A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire

This book analyses popular imperial culture in the Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the prominent role that the Dutch empire played in many (sometimes unexpected) aspects of civil society, and its significance in mobilising citizens to participate in causes both directly and indirectly related to the overseas colonies, most people seem to have remained indifferent towards imperial affairs. How, then, barring a few jingoist outbursts during the Aceh and Boer Wars, could the empire be simultaneously present and absent in metropolitan life? Drawing upon the works of scholars from fields as diverse as postcolonial studies and Habsburg imperialism, A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire argues that indifference was not an anomaly in the face of an all-permeating imperial culture, but rather the logical consequence of an imperial ideology that treated ‘the metropole’ and ‘the colony’ as entirely separate entities. The various groups and individuals who advocated for imperial or anti-imperial causes – such as missionaries, former colonials, Indonesian students, and boy scouts – had little unmediated contact with one another, and maintained their own distinctive modes of expression. They were all, however, part of what this book terms a ‘fragmented empire’, connected by a Dutch imperial ideology that was common to all of them, and whose central tenet – namely, that the colonies had no bearing on the mother country – they never questioned. What we should not do, the author concludes, is assume that the metropolitan invisibility of colonial culture rendered it powerless.

Locations of Theological Anthropology in Indonesia

Colonization takes over many dimensions of life, e.g., theology, economy, history, and the idea of humanity itself (anthropology). In Indonesia, colonization by the Dutch Empire has been determining the life of the Indonesian people since the eighteenth century. The twin gazes, namely of the European orientalists and of the colonized natives, have colluded to maintain certain ruptures in the mentality of the common Indonesian person, including how they treat other human beings. Such a malforming situation is obscured from historical analysis, given what history’s very construction owes to colonial influence. To retrace a more affirming and dignified history, I look elsewhere than the formal record and, by doing so, propose that such a decolonial task lies in availing contemporaneous literary works. In this essay, I present an analysis of the colonial-era novel Max Havelaar, wherein I parse the hidden historical archive offered both in and by the text. Through this analysis, I consider how such an alternative archive affects one’s theological imaginary and promotes the (re)construction of a theological anthropology that escapes the confinement of the white Western orientalist gaze.

In Search of Marble Monuments

The Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar (1922–49) appears to have known it all along: his poems, evoking loneliness and failed communication, written in a self-proclaimed new language, were to remain incomplete and unfinished. Incomplete because they were to be read again and again long after the Indonesian National Revolution had achieved its primary aim, political independence of the Republic of Indonesia, heir of the Dutch Empire; unfinished because they were to be published again and again, every printing and every reading creating other poems. The marble monuments of Indonesian culture of which Chairil was dreaming—polished and stable—never materialized. Perhaps only his last poem, in which a formally balanced description of the sociocultural life of the novel Republic was substituted for the evocations of loneliness and failure, seems to confirm his dream: it has rarely been published and became only a reluctant topic of Indonesian conversations in the new century, while the shadows of the Dutch empire and the revolution are fading, and the search for monuments remains incomplete.

From Impropriety to Betrayal: Policing Non-Marital Sex in the Early Modern Dutch Empire

The policing of illicit sex formed a key mode of social control in early modern Europe, where reproduction in legally sanctioned marriage was the primary means through which property and status was passed. When Europeans formed overseas colonial settlements sustained by slave labor and populated by people of a broad variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, this concern with sexually transgressive behavior took on new dimensions. This article takes the case of Dutch trade-company-led colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to examine how colonial visions of social order in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean shaped authorities’ responses to different types of non-marital sex. To facilitate comparison, these acts are read through narratives of criminalization, comprised of both conceptualizations of crime and prosecution practices. Through an analysis of legislation issued across the Dutch empire, most notably bylaws, combined with a selection of case studies from the juridical practice, we show that a concern with keeping different ethnic, religious, and status groups separate and maintaining European dominance shaped the policing of sexuality in such a way that the distinction between relatively benign sexual “improprieties” and a more serious criminal narrative of sexual “betrayal” was re-arranged along gendered and racialized lines. Conceptualizations and prosecutions alike show a considerably more stringent treatment of sex between non-Christian or non-white men and women of European status than between European men and enslaved or free local women, even when the latter scenario was coercive or violent.