ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Public Instructions, Colonial Distances: Prize Questions in the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (c. 1770-1800)

• In Event: Problematising Colonial Instructions: The Global Context of Scientific and Medical Information, 1650-1850

English Abstract

This paper investigates prize contests as a form of instruction by examining the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in the late eighteenth century. Founded by Dutch East India Company (VOC) employees in Batavia (Jakarta), the Society emulated European learned societies by organizing prize contests. But unlike metropolitan contests focused on philosophy, Batavian prize questions sought useful knowledge about practical colonial problems: shipbuilding methods, slave health during transit, treating sick sailors. These questions reveal the epistemological priorities of colonial learned men, who valued utility over abstract inquiry. Prize questions, I argue, constitute a distinct genre of instruction characterized by epistemological optimism and utilitarian imperatives. Unlike private instructions within mercantile networks, prize contests broadcast knowledge needs publicly, inviting responses from anyone with relevant expertise. They functioned as both solicitations and specifications, defining useful knowledge while instructing respondents how to observe and document colonial realities. Yet the contests mostly failed. Few answers came from Batavia. Sponsoring three Dutch societies to pose similar questions generated even less engagement, as metropolitan participants lacked colonial experience. Eventually, the Society sponsored questions on local Dutch concerns—Reformed education, church burials—abandoning colonial subjects entirely. These failures reveal the limits of instructions as knowledge-generating tools across epistemic and geographic distances. By analyzing why public instructions failed where private administrative directives might have succeeded, this paper shows how prize contests expose tensions between Enlightenment ideals of universal knowledge and the situatedness of colonial expertise.

Author

• Maria Iulia Florutau, Cambridge University