Maritime journeys of European opera in the Indonesian archipelago, 1835–1869

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akiko Sugiyama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Private Firms ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Structural Shift ◽  
East Indies ◽  
French Opera ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Coastal Shipping ◽  
Dutch East Indies

Professional performers of European opera began to arrive in Batavia in the 1830s. More performers set foot in Batavia in the next three decades and presented the often-matching selections of Italian and French opera. By the end of the 1860s the touring circuit of the itinerant performers encompassed leading port cities and towns, including Semarang, Surabaya and Padang. This article argues the coming of professional European opera to the Indonesian archipelago and greater maritime Asia was connected to the nineteenth-century operatic expansion in which the middling and intrepid singers transmitted current works of European opera to frontier regions. The journeys of the operatic pioneers to and from the Indonesian archipelago also mirrored an ongoing structural shift in coastal shipping from a business dominated by British merchant fleets to one serviced by the private firms under the contract of the Dutch East Indies government.

The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Race Mixing

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.

Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Pols
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Dutch Population ◽  
Dutch Society ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Future Population

Eugenics has never held broad appeal in the Netherlands and is taken up far more enthusiastically in the Dutch East Indies. This article aims to investigate the characteristics of the racial and ethnic groups that inhabited the Indonesian archipelago, acclimatization, the consequences of crossbreeding, and the effects of rapid modernization. It discusses percieved threats to the quality of the Dutch population. It concerns the participation of eugenicists in public health discussions that focuses on the quality of the future population of the Netherlands. Tensions between racial and ethnic groups provide the main context for a growing interest in eugenics in the Dutch East Indies. This article discusses the main reason for the lack of success of the rather moderate eugenics movement in the Netherlands as related to the pillarization of Dutch society.

The Opium Question in the Federated Shan States, 1931–36: British Policy Discussions and Scandal

1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Maule
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Opium Poppy ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
East Indies ◽  
West Central ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Opium Use

The earliest known evidence for the existence of the opium poppy has been traced to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages in west central Europe. Arab traders introduced opium into Asia, and in the eighth century A.D., it had been used in China. By the nineteenth century, China provided the most lucrative market for traders, primarily British and American, who brought opium to China from India and the Ottoman Empire. Opium use also proved to be popular among the overseas Chinese communities in Siam, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The Chinese demand for opium, the lucrative profits to be gained from the manufacture, transfer, and sale of opium, and official connivance at edicts to prohibit its import into China, served to create a flourishing trade.

scholarly journals Inter-islands Dynamic Economy: Colonial Policy on the Indonesian Ports Development for International and Domestic Shipping During Colonial Times

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Haryono Rinardi ◽  
Yety Rochwulaningsih
Keyword(s):  
Growing Up ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Dynamic Economy ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Trading Networks

As a capital-intensive transport technology linked to industrialized economies, ports become more essential economic infrastructure for developing periphery. Using the historical method, this article examines the relations between ports construction and the development of the voyages of the Indonesian archipelago, which was before called the Dutch East Indies. Based on the results, the port's construction caused by several factors. First, the colonial government wanted to reduce Singapore's role as an entre-port for the Dutch East Indies shipping activities, so that several ports been developed in the outer islands of Java. Second, ports development in outer islands became one of the Dutch economic expansions. Third, to relinquish reliance on foreign shipping companies, the colonial government then developed KPM and gave a monopoly right of shipping across the islands. Fourth, the utilization of modern ship engines in shipping led the growing up international voyages and had prompted the government to develop ports. Another interesting finding from this article is the relation between shipping and trade, the port constructions in various parts of the Dutch East Indies has encouraged trading networks developed in the area.

scholarly journals The Art of Printing in the Dutch East Indies

Quaerendo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-164
Author(s):  
Lisa Kuitert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
East Indies ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch East Indies

Abstract In the Netherlands, and elsewhere, too, Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem, and not Gutenberg, was long thought to have been the inventor of the art of printing. The myth—for that is what it was—was only definitively repudiated at the end of the nineteenth century, though some continued to believe in Coster until their dying breath. The Coster myth was deployed to give the history of the Netherlands status and international prestige. This article concerns the extent to which Coster’s supposed invention was known in the Dutch East Indies—today’s Indonesia, a Dutch colony at that time—and what its significance was there. After all, heroes, national symbols and traditions, whether invented or not, are the building blocks of cultural nationalism. Is this also true for Laurens Janszoon Coster in his colonial context?

Interpreting practices in a colonial context

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-391
Author(s):  
Audrey Heijns
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Cultural Mediators ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
The Government

Abstract This article investigates the experience of Dutch interpreters of Chinese in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) from the mid-nineteenth century until Indonesia’s independence nearly a century later. In the colonial context, the task of interpreters went beyond orally translating speech. They also served as cultural mediators, who prevented conflicts and resolved misunderstandings. Based on theories of interpreting in colonial contexts, the cases in this study will probe the interpreters’ training, their allegiances, and their search for neutrality. The findings reveal that, in the period from 1860 to 1912, the interpreters tried to mediate for the government by resolving problems and misunderstandings, despite their limited authority. However, in the period from 1913 to 1949, the interpreters had less room to maneuver, as a result of changes in training as well as in the work environment of the Dutch East Indies.

The ‘talking machine’ comes to the Dutch East Indies: The arrival of Western media technology in Southeast Asia

2008 ◽  
Vol 162 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Suryadi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Dutch East Indies

The invention of sound recording technology in the nineteenth century was a modern miracle. Making possible the storage and preservation of sounds across time and distance, which previously could only be dreamed of, this invention contributed significantly to the developing entertainment world. Thomas Alva Edison first realized this dream in 1877 when he invented the tin-foil phonograph, which then inspired other scientists to perfect and develop his invention. During the last two decades of the 1800s sound recording machines were exhibited outside the United States of America, first in Europe and then in Australia and Asia. In Europe the machine was first demonstrated at the Academy of Science in Paris on 11 March 1878, where a French professor named Bonjour accused Edison of cheating. He stated that Edison was a ventriloquist.

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