Cornelia van Nijenroode (1629 1692) was a Dutch merchant in the Dutch East Indies, famous for her conflict with her second husband.

Life

Van Nijenroode was born in

Hirado is a city located in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The part historically named Hirado is located on Hirado Island. With recent mergers, the city's boundaries have expanded, and Hirado now occupies parts of the main island of Kyushu. The component ...

, Japan, to Cornelis van Nijenroode (d. 1633), the manager of the Dutch trade station at Hirado, and his Japanese

concubine Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between a man and a woman in which the couple does not want, or cannot enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar but mutually exclusive. Concubi ...

Surishia. She was married in 1652 in

Batavia Batavia may refer to: Historical places * Batavia (region), a land inhabited by the Batavian people during the Roman Empire, today part of the Netherlands * Batavia, Dutch East Indies, present-day Jakarta, the former capital of the Dutch East In ...

Pieter Cnoll Pieter Cnoll, also known as Pieter Knoll (d. 1672), was a Dutch merchant who was employed by the United East India Company (VOC). Cnoll, who was born in Amsterdam, joined the VOC's accounting department at some point before 1647 and was sent to t ...

(d. 1672), manager of trade in Batavia, and in 1676 in Batavia to Johan Bitter (1638–1714), councilor of the legal court of Batavia. She was taken to Batavia with her sister Hester after the death of their father, despite the fact that their mother was still alive, to receive a Christian education. At the death of her first husband, she had become a successful and wealthy merchant. Through her unhappy second marriage, she lost the right to manage her own property and business to her spouse, who wished to control her finances, which caused a severe conflict. Johan Bitter returned to the Netherlands in 1680, but returned as a councilor of the legal court in 1683, and their conflict over the control of her fortune caused such a public scandal that they were both exiled from the colony by the

governor A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of political ...

Johannes Camphuys Johannes Camphuys (registered as Kamphuis in the ''Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie'') (18 July 1634 – 18 July 1695) was the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies from 1684 to 1691. Camphuys was born in Haarlem, in the Republic of the United ...

in 1688.Hugo s'Jacob, Nijenroode, Cornelia van, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/data/Nijenroode 3/01/2014/ref> In the Netherlands, the court rules that she must hand over her property to her husband, but, as her fortune was not accounted for, the matter was still unresolved at her death. Van Nijenroode died around 1692.

Legacy

She has been referred to as a typical example of the independent Eurasian women of the Dutch colonial empire. She is the subject of

Leonard Blussé Leonard Blussé (born 23 July 1946 in Rotterdam) is a Dutch historian concerned with the field of Asian-European relations. Blussé has a prolific written output in his field, having authored, co-authored or edited more than twenty books since 20 ...

's ''Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century''.

References

Nijenroode, Cornelia van (1629-1692?) - Historici.nl
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nijenroode, Cornelia Van 1629 births 1692 deaths 17th-century Dutch businesspeople 17th-century Dutch East Indies people 17th-century Dutch women Dutch people of Japanese descent Dutch slave owners Indo people People from Nagasaki Prefecture Japanese emigrants to the Netherlands