The Company Fortress

Erik Odegard

The Company Fortress Military Engineering and the Dutch East India Company in South Asia, 1638-1795

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion? Was European fortification design as important for early modern expansion as has been argued? This book takes on these questions by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single ‘European school’ of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century.

…the best and fullest available guide to the evolution of fortification technology from the first bastions through into the eighteenth-century. − David Parrott, Professor of Early Modern History at New College, University of Oxford.

Erik Odegard wrote in Leiden his PhD on Dutch colonial governors in the seventeenth century. He has published on shipbuilding, agency problems, naval warfare and the Dutch chartered companies. Currently, he works at the Mauritshuis museum as head of the research project ‘Revisiting Dutch Brazil and Johan Maurits’.

COLONIAL AND GLOBAL HISTORY THROUGH DUTCH SOURCES

Publication date Autumn 2020 NUR 685 ISBN 9789087283469 e-pdf 9789400603806 epub 9789400603813 Language English Price € 51.00 £ 46.50 $ 57.50 Format Paperback illustrated 156 x 234 mm Page extent 308 Cover design Geert de Koning Imprint LUP Academic