Natural History on the Island of Ambon
Writing Civil and Natural Histories on the Island of Ambon
Genre and Narrative in the Work of Georg Eberhard Rumphius
Dániel Margócsy
16 December 2025 – 5 PM (CET)
George Eberhard Rumphius (1627-1702) is arguably the most important natural historian of the early modern Dutch colonial archipelago, whose works defined the medicinal botany of Indonesia for the following three hundred years.
This talk offers an overview of his extensive writings and publications that started with histories and geographies of the East Indonesian archipelago of Maluku and ended with the posthumous publication of the Herbarium amboinense, whose printing was delayed because of the censorial intervention of the Dutch East India Company.
Rumphius’ writings were heavily influenced by the Muslim Imam Ridjali, whose Hikayat tanah hitu is the only surviving local account of Maluku from the period. We examine the reasons why Rumphius decided to translate the Hikayat tanah hitu, and present this translation as his own, credible account of the development of society on Ambon.
It is argued that there were significant resonances between the religious and philosophical worldviews of Rumphius and the religious and philosophical worldviews of Imam Ridjali.
I suggest that the seventeenth-century Indonesian archipelago saw the concurrent development of Reformed Christian thinking amongst Dutch colonisers and reformist Islamic movements within Muslim elites.
There was a striking similarity between the questions that Rumphius and Ridjali asked, even if their answers would ultimately differ. Significantly, Rumphius’ approach to medicinal healing was determined by these religious and philosophical considerations and debates.
About the Speaker ...
Dániel Margócsy is Professor of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Cambridge.
A 2024 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, he has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the Descartes Centre, the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. Author of Commercial Visions (Chicago, 2014) and co-author of The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (Leiden, 2018), he is currently writing Transported: Maritime Logistics in the Dutch East India Company World and leads the Colonial Natures Research Framework.
