Mining and Medicine between Central Europe and West Sumatra, 1650-1750

In the late seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) launched intensive mining operations on Sumatra’s west coast. Mining professionals from German lands, medical practitioners, local Minangkabau people, and enslaved laborers mostly from Madagascar were brought together at the mining sites: a space where diverse peoples, ways of knowing, and the natural world intersected. I suggest these mines, as zones of contact and contestation, shaped early modern European understandings of the environment, health and disease, and ethnic differences, in a process that exposed the limitations of European frameworks when confronted with local realities.

The project first examines the mining and medical knowledge produced at the Sumatran mines. Lacking relevant expertise in the Netherlands, the VOC brought miners primarily from German-speaking regions, where Central European and Minangkabau mining practices intersected, often with conflicting conceptions. Treating mining as part of the history of labor and health, I also reveal its health consequences and how medical practitioners gained insights through engagement with mineral materials and interactions with the diverse labor force. Next, I explore the influence of the Sumatran mining activities on European science and medicine, through epistolary communication, the return of the German practitioners, and the circulation of the mineral ores.

The project sheds new light on the early modern history of mining: while there is rich literature on colonial mining in the Americas, far less attention has been paid to that in the Indian Ocean World. Through the Sumatran mining venture, I show that understanding Dutch overseas expansion and its relationship to the development of science and medicine requires viewing it as part of a complex geography fueled by both intra-Asian trade and an extensive network of intra-European knowledge and labor exchange. Moreover, my project builds on the growing scholarship that underscores the important role Germans played in European expansion, especially through their participation in ventures under non-German flags. It reveals German lands’ deep integration into global flows of knowledge, expertise, and goods, and complicates the Dutch-centric narrative of the VOC.

Bio

Wenrui Zhao is a postdoctoral associate in the History Department at Cornell University. She will join the University of Utah as an assistant professor in the Fall of 2025. Her research mainly focuses on the visual and material cultures of science and medicine in early modern northern Europe and its connections to the wider world. Her first book project is titled The Eye and the Art of Medicine in Early Modern Germany. Her new project studies the German artisanal and scientific practitioners who travelled to Southeast and East Asia in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Dan David Foundation, Leopoldina Centre for Science Studies, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Renaissance Society of America, among others.