Immaterialism by Graham Harman

Author:Graham Harman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509501007
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

9.

Batavia, the Spice Islands, and Malacca

The spatial arena of the VOC was vast, with trade activities conducted not only in present-day Indonesia, but as far afield as Yemen and Iraq in the west and Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Cambodia in the east. The VOC discovered Australia in 1606 and New Zealand in 1642, and would no doubt have traded extensively in those places if there were significant wealth to be gained. Obviously, not all points on the VOC map were of equal importance. Physical geography has always been even less democratic than the history of individuals; no egalitarian firebrand will insist that all places were created equal. The Ancient Egyptians seemed destined for greatness by the Nile, the British for sea power and liberalism by their status as a European island, and the French and Germans fated for land rather than sea prowess and for robust statism due to their placement in the midst of dangerous continental rivals. The geographical interpretation of history has long been pursued by political realists, and recently surged to public view once more with Jared Diamond’s widely read Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999). However, all the examples just listed pertain to the homeland of any people, and thus to the geographical background of the birth of that people. By contrast, we are interested here in the symbioses of a company already anchored in Amsterdam before it came fully to grips with various key sites of the East.

The geography of the East Indies is fascinating and important, and deserving of a brief description here. Dominating the western approach to the region is the large island of Sumatra, shaped somewhat like the American state of Kentucky, but aligned from northwest to southeast. The northwestern tip of Sumatra was home to Aceh, an empire that long remained a thorn in the side of Europeans, while the island’s western coast more generally was dotted with ports important for the pepper trade. Sumatra’s proximity to two other pieces of land is what creates the two main choke-points in the region for any would-be imperial power. On its eastern side, Sumatra is close to the Malay Peninsula, occupied today by Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The narrow body of water between the two is called the Strait of Malacca, named after the city whose strategic importance was clear to all powers in the region, and which was occupied for long periods by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English in succession. At the southeastern corner of Sumatra is the much shorter and narrower Sunda Strait, home to the deadly volcanic island of Krakatoa, and presenting another choke-point for commerce between Asia and Europe. Across the strait from Sumatra is the smaller Java, shaped roughly like Long Island and extending like that American isle along a straight west-east axis, trailed by a long archipelago with today’s independent East Timor at its end. East of the Strait of Malacca is the island of Borneo, looking much like a bloated Cyprus and divided today like Cyprus between a north (Malaysia and tiny Brunei) and a south (Indonesia).

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