European Expansion and Indigenous Response49 Intimacy Social (Dis)Order in Dutch Colonial

This book explores the contestation of norms around sex and family life in the diverse and complex social settings that formed under the Dutch early modern chartered trade companies: the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC). Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.