Market Stall in Batavia: Money, Value, and Uncertainty in the Age of Global Trade

Abstract

This chapter explores how A Market Stall in Batavia, recently attributed to Andries Beeckman, constructs an image of the Dutch East India Company’s colony for an audience of Dutch burghers. The painting draws on the market setting, familiar from Netherlandish artistic traditions, to convey associations of profitable exchange in its depiction of the town in Indonesia. Focusing on the figure of the Chinese man and the coins in his hands, the chapter argues that these motifs carried multiple connotations, disrupting attempts at a single, positive reading. The use of these multivalent elements results in an ambivalent image that, I contend, offered an apt analogy of the fraught relationship between the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch economy at large.