Mr. Guanmian Xu (Leiden University)

In the eighteenth century, enlightenment ideas were not only spread globally by European missionaries, naturalists, and orientalists within a putative “Republic of Letters”, but also generated locally amid everyday cross-cultural interactions in colonial rural communities peripheral to any mainstream intellectual networks. Focusing on rural Batavia (Jakarta), this talk aims to investigate a tropical enlightenment deeply rooted in a colonial rural society where Chinese sugar technology encountered the Dutch Empire. It shows how sugar-making as an everyday technology in South China was introduced by Chinese entrepreneurs to rural Batavia, became a sophisticated plantation economy through massive mobilisation of Javanese migrant labourers, and then encountered the first European learned society in Asia, namely, the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (established in 1778).