The Deshima Diaries

English translation of the marginalia, or marginal notes, that were added to the text of the Deshima Diaries from the 1670's onwards in order to provide the Dutch chief of Deshima with a quick reference to the notes of his predecessors. This volume covers the marginalia from the 1740-4800 diaries. Providing the general public, and especially those who have neither a command of Dutch nor of Japanese access to a fascinating period of Japanese history in which the Dutch played such a singular role. At the same time, the serious scholar wil obtain an easy key to the extremely rich holdings of the archive of the Deshima trading factory, which covers a shelf length of more than forty meters in the National Archives in the Netherlands, but which has been only rarely utilized by historians, Japanologists or other scholars. In the 1740s, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was in many ways at the height of its power. The second half of the 18th century saw the decline of the Company from being the high and mighty - and only - trading company which covered from its base in Batavia (Jakarta) all of Asia with a network that stretched from Basra in Persia to Nagasaki in Japan, to becoming a mere shadow of its former self with only a tenous hold on a few possessions in the Indonesian archipelago. By the end of the century, it had lost its establishments in South Africa, India and Ceylon to the British, and its flleet was gone. However, as a trading company, it was dead, but as a proto-colonial producer it was actually doing quite well. The basis of the present text are the Deshima Dagregisters: their original tables of contents, Vol. VII (1740-1760), Vol. VIII (1760-1780), Vol. IX (1780-1790), Vol. X (1790-1800) published in the Intercontinenta Series Nos. 18 (1993), 19 (1995), 20 (1996), and 21 (1997) by the Institute for the History of European Expansion at Leiden University. Scientific Publications of the Japan-Netherlands Institute No. 21. Published by the Japan-Netherlands Institute, Tokyo 2004 (original ISBN 4930921066).