Dutch legacy in Indonesia

BossaNova

Banned
When I visited the Philippines I was rather amazed about the survival of "colonial" names (Spanish as well as American) here. Of course the very name of the country is a Spanish relic.

The last colonisers here, the Americans, have a pretty good reputation which partly explains the total absence of the Indonesian urge to obliterate topographical reminders of the past. Yet the Filipino - American war of around 1900, when the Filipino's saw their short-lived dream of independence shattered, was full of horrors. The number of Filipino "militants" killed is not known but estimates vary between 35,000 and over 200,000 (not including civilians) - and that was on a population of then four million. I remember that one American officer promised to turn Samar into a "howling wilderness".

Yet one hears very little about that war here and the American occupation has never attracted the bitter post colonial comments that has been the share of the Dutch. Of course, the US promised the Philippines independence at a fairly early stage and departed painlessly - quite unlike the Dutch.

But I think something else is coming into it. The Americans left the old Filipino elite in place and gave it, in fact, the chance to enrich itself by the division of church lands. Many of their descendants still rule the place.

The Dutch, by contrast, backed an elite (the old Indonesian aristocracy) that lost out in the struggle for independence. The new nationalist leaders were "new men". The Dutch education system had qualified them for academic positions in the colonial structure but since that structure was largely based on a "colour caste" system they could by and large not obtain positions commensurate with their academic qualifications.

The nationalist elite, Soekarno and Hatta first and foremost, largely consisted of these people who felt they owed nothing to the Dutch. Ad to that the bitter farewell and the fact that in the first decades of independence Indonesia was largely a mess (that had to be covered up by references to the supposedly even more horrible colonial era) and one has at least part of the explanation for the bad post colonial reputation of the Dutch.

I would like to refer you all to the publications by a man who knew both colonial styles intimately and from personal experience: J.S. Furnivall. Neither his Netherlands India nor his Colonial Policy and Practice give me the impression that he thought the Dutch colonial style inferior to that of the Brits, rather the reverse I would say. Here's one of his statements:

"Never, perhaps, has any Government set itself so wholeheartedly and with such zeal and comprehensive thoroughness to building up the welfare of its subjects as the Government of Netherlands India in the beginning of the present century. Most of the officials at that time had fallen under the spell of Multatuli during their studies at Leiden, and came to India as enthusiastic idealists, filled with ardour to take part in the great civilising mission of the Netherlands. On their arrival they found a welfare program as the official policy of Government; zeal for the well-being of the people was a condition of promotion…"

The former Governor-General of French Indochina, Gabriel Angoulvant, in his book Les Indes Neerlandaises had this so say:

"In many areas …the Dutch are masters of their trade; often one feels compelled, when one sees the results of they have achieved … to doff one’s hat. Whether it concerns irrigation, policies regarding land tenure, the scientific institutions serving the great plantations, banking, civil administration … one can only have praise for the Dutch administration, for its leading ideas as well as the implementation of these."

There's a certain injustice in the fact that in general popular imagination the Dutch colonial project in Asia is seen as unremittingly bad, while that same general popular imagination certainly allows for at very least a lingering image of pukka English sahibs with stiff upper lips “doing the right thing”, bearing their white men’s burdens with dignity and honour, and leaving a magnificent legacy of cricket, railways, tiffin, and fair play in their wake. A fine microcosm of this is the fact that Daendels appears as the devil incarnate, the “Thundering Marshall”, while Raffles is the ultimate “Good Man in the East” – despite the fact that they shared the same post-Enlightenment “liberal” sensibility, and did very similar things on the ground.

What do you think?
 
Well, it's kinda easy to paint a regime that enforced cultivation system through strengthening feudal intermediaries to confiscate much of rice-growing fields into cash crop plantations, and producing regular famine as a result, as ultimate evil. Especially through the eyes of a new government which in spirit is anti feudal such as the initially-leftist Indonesia. Not anymore, but historiographic memes don't die easily.

"Liberal" period was also really not much of a betterment, as it simply meant selling of cultuurstelsel lands to newer European businessmen. We might praise many of Dutch achievement in infrastructure development, and indeed there were some of Dutch better practices that were abrogated by Republican Indonesia simply due to ideological reactionism. But overall every development the Netherlands committed here was for the purpose of exploitation. That simply what a colony is for.

If anything, it's simply Britain getting much more smokescreen and pardon then Netherlands, whose only colony was lost through the fire. Japanese occupation certainly made things worse for everyone involved.
 
Britain is history's Karma Houdini. Being friends with the current world-hegemon and being one of the non-Commie protagonists of WWII helps a lot -- originally, the phrase "evil empire" was actually used to describe Britain in the Chicago Tribune!
 
Dutch policy was beneficial enough to allow for an educated native upper middle class to develop, and bad enough to make it utterly hate the regime and turn whatever loose ties the archipelago had and create a maddening supremacist ideology to counter it. It was an immense failure from any perspective, except for the few people who managed to make a quick buck out of it. Any attempt to defend the policy is hampered by the fact that nobody really bothered to carry it out to its full extent. With ethnic home rule in force by the 20s as planned, the entire nationalist movement could've been pre-empted.
 
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