Lecture | CMGI Brown Bag Seminar
Bank Courant en Bank van Lening van Batavia (1746): Questions and Hypotheses Regarding Colonial Institutional Change
- Date
- Wednesday 1 February 2023
- Time
- Series
- CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2022-2023
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
In 1746, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) produced a charter that institutionalized the Bank Courant en Bank van Lening van Batavia, the first institutional patent for a bank in Asia. The reason for the VOC to establish the bank remains illusory, although questions arise for the reasons that may contextualize this patent, the goals that were being served and the people it was meant to affect. This presentation introduces the current state of the art, the panoply of historiographical questions that are important and possible to consider for future research, relates the case of the bank to developments in current research projects and enlists working hypotheses to be addressed in the future by researchers at all levels (BA and MA students, PhD candidates, postdoctoral and senior scholars). This presentation continues some of the issues initiated by Noelle Richardson in her considerations regarding the Amphioen Societeit, part and parcel of the same wave of institutional change and ‘modernization’ in ‘Dutch’ Asia.