Francisca Hoyer, Relations of Absence: Germans in the East Indies and Their Families c. 1750–1820 (Uppsala: Acta Historica Upsaliensia, 2020). 370 pp.

Abstract

Francisca Hoyer’s thesis is a welcome addition to our understanding of early global processes on a micro level. Basing her investigation on twenty-seven archives and a vast secondary literature, she successfully analyses the familial relations of a category of world travelers who are not unknown to previous historiography but have frequently been overlooked. These are the hundreds of thousands of Germans who signed up with the leading East Indies trading companies, the Dutch VOC and the English EIC, in the early modern era. Many of them came to an early death in the plantations of Sumatra, the malaria-infested quarters of Batavia, or the cramped company ships which took more than half-a-year to reach their Asian destinations. Those who survived maintained connections to their Central European backgrounds and forged new connections in their new environment. Unmarried sailors, soldiers, artisans, and other company employees would find wives and mistresses, mostly but not exclusively Asian and Eurasian women, and consequently sire children whose status was largely contingent on skin colour. They might also go to great length to maintain contacts with their distant kin in Brandenburg, Saxony or Mecklenburg, though the exchange of letters demanded years of patient waiting. Conversely, the families back in Germany were often anxious for news about relatives who had become Ostindienfahrer, not least when there were issues of inheritance at stake. It is in this context that Hoyer analyses the nexus of family and empire, a history that is both social and global. Several German historians