Colonial Java Research Articles

Becoming Medical Personnels during Colonial Java: Historical Reflection on the Experience and Struggle of Women

The number of women in the medical field today is probably much evolved compared to when this science was first introduced in Indonesia. In the colonial period, the number of women entering into the medical field was minimal. Patriarchal values restricted women’s access to education, including the education of doctors, nurses, midwives and pharmacists. Becoming a doctor was considered to be against women’s ‘nature’. The STOVIA medical school at the turn of the 20th century, for example, was discriminatory towards women. The medical profession was seen as suitable only for men. Using a historical perspective, this study seeks to uncover the experience womens in the medical field in Indonesia. The achievements of women to date were inspired by the struggles of thewomen in the past.

G. Roger Knight, Sugar, Steam and Steel: the Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Jan Breman, Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market. Profits from an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Unfree Labour and Extractive Regimes in Colonial Java and Beyond

Development and ChangeVolume 47, Issue 3 p. 598-611 Review Essay Unfree Labour and Extractive Regimes in Colonial Java and Beyond Tania Murray Li, Tania Murray LiSearch for more papers by this authorAlexandre Pelletier, Alexandre PelletierSearch for more papers by this authorArianto Sangadji, Arianto SangadjiSearch for more papers by this author Tania Murray Li, Tania Murray LiSearch for more papers by this authorAlexandre Pelletier, Alexandre PelletierSearch for more papers by this authorArianto Sangadji, Arianto SangadjiSearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 May 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12229Citations: 14Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume47, Issue3May 2016Pages 598-611 RelatedInformation

Female Colonial Friendships in Early 20th Century Java: Exploring New Correspondence by Kartini’s Sisters

This paper explores the nature of an inter-racial relationship that developed between a young Dutch girl, Annie Glaser, and the daughters of the Bupati of Jepara – the sisters of Raden Ajeng Kartini – in Central Java revealed in a recently discovered cache of letters written by the Javanese women, in Dutch, between 1902 and 1915. While throwing further light on the events surrounding the ‘story of Kartini’, the paper also shines a light on the ambiguous nature of colonial friendships between women in this period. It suggests that closer reading of this ‘ordinary’ correspondence reveals the growing sense of national identity that made possible ‘real’ friendships between European and Indonesian women in colonial Java in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Review of: Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits from and Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java, by Jan Breman

Review of: Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits from and Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java, by Jan Breman

CHRISTIANITY FROM THE MARGINS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The relationship between nationalism and religion is very complicated. In the context of colonialism, Christianity has surely been perceived as a foreign religion that poses a menace to native nationalism. This essay presents a different picture, taking the case of colonial Java (the Netherlands East Indies) to illustrate the complex historical relationship between Catholicism and Indonesian nationalism. Perhaps it is rather ironic that it was chiefly through their connection with the Dutch Church and their mission enterprise that the Javanese Catholic intelligentsia were made deeply aware of their own dignity as a particular people and the limitations of European colonialism. In this case, Catholic Christianity as a world religion with supranational connection and identity has been able to help the birth of an intense nationalism that was prevented from being too narrow, chauvinistic, or simply “racialist,” precisely because it is connected with its larger ecumenism or network. More specifically, this ecumenism is also founded on the idea of “catholicity,” that is, universalism, that lies at the heart of Catholic Christianity. In the post-colonial Indonesia, however, this Catholic view needs to be translated into common platforms with the views and concerns of Indonesian Muslims, who face the same new challenges as they play their role in the formation of an authentic Indonesian nationalism.

Race, class and the deserving poor: Charities and the 1930s Depression in Java

The 1930s Depression caused an enormous growth in urban poverty in colonial Java. Informal neighbourhood networks could no longer cope with the unemployed, the homeless and the destitute. Politically conscious Indonesians were convinced that the colonial state was concerned only with poverty among Europeans. They responded by creating new charities focused on the Indonesian lower classes. Many provided middle-class women with opportunities for leadership denied them in the political and labour movements. However, those who managed the charities had no concept of empowering the poor. In dispensing support they made a clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Nevertheless their charitable work enabled thousands of Indonesians to survive the Depression years.

Chinese Entrepreneurship in Colonial Java and Malaya

Chinese Entrepreneurship in Colonial Java and Malaya

Exchange and the Protection of Java's Antiquities: A Transnational Approach to the Problem of Heritage in Colonial Java

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.

Colonial Capitalism in Java

Control of Land and Labour in Colonial Java. By Jan Breman Javanese Peasants and the Colonial Sugar Industry. By R.E. Elson

Dangerous Liaisons and other Tales from the Twilight Zone: Sex, Race, and Sorcery in Colonial Java

I have only once seen witchcraft on its path. I had been sitting late in my hut writing notes. About midnight, before retiring, I took a spear and went for my usual nocturnal stroll. I was walking in the garden at the back of my hut, amongst banana trees, when I noticed a bright light passing at the back of my servants' huts towards the homestead of a man called Tupoi. As this seemed worth investigation I followed its passage until a grass screen obscured the view. I ran quickly through my hut to the other side in order to see where the light was going to, but did not regain sight of it. I knew that only one man, a member of my household, had a lamp that might have given off so bright a light, but next morning he told me that he had neither been out late at night nor had he used his lamp. There did not lack ready informants to tell me that what I had seen was witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, on the same morning, an old relative of Tupoi and an inmate of his homestead died. This event fully explained the light I had seen. I never discovered its real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by some one on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 34).

The Cultivation System (1830–1870) and its private entrepreneurs on colonial Java

AbstractEver since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

Dutch engineering overseas: The creation of a modern irrigation system in Colonial Java

This article describes and analyses the development of modern irrigation in Java within the context of the establishment and transformation of the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies / Indonesia. In order to make this relationship comprehensible the concept “large technical system” has been adopted. The colonial socio-technical irrigation system was built between 1830 and 1942. Engineers, civil servants and agricultural experts were the main system builders and they formed specific coalitions practising specific irrigation approaches. After Indonesia gained its independence, the colonial irrigation system remained in existence and, consequently, irrigation engineering remained top-down, large-scale and focused on agricultural-technical management.

Irrigation development in colonial Java: the history of the Solo Valley works from a technological regime perspective

The circumstances surrounding the abandonment of the enormous irrigation project in the Solo Valley in colonial Indonesia (East Java) have always remained slightly shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, most engineers involved in the Dutch East Indian Department of Public Works could not understand why, in 1903, the Dutch government called off the project - which had been started in 1893 but was suspended in 1898 for budgetary reasons - and thus decided to deviate from the recommendations to continue the project issued by a special state commission. On the other hand, the reorganisation and the general budget cuts the engineers feared never took place. An analysis using the technological regime concept, alongside other concepts and insights from technological development theory, is shown to offer some clarity. The Solo Valley works formed part of an extensive irrigation program launched in 1890 and completed some 30 years later. Just like the other works, the Solo project was set up in the spirit of a specific technological regime, which emerged in 1885 and was characterised by detailed preliminary research and the design of facilities for an entire irrigation area; this is what I term the 'T'echnical Irrigation Regime. After 1920, irrigation projects were embarked upon in which more attention was paid to management and agricultural aspects and which were carried out in a piecemeal fashion. This was governed by a different technological regime which was the result of experience gained between 1885 and 1920; this is what I term the Irrigation Regime. On the one hand, the Solo Valley works project contributed to the shift from the Technical Irrigation Regime to the Technical-Agricultural Irrigation Regime, while on the other hand, it was abandoned because of this regime shift that had partially taken place by 1903. Finally, the gradual nature of technological regime shifts to be abstracted from this historical case is emphasised.

Labour Unions and the Provision of Social Security in Colonial Java

Labour Unions and the Provision of Social Security in Colonial Java

Labour unions and the provision of social security in colonial Java

Labour unions and the provision of social security in colonial Java

The Sugar Industry of Colonial Java and its Global Trajectory

The last 30 years have seen the creation of a rich scholarly literature on the sugar industry of colonial Java. However, most of that literature has focused on the impact of the industry on the Javanese peasantry, on the economy and society of rural Java. In so doing it has paid insufficient attention to two of its crucial characteristics – the fact that from c. 1870 through to the inter-war depression, Java was consistently the world's second largest producer-exporter of cane sugar after Cuba; and, more importantly, that during the course of the nineteenth century, Java was far ahead of other Asian producers in the industrialization of sugar manufacture. This paper is concerned mainly to explain Java's singular trajectory – its precocious industrialization – and in doing this it pays particular attention to such issues as the mechanisms by which access to land and labour was secured, the shifting location of the markets for Java's sugar, the changing pattern of ownership in the sugar processing sector, and the emergence towards the end of the nineteenth century of a culture of management which rested, in part, on the notion of Western technological and scientific superiority.

The Barikan Banner of Gegesik. Ritual and History in a Village Painting from Colonial Java

M.I. Cohen Les ogres sont dépeints en Hollandais dans cette peinture représentant un type d'art villageois javanais, décrit ici pour la première fois, qui disparut durant la difficile période recouvrant l'occupation japonaise et les années de lutte pour l'indépendance. Mesurant quelques dix mètres de long, elle tapissait l'intérieur des pavillons de cérémonie ou les murs d'une maison, contribuant à donner un air de solennité et de fête lors des principaux rituels familiaux ou communautaires dans le village de Gegesik, près de Cirebon, sur la côte nord de la partie occidentale de Java Central, dans les années trente. Les auteurs rapportent de façon détaillée l'origine de la peinture, son utilisation rituelle, le récit qui lui servit de base et l'identité de certains des personnages représentés, certains étant des personnes réelles dont se souviennent encore les membres les plus âgés de la communauté. On trouvera aussi des informations sur l'artiste, ses autres œuvres, sa place dans la communauté et sur la façon dont de telles œuvres étaient commandées, créées, livrées et payées. L'histoire, représentée sur cette peinture est un résumé détaillé du Barikan du théâtre d'ombre, tel qu'il est encore joué, chaque année, à Gegesik ou dans les villages environnants, ou encore au cimetière royal près de Cirebon. Les auteurs discutent la matrice culturelle dans laquelle fonctionnait la peinture et les circonstances socio-politiques qui entourèrent sa création et lui donnèrent une signification particulière. Ils examinent le sens encore plus profond qui s'enracine dans les traditions de la communauté locale et de la société javanaise en général.

The agrarian question in colonial Java: Coercion and colonial capitalist sugar plantations, 1870–1941

The article sets out to restore the recently denied view that state‐backed coercion is vital to colonial sugar plantations in Java (as elsewhere). Most unusual for a plantation system the Java sugar mills owned no land (other than that on which the mill was sitting). They leased fresh land each year from irrigated rice farmers. Secondly, and also remarkable, all this system was legally and effectively regulated (at least for the leasing farmers whilst for the mills the legal side was rather more optional). This provided the basis for cheap land to the plantations that the farmers were obliged to lease. Thirdly, each year every mill would calculate its needs for land and forward those to the level of Resident. Having consulted with his own and with lower staff, the Resident might amend the mills’ requirements and then approve them. These were then passed down through the various levels of the administration until reaching the village. However, they now appeared in the form of approved measures to which officials and village heads were supposed to adhere. Fourthly, the mills needed large contiguous areas of land to plant sugar cane whilst the average individual farmer had about half a hectare of irrigated land usually in more than one spot. This pushed the mills into favouring the leasing of ‘communal’ village land. These were in blocs. This procedure although widely used was illegal for most of the period. Whilst most satisfactory to Dutch colonial capitalism the system constituted the Agrarian Question (with no solution except Independence) in Java.