Ethnicity, language and culture in Melaka after the transition from Portuguese to Dutch rule (seventeenth century
Peter Borschberg (2010) examines the cultural, linguistic, and religious aftermath of the VOC’s seizure of Melaka from Portugal in January 1641, arguing that the ad hoc, pragmatic decisions made by Dutch commanders in the immediate post-conquest period—originally conceived as short-term fixes to problems on the ground—became the structural foundations of Dutch colonial policy in Melaka well into the eighteenth century.
Summary
Borschberg challenges the conventional narrative that attributes the fall of Portuguese Melaka primarily to Dutch military superiority. Drawing on a broad cross-section of VOC documentation, he demonstrates that the colony was brought down by what he terms the “Black Trinity”—war, famine, and disease. Five years of maritime blockade, combined with Johorean troops destroying orchards, fields, and overland supply routes in the final months, reduced the population by roughly ninety per cent. The physical destruction of the city was severe: suburbs were consumed by fire, stone buildings were shattered by artillery, and the subsequent uncontrolled looting by Dutch and allied soldiers irretrievably destroyed much of Melaka’s Luso-Asian material culture. Valuables were bartered at a fraction of their worth, the Jesuit library was stripped of its most useful legal texts, and the Company’s own attempts to inventory and centrally manage the booty proved haphazard.
The article then traces four phases of early Dutch colonial and cultural policy. The first concerned restoring public order and health in a city still ravaged by plague. The second focused on securing food supplies and reviving commerce, with the VOC deliberately retaining Portuguese tariff and fee structures to signal continuity to Asian trading communities. The third phase addressed the linguistic dilemma: with creolized Portuguese already the dominant spoken language among slaves, mardijkers, and even much of Batavia’s resident population, Governor-General van Diemen issued an edict in 1641 to restrict Portuguese and elevate Dutch. This measure failed, because the Protestant clergy themselves required Portuguese for sermons and catechism to reach the target converts, effectively entrenching the very language the edict sought to marginalize. The fourth phase concerned the handling of the surviving Roman Catholic population. Van Schouten’s report of September 1641 proposed open toleration of Catholic worship as a pragmatic, time-limited experiment—justified by the need to retain the remaining population, restore food production, and set an example that might weaken resistance in other Iberian colonies.
Underpinning all four phases is Borschberg’s central argument that the VOC’s tight commercial regulation paradoxically created space for cultural flexibility. What could not be easily assigned a monetary value on the Company’s balance sheet—language, religion, ethnic identity—remained comparatively unregulated. The Luso-Asian (mestico) community, comprising the surviving Portuguese-speaking slaves, Eurasian merchants, and their descendants, emerged as the cultural and economic backbone of Dutch Melaka, serving as linguistic intermediaries, commercial proxies, and diplomatic go-betweens precisely because the Company needed them and had little incentive to restrict their cultural practices.
Key Findings
- The population of Melaka was reduced from an estimated 20,000 to between 1,500 and 3,000 survivors (a ninety per cent loss), with approximately 7,000 deaths attributed to the siege period alone (pp. 95–97).
- The Jesuit convent library contained 545 Latin books (460 on theology, 85 on law) and approximately 200 Portuguese-language theology books; most other convent and church books were “thrown away, scattered or taken or have perished” (pp. 102–103).
- Governor-General van Diemen’s 1641 edict barred slaves from wearing hats unless they could speak basic Dutch and required mardijkers and prospective wives of Company servants to acquire at least a basic command of the language; the edict failed to displace Portuguese (pp. 107–108).
- Van Schouten’s report of September 1641 proposed that public Roman Catholic worship be permitted “for a year or two” in a single chapel within the walled city, with the majority of monasteries and churches converted to other uses (the Franciscan monastery to a boarding house for Company slaves, the Dominican monastery to a hospital, the Jesuit monastery to a school and library, and the Cathedral partly demolished and converted to an arsenal) (pp. 110–113).
- A reward of twenty per cent was gazetted for anyone who discovered hidden treasures, and slaves who voluntarily came forward were promised their freedom (p. 101).
- The evacuation of Portuguese subjects to Nagapattinam in January 1641 was accused of carrying away more than 100,000 ryals-of-eight in gold and jewellery, “the best slaves of both sexes, artists and musicians” (pp. 99–100).
Conclusion
Borschberg’s definitive takeaway is that Dutch colonial Melaka was “born out of the tragedy of the Black Trinity” and that its distinctive cultural character—marked by the persistence of Portuguese as a living language, the continued practice of Roman Catholicism, and the centrality of the Luso-Asian community—was not the product of deliberate ideological design but of pragmatic, incremental decisions made under conditions of scarcity, disease, and administrative confusion. The VOC’s singular focus on profit generation meant that cultural domains fell outside its regulatory purview, and the short-term accommodations of 1641 calcified into the enduring structures of the colony.
Context
- The study draws almost entirely on VOC manuscript materials held in the National Archives of the Netherlands (The Hague), specifically VOC ms. 1134 and ms. 1136, supplemented by the Dagh-Register Batavia (DRB) and Leupe’s 1936 English translation of siege-period documents.
- The article fills a recognized lacuna in the historiography of Melaka by focusing specifically on the destruction of Portuguese material culture and the immediate origins of Dutch cultural policy, rather than on the broader political or economic history of the VOC’s acquisition.