Asian Wives and the Emergence of Race in Early Modern Batavia

In his 1703 book Oost-Indise Spiegel[Mirror of the East Indies], Nicolaus de Graaff, a surgeon who had served the Dutch East India Company regularly from 1639 to 1687, excoriated Dutch men who married “black” women. He rooted his scathing critique of the women both in their physical appearance – “ugly skin” – and in their behavior – promiscuity – which, to de Graaff, disqualified these women as marriage partners. De Graaff’s statements mark a stunning counterpoint to the more frequently cited pronouncements of a series of Governor Generals from the middle third of the seventeenth century. These men actively advocated for interracial marriage on the grounds that Asian wives were more docile than European ones and would encourage their husbands to remain in Company service in the East Indies.

Historians of the Dutch city of Batavia [Jakarta] have emphasized the ease with which the non-European wives of Dutch colonists and Company employees assimilated to Dutch society and even became the progenitors of important dynasties. De Graaff’s statements suggest, however, that there was already a great deal of anxiety about these marriages by the end of the seventeenth century.

This paper examines seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of interracial marriage and sex in the Dutch East India Company’s jurisdiction in Batavia, and it argues that the government was becoming consistently less tolerant of interracial marriage. It also suggests that the discourse surrounding women in Asia was central to the emergence of a nascent conception of race. This discourse was important in Batavia, but it also had significant repercussions within the Dutch Republic because Asian wives of Dutch men were forbidden to take up residence within the metropole.