that content. But the past does not exist independently from the present…nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past— or more accurately, pastness—is a position.” [8]

31The “position” taken by Bertrand’s work can be reconceived in both time and space by drawing together his “traditional” archive with the focus on the event qui n’a pas eu lieu, where the very idea of non-lieu pulls the argument into an interrogation of his multifaceted early modern encounter history, yet also proposes a narrative that necessarily accounts for the contingent and ephemeral constitution of that past and its reliance on mnemonic reconstruction and reenactment.

32The implications are to unravel a momentous historical moment that changed the dynamic of world history, and also never took place. Without denying the shape of events or their transformative impacts, Bertrand takes a well-known story and unwinds it into many stories. The moments of challenge are preserved, yet the teleology is broken and perhaps replaced by the possibilities of debate over restatement and remembering. Bertrand concludes about Dutch accounts, but also about European-centered historiography within the context of world and global perspectives, « le récit de leur domination devrait être celui de leur errance » (449).

Carolien M. Stolte, Leiden University : On the Location of a Non-event: Problematizing “Encounters” at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century

33In this impressive re-examination of the first contact between the Dutch, the Malay and the Javanese at the turn of the seventeenth century, Romain Bertrand urges a new perspective on the well-known story of the years following the arrival of Houtman at Banten from a new perspective. Looking at the years from 1596 to 1628-1629, which span the arrival of Houtman’s expedition to the siege on the voc (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie-Compagnie néerlandaise des Indes orientales) by the Javanese, he chooses to limit its temporal scope in order to foreground a multi-dimensional view of the encounter. Bertrand presents us with a highly complex world—a stretch of coastal Java marked by a baffling array of people, languages, religions and politics, that is potentially much harder to navigate than the seas that surround it. The same holds true when the area is viewed as a marketplace connected to all corners of Asia, frequented by Persian, Gujarati, Chinese, and many other merchants with varying degrees of local and overseas ties and interests.

34The many protagonists of this book, Javanese, Dutch or other, must wend their way through this world and they do so with varying degrees of dexterity. The outlines of this world are familiar to all with an interest in the history of the area: they are those of a multicultural space in which the newcomers were one of many local players, without direct military or other advantages, in an uncertain political configuration. The certain contribution of this work lies in the facets which Bertrand has chosen to highlight. The fifteen chapters in which the encounter is examined are organized largely around thematic concerns. This means that the complexity of “Insulinde” is viewed through many different lenses: through the challenges presented by currencies, weights, and other measures of which the equivalency was yet to be established; or through the necessary reliance on local brokers for matters of language, culture and etiquette. The lenses themselves are also questioned, by examining the different ways in which the protagonists categorized each other, and located each other in their respective worldviews, calendars, and records. In this way, the structure of the book serves to strengthen the argument that a multifocal view of the encounter is in order. This argument is reinforced by the sources Bertrand has employed. In seeking to write a true Histoire à parts égales, Bertrand explores an impressive array of Malay, Javanese, and other sources to achieve a history that is indeed written from multiple perspectives.

35Given the many views and voices Bertrand thus brings to life, the inevitable conclusion of the book must be that the encounter « n’a pas eu lieu »: viewed from anything other than the Dutch sources the book seeks to contextualize, the encounter disappears in the process. The resulting silence tells us that we are examining a space of fascinating patterns of interaction, but one in which Houtman’s arrival is a non-event. As Bertrand elegantly puts it: we are looking at « ce qui n’advint pas, et où cela prit place ». The beauty of the argument lies in its simplicity, and it is in honour of this argument, that a minor criticism must be permitted: the first chapter of the book opens with the Houtman expedition, as so many books on the history of what used to be called “European expansion” have done before. Given the book’s intention, would it not have been more fitting to open the narrative in Asia?

36Part of the reason why L’Histoire à parts égales is a work of great erudition, is that the book fulfills its claim of equal parts beyond equality in the use of sources. Despite the book’s ambitious scope, Bertrand succeeds in giving his reader protagonists who are round characters with full histories. He examines in great detail the intricate and complex power struggles on Java, but does not lose sight of the complexities of Dutch religious and political strife. Though writing from many perspectives, he is never reductive and locates actors in their proper time. It lends much colour to the narrative that this includes playing with inverted orientalist stereotypes to bring out unexpected similarities between the “parts.” After an overview of mysticism in political and religious texts and movements on both sides (from the Taj us-Salatin to the Further Reformation in the United Provinces, p. 369), the thirteenth chapter concludes that the exoticism encountered has less to do with particular locales than with a particular moment that occurred « d’un bout à l’autre de l’Eurasie ».

37There are several instances of such parallel histories in the book, which serve both as thought experiments and to solidify the larger argument. However, in some cases the reader is left wondering to what extent they have been forced into this mold. One example is the scientific and cultural curiosity on both sides of “Eurasia”, a mentality that makes various appearances throughout the book. On the European side, much is made of the popularity of “discoveries”, both through time (histories) and space (travelogues). Bertrand further notes that these were directly linked to maritime ventures, in turning cartographic information into a commodity (51), or for staking or circumventing claims for trade in a certain territory (57). That link was no less present in art, where, following Svetlana Alpers, Bertrand sees a “cartographic mode” of viewing the world. Alpers argued that the Dutch “Golden Age” represented a novel outlook on the world that favored scientific observation, and that this outlook is reflected in the art of the times: it did not convey meaning so much as reality. Alpers called this the “northern descriptive mode.” [9] According to Bertrand, too, this purpor-tedly omnipresent “science of description” was based on the idea that « la vue était le sens le plus adapté à la saisie de la juste mesure du monde » (77). Bertrand locates a particularly poignant similarity in the collections of curiosities found in the archipelago and in the circulation of texts pertaining to almost all parts of Asia. These, then, are « l’expression d’un projet malais d’imitation de la nature » (226). Should we interpret this as a utilitarian approach on the part of the “Western-Europeans” (the referent is not always clear), driven by the quest for profit and functional description, with a softer counterpart in the collections and texts in Insulinde? Neither side fits comfortably. Alpers’ thesis is highly controversial for its static portrayal of Dutch art, and for arguing for a cultural mold that many of the age’s artists did not fit into. Alpers’ strict separation between descriptive and emblematic modes (whether geographically, as a north-south divide, or temporally, as a characteristic of the seventeenth century) has since been convincingly questioned. [10] Market interventions in travelogues, too, are the subject of debate. Bertrand presents these as fairly rational incentives to (and constraints on) circulating information on Asia. But a more productive parallel between the far ends of “Eurasia” might be to think less about an impulse to “describe” and more about an impulse to “order”: to edit, fit and catalogue the world into a comprehensible format. Ernst van den Boogaart’s evaluation of Linschoten’s Itinerario as a “moral map of Asia”, ranking people’s by European standards of civility, could be a case in point. [11]

38The occasional reference to Eurasia in the book, as well as the cameos by Persian, Gujarati and other actors, raise further questions. Dutch actors are sometimes extrapolated to represent the “Occident”, and at other times supplemented by Portuguese, Italian and other voices. Similarly, Java and the Malay world are put on stage as the “Orient”, supplemented by, in particular, Chinese mentalities and texts. One wonders what the picture would look like if the intermediate areas were given a voice as well. Especially in the context of interest in “foreign” or “exotic” manuscripts and art, the separation between “Orient” and “Occident” is much less clear when the Mughals and Safavids are taken into consideration. By the time Houtman arrived in Banten, the Mughals under Akbar had already translated (and circulated) the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa Purana, and court studios were replicating Mughal miniatures. [12] In Persia, Dutch painters were frequent visitors at the Safavid court in Isfahan and creating paintings of, among other things, Biblical scenes on commission of the Shah. [13] It is in such instances that the categories of “West” and “East”, and the search for parallels between them, do not always seem functional. A closer engagement with South- and Central Asian modes of writing and viewing the world could provide a continuum that could assist to further destabilize the “first encounter” narratives that the book seeks to correct. It might also shed more light on issues of (in)commensurability by highlighting ideas that were already circulating between those areas and the archipelago, through interactions within the Indian Ocean world. It is for this reason that the sixth chapter, Gens de Rum, about the western horizons of the Malay world, is particularly welcome, and one of the most exciting chapters of the book.

39Bertrand’s portrayal of the misadventures of the Dutch when it comes to local sensitivities, from breaches of court etiquette to failure to grasp the dynamics of local marketplaces in this period, makes the reader curious to know more about the cultural brokers on the ground, which were drawn from Chinese, Gujarati and other communities. These brokers held great power, not just over language, but also over quality control, measures, and money. In a history in equal parts, to appropriate the metaphor of scales and measures, does the fulcrum not deserve a bigger role? Their contribution to travelogues and manuscripts such as those that inform the book under discussion is all too often ignored, albeit not always by design—the historical record is sadly lacking in that respect. Yet one wonders whether it would not be possible to sketch the context in which such collaborations took place. However hard it is to retrieve the voices of these brokers, a creative mining of the available sources could yield interesting results. For seventeenth century South Asia, interesting cases are the local brokers of two protestant ministers; Abraham Rogerius in Pulicat, and Philippus Baldaeus on Ceylon. [14] In the case of Java at the turn of the seventeenth century, one wonders not just about the brokers’ activities, but also about their own “encounter” with the Malay and Javanese worlds. How should we interpret their presence in the archipelago, or more succinctly, their arrival? Did it make waves? Was it an event in the « récit mystique de l’expansion du Negara » (307)? Because if it was not, the non-event of the Dutch arrival is further reduced to one in a longer series of non-events as far as the Javanese and Malay sources are concerned.

40To a certain extent, these questions ought to be answered by a different book that problematizes the encounter (or lack thereof) even further. In the meantime, this book very successfully complicates the years between 1596 and 1629 by making what was once a single story into many stories, owned by multiple groups, peoples and locales. A great deal of research has been carried out on the history of Gujarati, Chinese and other trading communities in the archipelago. This book gives a great impetus to that project by adding Malay and Javanese perspectives and sources, thus further texturing our understanding of the multilayered world that was coastal Java at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Romain Bertrand, CERI-Sciences Po, Paris : How Not to Write a History of Encounters First Steps toward Answering Carolien Stolte and Matt Matsuda’s Comments

41I cannot but start by wholeheartedly thanking, firstly my two colleagues, Carolien Stolte (CS) and Matt Matsuda (MM), for the generosity with which they committed themselves to that most uneasy task of reviewing a 670-pages book written in French, and secondly, the editorial board of Monde(s) for giving me the prized opportunity to clarify some of my research aims and results.

42For both brevity and clarity’s sake, and because the sophisticated questions raised by my reviewers call forth as detailed answers as possible, I will start by restating what my purpose was in attempting to write a “History in equal parts” of the first Dutch-Javanese “encounters”. Contrary to what its first chapters may suggest, the book was by no means meant to be solely another contribution to the growing body of literature that, running contrary to decades of heroic colonial and postcolonial European self-celebration, provides us with more “complicated” stories of the so-called “European expansion” process. The idea of a self-propelled, inexorable spread of “Europe” in Asia, Africa, or the Americas has come under sharp criticism for a long time already, and “anti-Eurocentrism” is still very much the trendy catchword in Global History conferences. If my own narrative of the first Dutch-Javanese “encounters” builds upon this rich tradition of escaping the grids of teleological Grand Narratives by stressing both the contingencies and the “native” side of “conquest” and “settlement”, it does not stop with the production of a critical counter-narrative of the rise of Dutch power in the Malay Archipelago. Rather, it takes it as a starting point in order to move swiftly toward a positive historical anthropology of Malay and Javanese textual worlds.

43The basic building block of the argument is, that whereas the arrival of the First Navigation fleet in the bay of Banten, on Java’s north coast, on June 22, 1596, was almost instantly turned by a number of Dutch chroniclers (Meteren, Grotius, Pontianus, etc.) into a civic accomplishment of tremendous political-diplomatic consequences, it is not even mentioned in still extant Malay and Javanese chronicles, epics, and religious treaties of the same period. A number of facts pertaining to a situation of contact between hitherto geographically and linguistically “disconnected” social worlds [15] were turned into events—that is to say: deemed sufficiently important to be written down in publicly printed documents— on the “Dutch side”, whereas they were of such unconcern to Javanese scribes that they made no appearance at all in the Sajarah Banten: the royal chronicle of Banten, completed around 1660-1662. Right from the start, so to say, what we are dealing with is not, therefore, an event-centered discursive “common ground”, but an array of historiographical worlds that—even if they may overlap in some respects—do not intersect when it comes to telling the story of what happened in 1596 Anno Domini/1004 Anno Hegirae/1517-1518 Saka era.

44As I try to show in the first chapters in the wake of Hoesein Djajadiningrat and Claude Guillot’s works, the Sajarah Banten has a lot to tell us about the very year Houtman’s crew made it to the shores of Java, for the reigning monarch, the Maulana Muhamad, had died on the battlefield in Southern Sumatra a month or two before the appearance of the First Navigation, and this had triggered a ruthless succession crisis among the power-holders of the sultanate—a political crisis that ultimately led to open civil war in 1608 and that was rooted, not just in transient factional rivalries, but also in a deep-seated intra-elite ideological struggle pitting the ponggawa (high-ranking officials of common stock) against the nayaka (members of the princely elite). To put it succinctly, the latter accused the former, who were often of non-Javanese origin, of polluting the exercise of what should have been a purely palace-based mode of government by getting too heavily involved with the morally “coarse” and politically unreliable world of long-distance trade.

45Had the Sajarah Banten—the official, almost sacred chronicle of the negara of Banten—not been a chronologically-ordered and causality-oriented narrative paying due attention to the dating and the sequencing of facts (the latter thus being turned into events), or had it been wholly blind to the role that international trade and foreign merchants played in the city’s everyday public life, the fact that it makes no case whatsoever of the First Navigation’s arrival would not have been open to any kind of positive interpretation. If the Sajarah Banten had been a fairy tale, its not featuring the Dutch as relevant characters would certainly have come as no surprise. But the fact is that a number of both Malay and Javanese early xvii^th century texts, mostly produced by highly-skilled scribes and clerics for the literate happy few, are narratives relating in great detail public events such as tournaments, battles, or the welcoming of embassies from far-away countries.

46So, is trying to recover the horizons of relevance of these synchronous yet non-intersecting historiographical worlds all about the “telling of the same story from multiple perspectives” (MM) or the producing of a “multi-focal view of the encounter” (CS)? Phrased this way, the whole project would amount to nothing more (or nothing less) than providing the reader with as many Malay/Javanese/Dutch/Portuguese versions of a same set of facts as can be possibly found in available stocks of edited source-material. But if we are not to take it for granted that Dutch sources necessarily have the last say on “what truly happened” out there in Banten, there is no such “Event” with a capital E. There is no “encounter” in the sense of a bilaterally recorded, face-to-face interaction between “the Dutch” and “the Javanese”.

47This cannot, by any standards, be “a history written from multiple perspectives” (CS), for the sheer fact of assuming right from the start that what we are dealing with—and what we have to (re)produce in our own meta-account— is a single, unified, all-encompassing narrative is already, albeit unwittingly, to side with the zooming strategy so peculiar to the European imperial / colonial archive. Only the Dutch were convinced that they had a huis-clos “encounter” with the Javanese. What is at stake here is not so much the “multiplication of perspectives” as a switch to a true “perspectivist” mode of History-writing: one in which the plurality of “lived worlds” (and associated practical worldviews) is taken very seriously—up to the point where the (Eurocentric) fiction of a common “encounter” breaks down under the combined weight of the many worlds that (more or less deeply) come into contact.

48So what to do to avoid this pitfall? How not to replicate, in the historian’s account, the very causal and chronological categories through which the fact of contact is turned into the event of the “encounter”? First of all, by never assuming that we are dealing with some crystal-clear, perfectly-bounded, self-referential entities. I indeed wonder where one of my reviewers (CS)—who at some point gives me credit both for “never being reductive and locating actors in their proper time” and for “giving readers protagonists who are round characters with full histories”—found evidence of me positing “the Dutch” as an embodiment of “the West” or of “putting on stage Java and the Malay world as the ‘Orient’”. Actually, one basic methodological requirement I tried to adhere to throughout my book was never to intuitively ascribe overarching social or religious “identities” to the actors under scrutiny, but rather to explore in as great a detail as possible the way they themselves phrased their religious commitments and feelings of belonging. Almost a whole chapter is for instance devoted to investigating the kind of people the merchants and rank-and-file crew-members of the First Navigation thought they were. [16] And the fact is that—be it in printed travel accounts, unpublished logbooks, or private letters (such as those sent by Lambert Biesman to his father)—they never refer to themselves first and foremost as “Europeans” or as “Christians”. In reality, their actual sense of “identity”, or rather their practical sense of commitment, was rooted more in the twin worlds of city citizenship and occupational groups than in any firm, untroubled, and encompassing notion of a “Dutch/patriotic” or “European/Christian” subject.

49The United Provinces were such a complicated world of social, religious, and political dissension at the time Houtman left the Texel Island, that unquestioningly labeling First Navigation sailors “Christians” or “Netherlanders” would be terribly anachronistic. In order to keep at bay retrospective and ideologically dubious interpretations of early modern Eurasian “encounters” as “clashes” of “cultures”, “civilizations”, or “religions”, one indeed has to pay special attention to the social script of situations of contact. In the case under scrutiny, “Europe” did not meet “Asia”: a handful of only partly literate (Dutch) merchants interacted with some (Javanese) aristocrats whose social life was wholly determined by relentlessly spelled-out etiquette regulations (or “rules of conduct [aturan]”).

50As in so many other, more familiar settings, the world of the port most uneasily matched that of the palace. Many blunders and faux-pas, and most infelicitous misunderstandings, came from this peculiar social script—and this goes a long way towards explaining why court-centered Javanese chronicles of a later period always depict the Dutch in a disdainful way by making full satirical use of the category of the greedy, unmannered, “coarse” sudagar (trader). Moreover, by the turn of the xvii^th century, trade-oriented interactions were by no means a purely “mundane”, material profit-seeking kind of social activities: they were also very much a spiritual game involving high stakes, in the sense that any given transaction, if not kept in check by the basic moral tenets of this or that faith, could mar forever the fate of one’s soul and of one’s social reputation—something Global Economic History, because it still—predominantly and uncritically—makes use of such misleading “neutral/universal” categories as “supply and demand”, most often fails to capture. [17]

51Nor do I wish to forcefully reduce a host of competing early modern Dutch “visual cultures” to a hegemonic “northern descriptive mode” (CS): I make use of S. Alpers’ argument where it seems to me to fit best, namely when it comes to understanding that mixed, yet limited world of practical descriptive knowledge shared by cartographers, engravers, and captains of East Indiamen. But when it comes to deciphering the multi-layered meaning of a given painting genre, I do not privilege one mode of reading it—whether “realistic” or “emblematist”—over another. Hence, when I elaborate upon Hendrick Vroom’s leading role in turning seascapes into a trendy genre, I faithfully rely upon the work of Margarita Russell and Lawrence Goedde, who both do full justice to prevalent symbolical interpretations of tempests as “divine ordeals”. [18] Moreover, when dealing with Dutch art history, I often (uncritically) quote articles published in Simiolus—most of them clearly related to the “emblematist” school. [19]

52I also devote a whole chapter to trying to convey to the reader a sense of how plural the world of “Islamic” or “Muslim” Malay-speaking polities was at the time. [20] And, maybe less obviously, I try to escape any notion of a fixed, substantial “Javanese” identity by examining, not only Javanese, but also Sundanese and Malay edited source-material. [21] Banten was not “Java”: it had—as already explicitly stated in the early xvi^th century story of the many journeys of the Bujangga Manik across the island—its own peculiar historical trajectory, rooted in the story of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Pakuan-Pajajaran and of its conquest by the armies of Sunan Gunung Jati, and conditioned by its insertion into a chain of Malay-speaking commercial “hubs” spread along the “Spice Route”. I wonder whether, in the process, anything like a neatly-delineated “Dutch” or “Javanese” identity was able to survive.

53As for the “East-West divide” that I supposedly have maintained throughout a book whose actual aim is to break it up into a thousand (and one) pieces, CS advises me to complicate matters and to turn it into a “continuum” by taking into account “the Mughals and the Safavids”. Actually, that is precisely what I attempted to do, for I devote whole sections of the book to the question of the influence both of Persian mystical poetry on Sumatra-based literati and of South Indian (mostly Gujarati) “go-betweens” and vagrant scholars on local courtly elites— for instance, when I remind the reader of the bloody battles fought throughout the 1630s and 1640s in Aceh between the supporters of Hamzah Fansuri’s peculiar brand of mystical monism and those, like the Gujarati sheikh al-islam Nuruddin ar-Raniri, who considered the latter as sheer idolatry to be extirpated from society by all means. [22] I also describe in some detail the new direct connections that were established between Aceh and the Ottomans in the 1560s and between Banten and the Arabic Peninsula in the 1630s. [23]

54As for Asian “go-betweens” based in Banten, fragmentary source-material makes recovering their biographical details a thorny endeavor: for instance, I did my best to gather and cross-check all existing information regarding the whereabouts of “Abdul”—the “Chinese” (and Muslim convert?) who acted as the main interpreter of the captains of the Second Navigation when the latter reached Java in November 1598—, yet there is so much uncertainty surrounding this man’s identity in Dutch sources that one must remain cautious when assessing his “real” social-cum-“ethnic” background. [24] As for the Keling (Indian) acting as the official interpreter of the Regent of Banten in the 1596-1608 period, and named Panjang in Dutch sources, we know almost nothing of his life, except that he was a Tamil from Meliapur and had to flee Banten after the 1608 revolt was crushed by the anti-“free trade” party. [25]

55It certainly is true that “a closer engagement with South- and Central Asian modes of writing and viewing the world” (CS) would have valuably added to the larger picture of Java’s many-faceted long-distance connections [26] throughout the Indian Ocean, but the necessity of having direct access to first-hand source-material, and of translating for the French reader as many edited documents as possible—mainly from Dutch, Portuguese, and Malay—, pushed me to the very limits of my linguistic abilities. Even my reading skills were put to the test by the huge number of books, articles, and book-chapters published each year that deal with this or that particular segment of the worlds of the Western Indian Ocean and of the Java Sea.

56That being said, something else has to be addressed under the heading of “Central Asian modes of writing and viewing the world” (CS) when working on Java and the Malay world. Providing fine-grained evidence of the influence of Arabic, Persian, or Mughal textual/scribal traditions upon the literati of the Malay-speaking coastal polities of Java and Sumatra definitely is of critical importance for accurately mapping the dense, multipolar networks sustaining the circulation of literary/theological/artistic knowledge patterns and contents across the Indian Ocean—and Malay texts such as the Sejarah Melayu (1612) and the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (1815, 14^th century nucleus) actually are full of most interesting stories regarding the (sometimes ambiguous) role played by vagrant Persian or Gujarati scholars and sufi masters in the moral ordering of the kerajaan (raja-centered polity). [27] But there also may be too strong a tendency these days to emphasize the purely foreign dimension of these influences, hence to anachronistically turn Malay texts (or their calligraphic/stylistic conventions) into “adaptations” or “copies” of low value. For translating an adab treaty, a Persian epic, or an Arabic “universal history” compendium into Malay was no mere imitation, nor passive importation. It also was an act of plain local ingenuity: the art of neologism is itself very much part of the fabric of a specific Malay cosmography. That the Taj us-Salatin (1603) was based on a host of formerly written kitabs—as acknowledged by Bukhari al-Jauhari himself—does not make it less interesting as a treaty on “good government” aimed at a local (Aceh or Johore-based) princely audience. [28]

57“The metaphor of scales and measures”, with South Asians standing as the “fulcrum” (CS), moreover leads us in the direction, not of historiographical “symmetry”, but of sheer quantitative “equilibrium”. As I try to show in chapter 11, many modern Malay hikayat and Javanese babad encapsulate an explicitly stated concern with factual accuracy: many a scribe presents himself as wishing to convey not “lies” but the “truth” about the past and, in order to boost his credentials as a reliable “History (sejarah)-teller”, recounts to us in detail how he got informed about this or that series of facts. [29] To be sure, the way early xvii^th century Javanese pujangga and Malay syair-writers phrase their concern with recovering “what really happened” may be a far cry from xix^th or xx^th century positivist ideas on the philological edition and careful cross-checking of sources. But when compared with contemporaneous productions such as Diogo do Couto’s Decadas da Asia (1596-1616) or Grotius’ exalted version of The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic (1610), or when seen in the light of the craze of French and Italian Antiquarians for folk etymologies, these Malay and Javanese concerns become perfectly legible, in the sense that all these textual engagements with the past, whether Portuguese or Malay, Dutch or Javanese, point toward a specific, maybe typically late xvi^th century descriptive/prescriptive mode—that I call, for want of better words, “moral realism”. [30]

58This basically means that a small typographical detail should not be overlooked when assessing my research aims: namely, that in the very title of my book, L’Histoire à parts égales, History is written with a big H in order to signal that by the turn of the xvii^th century, critical narratives of the past were being produced not just in Western/Northern Europe, but also in the Malay-speaking world: Java certainly had a history of its own, yet it also was a place of History-writing. This makes it wholly impossible to forcefully reduce Javanese and Malay textual worlds to the set of claims and concerns sustaining the small “contact-zone” where commercial and diplomatic transactions with the Europeans took place.

59The same holds true for a supposedly purely “European” concern with “scientific” accuracy and classificatory sophistication (CS). Whereas I think that we should avoid as much as possible the uncritical use of such a broad category as “science” when dealing with pre-1650 textual material, it still seems to me judicious, by reminding readers that there also existed attempts at writing Arabic-inspired “universal histories” and at crafting automata in 1640s Aceh, not to be too hasty in endowing “Europe” with a unique ability to attain a superior kind of naturalistic or instrumental knowledge. [31] I would certainly not go as far as to say that the depiction of the “mourning snakes” of the shores of the Marmara Sea enclosed in the Hikayat Hang Tuah displays the same concern with a classificatory understanding of Nature as Dutch kunstkammern full of exotica. Yet there may also be some misleading tendency, today, to place the kunstkammern and the cabinets de curiosités— and the host of debates on the shifting boundaries between the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal reigns that they were closely related to—into a flawless genealogy of the rise of the “(European) scientific mind”. Bits and pieces of mermaids, sea-monsters, Patagonian giants, and unicorns were still avidly sought after by Western European “naturalists” by the 1600s, while the belief in the curative power of ground “bezoar-” or “snakes - stones” was widely held until the 1690s. [32]

60Once again, my purpose here is not so much to rescue Malay ingenuity from Eurocentric condescension, as to posit a more nuanced vision of early xvii^th century “natural sciences”— a vision more in tune with what we have been told in recent works about Bacon’s concern with physiognomony or about Campanella’s interest in prophetical astrology. Boundaries between the “magic” and the “technological”, between the “mystical” and the “political”, were still very much in the making at the time voc and eic merchants first reached the East Indies. In the 1600s, “travel accounts”—such as the one written by First Navigation merchant Willem Lodewijcksz and published by Claesz—were almost a brand-new genre in Amsterdam, and they were often advertised as being at the same time “wonderlijcke stories” and “true/accurate beschryvingen”. [33]

61Matt Matsuda takes me in another—most exciting yet quite unexpected—direction: that of the possibility of recovering, or rather “tracing back”, non-written forms of (events-centered) knowledge transmission. Could not a memory of the first contacts with the Dutch have survived outside the paper realm of kingly chronicles and religious pamphlets? Shall we not enlarge our understanding of what stands as an “archive” in order to reach out to modes of History-telling embodied by means of the performing arts? The (non-demonstrative but purely illustrative) reference in my book to 1970s Sundanese wayang golek Pakuan and wayang golek cepak sets of puppets featuring voc Governor-general Jan Pietersz Coen and Sultan Agung (or Siliwangi) indeed seems to point in that direction.

62Yet while it is undoubtedly worth further investigation, I wonder how we could get unmediated— that is to say non-textual—access to early or mid-xvii^th century non-written modes of History-telling. Given the construction of the wayang purwa (“old repertoire” shadow puppet theatre) as the repository of “Javanese culture” (itself very much a 1920s-1930s, Orientalism-inspired phenomenon [34]), what first comes to mind when talking about Javanese (re)enactments of the past through the medium of the performing arts is the possibility that there already existed, in xvii^th century Java, lakon (wayang stories) narrating the coming of the Dutch to Banten (or the 1619 voc conquest of Jakatra). The unsurpassable problem, in trying to turn this seductive yet highly speculative hypothesis into a research result based on solid fact, is the scarcity of source-material. I have only found passing references to wayang in edited xvi^th century Sundanese and Javanese texts—for instance in the 1518 Sanghyang Siksakandang Karesian, where it is mentioned using a verb in the active mode meaning “to watch wayang (ngawayang)” (XI, 80/103). But what kind of wayang performances were the people of Pakuan watching by the 1510s that could later on have accommodated European (first Portuguese, then Dutch or British) strangeness? It would be quite bold to assume that wayang purwa performances at the time were of the same kind as present-day ones.

63As far as I know (but my knowledge on these issues is limited!), the first detailed descriptions of wayang performances—usually providing us not with the details of the actual words of the dalang (puppet-master), but with a synthetic rendering of the lakon upon which he was elaborating—date from the 1870s-1880s. These may possibly be supplemented by an in-depth study of those wayang play texts still preserved in Central Javanese kraton (palace) libraries, such as those in the Radya Pustaka [35], yet this would mean to embark upon a long research journey. The world of wayang actually has a social and political history of its own, especially since the palace schools came to assume a prominent role in the training of dalangs in the xviii^th and xix^th centuries. [36] As far as the history of Javanese performing arts is concerned, I would certainly not go for “a narrative of the unchanged” (MM), yet I will definitely take the whole issue of the “resonant and actual space” of first contacts’ narratives in Indonesia more seriously into account should a revised edition of my book be put on the agenda. There would be a lot to say, for instance, about the way the Betawi of Jakarta, who claimto be direct heirs to the first inhabitants of Jakatra, have come forward in the past two decade swith a sophisticated vision of their “autochthonism” that is rooted as much in Portuguese-style keroncong lagu music as in Javacentric imaginings. [37] However, I beg to slightly differ with MM’s interpretation of the non-lieu dimension of my overall argument. Whereas the expression n’a pas eu lieu literally translates in English as did not take place (with no particular focus on the spatial dimension of the non-occurring event), the expression non-lieu means, in everyday legal French parlance, the acquittal of a suspect for lack of evidence. I would surely not advocate, even inadvertently, the acquittal of voc agents or late Dutch colonial officials! Right from the start, violence was very much a part of the fabric of Dutch dominions in the Malay world—J. P. Coen’s massacre of whole Moluccan villages in the 1620s being a case in point (which makes celebrating his role as a grondlegger quite a sensitive political issue, even today). [38]

64As for the “spatial turn” in historical studies that a less literal understanding of the non-lieu notion seems to convey, it certainly is a most interesting issue. But to me, the “spatial turn” is not that strongly related to Pierre Nora’s work on the lieux de mémoire—indeed a founding moment of a particular kind of “memory studies” in France. Nora’s views on social memories are highly controversial, since they turn every amateur (non-academic) engagement with the past into a potential source of conflict: History is Truth, while memories (always in the plural) are, if not plain lies, at least distorted views of the past that need not be taken into consideration, but scrutinized—and if necessary, emended—by historians. [39] Other historiographical traditions, such as that of “oral history” in the USA or of the “history workshops” set up by Rafael Samuel at Rutgers’ College, seem to me to have a less disdainful view of social memories, hence to be more prone to listen to “subaltern” views of historical processes.

65This leads me to a last reflection upon the difficulty of the impartial recovering of all the relevant spatial/temporal dimensions of Dutch-Javanese situation(s) of contact. CS would have my narrative start “not in Europe, but in Asia”. Well, it actually does start in “Asia”—to be precise: in Banten. The real problem seems to me to be less that of the spatial entrance point of the narrative—for the latter cannot but be dictated in the end by the coordinates of the place that becomes the core “contact zone” between the actors under scrutiny—than of its chronological (dis)ordering. Froma practical point of view, the difficulty lies in the articulation, in the historian’s account, of the many time-frames (or rather, to use François Hartog’s key-notion, “régimes d’historicité” [40]) that are simultaneously at play in a given, sources-bound locale, and that all lead us in different, and at times wholly diverging, directions. It is not sufficient to unravel the knots of causality of the Grand Narrative of “European expansion” to fully comprehend the resplendent intricacies of other chronological worlds. To follow until the end the serpentine historicity trails of the Sejarah Melayu or of the Babad Tanah Jawi is to venture far beyond the known lands of Eurocentric chronologies. How, then, to accommodate a host of highly textured visions of time in a coherent narrative without ultimately occulting some of them? There is quite a challenge lying ahead if we are to try to tackle this issue [41] seriously.

66To put a (provisional) end to this far too long paper, I hope that my rudimentary answers to a few of the exciting questions they raise will be of some interest to my two colleagues. Being fully aware of how privileged I am to have been provided with such dedicated reviewers, I very much look forward to carrying on our conversation, wherever these new “encounters” may take place.