itinerario

When I started working at the University of Minnesota I took a historical turn, looking into the longer geohistories of racial capitalism and the European imagination of global others. The following is from a 2010 proposal for a Huntington Library Fellowship (which I didn't get). More can be found in my 2011 article in the Annals of the AAG.

Writing the world:

geography in the making of Dutch identity

Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562/3-1611) is a key figure in Renaissance geography. His Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1596) offered state-of-the-art knowledge of all places relevant to incipient European trade expansion. Mostly self-taught, Linschoten gathered this knowledge while working as clerk to the Arch-Bishop of Goa, the Portuguese capital of the Indian Ocean. Rapidly translated into English (commissioned by Richard Hakluyt), Latin (in the prestigious de Bry collection), German, and French (three editions), the Itinerario facilitated actual and virtual exploration by collating navigational, economic, and anthropological information previously guarded by the Spanish and Portuguese. Linschoten was also the geographer aboard two official Dutch attempts to find the elusive Northeast Passage to the East Indies. He expressed desire to travel to the Americas, aware how all seafaring could buttress the Dutch Republic’s declared independence from the Spanish Habsburgs.

Using the geographic information and rich visual material in the Itinerario as a prism of European colonization, this project joins the recent establishment of a historical geography of the book. The resulting monograph will be the first to argue that Dutch national identity and mercantile dominance were precipitated by – instead of only reflected in – descriptions of the opening world. Along the way it speaks to current theorizations of nationhood, capitalism, and race. Dutch expansion in the East Indies cannot be understood in isolation from other European aspirations in Asia, the Americas, and the Arctic. Especially the complex tensions between the Dutch and the English during the seventeenth century directly connected places as far apart as Manhattan and the Spice Islands. The starting point of this project is that these connections were initially enabled by the new geographical imagination of the Itinerario. Though its direct impact was brief, the project follows this book’s distant reverberations during key moments in the evolution of the Netherlands. The bulk of the research has been completed. A Huntington Fellowship would allow for filling in details and commencing the writing phase.

Background

Though routinely mentioned in discussions of travel writing in early modernity, the Itinerario has not received the detailed attention it deserves. Historians of print have paid too little attention either to how books influenced actual voyages and national perceptions of the world at large, or how they allowed for the concomitant emergence of nation-states. Recent trends in historical research on maritime exploration and print culture are brought to bear on the applicant’s home discipline of geography. The geographical approach entails that no emergence of national identity can be understood outside long-distance interactions between societies. The main contribution of this project therefore lies in combining theoretical approaches and methods usually kept separate, to reach a more precise conceptualization of how scientific knowledge serves to cement a nation-state against a backdrop of conflicts and coalitions. 

Drawing these strands of research together under the umbrella of historical geography means, conceptually, that the role of cultural and physical distance (between ports; between the West and East Indies; between Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, and Hinduism; between oceans; between The Hague and Amsterdam) is key to the proposed monograph. Beyond studying how the Itinerario depicted exotic landscapes and peoples and analyzing its importance in the history of cartography, the project conceives of “the book” as a material object influencing what happens in various spaces and places (seas and straits, ships, official meetings, ports, markets, universities, etc.). The ramifications of the Itinerario for oceanic trade and the propitious establishment of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 will be deduced by tabulating its content with wider processes, including colonization in the Americas. Even or especially if these effects were relatively remote and obscure and in no way intended by Linschoten and his collaborators, tracing them reveals shifts in the geopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape. It is in this global setting that the gradual congealment of the contours of Dutch identity has to be understood.

The book resulting from this research will join a resurgence of interest in the Dutch Golden Age both in academia and popular history. This work appreciates anew what immense possibilities for travel, knowledge, intercultural contact, as well as war opened up during early modernity. Linschoten’s 1596 book communicated with other descriptions of travel and geography of the later sixteenth century, which together signaled the sudden shift over the 1590s and early seventeenth century from Iberian to Northwest-European control of the seas. The proposed research at the Huntington Library concentrates on how oceanic competition between the Dutch and English had long-lasting effects on the Indian Ocean world and North America. 

Unusually for historical research, this project reconstructs the role of the Itinerario all the way to the present. The significance of Linschoten is occasionally remembered in the Dutch public sphere (for example, when European empires were beginning to crumble, or during the commemorations of 400 years VOC). Such remembering is inevitably accompanied by certain biases and controversies over the rights and wrongs of colonialism. A beacon of tolerance, the Netherlands has recently become fraught with political tensions surrounding immigration. Across the political spectrum there is a reaching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – whether deliberately or vaguely – to make sense of the present. In retrospect, perhaps we can interpret Linschoten’s writings as containing indications of the complexities that the Dutch would later face in situating themselves in the world. The long time span and the inclusion of many kinds of material (cartography and navigation, engravings, contemporary letters and documents, historiography, paintings, the Bible) are ambitious, but the methodology broadly follows the interdisciplinary richness with the Annales school. What is added is an inquiry into how the present is shaped by interpretations of the past, how knowledge is also power.

Research plan

The project has three components corresponding to three key transformations of the Netherlands. The aim is not to present the evolution of Dutch identity chronologically and linearly, but to concentrate on these three moments of intense reordering of relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. The components have varying methodological and topical emphases, underscored by three conceptual approaches to the effects that book culture can have on political consolidation, national ideology, and geopolitical interactions. Research at the Huntington will focus on the first and second components.

1.  Precolonial (1580s-1620s). Why were publishers in northern Europe so interested in the West and East Indies? What humanist traditions was Linschoten drawing on and how was humanism turning into empiricism? Exactly how did the Itinerario enable Dutch and English fleets to navigate new sea routes? What tensions and collaborations emerged between the Dutch Republic, England, and populations in Asia (especially Java and the Moluccas)? How was Linschoten linked to the establishments of the English East India Company establishment in 1600, the VOC two years after, and the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) after his death in 1621? Did Linschoten foresee expansion in Brazil, the Caribbean, or North America? After all, he included a separate book on America, translated José de Acosta’s famous volume on the Americas into Dutch, and at one point had plans for a trans-Atlantic trip. 

Some of this research is summarized in a forthcoming article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Virtually all known references to Linschoten in Dutch from the 1590s to the late eighteenth century have been studied. The last stage of this first component calls for systematic analysis of translations and references to Linschoten and the Netherlands in contemporary English sources. The Huntington possesses fine copies of the first editions of the Itinerario in Dutch, English, and Latin; the last seventeenth-century edition (in Dutch); a separate collection of the plates; prints relating to indigenous people and seafaring; the second editions of Linschoten’s Arctic voyage in Dutch and German; and first editions in English and French of the account of the first Dutch voyage to Java, a route Linschoten had suggested. The Library further contains contemporary editions of the most important voyages and geographies of the era (especially those edited by Hakluyt), as well as of Linschoten’s illustrious scholarly sources and contemporaries like Garcia da Orta, Giovanni Ramusio, Jean de Léry, Carolus Clusius, etc. 

2. Colonial (1880s-1940s). When and how did the Itinerario become a belated classic in Dutch geography and discourses of discovery? How was Linschoten portrayed as a patriotic hero in the Netherlands? What influence did the ground-breaking Orientalist scholarship of the Hakluyt Society in Britain have on Dutch historiography, especially at the Linschoten-Vereeniging, established in 1908? 

For the second moment of the Itinerario’s effects, the research centers on how, during the heyday of European imperialist strife, Linschoten was reinvented as an ex-Catholic agent consciously gathering intelligence for Dutch trade expansion. The extensive collection of historiography on global interactions at the Huntington enables placing the rediscovery of Linschoten, first by the Hakluyt Society and then by history enthusiasts in the Netherlands, in a changing global cultural and geopolitical arena.

3. Postcolonial (1970s-2000s). Four centuries after the Dutch and English entered the Indian Ocean, and with European empires deflated and significant ethnic minorities in Europe, how are geographers such as Linschoten and Hakluyt remembered today – in museums and on educational television for example? Were some of today’s debates about identity, citizenship, and multiculturalism in any way prefigured in Linschoten’s writings? How are early-modernists contributing to the debates in the Netherlands and in the West in general?

The 2002 museum and public commemorations of 400 years of the VOC frames this third research component. It will enable understanding how the themes discovered and developed in the Itinerario have their echoes in today’s societies. The pioneering importance of the Netherlands in the development mercantile and finance capitalism will allow for some generalization. Most of the data for this third component will be gathered in the Netherlands in 2012. Discussions with others working on identity and travel at the Huntington will be indispensable for seeing how the Dutch experience of exploration and empire could illuminate those of Britain and the United States.