iSHORE

February 2025

–In this explorative paper I aim, firstly, to give a brief historical overview of early modern Malabar that entirely derives from the existing historiography written in European languages. Although there are various excellent studies on specific polities or communities, on commercial or agricultural developments, on literature or architecture and on many other more specific topics, what seems to be lacking is an integrated account of these developments, at least in English, at least for the early modern period. To be clear, the latter is taken very roughly from the early fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, without necessarily suggesting a sharp break with the previous, so-called medieval period or with the later British colonial period. Obviously, my overview here cannot fill in that gap but merely aims to sketch in broad strokes the historical scenery in which the Dutch operated and which their extensive reports must tell us about. Hence, my second objective is to briefly explore the potentialities of Dutch sources for a better understanding of Malabar’s early modern history. So, I will start with a short discussion of Malabar’s political economy, after which I will highlight the remarkable and simultaneous occurrence of a series of cultural renaissances that were patronized by increasingly prosperous little kingdoms and triggered by Malabar’s intensifying interactions with the outside world. Only at the very end I will make a few closing remarks by looking through the Dutch archival window at these developments which are meant to help a new generation of historians working with the Dutch archive to set up a new research agenda.