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SUMMARY:Advijsen\, old and new: the life span of VOC natural-historical in
 formation within the Dutch East Indies - Genie Yoo (Princeton University)
DTSTART:20190128T130000Z
DTEND:20190128T140000Z
UID:TALK117703@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Laura Brassington
DESCRIPTION:In the last decades of the 18th century\, VOC administrators i
 n Ambon dug deep into their own provincial archive in Casteel Victoria to 
 unearth bundles of natural-historical papers written almost a century earl
 ier. Among these late-17th and early-18th century papers were reports and 
 assessments – often labelled _advijs_ – written by and for individual 
 administrative officials who sought answers to specific questions\; in thi
 s case\, questions pertaining to the controlled extirpation of plants in t
 he Maluku islands. Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–1702) was one among sev
 eral other 17th-century administrators whose written assessments would com
 e to inform administrative decisions almost a century later\, in the last\
 , twilight decades of the Company which witnessed heightened inter-imperia
 l competition and a severe economic downturn that had far-reaching consequ
 ences in Company posts across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Th
 is paper attempts to historicize how administrators gauged the life span o
 f natural-historical information within this context and looks at VOC prac
 tices of recording and retrieving information on one island across time. H
 ow did officials' own practices of reading and interpreting the papered pa
 st inform their understanding of contemporary problems and solutions? How 
 did they register a century's worth of time and practice in the papers of 
 those whose practical urgencies differed from their own? Did they ever con
 sider information to be outdated and how did they assess the risks of resu
 scitating old natural-historical methods for new use? This paper attempts 
 to answer these broader questions while also reflecting on the power of th
 e archive for historical actors whose own prognostications were based on f
 ragments of mediated information from a wildly different past.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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