Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Patrimonial states and their chartered East India companies propelled the first wave of European colonialism in Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The metropolitan principals of these organizations faced special problems in monitoring and controlling their own colonial agents. Focusing primarily on the Dutch United East Indies Company and secondarily on its English counterpart, I argue that the network structure of each organization affected the degree to which relationships between patrimonial principals and their agents could serve as a disciplinary device. Dutch decline was imminent when alternative opportunities for private gain, available via the ascending English East India Company, allowed Dutch colonial servants to evade their own patrimonial chain and encouraged its organizational breakdown. Features of network structure determined whether colonial agents saw better alternatives to the official patrimonial hierarchy, when they could act on them, and whether principals could respond. importance and one that illustrates the importance of network structures in epochal social change. The story of early modern European colonial enterprise should interest social theorists as well as students of the past on other grounds as well: It reveals both the potential fruitfulness of principal/agent models for comparative historical sociology and the need to better specify these models systemically and historically. WHY THE NETHERLANDS? SETTING THE SCENEIn its first, triumphant, phase, the seventeenth-century Golden Age (Gouden Eeuw), the Netherlands established an unprecedented position of world power. Dutch developments during this period illuminate the general character of the first wave of European colonial enterprise. The basic structure of early modern European colonialism was created when merchant capitalists and their home states joined together to charter largescale monopoly companies aimed at global commercial and imperial dominance. The Dutch pioneered key aspects of the chartered company form with the foundation of the United East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) in 1602. The VOC merged individuals' assets into a single permanent ongoing enterprise, and was invested with sovereign rights over foreign territory and vassals. Chartered companies were quintessentially patrimonial forms, conjoining economic and sovereign political goals at the behest of the ruler's personal discretion. l

Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833

“…Consequently, what loomed large in England proved meager in the East. Throughout the 17th century, the EIC was a poor cousin to the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), itself struggling to establish a place along side the empires and merchant networks in the East, across Central Asia, and into the Mediterranean (Adams 1994(Adams , 1996.…”

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Water Spinach (<i>Ipomoea aquatica</i>, Convolvulaceae): A food gone wild

“…They then were replaced by the Dutch in 1605 (Forrest 1995), who established their headquarters in Batavia (modern Jakarta, Java). The Dutch dominated trade through the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC or Dutch East India Company) for the next 190 years (Adams 1996). Either group could have spread the name kangkong, if not the plants.…”

Keeping the Agents Leashed: The EU’s External Economic Governance in the G20

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