25-26 March 2026. Colonial Mobility and Legal Encounters: Rethinking the Dutch East Indian Company (VOC)’s Role in Asia

This workshop seeks to critically interrogate the mechanisms of the VOC’s expansion, focusing on the concepts of ‘colonial mobility’ and ‘legal encounters’. We understand the VOC not as a static entity, but as a mobile and adaptive agent whose strategies of governance, jurisdiction, and negotiation actively shaped — and were shaped by — Asian contexts. The ‘colonial mobility’ of the VOC makes it a pivotal subject for understanding how early modern colonial empires functioned beyond traditional state structures. The VOC’s colonial mobility also has a contemporary resonance, as global corporations restrict and reshape state sovereignty in former colonies across Asia. Our intuition is that the VOC’s repertoire of legal techniques forms a kind of ‘imperial debris’ that continues to influence corporate-state dynamics and restrict sovereignty in post-colonial Asia.

This workshop will be held in Amsterdam and will bring together selected participants with senior scholars for a series of panels and roundtable discussions designed to provide constructive feedback. Following the workshop, the organisers will look to select papers for publication in a proposed special journal issue.

The workshop is convened by Zhonghua Du (University of Amsterdam), Yilin Wang (University of Macau), and André Dao (University of Melbourne), and will include a keynote by Professor Sundhya Pahuja.