Die Stadt Suratta.

Title

Die Stadt Suratta.

Het gezandtschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham, Den tegenwoordigen Keizer van China: waar in de gedenkwaerdigste geschiedenissen... beneffens een naauwkeurige Beschryvinge der Sineesche Steden, Dorpen, Regeering... Gewassen, Dieren... Published by W. Waasberge in Amsterdam, a.d. 1693.

ca. 1693

Artist

Nieuhoff (1618-1672)

Johan Nieuhof was a Dutch traveler who lived in Brazil from 1640 to 1649 during Dutch efforts to challenge Portuguese control. From 1655 to 1657, he joined a Dutch delegation to the Chinese imperial court. His report on China included detailed observations on landscape, culture, and history, along with 150 realistic engravings that gave Europe its first accurate visual impression of China. In the 1660s, Nieuhof worked in India and Indonesia, serving as VOC director on the Malabar Coast. After leaving the company in 1667, he lived as a private citizen in Batavia. In 1672, he disappeared on Madagascar. His travel accounts were published posthumously by his brother Hendrik.

Historical Description

After the 10th century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift-horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity and religion, repeatedly overran South Asia's north-western plains, leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The sultanate was to control much of North India and to make many forays into South India. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs. By repeatedly repulsing Mongol raiders in the 13th century, the sultanate saved India from the devastation visited on West and Central Asia, setting the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, learned men, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from that region into the subcontinent, thereby creating a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in the north. The sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire. Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India and was to influence South Indian society for long afterwards. n the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. The resulting Mughal Empire did not stamp out the local societies it came to rule. Instead, it balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices and diverse and inclusive ruling elites, leading to more systematic, centralised, and uniform rule. Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic identity, especially under Akbar, the Mughals united their far-flung realms through loyalty, expressed through a Persianised culture, to an emperor who had near-divine status. The Mughal state's economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture and mandating that taxes be paid in the well-regulated silver currency caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets. Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience. By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, a number of European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts. The East India Company's control of the seas, greater resources, and more advanced military training and technology led it to increasingly flex its military muscle and caused it to become attractive to a portion of the Indian elite; these factors were crucial in allowing the company to gain control over the Bengal region by 1765 and sideline the other European companies.