The emergence of technological development and the question of native identity in the Netherlands East Indies

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 191-206

  Moon, Suzanne ^a  

^a Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; INDIGENOUS POPULATION; TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT;

ASIA; EURASIA; MALAY ARCHIPELAGO; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 33644604720     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463405000135     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. A phrase commonly used at the time was 'de ontwikkeling van de inlandsche bevolking' or 'the development of the native people.' The term 'development' used to refer to broad economic change on Java appeared as early as the 1860s in Dutch colonial literature. By the early twentieth century, colonial officials and journalists were also using the term in connection with indigenous society and indigenous agriculture. For more on the nineteenth-century change in the usage of the term 'development', see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 102-4.
2. Quoted by H. H. van Kol during his speech on the subject to the Tweede Kamer, 2 June 1904, as reprinted under the title, 'Kamerdebatten over de oprichting van een landbouwdepartement in Nederlandsch-Indië', Het Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlands Bestuur, 1904: 161.
3. Throughout this article I will capitalize the term 'Native' when I wish to draw attention to its use as a legal category in the Indies, which distinguished indigenous Malays from Chinese and Europeans.
4. Williams, Keywords, pp. 102-4.
5. Much later, the 'stages of growth' notion of economic and industrial change would become a central idea in modernization theory and in the international development of the post-World War Two era. See W. W. Rostow, The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
6. Michael Adas, Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology and ideologies of Western dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
7. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944).
8. For a broader general history of the Netherlands East Indies in the nineteenth century, see M.C. Ricklefs, A history of modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002).
9. Thomas Stamford Raffles reveals his territorial and imperial ambitions for the East Indies in letters collected in Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoirs of the life and public services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991); the quotation is from p. 75.
10. Furnivall, Netherlands India, pp. 72-3.
11. Ibid., pp. 76-7. This scepticism was no doubt helped along by the indifferent results of Raffles' policies, which to be fair, he had only about four years to put in place.
12. Ibid., pp. 92-3.
13. Ibid., p. 102.
14. Also see a recent biography: B. de Prins, Voor keizer en koning. Leonard du Bus de Gisignies, 1780-1849, Commissaris Generaal van Nederlands-Indië'(Amsterdam: Balans, 2002).
15. Furnivall, Netherlands India, pp. 109-10.
16. Cornelis Fasseur, Kultuurstelsel en koloniale baten: De Nederlandse exploitatie van Java, 1840-1860 (Leiden: Universitaire Pers, 1978)
17. Peter Boomgaard, Children of the colonial state: Population growth and economic development in Java, 1795-1880 (Amsterdam: Free University Press, Centre for Asian Studies, 1989).
18. Communication from Baud to P. Merkus, 10 Jan. 1842, no. 11, Archive of the Ministry of the Colonies, Nationaal Archief, The Hague; henceforth archival sources will be cited as 'AMC'.
19. Fasseur, Kultuurstelsel en koloniale baten, pp. 11-36.
20. J. S. van den Bosch, 'Hoe men met de Javaan moet omgaan', in Geld en geweten: Een bundel opstelling over en anderhalve eeuw Nederlands bestuur in de Indonesische archipel, ed. C. Fasseur (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 54.
21. Furnivall, Netherlands India, p. 140.
22. Luc Nagtegaal, Riding the Dutch tiger: The Dutch East Indies Company and the northeast coast of Java, 1680-1743 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996), pp. 36-50.
23. For more on this subject see Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
24. For an interesting view of life on a typical sugar holding in the late nineteenth century, see Roger Knight, Narratives of colonialism: Sugar, Java and the Dutch (Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2000).
25. While the translation of 'welvaart' should be 'prosperity', it has been rendered 'welfare' in translations and discussions of later works, most prominently the 12-volume Onderzoek naar de mindere welvaart der inlandsche bevolking op Java en Madoera (Batavia: Roygrok, 1904-14).
26. Fasseur, Kultuurstelsel en koloniale baten, pp. 52-3
27. Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or, The coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
28. Furnivall, Netherlands India, pp. 159-67.
29. Robert E. Elson, Javanese peasants and the sugar industry: Impact and change in an East Java residency, 1830-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 127-8.
30. W. R. van Hoëvell, 'De inlandsche hoofden en de bevolking op Java', reprinted in Fasseur, ed., Geld en geweten, pp. 173-83.
31. Ibid., pp. 177-8.
32. See for example, N. G. Pierson, Koloniale politiek (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1877). The focus on farmers to the exclusion of rural craftsmen like cartwrights, potters and other groups who might have benefited from the Cultivation System's increased demand for their goods, is typical for colonial critics at the time.
33. Furnivall cites W.J. van Welderen Rengers and J. Kuyper as Conservatives who took a humanitarian stance (Netherlands India, pp. 164-5, 175).
34. Ibid., pp. 178-80
35. see also Elson, Javanese peasants, pp. 127-8.
36. C. T. van Deventer, 'Een ereschuld', De Gids, 63 (1899): 205-57.
37. H. H. van Kol outlined a programme for the Social Democrats with regard to colonial policy in 'Ontwerp-program voor de Nederlandsche koloniale politiek', Nieuwe Tijd, 6 (1901): 197-220.
38. For his speeches in the Tweede Kamer, see H. H. van Kol, Nederlandsch-Indië in de Staten-Generaal van 1897 tot 1909: Een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der koloniale politiek in Nederland (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1911).
39. P. Brooshooft, 'The ethical course in colonial policy', in Indonesia: Selected documents on colonialism and nationalism, 1830-1942, ed. Chr. L. M. Penders (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977), p. 66. and nationalism, 1830-1942
40. Ibid., p. 71. and nationalism, 1830-1942
41. Ibid., p. 69. and nationalism, 1830-1942
42. Ibid., p. 70-2. and nationalism, 1830-1942
43. For more on paternalism and its use to justify colonial rule, see Adas, Machines as the measure of men, pp. 199-270.
44. Furnivall, Netherlands India, p. 233.
45. P. Creutzberg, Het economisch beleid in Nederlandsche-Indië, vol. 1 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1972), p. 173. The report that resulted was the 12-volume Onderzoek naar de mindere welvaart der inlandsche bevolking op Java en Madoera.
46. His remarks are paraphrased in De Indische Gids, 40, 2 (1918): 1383.
47. For the development of a technologically sophisticated irrigation service see J. A. A. van Doorn, The engineers and the colonial system: Technocratic tendencies in the Dutch East Indies (Rotterdam: Comparative Asian Studies Programme, 1982)
48. and Wim Ravesteijn, De zegenrijke heeren der wateren: Irrigatie en staat op Java, 1832-1942 (Delft: Delft University Press, 1997).
49. For the history of the Binnenlands Bestuur (the colonial civil service), typical training and activities, see H. W. van den Doel, De stille macht: Het Europese Binnenlands Bestuur op Java en Madoera, 1808-1942 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1994)
50. Cornelis Fasseur, De Indologen: Ambtenaren voor de oost (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1994).
51. See, for example, remarks by Pijnacker Hordijk in 'Kamerdebatten over de oprichting', p. 260.
52. Stephen J. Lansing, Priests and programmers: Technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
53. Margaret Leidelmeier, Van suikermolen tot grootbedrijf: Technische vernieuwing in de Java-suikerindustrie in de negentiende eeuw (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1997), pp. 113-47.
54. See, for example, the discussion of Native agriculture in the Onderzoek naar de mindere welvaart, vol. 5, pp. 12-4
55. Melchior Treub, Schematische nota over de oprichting van een agricultuur-departement in Nederlandsch-Indië (Buitenzorg: N.p., 1902)
56. Treub, 'Beredeneerd overzicht der verrichtingen en bemoeiingen met het oog op de praktijk van land-, tuin, en boschbouw, veeteelt, visscherij en aanverwante aangelegenheden', Landbouw: Januari 1906-October 1909 (1910): 27-8.
57. For similar projects elsewhere in the world, see, for example, Zaheer Baber, The science of empire: Scientific knowledge, civilization, and colonial rule in India (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 213-20
58. and Ronald Kline, Consumers in the country: Technology and social change in rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
59. A brief overview of tractorization projects in Soviet Russia is in James Scott, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
60. Treub, Schematische nota.
61. See the correspondence between Governor-General W. Rooseboom and the Minister of the Colonies Idenburg dated 23 May 1904, in Verbaal no. 46, 19 July 1904, AMC.
62. 'Kamerdebatten over de oprichting', p. 266.
63. Brooshooft, 'Ethical course', pp. 66-71.
64. See remarks by Fock in 'Kamerdebatten over de oprichting', pp. 279-80. In the correspondence with Idenburg cited in note 46, Rooseboom is preoccupied with the amount of return that the government will see from proposed development projects.
65. Creutzberg, Economisch beleid, p. 190.
66. 'Kamerdebatten over de oprichting'.
67. Treub, 'Beredeneerd overzicht der verrichtingen', p. 46.
68. Peter Boomgaard and J. L. van Zanden, Changing economy in Indonesia: A selection of statistical source material from the early 19th century up to 1940, vol. 10 (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1990), pp. 42-4.
69. James Ferguson has argued that present-day development organizations tend to pay less attention to data that does not meet their preconceived ideas of a 'lesser developed country', and emphasize even quite questionable data that does, in order to justify the technical interventions they are capable of making over more complicated social or political interventions that are outside their purview. It is possible that Treub and others who supported the scientific Department of Agriculture were emphasizing evidence that fitted their tools, and disregarding that which might make their methods seem inappropriate, although such a claim at this point is speculative. James Ferguson, The anti-politics machine: 'Development', depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
70. R. A. A. Achmad Djajadiningrat, 'Het lagere landbouwonderwijs voor inlanders op Java en Madoera', in Onderzoek naar de mindere welvaart der inlandsche bevolking op Java en Madoera, vol. 5b (Bijlagen) (Batavia: Van Dorp, 1908), pp. 1-5.
71. Correspondence on this issue (including Treub's defense) is found in Verbaal 12 May 1909, no. 8, Governor-General (van Heutz) to Minister of the Colonies (Fock), AMC.
72. Djajadiningrat, 'Lagere landbouwonderwijs', p. 3
73. R. A. A. Djajadiningrat, Herinneringen van Pangeran Aria Achmad Djajadiningrat (Batavia?: Kolff-Buning-Balai Poestaka, 1936).
74. One prominent critic was the Dutch political scientist and economist J. H. Boeke. In his dissertation, Tropische-koloniale staathuishoudkunde: Het probleem (Amsterdam: Debussy, 1910), he lays out objections to the general economic assumptions of the improvers.
75. Also see critiques of the Department of Agriculture's efforts by T. J. Lekkerkerker in Jaarboek van het landbouw, nijverheid, en handel, 1920 (Batavia: Kolf, 1920), pp. 93-5.
76. A. M. P. A. Scheltema, 'De ontleding van het inlandsche landbouw bedrijf', Mededeelingen van de Afdeeling Landbouw, vol. 6 (Buitenzorg: Department van Landbouw, 1929)
77. J. van Gelderen, Voorlezingen over het tropisch-koloniale landbouwhuishoudkunde (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1927)
78. and G. H. van der Kolff, Bevolkingsrietcultuur in Nederlandsch-Indië: Een landbouweconomische studie (Nijmegen: Thieme, 1925).
79. Algemeen Landbouw Weekblad, 12 Aug. 1921.
80. On tea, see T. J. Lekkerkerker, 'Twee inlandsche-theeplanters-associaties in de Preanger-Regentschappen', Bevordering van den inlandschen landbouw door den landbouwvoorlichtingsdienst (Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij, 1926).
81. On sugar, see the response of sugar planters in Verslag van het algemeen syndicaat van suikerfabrikanten in Ned.-Indië over het 31 e jaar, 1925 (Soerabaia: Nijland, 1926), pp. 29-41, and the exchange of secret memoranda condemning smallholder sugar production, dated May through November 1922 in Mailrapport 4066/1922, AMC. Involved in the exchange were the Assistant Resident and Resident of Surabaya, the Director of the Binnenlands Bestuur, and the Director of the Department of Agriculture, Industry, and Trade.