The Dutch come a cropper

A new monograph from Silkworm Books throws light on a fascinating story of conflict between Cambodia and the Dutch East India Company in the 1630s, part of the little known period between the fall of Angkor in the mid-fifteenth century and the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century. In Murder and Mayhem in Seventeenth-Century Cambodia: Anthony van Diemen vs. King Ramadhipati I, the author Alfons van der Kraan has based his story on unpublished Dutch archival sources, and examines the relationship between Cambodian king Ramadhipati I and the Dutch Governor-General at Jakarta, Anthony van Diemen, which eventually led to the slaughter of an expeditionary force at Oudong and the massacre of the Dutch trading post in 1644. Van Diemen died a year later and relations were patched up for the sake of trade but not before the Dutch abandoned all ideas of making Cambodia a Dutch colony.