Silvie-thesis outline

THESIS OUTLINE

This thesis will be a journey, voyage, through time, recounting the socio economic development and colonial expansion of The Netherlands, from the perspective of the sea. The sea, at once ancient and new everyday, local and global, shapeshifting and plural, is a witness. An infrastructure for trade and transport. A source of creation and destruction.

By adopting the sea as the perspective of this thesis, blending essayistic as well as creative writing, I aim to talk about history while getting rid of the objectivity and linearity often propagated by historical narratives.

INTRODUCTION

The 'Discovery of the Millennium': the existence of water memory (expand) shows that water retains, collects information about where it has been and what has traversed, been submerged in it. Water functions as an archive, a record of time. Water and time are inextricably linked to one another. Time is said to have come from the word tide, the same holds for the Dutch equivalent getij derived from tijd. 2 tides a day, created by an intermix between the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon, and the rotation of the earth. The sea with its waves crashing on the shore is like a metronome. What would the accumulated songs of the sea sound like?

The sea has seen the first maritime expeditions, the transition of VOC ships, the cradle of capitalism, into VOC cargo ships, organic shells replaced by Off-shore Shell refinery platform, while its waters are rising. The chances crashing into a containership is equally as big as that of crashing into a whale on the open sea

CHAPTER 1: The Tide: The Moon and the Merchant

Harbour

"If the Moon pulls the tides, it also rules the market" (Alice Sparkly Cat)

In Astrology the Moon is related to material fortune.

The sailors looked up at the stars to navigate. Expeditions and imperialism driven by hunger not by technological invention - what came on the market in the Netherlands (counter example of China).

The moon is only visible half of the time, through reflecting the light of the sun.
Visibility always comes at the cost of the invisibility of something else.

"The sea, or water, is the great medium of circulation established by nature, just as money has been created by man for the exchange of products" (Alfred Thayer Mahan, Naval Strategy).

"If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbour is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange ... But the more regularised, literally containerised, the movement of goods in harbours, that is, the more rationalized and automated, the more the harbour comes to resemble the stock market" (Allan Sekula)

VOC first registered company that went to the stock exchange. This "company" acted much like a governmental body.

"... the V.O.C. became, by some measures, the largest company in human history, worth more than ExxonMobil, Apple, and Amazon combined." (Taiwo, O., 2021) (creation through destruction)
“No trade without war, and no war without trade,” Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the fourth governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, declared.

"Debt creates currency" (Sparkly Cat p. 117)

Empty ships that come back full. Extractivism.

CHAPTER 2: The Deluge

Water as a source of creation and destruction: Flood myths.
Time is circular
At the core of the origin story of The Netherlands is the control of water. Control in the name of protection and control in the name of expansion: the annexing of land from the sea and overseas.

"The [Great] flood is a metaphor for The Netherlands as a phenomenon." (Geuze p. 8)

This quote refers to the Netherlands as having been able to resist the Great Flood due to Divine blessing, connecting the Dutch expansionist drive to a further carrying out of God's work. But has the Great Flood occurred or is it yet to come?

CHAPTER 3: Liquid land

Liquid financial markets

Liquifying land —> loss of firm ground —> "the problem of a world of floating, nonreferential signs, the creation of value from nothing, has been further intensified" (Klose, A. 2016)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Klose, A. (2016). Container Principle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mit Press.

2. J Michelle Coghlan (2020). The Cambridge companion to literature and food. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.

3. Fox, D. (2019). Limbo. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

4. Sparkly Cat, A. (2021). Post-colonial Astrology.

5. Adriaan Geuze and Olof Koekebakker (2005). The flood : 2nd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam ; catalogue ; [26 mei - 26 juni 2005]. Rotterdam: Internationale Architectuur Biënnale.

6. THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. (2017). Students: Shipping Tales. [online] Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/09-islands/students-shipping-tales-christina-varvia [Accessed 3 Nov. 2021].

7. Taiwo, O. (2021). Our Planet Is Heating Up. Why Are Climate Politics Still Frozen? [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/our-planet-is-heating-up-why-are-climate-politics-still-frozen-colonialism-environment [Accessed 4 Nov. 2021].

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