Anjana Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750-1830: The Social Condition of a Dutch Community in an Indian Milieu. TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-European Interaction 13 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). ISBN: 978-90- 04-16816-9 (hbk.)

The volume reviewed here is part of a series on the history of Asian-European interactions and a result of the highly successful TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) program that was carried out at Leiden University, the Netherlands, from 2001 to 2006 by a score of young Asian, South African, and European scholars. Seeking to better understand the Asian-European interactions in early modern maritime Asia, the authors strive to match their research conducted in the depositories of the former Dutch East India Company (VOC) held in the archival depositories at The Hague, Cape Town, Colombo, Madras, and Jakarta with local Asian sources and the latest scholarly literature. As such, these monographs provide new insights into the integration of the Asian theatre into global history. Patna-born Anjana Singh, a product of the TANAP program, obtained a doctorate in History from the University of Leiden in 2007 and currently serves as a Research Officer at the Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, as part of the URKEW (Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Global Histories of Material Progress in the East and the West) project, headed by Patrick O’Brien. Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750-1830 studies the early modern fortress town of Cochin (the former Portuguese Cochim de Baixo) in modern-day Kerala, India, based on extensive research undertaken in India, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Singh’s endeavors to paint an intimate portrait of a Dutch urban community of East India Company (VOC) servants and their dependants living in the larger social environment of the Malabar Coast from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Her aim is “to re-create the world of Fort Cochin from the archives created by the people themselves...to bring to life and tell the forgotten stories of individuals, the inhabitants of the fort and discover the individual journeys of the people living there” (12). Thus, Singh sets out to show how, in