During its nearly 200 years of activity in the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch East-India Company (VOC) operated as a coordinating force in the collection and transmission of knowledge about all sorts of matters and practices that could help its operations going and its personnel fit for missions. As a long-distance trading company, the VOC’s efforts in building infrastructures of knowledge was primarily motivated by commercial considerations rather than by reasons of state, in contrast with, for example, the growth of state-supported institutions serving overseas colonial expansion from France or Spain.
After the Dutch state by 1800 had taken over the assets of the VOC, however, the context for the development of colonial knowledge infrastructures in Dutch-ruled parts of Indonesia changed as well. What were the consequences of this shift from a commercial to an imperial mode of control for the ways in which mathematics-related knowledge was gathered, preserved and disseminated ? This is the key question of this paper. Covering the period from the second half of eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, the paper looks at various fields of knowledge related to mathematics such astronomy, surveying, mapping, geology and military architecture and analyzes continuities and changes in the relations between colonizers and colonized as well as metropolitan and colonial producers of knowledge.

The colonial historiography of science often presents unidirectional narratives, portraying 'Western scientific' knowledge as progressively and entirely displacing indigenous ways of knowing. This paper challenges such linear interpretations by examining the case of the Indigo dye in India. Narratives surrounding Indigo have traditionally been dominated by discussions of colonial plantation systems, the rise of synthetic Indigo, and the decline of Indian Indigo. However, the continuity of pre-colonial Indigo traditions in various parts of India challenges the dominant narrative that portrays colonies as passive receivers and consumers of colonial modernity.
Using case studies of Indigo cultivation and dyeing in South India (Madras Province), this paper illustrates how their survival offers new perspectives for conceptualizing indigenous resilience within the colonial discourse of science. Contrary to portraying indigenous knowledge as passive, I argue that Indigo practices are dynamic socio-technological ensembles that emerged through historical contexts. In doing so, I explore how peasants and textile dyers actively participated in, preserved, adapted, and reimagined their knowledge of Indigo. Synthesizing historical, conceptual, and archival sources, this paper demonstrates how indigenous Indigo practices resisted and actively re-shaped the development of scientific and colonial economic knowledge. It concludes by articulating the need for a situated, nuanced epistemological narrative that foregrounds indigenous agency and resistance.