The Discours of 1 January 1614 — the long memorandum addressed by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, in his capacity as director-general of the VOC’s Bantam-Jacatra factories, to the Heeren Zeventien in Amsterdam on 1 January 1614 — is the foundational text of the Coen programme of monopoly-by-force, the working-out of the bewindhebbers’ secret instructions of 11 April 1608 and 4 May 1609, and the proximate intellectual cause of the VOC’s coercive monopoly policy at Banda and elsewhere in the Indies. The Discours is the principal document of Van der Woude’s Van der Woude (1948) — the title of the book refers to the body to which the Discours was addressed.
The institutional context
Coen had been appointed director-general of the Bantam-Jacatra factories in 1613 — the post in which all the threads of the Company’s Asian business converged. The Pieter Both’s Banda expedition of March 1613 — in which Both was forced to restore discipline among the troops with drastic sentences and to confront the growing Dutch-English rivalry at Ai and Run — was the immediate strategic context. The Discours was Coen’s response, written on 1 January 1614 and addressed to the Heeren Zeventien in Amsterdam. Van der Woude notes that Coen’s appointment was the institutional foundation of the Discours: “voor het eerst liepen daar alle draden uit Indië en patria in diens handen samen en onder zijn toezicht werden alle gegevens in cijfers in het grootboek uitgedrukt”.
The argument
The Discours’s argument was the working-out of the bewindhebbers’ secret instructions of 11 April 1608 and 4 May 1609. The central complaint was that the bewindhebbers were sending “slechte, onkloeckmoedige menschen” to staff the Indies, and that no amount of commercial skill could compensate for the absence of “deuchtsaem van leven, cloeckmoedich ende groot van verstande”. The Discours explicitly cited Atjeh and Banda as the two theatres in which the policy of free competition had demonstrably failed: at Banda “moet ‘t ondergebracht worden ende moeten aldaer in ‘t velt domineren”, and at Atjeh the sultan’s balancing policy had kept Dutch pepper prices volatile and the factory precarious.
The Discours’s most-quoted passage is the Banda prescription: “Van Banda connen ons meester maken, dezelvige eylanden met macht aantasten; sulcx moeten nootelijcken doen ende de plaetse populeren, ofte het landt verlaten, want ‘t en sal anders met Banda nyet zijn”. The “plaetse populeren” — populate the place with imported settlers — was the policy that Coen would execute four years later, after his conquest of Banda in 1621: the depopulation of the Bandanese, the importation of Dutch settlers and slaves, and the establishment of the perkenier system of nutmeg plantations.
The argument for “Indië onafhankelijk van Holland”
The Discours also addressed the wider strategic question of the Company’s relationship to the Dutch state. Coen’s argument — anticipated by Matelieff’s Discours of 12 November 1608 — was that “Indië onafhankelijk van Holland” must be — that the Asian trade must generate its own capital, run its own books, and feed its own reserve fund, free from the quarterly pressures of Amsterdam shareholders. The argument was the administrative counterpart of the strategic argument: the Company in Asia could not be run as a branch of an Amsterdam export house. Van der Woude treats this as the institutional foundation of the Coen programme: the Indies administration must be free from Amsterdam’s quarterly pressures, the Asian trade must generate its own capital, and the monopoly-by-force policy must be executed without interference from patria.
The legacy
The Discours’s argument would define VOC policy for the next quarter-century. Coen’s conquest of Banda in 1621, his founding of Batavia in 1619, and his hardline policy against the English at Ambon (culminating in the Ambonese murder of 1623) were the working-out of the Discours’s prescriptions. The Discours’s argument for “Indië onafhankelijk van Holland” would also shape the institutional development of the VOC: the dual bookkeeping (the grootboek and the rekeningen-courant of the Indies versus the retouren-generaal and equipage-generaal of patria) was the institutional expression of the Discours’s argument, though Van der Woude treats it as the principal institutional failure of the VOC.
Significance
The Discours of 1 January 1614 is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the foundational text of the Coen programme of monopoly-by-force and the proximate intellectual cause of the VOC’s coercive monopoly policy at Banda and elsewhere in the Indies. The Discours’s working-out of the bewindhebbers’ secret instructions of 11 April 1608 and 4 May 1609 — and its argument for “Indië onafhankelijk van Holland” — defined VOC policy for the next quarter-century and provided the intellectual foundation for Coen’s conquest of Banda in 1621, his founding of Batavia in 1619, and his hardline policy against the English at Ambon. The Discours’s role in the Dutch-Atjeh relationship was indirect: by 1614 the Atjeh trade had lost most of its strategic significance for the Dutch, and the Discours’s prescription was for Banda, not for Atjeh. But the Discours’s framing of the Atjeh experience — as the principal instance of the failure of free competition at an Asian court — was the proximate intellectual cause of the Coen programme that would define VOC policy for the next two centuries.
See Also
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Heeren Zeventien
- Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
- Pieter Both
- Twelve Years’ Truce (1609)
- Murder of Verhoeff at Banda (May 1609)
- Cornelis Matelieff
- Acheh
- Banda-eilanden
- 1614
- 1619
- 1621
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk XI (pp. 326-365).
Jan Pieterszoon Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn verblijf in Indië, ed. H. T. Colenbrander, Vol. I (‘s Gravenhage, 1919), pp. 1-79 (the Discours).