Were the Dutch proto-capitalists? Were they Americans before America? What was the Dutch West India Company, and how did it work? I talk to Deborah Hamer — historian, research associate at the Omohundro Institute, and associate editor of the New York history blog Gotham — to discuss her work on marriage and gender in the early Dutch colony in Batavia (as they called the conquered city of Jakarta), how it illuminates the Netherlands’ obsessive efforts to create a stratified, orderly, and moral Protestant society in Southeast Asia, and what it reveals about the wider European colonial mindset.
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Things You Don’t Know
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