Radio as a Tool of Empire. Intercontinental Broadcasting from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer

In the interwar years, the colonial powers of the day instantly saw long-range radio technology as an instrument to strengthen their empires as it enabled broadcasters in the European metropoles to reach audiences in the peripheries via the ether. This article focuses on the Dutch colonial station PHOHI, a company that pioneered global radio broadcasting. The station was founded by a group of influential entrepreneurs in order to strengthen ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies by reaching out to colonial expatriates. This case study shows how geopolitical and ideological considerations shaped both the organisation and the content of Dutch intercontinental broadcasting.

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-580
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma ◽  
Thomas Kolnberger

Among the roughly 150,000 soldiers sent to the Dutch East Indies between 1815 and 1914, the Luxembourg contingent made up a tiny minority of just 1,075 men. Based upon extensive research into their careers, data on these soldiers provide further clues to understanding what drove Europe’s young men to become colonial soldiers. The results of this national case study will be compared with earlier investigations by Bossenbroek and Bosma on recruits for the Dutch colonial army. Similar to the Dutch soldiers, their Luxembourg counterparts had a predominantly urban provenance. However, in contrast to the Dutch, they did not have a strong military background, and it appears that fewer Luxembourgers stayed behind in the Dutch East Indies after their tour of duty. They were more attracted by the payments that the recruiters doled out in advance, particularly at a time of economic crisis, than in a career in the tropics.


Itinerario ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela McVay

It is common wisdom among the historians of the Dutch East Indies that everyone in the Dutch East India Company engaged in private trade. That is, ‘everyone’ traded in goods supposedly monopolized by the Company and ‘everyone’ abused his or her position to squeeze graft from the Company's trade. It was, supposedly, to get their hands on the private trade and graft that people joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the first place. But back in the Netherlands the VOC's Board of Directors (the Heeren XVII) objected vociferously to private trade, which drained Company profits and shareholder revenue. To appease the Heeren XVII back at home, the various Governors-General and Councillors of the Indies (Raad van Indië), who represented the Heeren XVII in Asia, issued annual placards forbidding private trade while the High Court (Raad van Justitie) carried out infrequent desultory trials for private trade. But these prosecutions were inevitably doomed to failure, so the story goes, because everyone engaged in private trade would ‘cover’ for everyone else.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91
Author(s):  
Laurie J. Sears

Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of people experienced in the imperial Dutch Indies island worlds. The storyteller explored in this article is Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), a mixed-race Dutch woman (Indo) who was born and raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her time did. The novella Toetie, one of Dermoût’s last works, uncovers Indies and Dutch attitudes toward race and color, moving her work from the genre of Indies Letters, or Dutch colonial literature, to that of postcolonial critique, with an exploration of forms of servitude, affect, and the social relations of her time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-422
Author(s):  
Judith Bosnak ◽  
Rick Honings

Abstract ‘Save our poor people from the vulcano poets’. The literary reception of the Krakatoa disaster of 1883 in the Netherlands and Indonesi On August 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatau in the Dutch East Indies erupted and collapsed, causing the deaths of tens of thousands, mainly as a result of devastating tsunamis. The Krakatau eruption was one of the first disasters to take place beyond the Dutch boundaries that received so much attention in the Netherlands. Because the Indies were a Dutch colony, a response of the motherland was rather logical. In many places, charity activities were organized to raise money for the victims. This article focuses on the Dutch and Indonesian literary reactions on the Krakatau disaster. For this purpose, two scholars work together: one specialized in Dutch Literary Studies and the other one in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. In the first part of the article several Dutch charity publications are analysed; the second part focuses on Indonesian sources (in Javanese and Malay). How and to what extend did the reactions in the Netherlands and Indonesia differ?


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.


Tempo ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (231) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl Tomson

Gerard Schurmann was born of Dutch parents in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, but spent more than 40 years, including the most formative period of his musical life, in England before moving to the US in 1981. Even during his years in the Netherlands as orchestral conductor with the Dutch Radio in his early twenties, he maintained an apartment in London, sometimes commuting to his place of work in Hilversum. His experience was similar to Bernard van Dieren, another Dutch-born composer who lived in England, although not for as many years as Schurmann: Holland has made no particular move to claim either as a Dutch composer. It was in England that Schurmann developed his skills and persona as a musician, after arriving as a teenager in 1941.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-147
Author(s):  
Muhammad Fakhriansyah ◽  
Intan Ranti Permatasari Patoni

This article examines the dynamics of the indigenous people of the Dutch East Indies' access to education during the Dutch Etichal Policy period. Considering that, the Netherlands was the longest-running country exploiting the Indies, the country was obliged to bear the burden of reciprocation on their colony. The burden of reciprocity was realised through an Ethical Policy that has three programs. They are irrigation, transmigration, and education. Of the three, Education was the program that had major impacts on the Indonesian national movement. This research used historical method. The result of this research showed us that although education had succeeded in undermining the Dutch colonial domination, the education during the Dutch Etichal Policy period was not fully given as a whole by the colonial government. Instead, it was very limited. The Dutch colonial policies, especially the one concerning education were driven by their interest of economic benefits for themselves over the improvement of the indigenous people of the Dutch East Indies' welfare.   Artikel ini membahas mengenai dinamika akses pendidikan bagi pribumi saat berlangsungya Politik Etis. Seperti yang diketahui, Belanda sebagai negara yang terlama mengeksploitasi Hindia Belanda membuat negara tersebut menanggung beban balas budi terhadap koloninya. Beban balas budi tersebut terwujud melalui program Politik Etis yang memiliki tiga program, yakni irigasi, transmigrasi, dan edukasi. Dari ketiga itu, pendidikan merupakan salah satu program Politik Etis dan salah satu program yang memiliki dampak besar bagi pergerakan nasional. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode historis dengan analisis studi kepustakaan. Hasil penelitian menunjukan meskipun pendidikan berhasil meruntuhkan dominasi kolonial, pendidikan saat periode Etis pun tidak serta merta langsung diberikan begitu saja oleh pemerintah kolonial meskipun tujuan Politik Etis adalah balas budi, pemberian pendidikan diberikan secara serba terbatas. Kebijakan-kebijakan pemerintah kolonial, khususnya di bidang pendidikan didorong oleh kepentingan keuntungan ekonomi bagi mereka sendiri alih-alih oleh motif untuk meningkatkan kesejahteraan rakyat setempat.  


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