Netherlands Indies

The opening chapter of Conchophilia. Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021). Addresses the labor that enabled the collection of exotic shells in the Netherlands and Europe more generally, and focuses on the work of Georg Eberhard Rumphius.

Chinezen in Indonesië worden vandaag de dag bekeken als een niet-inheemse minderheid. Dit artikel, geschreven als scriptie voor de Bachelor Geschiedenis, gaat over de ontwikkeling van Chinese identiteit in Indonesië vanuit emancipatie. Dat wil zeggen, hun integratie in de Indonesische en Nederlands-Indische maatschappij. Er wordt gekeken naar de keuzes die zij maakten zoals de manier waarop zij zich kleedden, woonden, spraken en uiteindelijk welke nationaliteit zij aannamen.

This article examines the representation of tea drinking in photographs, and the commemoration
of this passtime in European and Javanese family photograph albums, in the Netherlands Indies
(colonial Indonesia) during the early twentieth century. As ego documents (autobiographical
sources), family photographs of tea-time reveal how the expression of social categories like race,
class and gender were choreographed in the home by colonial family members for their own
viewing. As sources for social history, such photographs reflect not just on markers of social
differentiation, but also on familial cohesion and, importantly, on an emerging class solidarity
between Javanese and Europeans that transcended racial distinctions. Worldliness, domesticity
and a peculiar mode of civility that would in the European context have been considered middle
class, but in the Indies was considered elite, were the normative cultural standards by which the
photogenicity of the colonial family were measured in photographs of tea drinking. Tea cups and
cameras were wielded by amateur family photographers to reproduce both the hierarchy and
unity that simultaneously divided and connected sectors of elite colonial society in the early
twentieth century.

Kota Bandung kini merupakan salah satu kota terbesar dan terpadat di Indonesia. Bisingnya kendaraan yang lalu-lalang, cahaya lampu yang terang-benderang hingga bangunan-bangunan yang tinggi menjulang seakan menjadi representasi Bandung yang modern. Namun siapa sangka Kota Bandung yang kini tampak begitu maju, dahulunya merupakan sebuah pemukiman tradisional di pedalaman hutan belantara Jawa. Hingga dikenal dengan sebutan “...een kleine berg dessa (desa pegunungan nan mungil) yang jarang dikunjungi orang luar” (Kunto, 1996, hlm. 3). Barulah pada awal abad ke-19, pemerintahan Hindia-Belanda dibawah kepemimpinan Herman William Daendels mulai membangun jalan raya pos atau The Groote Postweg dan sekaligus pula merencanakan pembangunan Kota Bandung yang betul-betul baru.
Letak geografis Kota Bandung kemudian dipandang strategis oleh pemerintah kolonial untuk dijadikan ibu kota Hindia-Belanda menggantikan Batavia. Pandangan tersebut betul-betul dijadikan rencana yang membuat pembangunan Kota Bandung terus berkembang terutama memasuki awal abad ke-20. Fasilitas-fasilitas penting penunjang juga mulai dibangun seperti gedung pemerintahan, sekolah-sekolah formal ala barat, jalan-jalan hingga lapangan terbang. Selain direncanakan menjadi ibu kota Hindia-Belanda, Kota Bandung pun direncanakan akan menjadi pusat kemiliteran. Namun rencana-rencana tersebut pupus setelah Belanda tak dapat menahan kekuatan militer Jepang yang merangsek masuk mengambil alih pemerintahan Hindia-Belanda. Tulisan ini berfokus mengkaji perkembangan Kota Bandung pada masa pemerintahan Hindia-Belanda. Terutama terkait dengan dinamika rencana pemerintah kolonial menjadikan Bandung sebagai ibu kota dan pusat kemiliteran Hindia-Belanda.

The violence against Chinese during the revolution is only one of the many examples of large-scale violence during the Indonesian revolution. If mentioned, it is in passing, and it has received little thorough analysis. The circumstances of the violence is often shrouded in legend and neglect. We could rightfully ask, why it is that Chinese have been the target of so much violence during the revolution? We cannot see this issue in isolation from other bouts of violence against Indonesian Chinese throughout the history of Indonesia of the last centuries. But here we face a problem: if anti-Chinese violence was a fixed part of the repertoire of violence in Indonesia, how should we interpret the violence committed against Chinese during the revolution? Were the clashes, reported from many places in the archipelago, a simple reflex of 'violent' Indonesians, occurring any moment the authority structure collapsed? Or were they politically inspired and were the Chinese the target of national ethnic cleansing?

Sejak dekade 1970an, kajian tentang nasionalisme Indonesia telah berforkus pada persoalan pemikiran, peran para pemimpin, organisasi dan ideologi politik kaum nasionalis Indonesia. Tulisan ini mencoba melihat dengan cara baru tentang politik nasionalisme Indonesia dengan memasukkan aspek spasial, khususnya di lingkungan kota kolonial Surabaya, ketika kota muncul bukan saja sekedar pusat pertumbuhan dan ekonomi baru, tetapi juga menjadi sumber kelahiran gerakan politik baru di koloni Hindia-Belanda. Secara khusus, tulisan ini membahas bagaimana kesadaran diri kaum nasionalis Indonesia di lingkungan perkotaan, dan bagaimana bentuk kesadaran tersebut tampil dalam beragam aksi kolektif tentang bagaimana seharusnya kota berkembang dan bagaimana perkembangan itu diarahkan.

An important colonial journal, De Indische Gids was published from 1879-1941. I wanted to complement my own small paper collection with digital editions which were at the time difficult to find. On updating my list in 2022, I found that it can be hard to find, but there are multiple sources for the journal.

Each site has different features, and so it is worth looking around! I hope this list is helpful, at least as a reminder that the journal exists.

My Master Thesis about colonial collecting between 1823-1873. This paper examines the origin of the Javanese bronze and stone antiquities currently on display in the Museum of Ethnography in Leiden. This paper will investigate the emergence of government institutions and colonial policies that developed colonial collecting in the Netherlands and on Java. It will ask why and how antiquities were collected and brought to the Netherlands and how they were displayed, catalogued and thought about by Dutch civil servants.

This was the Powerpoint on 'British Naval Power and the Political Situation of Indonesia: Hindia Belanda dan Kota Nusantara di Pusaran Sejarah Global, 1795-1942' which I presented at the 2nd Annual Forum of the Journal of Maritime Studies and National Integration at UNDIP on 28 October 2020. The article which accompanies this PowerPoint will be published in JMSNI in December 2020. The paper looks at the role played by the Royal Navy in guaranteeing the security of the Netherlands Indies from 31 January-8 February 1795, when the Dutch Stadhouder (Head of State), Willem V (r. 1751-1806), issued  the so-called 'Kew Letters' from his place of exile in London instructing the heads of all Dutch trading posts east of the Cape of Good Hope to hand their possessions over to the British to prevent them falling into French hands, up to 27 February 1942 when the remaining British naval presence following the fall of Singapore (15 February 1942) was destroyed,  along with the American, Australian and Dutch naval assets in Indonesia at the Battle of the Java Sea by a Japanese fleet under the command of Admiral Takeo Takagi who had been tasked with protecting General Imamura's 16th Army conquest of Java .

Brown Lives Matter: Living in the Shadow of Apartheid in post-colonial Indonesia [Belajar Menghargai Kulit Sawo Matang-Indonesia pasca merdeka dan bayang-bayangan Apartheid] - This is the Indonesian translation of the Afterword I wrote to Farish A. Noor's soon to be published collection, 'The Long Shadow of the Nineteenth Century: Critical Essays on Colonial Orientalism in Southeast Asia' (Kuala Lumpur: Matahari, 2020). Given everything that is happening in the world right now, it might be useful for contemporary Indonesians and others to reflect on their own 'long shadow of the nineteenth century' in terms of the Apartheid regime instituted by the Dutch colonial state in the period 1816-1942 - in particular following the 1854 Regeerings Reglement (Government Regulation) when race was weaponised by the arbitrary division of the population into three major groups: (1) the Europeans; (2) the Foreign Asiatics (Vreemde Oosterlingen) (mainly Indonesian Chinese); and (3) the Natives (Inlanders). This tripartite division only began to be dismantled following the Japanese conquest of the former Netherlands Indies on 8 March 1942 and the declaration of independence (17 August 1945) three years later. But the legacy of this evil and divisive racial policy has yet to be completely eradicated because as Indonesia's first President, Sukarno (in office 1945-66), never tired of telling his compatriots political freedom from the former colonial power was only half the battle, the other and larger half was the need for a thorough decolonisation of the mind - as Frantz Fanon put it:  ‘Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove (not just) from our land but from our minds as well’ (The Wretched of the Earth [Les Damnés de la terre. 1961]. Richard Philcox trans. [New York: Grove Press. 1963], p.55).

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were pioneers in using visual anthropological techniques to study the aesthetics of bodily motion in Bali, Indonesia. What is less well known is that they also collected textiles, paintings, puppets, and carvings, most of which are collected at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This book and its accompanying exhibit explore the Mead-Bateson textiles as forms of power. Some textiles in the exhibit are valued for their magical powers derived from techniques of fabrication and contexts of use; other cloths are important for the stories that surround them as records of a period in Balinese history. An added layer of meaning is introduced as these fabrics are curated and exhibited in Western countries. This book reveals how the “power” of Balinese textiles depends upon the efficacies attributed to these objects as they journey from fabrication and ritual use in their native context to curation and display in the West.

When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.

Between 1820 and 1850, the Dutch government sent several scientists to the Netherlands Indies as part of the Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural History Committee). One of these was naturalist Eltio Alegondus Forsten (1811–1843), who was sent on a collecting mission to Celebes (Sulawesi). This paper explores the ways in which Forsten was in a relationship of mutual interdependence with four spheres of influence, two in the Netherlands (those of the Dutch government and the natural history museum in Leiden) and two in the Dutch East Indies (those of the governor‐general and the local population of Forsten's collecting grounds). These four entities served as focal points for Forsten's practice, and tried to use his mission for their own purposes. At the same time, Forsten negotiated their demands deftly and turned them to his own advantage in order to serve his own future career. Throughout, I draw parallels with the experiences of various other members of the Natural History Committee. I ultimately propose that this case study of Forsten provides a glimpse of a possible pattern for the relationship between government‐sponsored science and empire in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the 19th century.

The widely accepted view on the history of modern democracy is that it originated in the West and from there spread over the rest of the world. But is the narrative of a sudden Western-driven democratization telling the entire story? The example of Indonesia urges us to look beyond the seemingly clear characterizations of a West-driven modernization and awkward indigenous adoption. This article demonstrates the quintessentially heterogeneous genealogy of democracy. The development of democratic values and procedures is analyzed from several angles: the formal democratic structures that were established under colonial rule and at independence, the influences of local practices of participatory politics, and the political conceptualizations by political leaders.

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam has a rich history in collecting, exhibiting, and presenting wayang performances. This paper traces this history of collection, exhibition, and performance practice of wayang at the Colonial Institute, from 1950 known as Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from colonial times until the present. It demonstrates the entanglement of colonial and postcolonial power structures, collection, and exhibition legacies of the colonial past. The paper will show that from the moment wayang puppets entered the museum’s collection there has been continuous interaction between collecting and exhibition practices and performance practices. The emphasis on tangible elements of performance practice in collection and exhibition practices contributed to a dominant and static understanding of wayang.

During the first decades of the 20th century several scholars engaged in studies that would lay the foundations for legal pluralism. This article considers how the work of one of these founders, Cornelis van Vollenhoven, has influenced legal development in Indonesia. It outlines Van Vollenhoven’s arguments to defend the existence of non-state law and compares them with those of his contemporaries Eugen Ehrlich and Bronislaw Malinowski. All three authors developed their ideas to counter the hegemonic narrative of modern state law; Van Vollenhoven and Malinowski to denounce the subjection of ‘uncivilised peoples’ to this law, Ehrlich to reject legal formalism and the central role of jurists in producing it. The next part of the article discusses how after Independence Indonesia has pursued legal unification, with limited success and various results. The unification of land law has led to widespread dispossession of small peasants; in marriage law legal pluralism functions because local officials and courts mediate between state law and local normative systems; and in Aceh the officially recognised legal pluralism is deployed by local officials and the police to accommodate local ideas about justice. This seems to indicate that state recognition of legal pluralism still promotes social justice, just as Van Vollenhoven argued a century ago.

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam has a rich history in collecting, exhibiting, and presenting wayang performances. This paper traces this history of collection, exhibition, and performance practice of wayang at the Colonial Institute, from 1950 known as Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from colonial times until the present. It demonstrates the entanglement of colonial and postcolonial power structures, collection, and exhibition legacies of the colonial past. The paper will show that from the moment wayang puppets entered the museum’s collection there has been continuous interaction between
collecting and exhibition practices and performance practices. The emphasis on tangible elements of performance practice in collection and exhibition practices contributed to a dominant and static
understanding of wayang.

Review of Bob de Graaff and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, J.P. graaf van Limburg Stirum 1873-1948. Tegendraads landvoogd en diplomaat (Waanders Uitgevers; Zwolle 2007) 552 p., ill., € 34,95 ISBN 978 90 400 8450 8.

Published in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 122 (2009) 124-125.

We present a web-based tool for retrieving and annotating audio fragments of e.g. interviews. Our collection contains 250 interviews with veterans of Dutch conflicts and military missions. The audio files of the interviews were disclosed using ASR technology focussed at keyword retrieval. Resulting transcripts were stored in a MySQL database together with metadata, summary texts, and

This essay examines Dutch still lifes in the Netherlands’ oldest and most prestigious overseas
possession – the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) – during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Early modern scholars have cogently argued that Dutch flower pieces
from the seventeenth century typically reflected georgic discourses on human mastery over
nature. However, three centuries later flowers were largely absent from colonial still lifes:
painters and photographers were more inclined to depict tropical fruits, a preference which
reflects the development of modern colonial discourses of an abundant tropics, where nature
flourished even in the absence of cultivation. Such notions were commonly employed by
Europeans in Southeast Asia to justify the need for colonial intervention in the tropics while
minimising the role of Asian labour in enriching European economies.

Dekolonisatie vanuit Nederlands perspectief, op weg naar de onafhankelijkheid van Indonesië.

Natuurlijk is het zo dat het koloniale verleden van Nederland veel meer is en was dan alleen de gezamenlijke geschiedenis van het huidige Indonesië. We hoeven alleen maar te denken aan de voorlopers van de Verenigde Staten, verschillende Afrikaanse landen met o.a.  Zuid-Afrika en bijvoorbeeld de Caribische delen van ons Koninkrijk. Recenter nog de officiële onafhankelijkheid van Suriname. Maar ik durf wel te stellen dat de lange periode van kolonisatie en het pijnlijke proces voor beide partijen van dekolonisatie in Nederlands-Indië het meest aansprekende voorbeeld in onze koloniale geschiedenis is.

Setelah berakhirnya Perang Jawa pada 1930, pemerintah kolonial Belanda mengalami defisit anggaran sehingga negara induk harus mensubsidi negara koloni. Akhirnya oleh Van Den Bosch diusulkan sebuah sistem tanam yang menurut proyeksinya bisa menghasilkan keuntungan yang tinggi. Ide utamanya adalah sedikit mendorong kemampuan masyarakat Jawa untuk berusaha dalam bidang pertanian lebih keras. Orang Jawa dalam pandangan masyarakat Eropa memang terkenal malas dan tidak produktif. Sifat-sifat ini memang dipengaruhi oleh lingkungan geografis dan kebduayaan yang ada. Masyarakat Jawa dengan sistem ekonomi yang agraris, membentuk pola pikir yang berbeda dengan masyarakat pesisir misalnya. Masyarakat Jawa pada saat telah selesai melakukan penanaman padi mereka akan menunggu masa panen. Pada waktu masa menunggu masa panen ini lah banyak diantara para petani hanya berdiam diri, dan mengisi waktu luang mereka dengan tidak melakukan banyak aktifitas. Tetapi hasil produksi yang mereka hasilkan tetap besar dan mampu mencukupi kebutuhan hidup mereka selama setahun penuh. Atas dasar inilah orang pemerintah kolonial berasumsi bahwa dengan meningkatkan seperlima dari daya produksi masyarakat Jawa pada umumnya, dalam teori kebijakannya, sebagai ganti pajak yang mengharuskan masyarakat Jawa menanam tanaman pertanian atau perkebunan untuk kebutuhan ekspor, tidak akan memberatkan mereka. Namun pada pelaksanaannya Tanam Paksa tidak dijalankan sebagai mana rencana awal yang ditetapkan. Dikarenakan pemerintah kolonial menggunakan sistem kontro secara tidak langsung, yang menggunakan bantuan birokrasi pribumi, membuat Sistem Tanam Paksa yang dijalankan menjadi lebih rumit, dan rawan sekali penyelewengan. Seiring dijalankannya Sistem Tanam Paksa , ternyata terjadi berbagai permasalahan yang cukup rumit dan sulit. Tanah yang digunakan untuk menanam tanaman ekspor lebih banyak dibandingkan luas lahan yang digunakan untuk pertanian konsumsi. Hal ini membuat penghasilan petani menjadi berkurang drastis daripada sebelumnya. Ditambah masih banyaknya penyelewengan hasil Tanam Paksa kepada para bekel. Bekel yang menjadi perantara antara pemerintah kolonial dengan petani bisa dengan mudah memainkan kuota hasil produk yang harus diserahkan oleh petani kepada pemerintah kolonial. Petani juga harus mengorbankan waktu mereka lebih banyak, untuk bekerja dilahan sendiri dan dialihkan kepada lahan Tanam Paksa. Tentu saja hal tersebut mengganggu siklus tanam pertanian mereka sendiri. Karena para petani harus meninggalkan lahan mereka yang masih membutuhkan perawatan untuk mengolah lahan Tanam Paksa,. Tidak jarang para petani juga