Sophie Rose investigates how mental illness was understood in the Dutch East Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
By most accounts, the history of psychiatry begins around 1800, with medically-staffed mental asylums opening their doors across Western Europe. Long before this point, however, people experienced all kinds of mental anguish and irregular behaviors or modes of cognition were the subject of discussion and concern. This was no different in the Dutch East Indies, where the Malay term ‘amok’, for example, was used to describe a sudden, inexplicable outbreak of violence.
Anna Sophie Rose studies the understanding and treatment of mental illness in the Dutch East Indies between 1600 and 1800, before the advent of modern psychiatry. Using archives from the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Rose seeks to examine how ideas and practices concerning ‘madness’ took shape within the harsh realities of a colonial world. How did colonial authorities and local communities respond to individuals whose mental states deviated from the norm? And how was that norm defined? By addressing these questions, Rose offers new insights into the cultural and political dimensions of mental health within the complex history of colonialism.
Sophie Rose (born 1992) earned a master’s degree in Cultural History from Utrecht University in 2015 and another master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2016. In 2023, she obtained her PhD with distinction at Leiden University. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Tübingen. Her first book, based on her dissertation, will be published by Brill in 2025 under the title Regulating relations: Intimacy and social (dis)order in the early modern Dutch empire.
