Dick Kooiman

Dick Kooiman studied History and non-Western Sociology at the Amsterdam Free University. As a staff member of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at this university, he teaches Third World History with an emphasis on the South Asian region. He also supervises a number of Ph.D. students at the Free University (VU) in preparing their Ph.D. theses.

His first major study was on patron-client networks in the emerging Bombay labour movement (1919-1937), and it became the topic of his doctoral dissertation (Leiden 1978). His later research, which took him to libraries and archives in the UK and India, was on Kerala, Christian missions and plantations. At the moment he is engaged in a comparative analysis of communalism in some Indian Princely States (Communalism and Indian Princely States: Travancore, Baroda and Hyderabad in the 1930s, New Delhi: Manohar 2002) and in questions of ceremonial in princely India (Invention of Tradition in Travancore: a Maharaja's quest for political security, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15 (2) 2005).