Lecture | Brown Bag Seminar
Governance Technologies and the Performative Reproduction of Delegated Imperial Authority: Multi-Actor Making, Enacting, Contesting, and Reproducing of VOC Rule in the Cape, Formosa and Ceylon, 1620s-1660s
- Lap Kan Au
- Date
- Friday 16 October 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminars 2026-2027
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room 2.60
Abstract
This project intervenes in the historiography of the Dutch Empire by shifting the analytical focus from the outcomes of land regimes (who received land grants, who achieved mobility, and who became freeholders) to the prior and continuous production of the imperial authority that made such outcomes. It draws on Cátia Antunes’s call to move beyond Dutch exceptionalism and Batavia-centrism toward a multi-actor, polycentric and interconnected understanding of empire, it asks not simply how the VOC ruled, but how the VOC’s delegated imperial authority to define, classify, and govern populations was produced, legitimised, and reproduced in everyday colonial practice.
The research focuses on the formative decades of the 1620s-1660s in the Cape of Good Hope, Formosa, and Ceylon. The project treats governance technologies not merely as written plakkaaten, but as a broader repertoire that operated across textual, corporeal, spatial, and social domains. These governance technologies encompassed normative languages (such as claims to vrijen handel and legitimacy), legal and material instruments (including plakkaaten), governance categories and practices. Performative reproduction is understood as the iterative mechanism through which imperial authority was continually made effective at the local level. Its effects, through public posting, reading aloud, violation, and reissuance, can be measured by indicators such as frequency of iteration, the extent of penalty escalation, the appearance of reporting and reward mechanisms (bounty system of denunciation), and the persistence of violations. However, in some cases, imperial authority was produced through a single, high-intensity embodied performance in which the enslaved body became a site of enduring inscription. Through comparative analysis of issuance, enforcement, adaptation, strategic evasion, and local contestation across the three sites, the project demonstrates that VOC authority was neither a stable projection of Batavia nor pure local improvisation. Instead, it was a continuously reproduced, polycentric form of delegated imperial authority in which multiple actors participated in, challenged, and ultimately helped constitute the empire.
Governance occurred in the productive tension between legal norms and administrative practice, in which “law lagged behind the empire reality”, and it was this gap that enabled imperial authority to function effectively. By highlighting the everyday mechanisms through which VOC’s delegated imperial authority functioned effectively. the project offers a new perspective on how people and colonial spaces became part of the Dutch Empire through different governance categories and
practices.
Speaker: Lap Kan Au
I am an external PhD at Leiden University, and my research focuses on the VOC Empire. I have published a journal article titled “The Clash of Trade Ideologies: Revisiting the Battle of Liaoluo Bay through the Lens of Hans Putmans’ Interpretation of Vrijen Handel and the Ming Tributary System” and participated in the project “From Formosa to the Cape: Seventeenth-Century Dutch-Language Historical Materials and Digitalisation＂(Taipei, 2025) , which included a year-long reading group on the Kaapse Plakkaatboek. I presented a paper at the GLOBALISE Conference (Amsterdam, March 2026) and am scheduled to present a paper at the Privacy and Slavery, Past and Present Conference (Copenhagen, October 2026). In addition, I have experience assisting in the organisation of a conference and contributing as a translator to a scholarly volume.
Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminars
The Brown Bag Seminars provide researchers with an opportunity to receive constructive feedback on work in progress, unpublished papers and new research ideas. To encourage the presentation of new material, papers that have already been presented at conferences are generally not considered suitable. Speakers are invited to present ongoing research, preliminary findings or new directions in their current projects. Postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates are particularly encouraged to share their work.
There is no requirement to circulate a paper in advance. Presentations typically last between 20 and 35 minutes, allowing ample time for discussion. Everyone is welcome to attend these seminars. Depending on the venue, participants are welcome to bring their own lunch.