SMALLPOX AND SLAVERY: CAUSES OF A FREELANCE INTELLECTUAL
January 26th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Willem van Hogendorp was a founding member of the academy, a senior VOC official, and a successful businessman. He spent the years 1774 to 1784 in Java. The academy gave him a reason for pursuing his intellectual interests and a means of disseminating them through its journal. He drew on Batavia’s archives to write histories of the Muslim kingdom of Jayakarta and of the VOC in Java. Van Hogendorp was also exponent and publicist of scientific developments in Europe. He worked to create public support for vaccination against smallpox by publishing a play and an essay in 1779 and by establishing a cash prize for the best essay on vaccination.
Van Hogendorp’s principles led him to be critical of slavery. He found the government-licensed printer, Lodewyk Dominicus, willing to publish his protest in the form of a play. Harsh Blows, or Slavery criticized the treatment of slaves by that segment of Batavia’s population called “Portuguese,” that is, Eurasians and Asian Christians. (It did not treat Dutch or Indonesian slaveowners.) In the play, the vicious treatment of domestic slaves by a Eurasian woman and her Indonesian overseer leads to murderous revolt by the household’s victims.
photocredit: nl.wikipedia.org
