‘The apologies for the history of slavery and the police actions, as made by the king, will be withdrawn.’ So promised the Netherlands’ right-wing firebrand lawmaker Geert Wilders ahead of the country’s 2023 election. On this subject, Wilders is no far-right outlier. Early in Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck quotes a YouGov poll from 2019 which found that 50 per cent of Dutch respondents were proud of the country’s colonial past – vastly more than the British at 32 per cent or the French at 26 per cent. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian who explored his own country’s colonial legacy in 2010’s Congo, notes that 23 per cent of respondents from Belgium were proud of that history. The horrors that the Netherlands unleashed on Indonesia are hardly unique in Europe’s history of imperialism. Why are the Dutch so much prouder than their European cousins?

Call it the ‘VOC mentality’ says Van Reybrouck. The Dutch East Indies were not initially conquered by the Dutch Crown. Rather it was the Dutch East India Company (known by its Dutch initials) that first sailed to the archipelago in the early 1600s on the hunt for the natural resources such as spices and (later) rubber that would make it a corporate giant. For three centuries the VOC – and then the Netherlands itself – fed off Indonesia.

It’s often been said that Indonesia is the world’s largest ‘invisible country’. If that’s true, the revolution beginning in 1945 must surely be the most consequential ‘invisible revolution’ of the last hundred years. Where and when it began, exactly, is difficult to pin down. Nationalism in Indonesia has deep and varied roots, but most scholars – and Indonesians – point to the Sumpah Pemuda, or Youth Pledge, announced at the Second Youth Congress of October 1928 as a decisive moment. Through the pledge, still commemorated annually, attendees committed to ‘one motherland’, ‘one nation’ and ‘one language’. It would take nearly 20 years and a Japanese occupation before an independent state was declared by founding president Sukarno in 1945. The Netherlands, however, had little interest in giving up its Asian colony. In jungle battles and UN meeting rooms it fought for years to keep a grip on Indonesia. How it came to have that grip is a story centuries in the making.

Van Reybrouck explains the complicated social strata of the Dutch East Indies in the prewar era by drawing an analogy with a (then) famous steamship tragedy. In 1936 the Van der Wijck steamboat, a shuttle service running between Batavia (now Jakarta) and Makassar in Sulawesi, was sunk off the north coast of Java. The boat, says Van Reybrouck, was a lively microcosm of colonial society. Europeans enjoyed the top deck, non-white foreigners and Indos (mixed-race Indonesian-Europeans) jostled for space on the second, while native Indonesians suffered in cramped conditions on the third. The Van der Wijck tragedy suggests why so many stories remain missing from Indonesia’s history: the names of those on the lowest deck were simply never recorded.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Erin Cook is a journalist based in Jakarta. She writes about Southeast Asia at Dari Mulut ke Mulut and The Diplomat.

Heel toegankelijk en leesbaar geschreven overzicht van de koloniale geschiedenis van Nederland in Indonesië, de strijd om onafhankelijkheid en de pogingen van Nederland om dat te verhinderen. Schokkend en leerzaam. Veel wist ik al wel, maar heel veel ook niet. Wat tamelijk nieuw voor mij was, het hele optimistische gebeuren in 1955 met de conferentie van Bandung. De namen Lumumba en Kwame Nkruma kende
ik wel wel, maar de enorme impact die zij toen op de andere Afrikaanse en Aziatische vrijheidsbewegingen hadden èn op de burgerrechtenbeweging van de zwarte mensen in Amerika wist ik niet. Het verbaasde me niet dat de VS met zoveel geweld op deze ontwikkelingen hebben gereageerd.
Van Reybrouck kan prachtig vertellen, het wordt nergens saai en zijn weergave van de gesprekken die hij met zoveel al heel oude ooggetuigen kon hebben is indrukwekkend en stilmakend ( )

Well-written, fast read about the birth of Indonesia and the role of the Japanese and Dutch empires in this, including a brief summary of its international ramifications (Bandung conference, birth of the EU, CIA’s cold war Jakarta doctrine).

Again van Reybrouck manages to combine the bigger picture with intricate, personal detail through oral history of eyewitnesses, like he did before for the Belgian Congo. And of course it requires a Belgian national to write a critical, yet balanced history of the painful Dutch decolonisation in Indonesia. Chapot, David! Below I will only discuss two chapters of his voluminous history to entice you to read and enjoy it.

In the first part the author presents an analysis of a number of key phases of Dutch (de)colonization of the Indian island archipelago. Thus van Reybrouck reconstructs the history of Dutch colonial expansion between 1605 and 1914, observing that some islands have been part of the Dutch empire much longer (Ambon – 337 years) than others (Aceh – 28 years, ‘pacified’ as late as 1914).

The Dutch crafted what became known as the Dutch East Indies, and later Indonesia, like a jigsaw puzzle in five consecutive phases. During the first phase (1600-1700) the general principle was: ‘the less territory one occupies, the better’ (cheaper, unless absolutely necessary to establish a trading monopoly as in Ambon for cloves, and in Banda for nutmeg). The VOC was present to establish trading posts for key spices, acting ruthless in case of competition: exterminating the population of Banda for breaking the VOC’s monopoly in trading nutmeg in 1621-23, even occupying the tiny island of Run (in English hands, trading nutmeg) in exchange for Manhattan in 1667.

When the market for spices became saturated and even partly collapsed in the next century, the VOC switched to other colonial products for which a mass market was emerging in Europe: coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco and cacao (second phase). The company started cultivating coffee and tea in 1707 on Java, capturing 75% of the world trade in coffee from 1725 onwards. Chinese planters started growing sugarcane on Java, thus causing both Java and Sumatra to form the core of the Company’s possessions (meanwhile expanding to Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes)). By occupying more territory, the costs of governing the trading colony exploded: 35,000 men were employed in 1750, while the global slump in sugar prices put a dent in the profits. Debts started to rise, while the fourth Anglo-Dutch war resulted in a crippling blockade by the British: in 1795 the VOC went bankrupt.

The Dutch State stepped in and underwrote the remaining debts. The third phase (lasting only from 1800-1814) was crucial in terms of establishing the key features of modern statehood in Indonesia. The French appointed governor general Daendels constructed a road from east to west along the Java coast (grote Postweg) and introduced administrative Districts (prefectures), a basic education system, and a system of governing sugar estates and irrigation works. He also curtailed and subjected the powers of local rulers. When Raffles invaded and conquered Java in 1811 for the British, he centralised the administration and introduced a systematic land tax replacing payment in kind to local princes by payment of land taxes to the colonial government.

The fourth phase started with the return of the Prince of Orange from British exile as a King in the Netherlands. The Cape colony, Ceylon and Indian trading posts that the British took over from the Dutch remained British, but Java and all other Indonesian islands were returned to the Dutch State, that asked for tax payment in kind for all the princely lands that had been taken. This led to the so-called Java war which raged between 1825-1830 under the inspiring leadership of Prince Diponegoro, costing the lives of 15,000 colonial soldiers and some 200,000 Javanese. When the Dutch lost sovereignty over Belgium in 1830, their Indian colony had to compensate for the loss of income. This was done by imposing the cultural tax system: each land owner had to grow cash crops (coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, cinchona, indigo) on at least 20% of their land that was sold by the Dutch Trading Company (NHM). To collect the tax, a governing system of residents and assistant residents was imposed. The resident was a local prince or indigenous ruler; the assistant resident was appointed by the Dutch colonial government. Inhabitants also had to provide 66 days of free labour a year for colonial works. This system reaped tremendous benefits for the Dutch State (responsible for 33-50% of its total annual income between 1831-1877) and caused endless misery for the local population responsible for the famines of 1846-1847 and cholera epidemics of 1851 and 1864.

During the fifth and final phase (1870-1914) over 50% of the colony was 'pacified' with the war in Aceh lasting for 40 years leaving over 100,000 dead. Meanwhile, tobacco production took off on Sumatra with some 169 tobacco estates in 1891, employing over 140,000 imported Chinese labour force and 35,000 labourers from Java. The discovery of rubber and oil opened up other profitable venues.

In the third chapter van Reybrouck introduces a powerful metaphor that he will use as a guiding prism to analyse the fate of different strata of Indonesian society throughout the remainder of his book: the mail boat (in Dutch pakketboot). Before ww2 broke out in 1942, the mail boat was the principal means of communication and transport between the many islands making up the Dutch East Indies. The mail boat had three separate classes for passengers: top floor – first class: all Dutch and European nationals; middle deck – all Chinese traders and top echelon of Indonesian ruling class (regents, princes); below deck – third class, the majority of inhabitants. These three segregated classes on the mail boat where also reflected in the governance and wealth of the colony – a segregated education system, segregated tax paying system, segregated electoral suffrage, etc etc. When an indigenous cohort of educated and/or religious Indonesians emerged during the inter-bellum, these were the very people who knocked on the door of the top deck, on behalf of the below deck majority. The anti-colonial resistance that emerged during the inter-bellum had three sources of inspiration: religious – political Islam (1910s); communist (1920s) and nationalist (1930s), creating their own reasonable networks that over-lapped. However reasonable their demands, the Dutch authorities crushed any request for upward mobility and enhanced rights.

By providing this analytical glimpse I hope I have wetted your appetite to read the whole book. Van Reybrouck manages to combine the daily and intricate experience of history, with the bigger picture history of political and economic shocks. Thus history comes to life. By applying many Points of View, through personal testimonies in writing and speaking, van Reybrouck can be critical, where others become partisan. In my experience it virtually always takes an 'outsider' to provide such a critical, reflexive treatise (like Simon Schama and Jonathan Israel did for the Dutch republic). ( )

Na Congo waren de verwachtingen hooggespannen. Van Reybroeck kon met deze Revolusi deze verwachting niet inlossen. ( )

Een meesterlijk boek. Interessanter en aangrijpender dan Congo doordat Ind(ones)ië zoveel associaties heeft. Als ik het had gelezen voordat we in 2011 naar Indonesië gingen, had ik me nóg meer geschaamd. Een inleiding over hoe groot en belangrijk Indonesië eigenlijk is en relatief ongekend + een stuk over verre geschiedenis dat een beetje 'grote stappen, gauw thuis' is, komt het echte verhaal, zeer goed samengesteld uit documenten, historische gegevens en persoonlijke gesprekken en herinneringen van zeer oude Indonesiërs, die ook nog eens heel goed gespreid zijn in het boek. Die maken het boek c.q.de geschiedenis vaak ontroerend, zonder kitscherig te worden. Belangrijke metafoor is de pakketboot met zijn klassenindeling: europeanen boven, Indo's en Chinezen in het midden en inlanders beneden. Hier wisselt van alles, vooral door en na de oorlog (met de middengroep het vaakst waar de klappen vallen). Onvoorstelbare starheid van de heren in Den Haag die niet begrijpen dat en zelfs waarom Indonesië vrij moet, het totaal negeren (tot ver in de 21e eeuw) van de Proklamasi van aug. 1945, het kapotmaken van het accoord van Lingadjati uit nov. 1946. Van Reybrouck draait niet heen om de wreedheden door (meestal piepjonge) Indonesiërs uit de Bersiap-periode, die hij vooral verklaart uit de vooroorlogse frustratie. Maar de wreedheden van Westerling en vele andere Nederlanders in de jaren '40 waren veel systematischer en onvergeeflijk. Ook is goed te zien hoe de Britten een beetje, maar bovenal de VS een totaal onbetrouwbare partner zijn, alleen in zichzelf geinteresseerd, eerst de onafhankelijkheid steunend, dan Soekarno inruilend voor de dictatuur alles uit hysterisch anticommunisme. ( )