Lecture | Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar
The Western Part of the East Indies: Colonial Worldmaking and Global Knowledges at the Early Modern Cape Colony
- Date
- Thursday 13 November 2025
- Time
- Series
- Global Histories of Knowledge 2025 - 2026
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.80
Abstract
As the Cape of Good Hope was integrated into early modern colonial world-making projects, it came to be regarded as ‘the western part of the East Indies’. The initial elaboration of this imaginary was contingent upon the contours of Dutch mobility in the Indian Ocean and material exigencies on the ground at the Cape. Early commanders sought to transform the colony’s environment, culture, and demographic constitution into a mirror of their productive East Indian colonies. Relatedly, some Indigenous Khoekhoe, forcibly transported to Java to train as colonial servants, came to understand Europeans — and the dangers they posed — in relation to the East Indies. This contingent colonial world-making soon gave rise to broader epistemic frameworks linking the southern African territory to Asia. European travellers began remarking on the purported similarities between the Cape’s plants, colonial customs and material culture, and Khoekhoe practices and those of the East Indies. By the end of the seventeenth century, some travellers even hypothesized that the Chinese had visited the Cape before the birth of Christ. Exploring the causes and consequences of the Cape’s integration into the East Indies, this talk asks how contingent geopolitical designations reshaped scholarly descriptions of natures and cultures in southern Africa.
Speaker
Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is Assistant Professor in Colonial Environmental History and Decolonial Futures at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from Cambridge with research on Jesuits in China, Eurasian exchanges, and the global history of science, and was subsequently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Lumley Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is currently interested in worldmaking and the formation of braided knowledges in colonial contexts, with a particular focus on connections between maritime Asia, southern Africa, and Europe. His first book, The Tartar Moment: Crises and the Globalization of Chinese Knowledges in Early Modern Europe, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.