Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Editors -- Notes on the Contributors -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction (Siegfried Huigen) -- THE AMERICAS -- Elias Herckmans. A poet at the borders of Dutch Brazil (Britt Dams) -- Officers of the West India Company, their networks, and their personal memories of Dutch Brazil (Michiel van Groesen) -- The butterfly effect. Embodied cognition and perceptual knowledge in Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Julie Berger Hochstrasser) -- Picturing New Netherland and New York. Dutch-Anglo transfer of new world information (Frans R.E. Blom) -- ASIA -- Piracy and play: Two Catholic appropriations of Nieuhof 's gezantschap (Paul Arblaster) -- Knowledge transfer and cultural appropriation: Georg Everhard Rumphius's 'D'amboinsche rariteitkamer' (1705) (Maria-Theresia Leuker) -- Antiquarian Ambonese: François Valentyn's comparative ethnography (1724) (Siegfried Huigen) -- Engelbert Kaempfer, Imamura Gen'emon and Arai Hakuseki. An early exchange of knowledge between Japan and the Netherlands (Henk de Groot) -- Witsen's Studies of Inner Eurasia (Bruno Naarden) -- SOUTH AFRICA -- (Ex)changing knowledge and nature at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652-1700 (Alette Fleischer) -- A badly harvested field: The growth of linguistic knowledge and the Dutch Cape colony until 1796 (Hans den Besten) -- EUROPE -- Writing history in the age of discovery, according to La Popelinière, 16th-17th centuries (Adrien Delmas) -- The model of the VOC in early seventeenth-century France (Hugo Grotius and Pierre Bergeron) (Grégoire Holtz) -- 'Aus den fürnembsten indianischen Reisebeschreibungen zusammengezogen'. Knowledge about India in Early Modern Germany (Antje Flüchter) -- The VOC and Swedish natural history: The transmission of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century (Christina Skott).

Unknown unknowns. Ignorance of the Indies among late seventeenth-century Scots (Elspeth Jajdelska) -- Colonial objects and the display of power. The curious case of the cabinet of William V and the Dutch India Companies (Edwin van Meerkerk) -- Index Nominum.