Court journeys represent the most spectaculars sub-genre in western travel literature and the history of cross-cultural interaction. Preceded by an incisive introduction on images and ideologies of Dutch-South Asian contact, these are the hitherto unpublished accounts and related documents of three encounters between representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC after its Dutch initials), one of the great Northern European chartered companies of the age of mercantilism, and the state of Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in Southeast India in the second half of the seventeenth century. A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex courtship fraught with tensions between two ill-suited partners, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict'. |
