Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [250]
* Each country had between 1.25 and 1.5 million people in the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969: 114).
* The Batavi were a Germanic tribe who had lived in the area of modern Holland, north of the Scheldt, around the turn of the first centuries BC-AD. They thus provided a useful classical pseudonym for historically minded Dutchmen, perhaps little appreciated by the Javanese among whom they settled.
† A major motive was the association of the Portuguese with Christianity, which the Japanese government of Tokugawa Iemitsu was determined to stamp out within their shores. The Dutch, prepared to restrict their concerns to secular matters of trade, were therefore the only foreign contact of the Japanese for the following two centuries.
This led to a famous linguistic incident in Japanese history (comparable to the use of Portuguese mentioned above, [’An Asian empire’, p. 388]). In 1853, when the American Commodore Perry entered the port of Uraga with his ‘black ships’, determined to end Japan’s isolation, one of the first Japanese to come alongside, Hori Tatsunosuke, said in very good English, ‘I can speak Dutch.’ Since one of the Americans, a Mr Portman, also knew the language, the first sustained exchange between an American and a Japanese actually took place in Dutch. (Hawks 1954, pp. 48-9)
* They originally stepped in to take pre-emptive control of Dutch possessions when revolutionary France occupied the Netherlands in 1795, but permanently annexed the Cape colony in 1806.
* Anderson (1991: 110) suggests two other motives: the absence of nationalism as such in the early seventeenth century (the VOC was after all a corporation, not a nationality), and Dutch lack of self-confidence in their own language. Neither seems particularly convincing, especially in comparison with the Portuguese competitors whom the Dutch were quite consciously outdoing. On p. 133, he suggests further that the Netherlands, with only one substantial colony, could afford to adopt a non-European language for administration: it would have been unworkable, he says, for a multi-continental empire such as the British. But the Dutch empire too, for its first 150 years, had been just as multi-continental.
On the other hand, he may be right in pointing (p. 110) to the language policy as a means of keeping the native population underdeveloped: ‘in 1940, when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637 “natives” in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs.’
* The Italian Pigafetta, accompanying the Spanish circumnavigators in 1521, had been able to compile a list of 450 Malay words at Tidore in the Moluccas. Nevertheless, it was not yet well established there: ‘even the scribes who had to write it for the infant Sultan of Tidore in 1521 and 1522 showed that they were “certainly very imperfectly acquainted with it’” (Hoffman 1979: 66-7, n. 9).
* There was always speculation that the strange unwillingness of the Dutch to share their language with their colonial subjects was a sort of snobbery, to enhance their prestige among the Dutchless natives. This was roundly discouraged by the Dutch administration as a harmful attitude. Nevertheless, it was widely believed by foreign observers (e.g. Bousquet 1940: 88-9); and it did happen to fit in with a certain aspect of Javanese etiquette, whereby social status was marked by styles of language (taalsoorten).
* It might even be seen, by an unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon, as an example of ‘that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit’, a phrase of Peter Medawar in a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénomène humain (accessible at * The term was invented by the geographer Onésime Reclus in 1880, to refer to the French-speaking community in the world. Nowadays, at least in