The best Dutch East India Company books

Abbott in Darkness is Lost in Space as a corporate crime story. John Abbott and his young family are forty light-years from earth starting his dream job working as an accountant for the famous Sarovar Company. Company employees are allowed to trade for their own accounts and make their fortunes. This is good, because John and his family are in debt and need the money. On the other hand, the resulting temptations sometimes lead Company traders astray.

John is assigned to investigate embezzling on Sarovar Alpha, but quickly discovers that behind the thefts lie smuggling, gun-running, and murder… and now the criminals have him in their sights. With no way back to Earth and nowhere else to go, John Abbott is all in.

This mix of travelogue, history, and vignettes of small-town life is the kind of book I like to read myself: history and culture woven into travel narratives, and with a healthy sprinkling of eccentric characters. I think readers will be surprised to learn that Taiwan was – until the early twentieth century – one of the wildest places in Asia, as shown in the tales recounted of fatal shipwrecks, headhunting tribes, banditry, and revolts. From those early frontier days, Formosan Odyssey takes us through the period of Japanese colonial rule, and the post-war transition from an impoverished police state to a prosperous democracy.

The samurai were an estate of warriors who imposed and maintained peace in Japan for more than two centuries during the Tokugawa period, 1603-1868. While they maintained a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as a result of the peace the samurai themselves were transformed over time into an educated, cultured elite--one that remained fiercely proud of its military legacy and hyper-sensitive in defending their individual honor.

This book provides detailed information about the samurai, beginning with a timeline and narrative historical overview of the samurai, followed by 100+ alphabetically arranged entries on topics related to the samurai, such as ritual suicide, castles, weapons, housing, clothing, samurai women. The entries cite works for further reading and often include sidebars linking the samurai to popular culture, tourist sites, and other information.

At the age of fifty-one, Matsuo Taseko left her home in a farm village where she had spent most of her life to go to Kyoto. It was 1862, and Japan was in the throes of dealing with a new international order. Was she going to further her study of classical poetry with court nobles, or was she going to demonstrate her loyalty to the emperor and expel the Western “barbarians”? Although she played a minor role in the events that ended the age of the samurai, her deeds were nonetheless astonishing for a woman of her day.

She was honored as a patriot even before her death, but her story also speaks to the transformative potential of a woman’s old age. 

Whenever leadership emerges within a group, there will be resistance to that leadership. What, then, turns discontent into mutiny? Mutiny is often associated with the occasional mis-leadership of the masses by politically inspired hotheads, or a spontaneous gesture of defiance against a uniquely overbearing military superior. In reality it is seldom either and usually has far more mundane origins, not in the absolute poverty of the subordinates but in the relative poverty of the relationships between leaders and the led in a military situation. The roots of mutiny lie in the leadership skills of a small number of leaders, and what transforms that into a constructive dialogue, or a catastrophic disaster, depends on how the leaders of both sides mobilize their supporters and their networks.

Recipes and stories explore how centuries of spice trading and cultural diffusion changed the world's cuisine. A unique and enlightening guide to cooking with spice, the book looks at their flavour profiles and how they can be used, combined, and layered - how some bring sweetness, others fragrance, heat, pungency, sourness, or earthiness.

There are 80 spice-infused recipes in this collection following the trails of ancient maritime trade through Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Iran, and the Emirates. Eleanor combines historical research with a travel writer's eye and a cook's nose for a memorable recipe. Interwoven are stories that explore how spices from across the Indian Ocean - the original cradle of spice - have, over time, been adopted into cuisines around the world.

In 1833, a young Charles Darwin met a species in the Falkland Islands that astonished him: tame, curious birds of prey that looked and acted like a cross between a hawk and a crow. They stole hats and other objects from the crew of the Beagle, and Darwin wondered why they were confined to a few islands at the bottom of the world. But he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it—and a chance meeting with these unique birds, now called striated caracaras, led Jonathan Meiburg to pick up where Darwin left off, sending him on a grand and captivating odyssey across thousands of miles and millions of years. “To call this a bird book,” wrote The Dallas Morning News, “would be like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual.”     

The samurai were an estate of warriors who imposed and maintained peace in Japan for more than two centuries during the Tokugawa period, 1603-1868. While they maintained a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as a result of the peace the samurai themselves were transformed over time into an educated, cultured elite--one that remained fiercely proud of its military legacy and hyper-sensitive in defending their individual honor.

This book provides detailed information about the samurai, beginning with a timeline and narrative historical overview of the samurai, followed by 100+ alphabetically arranged entries on topics related to the samurai, such as ritual suicide, castles, weapons, housing, clothing, samurai women. The entries cite works for further reading and often include sidebars linking the samurai to popular culture, tourist sites, and other information.

This study provides a broad political and economic examination of the impact of the silk trade on nineteenth-century Japan. It analyzes the economic role of Japan’s eastern interior region and that of the port of Yokohama. It argues that the economic development in this period laid the foundations for Japan’s prewar industrial development in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for the integration of Japan into the global economy.

This is the distillation of hundreds of titles and decades of reading. Telling the story of Taiwan through the most acclaimed, interesting, and influential English-language books, we travel from the early seventeenth century to the present. The book was great fun to write, and especially satisfying to shine a light on forgotten gems. It’s an accessible introduction to the country and also a bibliophile's elixir packed with the backstories of the authors and the books themselves; there are tales of outrageous literary fraud, lost manuscripts, banned books, and publishing skulduggery.