More Baron Sakender/Sakhender

If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which Sakhender is seen in the context of a constructed Dutch-Javanese symbiosis which allotted commercial dominance to the former and permitted the maintenance of symbolic power by the latter.

Interestingly, this symbiosis is not reflected clearly in the various creoles that arose from contact between the Dutch and the locals, with, for example, the Javanese names for Javanese weights and measures frequently being adopted in informal speech by the colonisers. A more straightforward situation is to be found in the Dutch West Indies, where I think I’m right in saying that the period of Iberian dominance is reflected in the Papiamentu lexicon by numerous spiritual terms whereas Dutch barbarisms tend to be practical and trade-related.

(Thanks JLR for the hint.)

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