Retrospect on J.C. van Leur's Essay on the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Asian History

Abstract

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.