Paradise Lost: The Biblical Fashioning of the East Indies in Dutch Chorographical Accounts, 1596-1726

Abstract

Biblical concepts were a key element in early modern Dutch representations of Asia, and played an essential role in the development of European cultures of empiricism. Historians, art historians, and scholars of orientalism have emphasised the imperialist and commercial inflections of Dutch representations of the world. My thesis, by contrast, shows how Dutch chorographical writings about Asia were closely intertwined with popular debates in Biblical philology taking place in the Netherlands. Through four case studies, my thesis demonstrates how Dutch merchants, ministers, and colonial administrators used concepts such as the Garden of Eden, idolatry, Satan, monotheism, Noachic descent, the location of Ophir, Hebrew rituals, and the Book of Nature to construct an Indian Ocean World which was an extension of the world of the Old Testament. This world was both observable and describable, giving rise to a form of Biblical empiricism that was only possible among the philologically literate population of the Dutch Republic. Over the long seventeenth-century, Biblical empiricism generated an image of the Indian Ocean World first characterised by Catholic immanence, and later by Reformed transcendentalism.