The VOC’s “Dirty Work”: sodomy prosecutions and the Dutch East India Company’s sexual–moral order from the Indies to the Dutch Republic, 1600–1730

Abstract This article examines sodomy prosecutions by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows that long before the Dutch “gay panic” of 1730, colonial workers were actively (if selectively) prosecuted for sodomy by the VOC’s ship and fleet councils, as well as the corporate colonial courts in the Dutch East Indies. These prosecutions, this article argues, contributed to the construction of a Dutch sexual–moral order in the colonial encounter—within, and as a function of, European imperialist capitalism, and by extension, capitalist law. The overarching aim of the “VOC sexual-moral order” was VOC commercial hegemony in the Indies, and labor discipline, with “sexual enclosure” (following Christopher Chitty) delineating permitted and punishable practices. VOC leaders like J.P. Coen articulated an ideal Dutch identity, the “nation mirrored in the individual,” contrasting it with Asian (especially Muslim) societies. The contested VOC sexual–moral ordering “boomeranged” back to the Dutch Republic in the early eighteenth century. The story of one convicted sodomite, Leendert Hasenbosch, tracks this boomerang movement from the Dutch Indies back to the Dutch Republic, where, during the 1730s “gay panic,” the criminalization of sodomy served to strengthen and legitimize the nascent capitalist state apparatus. The case of the VOC shows that colonial history is part of Western history of sexuality, and illuminates how European, and eventually hegemonic, ideas about sexuality in fact developed in the colonial encounter. Conversely, it shows that sexuality, alongside race, forms a key part of the history of imperialism and European state-formation.