Romain Bertrand (CERI-Sciences Po, Paris) Book presentation Conference « Missed Encounters. How to Write a Non-Eurocentric History of Early Modern “Situations of Contact” between Europe and Asia (16th-17th c.) » Thursday 9th October 2012 6:00 PM at IFEA The conference will be in English L’Histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe-XVIIe siècle), Paris, Seuil, 2011. Partly dating back to the heydays of Dutch colonial history, the officially endorsed narrative of the first Dutch-Javanese contacts celebrates a “face-to-face” encounter between monolithic, large-scale entities. Starting in Banten (North Java) in June 1596 with the arrival of Cornelis de Houtman’s First Navigation fleet, a “modern”, dynamic, and inherently expansive “(Northern) Europe” would have met with an over- ritualized, inward-looking, and “immobile”