Maria Florutau: "Prize questions as instructions: useful colonial knowledge in the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences"

Maria Florutau

Beskrivning:

The paper analyzes the prize contests of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The Society was founded by a handful of learned men employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia (today’s Jakarta), inspired by the mushrooming of learned societies and academies in the Netherlands and Europe, and motivated by the perceived isolation from European culture. By adopting the modus operandi of Enlightenment learned societies, the Batavian Society not only promoted the collection of objects from Dutch colonial holdings and their surroundings but also encouraged the gathering of useful knowledge through prize contests, a popular academic genre in Europe.

Unlike the metropolis, where the primary focus was on philosophy, the colonial outpost prioritized practical knowledge. The questions concerned shipbuilding methods, the health of slaves in transit, caring for sick sailors once in Batavia, and so on. Initially, the contest was opened to other VOC members in Batavia and the Asian colonial outposts, but responses were few and unsatisfactory. Determined to make the contests a success, the Society sponsored three Dutch-based societies that held prize contests to ask similar questions, but even fewer responses were received due to the lack of knowledge about colonial issues. In a final attempt to make the contests relevant, the Society sponsored questions addressing local Dutch issues, such as Reformed education and the reconsideration of church burials.

The paper will investigate why the founding members of the Batavian Society sought to emulate European learned societies in a colonial outpost and why they sponsored the prize contests in the Dutch Republic at a time when the VOC was going bankrupt. In doing so, it will argue, firstly, that European intellectual sociability during the Enlightenment became a criterion for self-identifying as civilized, especially among the Dutch mercantile classes and particularly in a non-European context. Secondly, it will demonstrate that useful knowledge was seen as a potential solution for the overall decay of the VOC and the perceived decline of the Dutch Republic, engaging learned men both in the metropolis and the colonies. Lastly, it will conceptualize the genre of colonial instructions by showing that prize questions were public-facing instructions, defined by utility and epistemological optimism.