Reinier Salverda (Director, Fryske Akademy (KNAW) / Honorary Professor, Dutch Language and Literature, University College London)
Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and Dutch Colonialism: information, publication, critical debate and colonial reform in the Age of Enlightenment
In this lecture, I will focus on the complex interconnections – of information and criticism, publication and translation, critical reception, debate and influence - between Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and the Dutch colonial empire of the late 18th century.To begin with I will discuss the network of Dutch contacts and correspondents in the Dutch Republic available to Raynal and his collaborators. In 1773-74 for example, Diderot’s contacts included the philosopher François Hemsterhuys [1721-1790], the influential professor of biology, Petrus Camper [1722-1789], VOC-director Isaac de Pinto [1717-1787] and the Amsterdam publisher Marc-Michel Rey [1720-1780]. What information did these and other informants provide him with on the Dutch colonies, and what information did they have for Raynal himself when he visited The Hague in July 1777 in order to gather materials for his new edition of the Histoire?
In the third part, I will consider the impact of the Histoire des deux Indes in the Republic. In 1780-83 for example, the Leyden publisher of De la Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1748), Elie Luzac [1721-1796] published his four-volume Hollands rijkdom (La Richesse de la Hollande), which was very critical of Raynal. At the same time, Raynal’s work inspired a range of important Dutch colonial critics and reformers such as Willem van Hogendorp [1735-1789], his son Dirk [1761-1822], Jacob Haafner [1754-1809] and Jacob Elisa Doornik [1777-1837], but also the highly critical anti-colonial play Agon, Sultan van Bantam (1769) by Onno Zwier van Haren [1713-1779] and the anti-slavery epistolary novel Reinhart (1791/2) by Elisabeth Maria Post [1755-1812]. As we will see, Raynal’s Histoire not only shaped both the Dutch and the European critical debate on Dutch colonialism, but it also, via the Van Hogendorps, came to influence the enlightened colonial reforms of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles [1781-1826], the British governor of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies between 1811 and 1816. Bringing together these different strands - of international exchange, dissemination, critical debate and influence - will provide a close view of Raynal’s Histoire and its role in this important but little-known chapter in the history both of Dutch colonialism and of enlightened European anti-colonial criticism.
