The Travels of Pieter Albert Bik
Writings from the Dutch Colonial World of the Early Nineteenth Century
9789087282790
336 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Pieter Albert Bik (1798-1855) was a Dutch colonial official whose work took him all over the world, including travels throughout Europe, the Dutch East Indies, and Japan. This book presents for the first time in English his autobiographical writings about those travels, which Bik never published in his lifetime. Presented here with annotations to set his observations in context, Bik’s accounts offer a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism in the first half of the nineteenth century, while editor Mikko Toivanen also draws interesting parallels between Bik’s travels and the contemporary emergence of tourist travel in Europe.
Author Bio
Mikko Toivanen is a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, specialising in global and colonial history. His work deals with the Dutch and British empires in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the global cultures of imperialism, with a current focus on developing ideas of urbanity and the changing uses of public space in colonial contexts. His wider research interests include the global circulations of colonial knowledge and the history of Nordic colonial entanglements.
