Gerrit Knaap, born in Raamsdonk, the Netherlands, in 1954. Ph.D. from Utrecht University. Head of the Department of Historical Documentation at the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV), Leiden.
Fellow (1 September 1997 – 30 June 1998)
Besides the work on my project I gave a few lectures and papers at academic meetings, for instance at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, where I presented a paper about Makassar’s seafaring community, and at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where I presented a paper about women and gender in early-modern Amboina.
The purpose of my stay at NIAS was to work on the project “Trade and Shipping, in particular of Asians, in Makassar 1717-1796: A Quantitative Analysis”. In the framework of this project the eighteenth-century administrations of the harbourmasters of the Dutch East India Company about private trade and shipping in Makassar, nowadays Ujung Pandang (Indonesia), were thoroughly analysed and interpreted in order to gain a better insight into the general structure and development of seaborne traffic in that part of the world. The analysis revealed several interesting processes of change, among other things in the fields of technological change (the advent of better indigenous ship types rather than adopting Western models), of economic power (a substitution of Dutch Burghers and indigenous traders by Chinese and Malay traders) and of merchandise (from agricultural products and Indian textiles to sea-produce and Chinese commodities).
The results of the project will be published in a monograph, of which Professor Heather Sutherland of the Free University, Amsterdam, will be the co-author. Apart from a great number of mainly statistical Appendices, four chapters for the monograph were written during my stay at NIAS.