In search of panacea: The Dutch East India Company and politics of the body in early modern Asia

What role did politics of the body play in the operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), an institution which amassed significant political power across the Indian Ocean over the course of two centuries? This project analyses the VOC as an institution that takes advantage of, restricts, or propagates medical expertise and goods in negotiations of power and as a tool of authority. Batavia (present-day Jakarta) was crucial in its role as the VOC’s headquarters in Asia while also functioning as a medical entrêpot in the region.

My research maps the trajectories of mobile European and indigenous actors affiliated with the VOC and analyses the spaces in which they operated. I suggest that spaces such as the apothecary and the dispensary played significant roles in regional circulations of medical expertise and goods, where uses of plants for remedies and understandings about healthy living became increasingly contested. By analysing how these spaces of contestation and medical pluralism emerged, I also unpack how the concept of “Western” medicine became established over time, coinciding with increasing interventions of European trading companies in the Indian Ocean from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century.

Image credit: Detail of Jan Brandes, Methodes voor het maken van sirih (Methods for making sirih), 1783, watercolour and pencil on paper, 195 x 155 mm, collection of Rijksmuseum, NG-1985-7-1-127.