Romain Bertrand is a Paris-based political scientist and historian of Indonesia, writing on colonial history and current affairs with an interest in global history. This extensive and well-documented study deals with the contacts between Europeans and the people in the Malay–Indonesian world, or ‘Insulinde’, during a period when Western hegemony had not yet been established. It is mainly a cultural history of interconnection between two worlds which in themselves were global in scale but configured in very different, but at times comparable, ways. The book focuses on the events between the arrival of the first Dutch fleet in Banten, West Java, in 1596 and the failed siege of Jakarta by Sultan Agung in 1628–29, but moves far beyond this locality and time frame, thereby using mainly primary source materials in a wide range of languages (Dutch, Malay, Javanese, Portuguese, and Chinese, among others). The result is a fascinating, encompassing picture of a highly complex world, in which the main participants interacted on their own behalf, without yet being governed by relations of hegemony or submission.

Bertrand offers the reader a basic account of what happened in West Java in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but his main endeavour lies in offering a large number of varied ‘tableaux’ dealing with different aspects of the intercultural encounters of that time. Fifteen chapters are required to tackle such extensive material, each of them offering a rendition of relevant information from mainly source texts, with concise but interesting reflections on the nature of the themes addressed and how to evaluate them from a broader global cultural history perspective. While many of the facts and events presented are already well known to the area specialist, the main contribution of this work comes from the attempt to find new interpretations by taking different approaches towards the early contact history between Europe and Southeast Asia.

While the arrival of Cornelis de Houtman in West Java was a major event in Dutch history, constituting the beginning of a process that ended with the colonization of the Indonesian Archipelago, for the Bantenese it was essentially a non-event in a marketplace that was already frequented by many foreign traders. To start with, there was no single dominant calendar available to make it possible to fix this event on an overarching time-scale. It is this kind of asymmetry that explains the silence of the indigenous texts, rather than their lack of veracity, as Western philologists and historians have assumed. In Banten, particularly at the beginning of the encounter, instruments of commensurability had to be established on the basis of geographical knowledge and brokers of all kinds, who established chains of translation. Early European–Southeast Asian contacts were framed through pre-existing images of alterity, whereby that which was far away was judged through local terms. Collections of exotica could be found not only in Europe but also in Asia, the inhabitants of Insulinde already having ideas about the people living on the far side of Rum or the Ottoman empire.

With their arrival in Banten the Dutch entered a place that was part of different, overlapping worlds at a juncture of transoceanic routes: those of the permeable Portuguese Estado da India, and of Chinese, Indian, and Malay–Javanese maritime trading systems. Far from being simply a mechanism of economic exchange, the market (as it was constituted in West Java) was a multidimensional space, governed by both the Bantenese and the Dutch through the politics of morality rather than profit. Although the Javanese–Dutch encounter has often been presented in religious terms, Christianity and Islam entering here into a new phase of competition, the real antithesis seemed to be within Islam itself, between scripturalist and more mystical forms of belief. In a political sense, in their war against Spain the Dutch were only at the beginning of modern state formation. Similarly, the state in the Indonesian Archipelago was seen by its inhabitants as a ‘garden of rules’, authority a ‘perfume’, and power a matter of asceticism. For both parties the end of the sixteenth century constituted a hinge where several philosophical traditions of government converged and were challenged.

All these observations are thought-provoking, and are essentially based on the idea of interconnectedness and synthesis that drives much of the global history approach. Bertrand identifies himself as a practitioner of connected history (p. 293), which is by necessity decentred and which involves, in several respects, the exercise of multi-perspectivity. The author attempts to bring together the Malay and Javanese worlds, on the basis of a close reading of the chronicles and literary texts of both, and by viewing this world as a space geared towards India and the Arabian Peninsula. This venture is productive in that it reverses the Eurocentric gaze. At the same time, Bertrand takes the early seventeenth-century internal developments in the Low Countries seriously, by showing the parallels with, or transfers to, the Indonesian Archipelago. This is certainly a step beyond the work done by previous specialists on European–Javanese historical relations, such as Peter Carey, Merle Ricklefs, Ann Kumar, and others, whose observations are referred to only indirectly in the main text. At some points I wondered whether indigenous sources were not stretched or over-interpreted, in order to prove the asymmetry of the early modern intercultural encounter, and whether a kind of intertextuality of ideas had not been projected into a Malay–Javanese world that was sometimes more segmented and disconnected than appears from this book. This raises a number of further methodological questions, a discussion of which is certainly given impetus by this admirable and substantial study.