Bøker av Leonard Blusse

This book evokes the forgotten colonial tragedy of the Chinese massacre at Batavia in 1740.

The archive of the Kong Koan constitutes the only relatively complete archive of a "diaspora" Chinese urban community in Southeast Asia. The essays in the present volume offer important and new insights into many different aspects of Overseas Chinese life between 1780-1965.The Kong Koan of colonial Batavia was a semi-autonomous organization, in which the local elite of Jakarta's Chinese community supervised and coordinated its social and religious matters. During its long existence as a semi-official colonial institution, the Kong Koan collected sizeable Chinese archival holdings with demographic data on marriages and funerals, account books of the religious organisations and temples, documents connected with educational institutions, and the meetings of the board itself.

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Blusse chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities-Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia.

J.C. Van Leur attacked the views on the character and significance of the 18th century in Asian history. His denial of European pre-eminence in Asian waters represents an attack on colonial historiography. These essays provide studies of what this period meant in the history of South and East Asia.