Ahead of next Tuesday’s online Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Jim van der Meulen of Ghent University. On 27 February between 5.30 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., Jim will discuss seventeenth-century Dutch provincial assemblies in East Asia, North America and the Dutch Republic.
The seminar takes place online on 27 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
When the Saxon land surveyor Caspar Schmalkalden hitched a ride to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan) in 1648, he was able to witness a peculiar spectacle. From the 1620s, the southwestern part of Formosa had been conquered by Schmalkalden’s employers, the Dutch East India Company (VOC). As part of their colonial project, these Dutch newcomers had introduced their own political institutions to the island. And the event that Schmalkalden witnessed first-hand was probably the most remarkable of their introductions, namely a session of the deliberative assembly called the Landdag or ‘Diet’.
At these gatherings (literally ‘Land days’), which were partly modelled on provincial assemblies such as existed in the European metropole, members of the Dutch colonial government would convene with village elders (capitangs) who were appointed from among the numerous indigenous Austronesian communities that inhabited the island. By the time that Schmalkalden arrived in the colony, the Dutch had been organizing these political events for several years. Yet the surveyor is the only person to have recorded for posterity what the colonial assembly looked like.
Deliberation in such provincial assemblies was a central feature, not only of the political system but also of the burgeoning self-image of the young ‘Republic of the United Dutch Provinces’ (1579–1795), or ‘Dutch Republic’ for short. Together with the English Parliament and the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm, the Dutch States General even ranked among the most powerful representative institutions in early modern Europe.
The ideal of the regionally autonomous assembly crystallized, along with the Republic itself, during the prolonged conflict known as the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648), the struggle against political and religious colonization by Habsburg Spain. In fact, it became such a fundamental component of their emerging national identity that the Dutch professed to be ‘brothers’ with other nations that likewise fought against royal and Catholic suppressors in different places across the globe. As the example of Formosa indicates, however, the Dutch themselves soon began invading areas around the known world, imposing their rule and Protestant religion on indigenous communities from the Caribbean to the Indonesian Archipelago.
My paper will explore how the Dutch colonizers, once put in this position of overlords, incorporated their ideals of deliberation and regional autonomy into newly minted colonial institutions. The focus lies on this particular type of provincial assembly called the Diet or Landdag, which, as evidenced by Schmalkalden’s drawing, the Dutch went on to export thousands and thousands of kilometres beyond their fatherland.
I will mainly focus on the cultural similarities between three such Diets in diverse regional contexts of the global Dutch empire: the Diet of Formosa in present-day Taiwan, the Diet of Guelders or ‘Gelderland’ (a province in the Dutch Republic itself), and the Diet of New Netherland in what is now the State of New York in the United States of America.
The central issue that I wish to delve into is how the participants in these clearly highly diverse political settings nevertheless used similar rituals and symbols to negotiate internal hierarchies, and how these rituals were connected to contemporary imaginations about the land and people(s) nominally represented at the ‘Land days’. My main argument is that such connections between land, people, and assembly were forged through their shared history.
For, as the ideal of the autonomous assembly became a linchpin of Dutch political ideology, so contemporary historians began to project the ideal further and further back in time. The humanist and statesman Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), for instance, placed the history of the Dutch people in a mythologized historical framework wherein the distant ancestors of the Dutch, the ancient tribe of the Batavians, had fought off Roman colonization to retain their own ‘parliamentary’ form of self-governance.
Historical paintings embraced this Batavian motif as well. A notable example is a panel series of twelve tableaux painted by Otto van Veen, which included an assembly of Batavian conspirators. Tellingly, it was the Dutch States General that purchased this series, to be hung in its assembly hall, in 1613.
As I aim to demonstrate, though, it was not just the ancient past that shaped early modern political ideology. More recent historical events also left a lasting imprint on the rituals and proceedings of Dutch deliberative assemblies, including the three Diets of Formosa, Guelders, and New Netherland. Provincial delegates who sat on the Dutch States General, for example, were arranged at the table – and voted in order – according to the historical ‘ranking’ of the province they represented.
The same concern for pride of place in connection with historical status can be seen, not only at the Diet of Guelders, but at the two colonial assemblies as well. As part of the opening ceremony of the Formosan Diets, the indigenous village elders would walk in a procession to their seats in a fixed sequence, which was determined by the chronological order in which their villages had yielded to the authority of the Dutch East India Company. Similarly, the delegates of the Dutch and English towns and rural settlements that made up the multinational Diet of New Netherland occasionally quibbled over the right to preside at sessions of the assembly based on whose locality had purportedly been established the longest.
It is these kinds of historically-grounded similarities of procedure that I want to draw out and examine in my paper. Considered together, they suggest that despite the undeniable ‘Dutch Diet Diversity’ of my title, the different colonial and metropolitan assemblies inhabited a shared conceptual space in the mental landscape of European observers. This idea serves as a stepping stone towards considering the often-overlooked transnational hybridization of representative institutions in the contexts of early modern colonial spaces, and hopefully invites further research into the role of indigenous peoples in the long history of political representation.
JVDM
The seminar takes place online on 27 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
