"Indische" Indos and Theosophists in the Dutch East Indies

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 293-297:

The 20th century arrived in the Dutch East Indies accompanied by a chorus bewailing the growing number of children who had concubines as mothers. The prevailing tone was that many of these children did not merit the status of European. A commonly heard anecdote was that of the down-and-out soldier who, in exchange for a bottle of Dutch gin, acknowledged that he was the legitimate father of a child who had not a drop of Dutch blood. The newspaper Java-Bode reported the growing number of "degenerate Indos and complete hybrids" who were in fact natives but were entitled to call themselves European: "Without a doubt, such people must feel deeply dissatisfied with their lot." These gloomy musings were, however, seldom based on more than anecdotal accounts and were certainly not founded upon systematic research. It was nothing new to hear of "immoral" goings-on in the army barracks, while concubinage and large families of pauperised (Indo-)Europeans were a familiar phenomenon. What was new were the growing complaints about the situation and the sombreness of their tone. Such attitudes became widespread at the end of the 19th century, when interest grew in matters such as genetic inheritance, Malthusian ideas about population control and the theme of ennobling the lower classes.

The fin de siècle Zeitgeist encouraged the notion of a moral decline of European society in the Indies. Colonial policy in the Indies had always tried to draw a clear distinction between European society and the natives. Until the close of the 19th century the emphasis had continually lain on reclaiming the stray sheep of the European flock and returning them to the fold of European culture and values. Bur now the idea arose that it might be better for them to remain in their native environment. This notion, born largely out of discussions on inheritance, race and degeneration, now buzzed on every side. The Java-Bode, which represented the conservative opinions of the more wealthy Batavian civil servants, used the word "hybrid" to highlight the problematic aspects of racial mixing. Understandably, this newspaper did not dispute the fact that there were large numbers of decent Indo-European families bringing up their children in a correct and seemly manner. But once the journalists got the bit between their teeth, they became carried away by polemics regarding degeneracy and childhood neglect. It only needed a tiny slip of the pen before they were fulminating about the stereotypical Indische family where the eternal ne'er-do-wells lazed around and never lifted a finger, convinced as they were from birth that to do manual work would debase them forever.

This caricature was not something new. A hundred years earlier, at the beginning of the 19th century, newcomers to the East Indies had written with shocked amazement about the lack of parental care, about the frequent beatings that children received, and about how their mothers carried on their peddling trades and spent their time playing cards instead of looking after their children. Around 1900 such commentaries became imbued with pseudo-scientific arguments on the topic of racial inferiority. Articles and reviews with scientific pretensions were published claiming to substantiate the stereotypical pictures of Indo-Europeans as people who were underhand, easily suspicious and quickly roused to anger. The widely held opinion in British colonies that when European populations became mixed with a native race they dissolved into native society also crept insidiously into Dutch (Indies) publications. Some suggested that several generations of mixed marriage resulted in infertility — although such an opinion would appear to be firmly disproved by the many large and flourishing Indo-European families. However, a conservative newspaper like Java-Bode could not be shaken from its conviction that social improvement — with all its biological connotations of crop or cattle improvement — was the same thing as opposing mixed marriages. In the Netherlands, newspapers were quite unabashed in stating that pauperism was the result of racial mixing. The word volbloed (pure-blood) began to appear in advertisements for domestic staff and personnel. Cynical remarks were heard to the effect that the elite corps of the Binnenlands Bestuur [Dept. of the Interior], in Dutch keurkorps, was turning into a coloured corps, Dutch kleurkorps. In short, with the arrival of the 20th century, the colonial discourse became strongly racialised.

It is tempting to think — although inaccurately — that Darwinism, then a fashionable ideology, was responsible for this racist thinking. Social Darwinism was widely accepted in Europe, but in the Indies it was the Spencerian theory of evolution that predominated. Herbert Spencer saw human ability as the product of social evolution, and not of biological selection. It proved a difficult task, however, to distinguish between inherited propensities and the effects of upbringing. The journalist Paul Daum, for instance, was a fervent Spencerian, yet in his novel published in 1890, titled "Ups" en "downs" in het Indische leven ("Ups" and "Downs" of Indische Life) — which recounts the downfall of the aristocratic planters' family the Hoflands — he invokes heredity as a major element in the family's decline. In his journalistic writing, however, he pleaded the cause of education as the driving force behind social advancement and the best possible cure for the ills assailing the European community in the Indies. City gardens, public parks, theatrical performances and concerts were surely more attractive ways of passing the time than cockfighting, tandakken (Javanese dancing) or Javanese wayang puppet theatres. Cultural paternalism of this nature encountered little opposition; indeed, it was applauded by the newspaper De Telefoon, which wrote in this context of "the improvement of destitute Europeans".

All the complaints about the effects of mixing and the negative influences of an Indische lifestyle might almost make one forget that ever-growing numbers of Europeans in the Indies were now speaking Dutch, reading the paper, and writing letters to the editor on touchy topics. It was a recent development, for until well into the 19th century — even in wealthy families in the Indies — the lingua franca was not necessarily Dutch, but Malay. This appears, for instance, from a complaint made in 1887 by the education inspector about the poor level of Dutch among students at the HBS School, which was intended for children from the better circles. It was only in the closing years of the 19th century that Dutch began to be more widely used among Europeans. It first became the standard language at work and then moved into informal areas. In contrast to the much-quoted opinion of the education inspectors that in 1900 the majority of Indies-born European children at elementary school had a very poor command of Dutch, we find that at that time already 40 per cent of Europeans used Dutch in their everyday affairs.

The early 20th century also witnessed an alternative wave against the assumption that "Indische" meant "inferior". While the terms "hybridity" and "Indische" when used in the colonial context both had negative overtones, the cultural avant-garde in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the Western world embraced the exotic. The artistic style of Jugendstil (art nouveau) made use of exotic shapes and designs. The artist Jan Toorop, born in Java in 1858, who was greatly celebrated in the Netherlands, exploited heavy symbolism borrowed from Javanese art and even transported this into his painted posters advertising salad dressing. For the colonial newcomers, belief in animism was superstitious, possibly even dangerous, nonsense, but in the Netherlands it was all the fashion to hold séances and make contact with the spirits of the dead. What might be described as an organic way of thinking, most powerfully expressed through the eclectic and unrestrained images of Jugendstil, flourished among the elite of the Netherlands. The urge to reconcile opposites also reached the colonies and was to have an influential role in the rejection of conventional European tastes and values One manifestation was the growth of the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) which acquired a considerable following in the first decades ot the 20th century. Before this, the Freemasons had been the chief instigators of dialogue between the various cultures and faiths in the colony. In about 1908 the Theosophists took over. In the Indies their champion was Dirk van Hinloopen Labberton, who taught Javanese at the training institute for the Binnenlands Bestuur in Batavia, the Willem III School. This eloquent, indeed loquacious, man was inspired by the great British Theosophist Annie Besant (1847–1938), who had left England for British India in 1893, declared the Indians to be her brothers and sisters, and become a tireless advocate of home rule for India. Theosophy also appealed to nationalist intellectuals in the East Indies, who applauded its approach of an Eastern counter-current against the materialism of the West.

Thus the world of the East Indies became aware of two contrasting, indeed opposing, voices. Since the rise of the Soeria Soemirat movement, the Indo-Europeans had spoken out as a separate group, although their plea was to be accepted as Europeans. In contrast, the notion ot an Indische domain as a space where European and Asian cultural influences were equally valid steadily gained ground. The politically tense period linked with the growth of nationalism served to reveal the tensions between the concept of "Indo-Europeans" — people who constituted a category of class and race within the wider group of "Europeans — and "Indische", a term that could be applied to everything connected with the Dutch East Indies. On the one hand, the expression "Indo-European (or Indo) was used to apply to Europeans who had a part-Asian ancestry as opposed to pure-blood white. At the same time, the word Indische was used in contrast to Hollands (Netherlandish) but never to demarcate Europeans from Indonesian, Chinese or other population groups living in the East Indies. The "closed" character of the term "Indo-European" and its opposite, the boundless connotations of the word "Indische", have dominated the political evolution of the Indies. During those years of budding nationalism the political pendulum swung continually between the struggle to establish a movement representing the more general Indische interests, and a Union of Indo-Europeans. Two Dutch words crystallised the differences: beweging (movement) stood for new and open, while bond (union) implied the formation of a group to defend one's own interests. Everything born out of the Indische movement was to be absorbed almost unnoticed into Indonesian nationalism, while the notion of a union or brotherhood gained definitive form in 1919 in the Indo-Europeesch Verbond (IEV) — the Indo-European Union.

This final excerpt from this book touches on most of the major themes raised in this fascinating look at the history of the Dutch and their local allies in their East Indian colonies.

Democratization vs. Secularization

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 3149-85:

More and more Muslims, especially those in the rising middle class, are going around the mosque and mufti network to take advantage of such choices for engaging with Islam available not only on television and radio but also in cyberspace. It is now possible to get guidance from on-the-air or online clerics and Islamic sages. Fatwas—which are religious decrees that clerics issue to clarify ambiguities in religious practice or to call on Muslims to follow a specific course of action—are a phone call or an email away. Sites such as IslamOnline, eFatwa.com, MuftiSays.com, askimam.com or, for Shias, Sistani.org offer lively discussion groups about such hot-button issues as how Muslims should interpret shariah law, how they ought to behave in the workplace, and whether the jihadist’s call to arms has any religious validity. Such websites command an impressive number of visitors, and this popular engagement is generating a democratization of sorts in Islam comparable to the rise of a more populist, and pious, breed of Christianity in the United States spurred on by the advent of televangelism.

Many of the popular new breed of media-savvy preachers blend tradition with modernity in their style as well as the substance of their messages, wearing Western attire rather than traditional robes, and speaking to their audiences in the personable, folksy manner of so many popular American preachers, making use of anecdotes about life’s daily struggles. That recipe has proven enormously popular. The strong appeal of this blending of modernity and Islam does not mean, however, that there is strong support for reform of Islam itself. The core of the appeal is in reassuring the Muslim masses that a modern way of life—the pursuit of material success, watching television, going out to nightclubs, listening to pop music—is in no way in conflict with Islam. Muslims can enjoy the fruits of modernity, they say, and be good Islamic believers at the same time. They are not, for the most part, championing the kind of more thoroughgoing reform of the faith that many in the West have advocated.

We should not kid ourselves: There is very little in the way of liberalizing reform going on in the Muslim world today. If anything, the phenomenon of rising demand for Islam is disproportionately raising the stock of conservative voices, though there surely are leaders of movements for democracy—and for women’s rights—who are building followings, as we’ll explore shortly. But by and large, while there is a great deal of engagement with new ways of delivering the message of Islam, there is not much interest in changing the message itself. For the most part, changing Islamic law or compromising on Islam’s values and worldview is not in the cards.

The attacks of 9/11 convinced many Americans that the problem with the Muslim world is that it is “unenlightened,” meaning it is pre-Renaissance in its mind-set. To catch up with modernity, Muslims must subject Islam to substantial change—Vatican II at least if not the Reformation tout court. But Westerners who are pinning their hopes for better relations with the region on an Islamic Reformation are going to be let down, at least in the near term. The paradox that can be hard to grasp is that the aspirations of the rising middle class have, by contrast, fueled the embrace of traditionalism—the Islamic world’s version of old-time religion. The prospect of launching oneself, one’s children, and one’s society out into the competitive, globalized economy has increased rather than decreased interest in tradition—religious tradition very much included—because of the belief that enduring sources of standards and values are needed to help navigate the currents of change [and not just among Muslims—J. (emphasis added)]. In time, the embrace of tradition may give way to a broader and more vigorous movement for reform, but Western efforts to promote reformism are unlikely to be the impetus. Indeed, they may be even counterproductive, feeding fears that the West wants to subvert Islam.

Many Western observers do not want to hear this. They remain preoccupied with locating the right Islamic reformer, someone who can slingshot Islam onto the fast track toward Reformation and Enlightenment. Why is such a reformer, like Samuel Beckett’s Godot, not showing up? Is reform only a matter of time, or is the West wrong to assume that the Muslim world will follow the same historical trajectory that unfolded in the West when capitalism and the scientific revolution forced change on Christianity?

Those advocating a Protestant future for Islam dwell little on the facts that early-modern Christian reformers were hardly liberal or tolerant—and that the Reformation unleashed a century and a half of bloody and even cataclysmic warfare. The Reformation in all its manifestations across Europe enforced narrow puritanical views with great violence.

Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a great many other secular "rationalists" also enforced narrow puritanical views with violence far greater than that of any religious leaders in history. Nor was the post-Reformation transition to secular nationalism—especially the racialist nationalism of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan—accomplished without great violence, not just in wars between nations but in warfare and ethnic cleansing within national boundaries. If religious intolerance is the problem, secularist intolerance of religion is not the solution.

Lessons from Romanizing Turkish Orthography

From: "Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization" by İlker Aytürk in Journal of World History 21(2010):97-130 (on Project MUSE):

Since the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991, successive Turkish governments have been trying to impress upon the ex-Soviet Turkish republics the necessity of adopting the Roman alphabet. As late as June 2007, for example, a delegation from the Republic of Kazakhstan visited the Turkish Language Institute (Türk Dil Kurumu) for consultations and received briefings on a number of topics, including the history of script change in Turkey, the economic costs and benefits of romanization, and the implications of script change for electronic media and information technologies. Indeed, Turkish policy makers are correct when they underline Turkey’s role as a model in this regard. Adoption of a Roman-based alphabet in Turkey in 1928 is habitually cited as the textbook example of a successful and lasting case of romanization. The problem with the approach of the Turkish policy makers, on the other hand, is the somewhat naïve conviction that, with a good amount of fortitude, the Turkish success could be easily replicated elsewhere.

This approach is not new, nor is it particular to the Turkish officials. It had been voiced earlier, during attempts at romanizing the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese scripts in the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of World War II at the heyday of an international romanization movement. What is common in all of them is a tendency to strip the question of script from its historical, religious, and political context and to present it mainly as an issue of the expediency of a writing system. It is very telling that Western advocates of romanization were pointing at the Turkish example even then, as Turkish officials still do. The success of the Turkish experiment, though, obscured many other attempts at romanization that ended up as utter failures. If truth be told, the impact of the permanent adoption of the Roman alphabet by a handful of speech communities in the twentieth century is far outweighed by the resilience of non-Roman writing systems in spite of efforts to romanize them. It is impossible to overlook the fact that about half of the world’s population today employ non-Roman alphabets or scripts: the Devanagari script in India, the han’gŭl in Korea, the kanji and kana in Japan, the hànzì in China, the Arabic alphabet in most of the Muslim world, the Greek alphabet in Greece, the Cyrillic in Russia, and the square letters in Israel, just to name a few, show the limits of the expansion of the Roman alphabet in contrast to high expectations in its favor at the beginning of the twentieth century. The image of a victorious Roman alphabet is then probably caused by the paucity of counterfactual data, which could have been gleaned from failed cases, and it also results from the lack of comparative works, especially those that compare a successful case with a fiasco.

What I intend to do in this article is precisely this. By focusing on the Hebrew and Turkish cases, I aim at constructing a theoretical framework for explaining success and failure of romanization. The two cases in question are selected on purpose: adoption of the Roman alphabet in Atatürk’s Turkey is the emblematic example of romanization in the twentieth century. Quite the reverse, the feeble movement in the Yishuv—a term that describes the Jewish population and settlement in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel—in the 1920s and 1930s for writing Hebrew in the Roman alphabet had so utterly failed to impress the Hebrew speakers at the time that there are very few today who even remember that such a bizarre attempt was ever made. Comparing these two cases will help us identify a number of independent variables that facilitate romanization or inhibit it....

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the implantation of the Roman alphabet in the Americas and pockets of European colonization in the Far East. The first real conquest of the Roman alphabet outside the boundaries of Western Christendom, however, was the romanization of the Romanian script in 1860, during an atmosphere of cultural revival and independence, which also signaled Romania’s growing estrangement from the Slavic and the Orthodox world. A second, less known, case was the gradual adoption in Vietnam of Quoc-ngu, a Roman-based alphabet, which was officially endorsed in 1910 but whose spread to the masses took considerably more time and lasted until the 1950s. A more crucial and rather famous decision of romanization was made at the Baku Congress of Turkology in 1926, when representatives from the Muslim-Turkic and Tatar communities in the Soviet Union and from the Republic of Turkey discussed matters of orthography among other cultural problems. The resolution of the congress stressed the need for the creation of a common script based on the Roman alphabet for all Turco-Tataric nations. This particular wave of romanization started with the Yakuts and the Azeris in 1926, while the Uzbeks and the Crimean Tatars followed suit in 1928 and 1929 respectively. The Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, whose initial attitude toward romanization at the congress could best be described as lukewarm, jumped on the bandwagon in 1928 with huge publicity given to the event in world press.

If it is permissible to use Max Weber’s notion of “charismatic authority” in a field that he did not intend it for, the Roman alphabet had in effect become a charismatic script by the 1920s and 1930s. It owed its charisma less to its Roman or Catholic background, and more to a rather secular association with the advent of modernity, Westernization, and, later, the ascendancy of English as the global lingua franca....

An argument in favor of romanization of the Hebrew script was first heard in 1898, but that preliminary shot by Isaak Rosenberg, a Hebrew teacher in Jerusalem, fell on deaf ears and did not make an impact at all. The person who actually catapulted the idea of romanization to short-lived fame and notoriety was Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of the “father of modern Hebrew,” Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Hardly remembered today, Itamar Ben-Avi (1882–1943) was a celebrity in the Yishuv as well as the diaspora world from the first decade of the twentieth century to the 1940s. His father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the individual who probably contributed more than anybody else to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, raised him as the first Jew in nearly two millennia whose mother tongue was Hebrew. Thanks to the publicity given to him since his childhood for this reason, Ben-Avi was a living specimen of the “new Jew,” who could turn dreams into reality by strength of will. Upon completing his university studies in Berlin, Ben-Avi returned to Jerusalem, where he embarked on a journalistic career, first writing in his father’s newspapers, then acting as the Jerusalem correspondent for British and French dailies, and eventually topping his career with the editorship of such important Yishuv newspapers as the Do’ar ha-yom and the Palestine Weekly. He was to put his oratorical skills in many languages into use following a request from the Jewish National Fund to go abroad on lecture tours for the Zionist cause, a job that further boosted his image abroad, where he rubbed shoulders with the VIPs of the diaspora Jewry.

Of all people, it was this man who proposed to write Hebrew with Roman characters, and put his name at risk and gambled with his financial resources to carry out his plans for romanization. After many adventures along those lines in his youth, Ben-Avi’s first concrete action was to publish a biography of his father, titled Avi (My Father), in romanized Hebrew in 1927. That initial attempt drew the ire of the Jewish literati in the Yishuv, who nipped the project in the bud by their deadly silence. The following year, no doubt encouraged by the news coming from Turkey, he briefly experimented with offering a Hebrew supplement in Roman alphabet to the Palestine Weekly. The first issue of Ha-shavu‘a ha-palestini [variously spelled (per fn. 42) ha Şavu‘a ha Palestini, ha Şavuja ha Palestini, ha Shavuaj ha Palestini, ha Shavuaa ha Palestini, and ha Shavua ha Palestini], as the supplement was called, appeared on 14 December 1928 and continued until May 1929 in twenty issues altogether. Members of the Revisionist Zionist Organization in the Yishuv rallied round his cause, and the organization’s legendary leader Vladimir Jabotinsky emerged as the second best-known advocate for the romanization of Hebrew script. Yet, the supplement failed to create a momentum, with about three hundred copies sold in the Yishuv and abroad, even though a few first issues were distributed gratis. Ben-Avi made a final, and more serious, attempt in 1933, this time by publishing an independent weekly journal in romanized Hebrew. The weekly Deror appeared from 17 November 1933 to 25 March 1934 in sixteen issues, and, if we trust Ben-Avi’s somewhat inflated numbers, the journal’s sales stabilized around 1,400 copies from the third issue onward, several hundred of those being subscriptions from abroad. Not surprisingly, the Deror met the same fate as its predecessor and had to be closed down at enormous cost to its owner. The damage done, however, was not just financial. Ben-Avi was compelled to admit defeat, facing the Yishuv’s indifference, if not outright animosity, toward his romanization plan.

South Moluccans: Teachers before Soldiers

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 173-176:

Migration to other territories within the vast Indonesian archipelago was also part of a general pattern in the Moluccas. From the letters of the Neumann family, we gain a unique picture of an Ambonese family that became widely scattered. The letters also offer an occasional glimpse of the poorer relatives who sent their children to study in Batavia in the hope that they would gain an acceptable job as office clerks. Family members who emigrated remained in contact with each other, forming a small colony in the city of Batavia and maintaining their links with Ambon. Relations with home were maintained, and presumably this held true for all the Moluccans who left their native islands and ranged out across the Indonesian archipelago. According to the 1930 census, about 16 per cent of Moluccan Christians lived outside their home islands. Traditionally, the highest status an Ambonese Christian could attain would be Burghership, and a position as clerk or teacher. In contrast, a position in the army was generally spurned. This aversion to military service had already been prevalent in the 18th century when village headmen had to furnish young men for the annual patrols guarding the clove monopoly. For those living on the Ambon islands, upward social mobility came through education, missionary work and Burghership, while the army was traditionally considered to be an instrument of economic oppression.

The bases for missionary work and education, also in the Dutch language, were already laid in the 17th century. However, these became gradually eroded in the 18th century, a period of economic decline in the Moluccas. Things began to pick up when the Reverend Joseph Kam, shortly after his arrival in 1815, installed a small printing press at the back of his home; here he produced religious matter for his local readership. Then in 1834 the missionary Bernhard Roskott founded a teachers' training college, which by 1855 had turned out 82 teachers. Most of them found jobs in the village schools on the Moluccan islands. Although these pupil-teachers in the main received Bible instruction, the missionary background undoubtedly enhanced the status of the elementary schoolteacher. From 1856 on, children of native Christian Burghers had the opportunity of attending a European elementary school without having to pay fees. As on the island of Ternate, so too on Ambon, in most cases a distinction was no longer made between the descendants of Europeans, and Christian Burghers; admission to elementary school, and hence the opportunity of gaining a job as a low-ranking civil servant, became equally possible for them all. However, this was only in principle; the two elementary schools on Ambon could not possibly accommodate all the children of the 8,000 Ambonese Burghers. There were, furthermore, few job opportunities in the Moluccas for these junior civil servants — unlike the encouraging outlook for schoolteachers.

It is doubtful whether the missionary teaching made much impact on Dutch fluency among the Ambonese — the Bible was, after all, translated into Malay. Nevertheless, in the second part of the 19th century the Dutch language spread even to the small villages. The inspector for education. Van der Chijs, reported in about 1860 that the Ambonese were more inclined to regard Dutch as their language than were the Indo-Europeans in Java. The affection for the Dutch language would only grow stronger. After the establishment of the second European school in 1856, the Ambon Burgher School was founded in 1869; this was intended for the native Christians of Ambon and had Dutch on its curriculum. Pupils with the highest marks in their school-leaving exams received the diploma of junior civil servant. It seems that in the 1860s there was enormous enthusiasm among the Ambonese Christians to become teachers. Indeed, they were so keen that it was reported, "If they are not curbed, half the male population would become a schoolmaster". Not surprisingly, when the government teacher training college opened its doors in Ambon in 1874, there were many applicants. Anyone with a certificate as junior civil servant or schoolteacher who failed to find work in the Moluccas left for Java, for the towns of Surabaya, Semarang or Batavia. Some students found their way to the STOVIA ([School Tot Opleiding Voor Indlandsche Artsen =] college for training native medical doctors) in Batavia, which had been founded in 1852.

Although the army did not enjoy great popularity in the Moluccas, the colonial administrations found it most important to have a sizeable contingent of local Christian soldiers in the army, since it was largely composed of Javanese Muslims. Native Christian soldiers had enjoyed the status of semi-Europeans ever since, in 1804, Daendels had declared that the military from the Ambonese islands, Timor and Minahasa were to be treated as equals of European soldiers. Nevertheless, army recruitment in the Christianised islands proved a very difficult task throughout most of the 19th century. In 1854 the local government began a recruitment campaign to increase the numbers in the military, but at the end of two years the army authorities had to concede that all their efforts had yielded no more than a meagre 77 recruits per year for Minahasa and the Ambon islands combined. In 1860, however, the army managed to recruit 1,308 "Ambonese" — this term was used in army statistics to describe soldiers from both Minahasa and the Moluccas. Half this number came from Minahasa. Midway through the Aceh War, in 1875, the numbers from Minahasa had declined to 498, and those from Ambon were merely 398. When the war started in 1873, the residents of Ternate, Manado and Ambon were exhorted to concentrate on recruiting — especially in the Christian villages; but this had little effect, despite a 50-guilder premium to the village headmen for every soldier they provided. At the beginning of the Aceh War, army recruitment moved at a snail's pace. In addition, in 1864 the cloves monopoly was rescinded, which not only led to a growing trek towards the towns but also produced an economic revival in the villages, since during the 1870s and 1880s cloves were fetching a very good price. In Minahasa, too, the numbers of Christians from the Manado district remained meagre, despite a large number of conversions to Christianity during the 1850s. Only at the end of the 1870s, when the early losses in the Aceh War had made enlistment in the military even more unpopular, did the army authorities manage to attract more recruits. In 1879, when a school was opened in Magelang, Java, for army children from the Moluccas, Minahasa and Timor, it proved exactly what was needed. And, besides, training for the military was expanded. Thus, the army became a feasible route to social advancement, all the more since employment as a clerk or teacher proved unattainable for most
literate Moluccans.

By 1883 the Ambonese contingent in the Dutch-Indies army had doubled to 801 from Manado and 708 from Ambon. The appeal of the army would increase even more on the Ambon islands in the 1890s, when the prices of cloves fell once again. At last there were sufficient volunteers — and the same was true for Minahasa. Indeed, here the army authorities were even able to select out of the large numbers who applied. Ultimately, the greatest number of soldiers would come from Minahasa; in 1918 there were 6,388 soldiers from Minahasa compared with 3,674 from the Moluccan islands. The increasing majority from Manado can easily be explained: in the 1870s the Christian populations of these two areas were more or less the same size, that is, around 60,000. The figures for the 1900 census, however, are 72,359 native Christians on the Ambon islands compared with 164,117 in the Minahasa region.

The former military became part of the village notables, along with the raja and other village headmen and the schoolteachers, who were on a slightly lower rung of the social ladder. Both in Minahasa and on the Ambon islands it became part of the local pattern of social mobility to enter military service; it also formed a confirmation of the Christian identity of these communities. The army did not, however, initiate the integration of the Christian communities in the colonial world. The image that has evolved in Dutch colonial history of the Ambonese as a martial race is primarily a colonial picture and does not reflect a predilection for the military life on the part of the Ambonese.

Mawdudi and "Theodemocracy"

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2645-76:

The fundamentalist founders argued that the decline of Islam began not, as popular wisdom held, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but much earlier, in 661 C.E., when the Umayyad dynasty rose to power and turned the caliphate into a monarchy. Muawiyah who founded the Umayyad caliphate was not a companion of the Prophet or respected for his religious standing. He was a general who strong-armed his way to the top to rule an empire that he then passed on to his son. From that time on, went the argument, clerics had betrayed the faith by submitting to the will of religiously unqualified rulers who in turn sustained them through patronage. They had allowed for religion to be separated from politics, which fundamentalists thought ran counter to the religion’s intent. “The chief characteristic of Islam,” wrote Pakistan’s Mawdudi, “is that it makes no distinction between spiritual and secular life.”

Mawdudi was particularly effective in articulating this vision of history and politics. He taught that Islamic history after the seventh century was therefore “un-Islamic”—a shocking assertion, rejecting as it did centuries of impressive achievements of Islamic society in the sciences and arts, culture, and the building of powerful empires. Those achievements did not impress him, and he found fault with the manner in which, throughout history, as Islam spread to new regions of the world, it had found expression through local cultures. Such compromises he thought had altered the true meaning of Islam. He also dismissed the moral efforts and spiritual accomplishments of the countless Muslims who had lived by and handed down their faith’s teachings across all those centuries.

Mawdudi did not preach violence; on the contrary he argued that the goal of an Islamic state would be achieved by a steadfast process of proselytizing. To Mawdudi fundamentalism was all about a practice of educating; he would write and give speeches, argue and persuade, and his followers would do the same. The process would be slow and tedious, but by this means, more and more believers would be converted, until everyone was in the fold. The Islamic state would then follow naturally. He told his followers in 1941, “we desire no demonstrations or agitations, no flag waving, slogans, or the like … [for us] such display of uncontrolled emotions will prove deadly. … You do not need to capture your audience through impassioned speeches. … but you must kindle the light of Islam in your hearts, and change those around you.” There was more than a pinch of elitism here. Mawdudi wished first to convert the educated—professionals, bureaucrats, and intellectuals; the same class upon which Ataturk and Reza Shah had pinned their hopes. If the best and brightest converted to Mawdudi’s cause, then an Islamic state could not help but follow, he argued, as the educated elite would be running the state.

His teaching was also not expressly antidemocratic. The Islamic state was not conceived of as a true democracy, but through tautological reasoning, Mawdudi and his followers did claim that their Islamic state would be democratic. If democracy is a cherished quality in a state, then the Islamic state must by definition have it too, so Mawdudi described his imaginary republic as a “theodemocracy” or a “democratic caliphate.” The state’s duty was not however to enact the will of its citizens but to make sure that its citizens followed religious dictates in their daily lives. Mawdudi assumed that this in itself would win the state popular support. After all, he argued, in a gemlike example of the closed-circuit rhetoric at which fundamentalists excel, if a state truly reflects God’s will and its citizens are good Muslims, then how could they possibly want otherwise or disagree with their rulers? If you offered sovereignty to the people, they would give it right back, assuming they had been properly educated in what is expected of them. Fundamentalism is therefore not, in its own mind, antidemocratic; it merely thinks democracy is irrelevant.

Mawdudi doesn't sound all that different from a million other revolutionaries—religious or secular—who have no use for democracy until everyone is properly (re)educated and therefore can be expected to vote the approved way.

Rising Primacy of Sistani among Shia

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2840-63:

Fundamentalism and extremism speak to the Muslim world’s deep-seated yearning for change. Sentiments that decades ago supported leftist ideologies across the Muslim world today fuel Islamic ideology and more so the extremist interpretations of it. Look and listen closely and you can see Lenin’s ghost standing behind Khomeini, and an undertone of Che Guevara in bin Laden’s bluster. Bin Laden is not quite as dashing as Che, and al-Qaeda is far too steeped in jihadism to have come up with a really good T-shirt, but still it has attained glory as the iconic flag-bearer of resistance in the postcommunist world. It appeals to those who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, still yearn for revolution. Until violent jihadism meets the same fate in the many pockets of the region where it is currently wreaking havoc that Islamic revolution met in Algeria, many Muslims will continue to see in the jihadi fighter a compelling representative of their hunger for success and respect. This is why the effort to quash radical groups is vitally important and must be sustained. But fundamentalism has also been changing from within, recognizing the limits of revolutionary violence and turning attention instead to participation in elections and to winning over converts by championing the cause of social justice and representing the interests of the poor in the political system, providing much-needed social services. With the putting down of Islamic revolts in state after state—Egypt after 1981, Syria in 1982, Algeria after 1991, and most recently, Saudi Arabia after 9/11—many fundamentalists conceded that the creation of Islamic states was no longer in the cards. The call for an Islamic state was not entirely abandoned, but increasingly it was recognized as a distant prospect, and social activism took over as the work at hand. Many popular clerics have also stepped up to denounce violence in the name of Islam, especially in the wake of 9/11. Even Shia fundamentalism, which was the force behind Khomeini’s fashioning of the Islamic Republic as the domain of clerics and which sees politics as inseparable from Islam, has been moderating.

Three decades after the Iranian Revolution, it is not Khomeini’s heirs who are the most popular voices of Shia faith, but the quietist Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, who sees to the affairs of his community from his perch in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq. Sistani stands for the older Shia tradition, which holds that, absent the return of the messiah, the Mahdi, the ideal Islamic order is not within the realm of the possible. Clerics, he says, should merely see to it that the state does not repress Islam or violate major Islamic teachings, and should otherwise leave politics alone. Since 2003, Sistani has gathered an impressive following and is today the most venerated and influential Shia cleric not only in Iraq, but far beyond. Shias from Detroit to Delhi embrace him as their “source of emulation.” Even in Lebanon, where Shiism is usually associated with Hezbollah, most Shias follow Sistani. That is also now the case in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Even in Iran, observant Shias have turned to Sistani.

Secularist Delusions in Revolutionary Iran

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2325-50, 2372-87:

The chasm between the Shah and his people had become glaringly obvious. What was less clear, but equally important, was a chasm between the communist and socialist visions for the country of the secular intellectual elite and the middle-class professionals and the hopes of the ardent lower-class followers of Khomeini. At least the chasm was misunderstood by the secularists. Among the secular agitators against the monarchy, clerics and their followers were widely regarded as harmless hangers-on to the great bandwagon of revolution. The secularists failed to perceive both Khomeini’s true intentions, and the surging momentum—and force in numbers—of the backing for him among the teeming urban and rural lower and working classes. The exploding numbers of urban factory workers had no infatuation with the ideologies that fascinated the middle class; Khomeini’s populist call for freeing Iran of dictatorship and spreading the oil wealth among the population is what appealed to them.

Azar Salamat studied at Berkeley in the late 1960s, and there joined radical Iranian students agitating against the Shah. When she went back to Iran in the late 1970s she was determined to do Lenin’s work, spreading the gospel of communism, organizing the working class, and setting Iran on the path to a communist revolution. With comrades in tow she would visit factories on the outskirts of Tehran looking for the proverbial proletarian laborers to convert to the cause. Workers on their lunch break listened politely to the Marxist harangue, humoring the young idealists, but understood little about dialectical materialism or capitalist exploitation. Communism was an alien tongue; so “when we turned to leave,” remembers Salamat of one telling lunchtime encounter, “one of them called to us, waving his hand. ‘Bye bye,’ he said in English, grinning with amusement. Nothing seemed to express more clearly the foreignness of our contingent to those workers whom we thought our natural allies.”

It was as if years of thinking secular thoughts and following secular ideologies had blinded these secular activists to reality. They correctly perceived that their support for Khomeini was vital in building widespread support for a revolution. Leftist jargon did not percolate down into society very well, and the revolution needed the support of larger numbers—of the poor and traditional Iranians who looked to the clergy for moral and political leadership. But the secularists failed to appreciate the intensity of Khomeni’s mission to establish an Islamic state, or to think through what would be in store for them if and when the clergy took power.

Secular revolutionaries stayed deliberately silent on the issues of Islamic government and Islamic law, hejab and women’s rights, and engaged in little discussion of how individual liberties, economic aspirations, and democratic goals could be affected by clerical rule. This absence of serious discussion in speeches, rallies, meetings, manifestoes, media, and everyday conversations is astonishing on reflection. So strong were their opposition to the Shah and their trust in the clergy—their conviction that the only issue that mattered was ridding Iran of the Shah—that they forgot all about those other hard-earned cultural freedoms that were so vital to their lives and future. When they did finally wake up to the reality of the revolution, it was too late....

With the revolution triumphant throngs of class warriors banded together in revolutionary committees and militias, and backing Khomeini’s cause, came out of slums and working-class neighborhoods, bazaars, and poorer quarters of the city to claim their prize. They were quick learners. None knew what dialectics of history was about or what Marx had penned in his Das Kapital. Khomeini had taught them it was not necessary to convert to Marxism to be a revolutionary; it was more important to make the revolution Islamic.

The middle-class pro-communist and pro-democracy protestors were shocked by the numbers of Khomeini’s forces and their zeal, and they quickly came to understand they were outgunned. The clergy drew large crowds to demonstrations day after day, and even larger numbers to voting booths for a national referendum and constituent assembly elections that were to decide the fate of the revolution. The middle class cringed at the takeover unfolding, and efforts were made to better organize and resist. But leftist and pro-democracy rallies were disrupted by club-wielding thugs, who also stormed Tehran University to purge it of leftists. When in March tens of thousands of middle-class women poured into the streets to demand freedom of dress, vigilante thugs attacked them. Pro-democracy forces formed a new party, the National Democratic Front, and at first large crowds showed up at its rallies. But after only a few confrontations with Khomeini’s stone-throwing and club-wielding mobs, the Front melted away.

Downsides of Kemalism

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 1902-23:

Looking back over the decades since Ataturk and Reza Shah ruled we can see that much in way of economic development and social change has been achieved in the Middle East. Kemalist presidents, kings, and generals unified countries, and built roads, modern school systems, and hospitals. But those authoritarian regimes also often lost their way, succumbing to the temptation of despotism, and in the process growing corrupt. The leviathans they created also stifled market forces and hindered true economic change.

Top-down modernization had its limits. States can do things faster and more efficiently than markets, but only to get things moving; they are notoriously bad at managing economies once they are out of the gate. Kemalist states did not know when and how to stop growing, and that was their undoing. Unchecked by parliaments and unaccountable to the people, the Kemalist states have lived up to the saying: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Kemalism never had a problem garnering support in the West. Defenders of Kemalism, such as the historian Bernard Lewis, had hoped that by promoting secularism and modernity the state would serve as handmaiden of democracy, believing that modernity must come before democracy, especially given Islam’s strong hold on the structures of power, and the hearts and minds of the populace. Democracy would have to follow dictatorship.

But by the 1970s, Kemalism was running aground everywhere. The state remained imposing, but its modernizing edge was gone. The juggernaut of swift reform, secularism, and rapid change had ground to a halt. Accolades for the state and trust in its ability to transform society and economy had given place to widespread cynicism and doubt among the populace. In the Arab world modernizing states became platforms for the dynastic machinations of strongman presidents; their best-functioning institutions—impressive in their efficiency—became their dreaded mukhabarat, intelligence and security services.

One of Kemalism’s legacies is pent-up rage among the lower classes, to whom so few of the economic benefits flowed, and who greatly resented the assault on Islam. This pent-up rage has in time inflicted much travail on the region—as well as on the West. It was the driving force that tipped the balance of power toward fundamentalism in the Iranian Revolution, and it has been the fuel driving the support around the region for Islamic extremism. Crucial to Kemalism’s failure to generate more robust economic growth, and to distribute economic benefits more equitably, was the manner in which it bred a highly dependent, rather than entrepreneurial, middle class.

Wordcatcher Tales: Catenary, Ka‘auila, HEA

Catenary – In a coffee-table book I purchased recently at a collector's fair, I discovered a new term for what I've always just called the overhead wires that power streetcars or trolley buses. The book, Streetcar Days in Honolulu, instead employs the technical term catenary, no doubt following prevailing usage in the records of the Honolulu Rapid Transit & Land Company. It's a fascinating book for anyone who has spent as much time riding Honolulu's TheBus system and researching local history as I have.

Ka‘auila – In the same book, I also discovered the Hawaiian word for ‘streetcar’, ka‘auila, which turned up in the name of the company newsletter, Ohua Ka‘auila. ‘Ōhua means ‘retainers, dependents, servants, inmates, members (of a family), visitors or sojourners in a household; passengers, as on a ship’ and the neologism ka‘auila bears only a coincidental resemblance to what one might imagine car and wheel to look like when borrowed into Hawaiian.

The noun ka‘a ‘wheeled vehicle (carriage, wagon, automobile, car, cart, coach, buggy)’ derives instead from the ka‘a that means ‘to roll, turn, twist, wallow, wind, braid, revolve’ or ‘rolling, twisting, turning, sloping’ (< Proto-Polynesian *taka). I first encountered this word in the Hawaiian placename Pu‘u ‘Ualaka‘a (‘hill + sweet potato + rolling’, with Hawaiian ‘uala ~ Māori kūmara) for the hillside nowadays more commonly called Round Top.

The earlier meaning of uila was ‘lightning’ (< PPN *‘uhila, with PPN *‘ and *h both lost in Hawaiian), which was later extended to mean ‘electricity; electric’. So ka‘auila is literally ‘vehicle-electric’.

HEA – Honolulu Estimated Arrival is a new service of TheBus that allows passengers to track bus arrivals at any particular stop electronically via Google Maps. The acronym (or initialism) was crafted to match the Hawaiian question word hea (< PPN *fea), which translates as ‘which’ when it follows a noun, or ‘where’ when it follows a locative preposition. So the catch phrase to promote the new service is the Hawaiian question Aia i HEA ke ka‘a ‘ohua? (‘there at where the vehicle passenger’) ‘Where is the bus?’ The answers, the HEA times, can be found at http://hea.thebus.org/. Not bad, eh, for a municipal transit authority?

Wordcatcher Tales: Totok vs. Indo-European Dutch

Two books about Indonesia that I've recently blogged excerpts from have discussed divisions between newcomers and local-born, assimilated expatriates in the former Dutch Indies.

In Bittersweet: The Memoir of a Chinese Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century, local-born Chinese are referred to by the Malay/Indonesian word peranakan (< anak 'child'), whose other meanings include 'of mixed ethnicity or cultural orientation' (therefore 'creole'), 'hybrid (of cattle)', or 'uterus, womb'. By contrast, the newly arrived (F.O.B., Issei, etc.) immigrants are called totok, meaning 'pure, full-blooded' in Malay/Indonesian.

The Malay/Indonesian word totok is also used in Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 to refer to Dutch expatriates newly arrived from the Netherlands. But the contrasting formal term used to designate the local-born Dutch expatriates is "Indo-European" (rather than the perhaps too informal Indo) in the English translation, apparently following later endonymic usage by the same group during the era of rising nationalism during the 1800s.

The following excerpt (pp. 221-222) from a chapter entitled "The Underclass" expands upon upper-class Totok attitudes toward their "Indo-European" inferiors:

The inclusion of the Mestizos and the poor whites in the category "European" was a legal and, to some extent, a cultural question; but despite this incorporation, a vast social gulf remained between rich and poor. Newcomers expressed their discomfort (caused by the lower-class Europeans) by mocking those born in the Indies, particularly Indo-Europeans. Interestingly, just as it had been a century earlier, it was not the Mestizo men but the women who came in for criticism. Johannes Olivier, who travelled in the East between 1817 and 1826, referred — like his 17th- and 18th-century predecessors — to the "loose manners of the female Liplaps [half-breeds]". At the same time he admitted that "there are some exceptions, and indeed certain of the Creole girls are truly beautiful, with souls as pure as their skin is white". Skin colour would frequently be related to inner purity. This same Olivier, who was expelled from the colony in 1826 on account of drunken and unseemly behaviour, returned to the Netherlands and became head of a boarding school in Kampen. He saw fit to air his prejudiced views in his own periodical De Oosterling, the oldest journal about the East Indies to be published in the Netherlands. In it he made fun of the garbled Dutch spoken by the "coloureds".

Olivier was, of course, a colonial snob, horrified (at least, on paper) by racial mixing and contact between European men and Indo-European or Indonesian women. But he was one of many. Feelings arising out of racial prejudice would often be expressed in moral terms, cloaked in arguments of public decency and educational standards. Thus, in 1835 the commander-in-chief of the Dutch Indies' army Hubert J.J.L. Riddel de Stuers wrote of Indo-Europeans: "They possess the bad characteristics of the European, combined with those of the Indonesians. They take after their fathers in their excessively lascivious ways, and by their mothers they are brought up in idleness. How could they possibly turn out good?" What De Stuers was describing here was the notion of the hybrid, a concept that took firm root in the later 19th century. It had its origins in biology, where it was used co refer to the crossing of two breeds of animal, implying the combining of two pure strains. As used here, it seems to mean the combination of two "pure" racial types. It is striking that the hybrid apparently combines most remarkably all the bad qualities of the two parent races from which it is composed." Although the term "hybrid" never became part of everyday speech, it was certainly widely used in the Indies and contributed to the racial stereotyping associated with the European underclass. Many expressions came into everyday use ro refer to the poor (Indo-)Europeans, for instance, Liplap, blauwtje (blue-hued), sinjo (for men), nonna (for girls), petjoek (a cormorant), Indo and the accepted "correct" term inlandse kinderen, which means literally, "native children".

Besides the ever-present prejudices, there also developed a social vision in which the various offshoots of the European clan were deliberately drawn closer to the European community. In this process, the long history of the Dutch presence in the East Indies and the fact that most government jobs were filled by Indies-born Europeans were both highly significant. Indeed, the Indische element in colonial society was so overwhelming that it would have been impossible to exclude on explicit grounds the Europeans born in the Indies.

Ahmadinejadonomics

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 1345-1405 (reviewed here):

There is no question that Ahmadinejad has been the biggest individual beneficiary so far of the regime’s crackdown on reform. The fuel behind his electoral victories, and the reason for his appeal to the Supreme Leader, was his raging populist anger that the benefits of the economic reforms had not made their way down to the lower classes. During the 2005 campaign, he said little about the thorny nuclear issue and even less about religion and cultural freedoms. Instead he railed against corruption and the suspect wealth of clerics (including most famously Rafsanjani, who was running against him). Ahmadinejad vowed to halt privatization while protecting the consumer subsidies, price controls, and labor laws that were popular with those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Asked about his intentions regarding women’s rights, the aspiring candidate said: “People think a return to revolutionary values is only a matter of wearing the headscarf. The country’s true problem is employment and housing, not what to wear.”

When he became president, Ahmadinejad followed through with sound and fury in clamping down on the private sector. He shoved aside the normal economic-policy agencies and put monetary, budget, and fiscal matters under the president’s office. He then used that control to print money with no regard for the inflationary consequences. Iran’s money supply soon ballooned by a staggering 40 percent. His office also used its discretionary authority over planning and budgets to hand out contracts large and small to allies and favorites. A series of central bank governors resigned in protest—the last to go accused the president of mismanagement and plundering bank reserves.

To combat the growing problems Ahmadinejad proposed price controls as well as tightening the regulation of banking and credit markets. He even mused aloud about the benefits of abolishing interest (which despite all the talk of Islam’s ban on usury has remained the foundation of banking in the Islamic Republic), in the end settling for rates a good 10 and 15 points below the rate of inflation. Those who could withdrew their savings and bought real estate at home or abroad; those who could not saw their money dwindle amid Ahmadinejad’s flood of devalued currency. Salaried workers and pensioners suffered most. Ahmadinejad cared little if he was scaring businessmen into sending billions out of the country. At one point, he said that Iran’s economic problems would go away if a few people from the stock market could be stood up in front of a firing squad. The economic sanctions that his wild rhetoric helped to attract seemed to concern him even less. Capital investment, especially in manufacturing, dried up. Production fell, and by 2008 many factories were working at less than half their capacity. The money that was flowing into land speculation and property development was causing higher real-estate prices and construction costs—the latter dealing an especially heavy blow to a country that desperately needs to build up its basic infrastructure.

Ahmadinejad flaunted his lack of concern with economic planning and numbers; to him inflation and unemployment were alien concepts. He once told a reporter that he got his economic news from his neighborhood butcher (when that butcher too complained about inflation to a newspaper, Ahmadinejad closed the paper). Ahmadinejad’s game was raw populism. Why not bribe the poor for their support when there are so many more of them than there are of those wealthy Iranians who live in prosperous enclaves and depend on the private sector? He almost tripled government spending from $15 billion to $40 billion. Everywhere he traveled he promised public projects, and then decided to do more, to take wads of cash and checks to rallies and distribute them among well-wishers. Pensioners may have had a hard time making ends meet, businessmen may have faced a credit crunch, but all the poor needed to do to get a home loan was to write to the president’s office.

The steady rise in oil prices between 2005 and the third quarter of 2008 made this populist spending spree affordable. With dollars from oil sales flooding in, Ahmadinejad could afford to focus on currying favor with the voting masses while putting off hard economic decisions, and the Supreme Leader could afford to stand by and watch as Iran’s president shredded his country’s economy. Ahmadinejad used government contracts funded by the oil windfall to bolster his favorite businessmen and grease the Revolutionary Guards, whose support was essential to his political survival. The private sector changed shape, breaking down into the president’s preferred insiders (who got the contracts, cheap loans, and government support), and everyone else. The high oil prices made it seem, to the undiscerning at least, as if Iran could afford a political strategy masquerading as an economic policy.

When oil prices were peaking in 2007–08, Iran brought in $250 billion in petroleum income. Yet by the time prices fell off the table as a credit crunch cooled the global economy drastically in the second half of 2008, there was no more than $25 billion (some estimates run as low as $9 billion) of this left in the country’s cash reserves. Where did all that money go? Not to growth-promoting investments, but to populist causes near and dear to Ahmadinejad. As 2008 came to a close, Iranians found themselves staring into an economic abyss. The official rate of inflation was 27 percent (the real rate is almost certainly higher). Unemployment ran far into double digits too, possibly as high as 35 percent (the government admits to 20 percent). Merchants and salaried workers complained, and labor unions took to protesting for higher wages. The poor began complaining that their government handouts were not going far enough, and wanted more. The exceptionally cold winter of 2007–08 and a drought the following summer had caused first a fuel shortage and then an electricity deficit (Iran relies on rivers and dams for a good portion of its electric power). The depth of unhappiness manifested itself in September 2008, when merchants shut down bazaars across Iran for three days to protest a new sales tax. Growing government spending under Ahmadinejad had made the country dependent on oil prices in the $90 range (Iran claims its budget assumes $37) to stay in the black, and no one could say when prices that high would return.

Such a reversal in economic fortunes can be a powerful impetus for regime change. When a period of boom in Southeast Asia ended in the Asian financial crisis of 1997, many governments came under pressure. Anwar Ibrahim led a serious but unsuccessful challenge against Prime Minister Mahathir in Malaysis, and in next-door Indonesia, the Suharto dictatorship unraveled. The global crisis of 2008 and the massive drop in oil prices that it brought have buffeted Iran—which relies on oil for 80 percent of it government revenues—and could well have far-reaching political consequences beyond the summer of 2009 protests.

The last time Iran went through a boom-to-bust ride on the oil rollercoaster, there was a revolution. That will not likely happen again, but the downturn could end the current detour down the blind alley of populism and spark renewed interest in economic reform, privatization, and a viable private sector. Government spending (including subsidies that equal 25 percent of annual GDP) are a drag on the economy. Falling oil revenues and mounting government expenditure leave little room for complacency. The government will have to tighten its belt, shrink in size, and look to the private sector to create jobs, generate tax revenue, and grow the economy; and that will require private sector–friendly policies.

Translator Dynasties in Dutch Java

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 115-118:

Despite the concerns of the government in Batavia about the planters in Surakarta, and the occasional uprising of a discontented populace — as in 1855 — things were generally settled and satisfactory for both colonial rulers and landleasers. The lease of land put money in the pockets of the inhabitants of the Principalities, and most of the planters treated the local residents in a less arbitrary manner than did the apanage holders. The European presence became more and more accepted. Indeed, the leaseholders were essential for all parties: for the Dutch officials who thereby increased their influence; for the royal courts, who made money from the system; for the local population, who probably experienced an initial improvement in their living conditions; and, finally, for the business life of Semarang, because the Principalities formed a good market for imported goods. Even Europeans who were not leaseholders profited from the commercial activity in the Principalities. Most of them in Yogyakarta found employment on the plantations, while one-third of the European male population worked in the civil service. A handful of Europeans set up as tradesmen or ran a shop.

There is nothing to support the view that the Javanese and European worlds, like oil and water, refused to mix. Daily life contradicted this notion. Nevertheless, an aspect of colonial ideology chose to emphasise the distinction between the rulers and the ruled. It thus became part of the colonial structure to have translators render speeches into the local language on ceremonial occasions when royalty, colonial civil servants and planters gathered. Translators who were recruited from the local European community were known to be the confidants of both residents and Javanese royalty. Their position was one requiring tact and delicacy. It would seem that many translators saw themselves more as part of the local royal court than as colonial civil servants. This might explain why Johannes Gotlieb Dietrée, interpreter in the residency of Yogyakarta from 1796 to 1825, was Muslim.

In the Principalities, and especially in Surakarta, the study of languages became a family tradition. Best known among these linguistically oriented dynasties are the Winters and the Wilkenses. Carel Friedrich Winter was born in 1788 in Yogyakarta and moved to Surakarta when he was seven years old. There, his father, Johannes Wilhelmus Winter, was appointed a translator for Javanese languages. The young Carel Friedrich did not seem to be learning much at school, so his father taught him at home, and in 1818 the young man became an assistant translator at his father's side. When his father left for Semarang in 1825, Carel Friedrich remained in Surakarta as a translator. Three years later he assumed the extra task of secretary at the newly established Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. This was followed in 1829 by his appointment as the director of the brand-new Institute for the Javanese Languages in Surakarta. This institute had been set up to teach Javanese languages to employees of the Binnenlands Bestuur ['Interior Administration']. When the institute was closed down in 1843, Carel Friedrich lost his position. There had been an inspection of the institute by four residents, who had produced a devastating report on the quality of education there, and on Carel Friedrich as a teacher. His command of Dutch was judged to be very poor, and because he was "a son of the country" (an inlands kind) he failed to gain the respect of the students, who all came from the wealthy Netherlands and Indische bourgeoisie.

Despite all this, when a new training college was set up in 1843 in Delft, the Netherlands, for civil servants to be employed in the Binnenlands Bestuur, they could not do without Carel Friedrich Winter and his proficiency in Javanese. The professor of Javanese in Delft, Taco Roorda, was undoubtedly a great linguist, but he taught a language that was not his own as a medium of daily speech. He benefited greatly from the assistance of Carel Friedrich, who made a large number of translations for him. It would seem that despite Carel Friedrich's sporadic elementary schooling, his Dutch was not so bad after all. This also appears in the translations he made of official documents, which have been preserved in the archives. The linguistic scholar Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk remarked somewhat maliciously in 1864 that Roorda was not teaching Javanese, but Winterese. Carel Friedrich earned his place in the history books, however, when the susuhunan [ruler of Surakarta] granted him permission to bring out the first Javanese-language newspaper, named the Bromartani, which was intended for the aristocratic circles of Surakarta. The newspaper contained scientific articles, economic reports, announcements of births and deaths, notices about forthcoming public sales of household effects, and advertisements.

In most cases, translators are seen as go-betweens, but they were go-betweens for the government only in their capacity as translators of official documents and for ceremonial occasions. They were not normally required to act as intermediaries when Europeans and Javanese met. In Yogyakarta, in particular, there were close and warm relations between the leaseholders and the sultan.

Dutch Mennonite Industrial Pioneers in Java

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 125-126, 134:

The story of the [Karel] Holles and the [Eduard and Rudolf] Kerkhovens in Priangan would appear to bear little resemblance to that of the aristocratic lifestyle of the landed gentry of West Java or the leaseholders in the Principalities. In Dutch historiography they are described as hard-working Dutch Mennonites who started growing tea in primitive circumstances and were proud of their social involvement. Their style of entrepreneurship however, was not essentially different from that of the paternalistic rule of the powerful landowners of West Java or the leaseholders of the Principalities. The Holles and the Kerkhovens were, like the first generation of planters in the Principalities, forced to move between various cultures and lifestyles in order to acquire the necessary knowledge capital and labour force. Just as in the Principalities, contacts with a British trading house were crucial; in this case it was the firm of John Peer & Co. in Batavia. This firm introduced the Holles and their Kerkhoven nephews to tea cultivation in British India, which was at that time far more highly developed than in the Dutch East Indies.

Holle earned fame as an expert in the Sundanese language and as a promoter of local agriculture. He published many articles on both these subjects, and his brochures were translated into Javanese by the Wilkens and Winter families. In acknowledgment for his groundbreaking recommendations about rice cultivation and his contributions to the reform of government-directed coffee production in Priangan, in 1871 Holle was decorated with the title of Honorary Adviser for Native Affairs. An intriguing aspect of the Holle story is his well-known friendship with Muhammad Musa, chief penghulu (Islamic religious leader) of Garut, whose sister he was to marry. More mundane, but equally important, was the fact that without his knowledge of Sundanese, Holle would never have been able to grow a single row of tea bushes. Whereas in the Principalities (unpaid) labour of the Javanese peasantry was generally included, as it were, with the lease of land, in Priangan Holle had to recruit his workers himself. Hence he set up small shops and provided housing for his loyal employees — which included the women tea pickers. Incidentally, other landholders in West Java had already done the same thing. Like the legendary Major Jantji, Holle too created his own image; he was wont to wear a turban and flaunt precious rings on his fingers. In this way he demonstrated that — notwithstanding his simple lifestyle and approachability — he was also the tuan besar, the great lord. Although his business collapsed in the great crisis of 1884, the image of him as a benevolent landlord survived after his death, and a monument was unveiled in his memory This too, fitted into the tradition of the Indies, where similar monuments had been put up for other memorable landlords.

Such monuments suggest the specific manner in which certain landlords wished to be remembered in Sundanese history — that is, as development workers avant la lettre [i.e., before the term existed]....

The sugar barons of the 19th century have received scant applause from historians. They gained their wealth from exploiting slave labour (as in the Caribbean) or corvée labour (as in the Principalities). Easily won wealth turned them into bloated and reactionary bosses, a picture that continues to persist. Leaseholders are still seen as a curb on the development of modern production methods. But in fact, the Creole sugar planters in both the New World and the Old were usually forward looking and up-to-date with the latest technology of steam and steel. The planters and commercial entrepreneurs in Central Java who built a railroad track to transport goods to the coast had been preceded by the Cuban sugar producers. Both groups understood the political and technological signs of the times. In 1870 the leaseholders of the Principalities went ahead and founded the Indisch Landbouwgenootschap (Agricultural Society of the Indies), which had its headquarters in Surakarta and by 1874 already numbered 669 members throughout Java. It published its own newsletter run by Frederik Adriaan Enklaar van Lericke, an indigo planter in Surakarta. We shall meet him later in the role of a propagandist for agricultural colonies for the benefit of impoverished (Indo-)Europeans. The newspaper DeVorstenlanden started in 1870 in Surakarta, advocated the interests of the planters. It was no coincidence that these initiatives appeared at roughly the same time: they evidenced a growing self-awareness and the increasing role of science in agricultural industry.

I suppose one could make a similar case for the sugar barons of Hawai‘i—if they hadn't taken over the government as well.

Anti-Chinese Laws in Indonesia, 1950s

From: Bittersweet: The Memoir of a Chinese Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century, by Stuart Pearson (National U. Singapore Press & Ohio U. Press, 2008), pp. 125-127:

Under the provisions of the Round Table Conference which decided the terms of Indonesia's Independence, the sensitive matter of citizenship for its 70 million inhabitants was also resolved. Native Indonesians automatically became Indonesian citizens while Eurasians could accept Indonesian nationality or the nationality of their European forebears. Likewise, peranakan Chinese, that is Chinese born in Indonesia, had a choice between Indonesia or China, but totok Chinese, that is Chinese born outside Indonesia, were ineligible for Indonesian citizenship.

In reality it was not that simple. I believe the Indonesian Government wanted to rid itself completely of Chinese, so they structured the arrangement in such a way that everyone who had not accepted Indonesian citizenship by December 1951 was automatically regarded as an "alien" and therefore liable for expulsion. In practice, however, most Chinese in Indonesia (peranakan and totok alike) ignored this government direction and continued living in the country with their nationality unresolved.

Throughout the 1950s the Government imposed progressively harsher legislation to force the issue of nationality and Indonesia became increasingly more difficult to live in if you were ethnically Chinese. After 1954, a succession of discriminatory government decrees officially sanctioned anti-Chinese prejudices which had never been far below the surface. Priority was given to financial and other government support for pribumi (native) enterprises at the expense of Chinese businesses. New laws prevented Chinese from purchasing rural property (1954), owning rice mills (1954), or studying at University (1955) and in 1957 Chinese-operated schools were forced to close. In 1958 newspapers and magazines printed in the Chinese language were banned.

Then there was a Presidential Order (Peraturan Presiden No. 10 of 1959), instigated at the insistence of some Muslim politicians, which banned Chinese from participating in any form of retail trade in rural areas. This latest edict was catastrophic! Chinese in their hundreds of thousands earned their livelihoods from trading, just as many Chinese before them had done so for centuries, but this decree suddenly denied many Chinese in Indonesia a right to earn a living. The only way out was for Chinese traders to bring indigenous Indonesians into the business at senior levels or else the Government would shut them down. For many Chinese firms, having Indonesians "freeload" as board members or senior management was a very unpalatable demand. A large number of firms decided to cease trading and leave Indonesia. These included one of the wealthiest trading houses in Indonesia at the time, Kian Gwan, which anticipated nationalization by sending my older brother to organize the transfer of some of its assets to Holland.

In 1960 Indonesian and Chinese governments belatedly ratified their Dual Nationality Treaty of 1955, giving the estimated 2.5 million Chinese Indonesians two years to decide their nationality. The Indonesian Government accompanied the directive with enforced name changes and other anti-Chinese measures. If the Chinese did not take up Indonesian citizenship and change their names, essential services and government pensions would be denied them and life would become even more difficult. Through these measures an estimated 1.25 million Chinese living in Indonesia were classified as Chinese citizens in the early 1960s and approximately a tenth of that number actually departed.

For Indonesians however, this plan was less than a complete solution. Over a million people of Chinese ancestry living in Indonesia thereby became Indonesian citizens and with their new nationality became safe from expulsion, though certainly not safe from further discrimination. Chinese Indonesians were issued with new identity cards that included their racial origins. People frequently used these new identity cards to discriminate against the Chinese, such as placing restrictions on travel inside and outside Indonesia and having to notify authorities when guests stayed in your house. Chinese Indonesians, like us, were becoming prisoners in our own country.

People who held on to their Chinese names found their utilities, such as electricity, phone, gas, water and garbage collection, suddenly cut off. The emergency services of fire, ambulance and police would not respond to calls of assistance. Then they found that they could not get a job or, in a growing number of cases, could not keep their jobs if they persisted with their Chinese names. All in all it was becoming burdensome to sustain a Chinese name, which of course was exactly what the Government wanted.

We felt that we had no choice. If we were to exist in Indonesia, we had to accept Indonesian citizenship, which also meant renaming ourselves. For many others this was the last straw and they chose to leave instead. During the early 1960s over 100,000 Chinese departed overseas, with the People's Republic of China being the main destination. The resultant loss of commercial expertise sent the economy into a dramatic downturn. My husband and I discussed these developments quietly amongst ourselves as public comments often resulted in the loss of one's job or even arrest. We had a real sense of sadness and concern. First the Dutch had been forced out of Indonesia causing instability and now the Chinese were being forced out, which was causing more instability. For us and many others who thought likewise, Indonesia appeared to be on a downwards spiral towards political and economic ruin.

One Chinese Family under Japanese Occupation in Indonesia

From: Bittersweet: The Memoir of a Chinese Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century, by Stuart Pearson (National U. Singapore Press & Ohio U. Press, 2008), pp. 79-81:

One member of the Kempeitai who had the rank of Captain visited us regularly from the district headquarters nearby at Jember, where the main bulk of hundreds of soldiers were in barracks.

While the infantry soldiers busied themselves protecting assets of value to the Japanese war effort, including our rice mills, he took charge of the civilian administration in our district. He assumed control of the existing system of colonial administration and the Wedana (District Head) reported directly to him. He also quickly established a network of paid informers to report to him on any anti-Japanese activities. Being both investigator and adjudicator in one, he had unlimited power to punish individuals, families or entire communities. Punishment ranged from fines, withdrawal of privileges such as food rations and imprisonment to, in extreme cases amputation or execution.

Our Kempeitai officer favoured occasional public displays of violence to maintain order. He was not interested in minor forms of punishment. Being the only man responsible for civilian order in a population of hundreds of thousands, his preferred method of operation was the occasional amputation, strangulation, or decapitation. Yet he was kind to us. We looked after him every time he visited and he could see we were treating the billeted soldiers very well, never provoked them, and always ensured that an agreed amount of rice was delivered to the Army.

The regular presence of the Kempeitai officer did produce one unexpected benefit. Previously, our rice mills had experienced losses due to grain theft. In fact, most mills across Indonesia suffered similarly. However, with the arrival of the Japanese, the overall crime rate dropped dramatically, including theft of grain from rice mills. For this action alone, most people including my family were grateful.

Because there were more Chinese in Indonesia than Dutch — two million compared with about a quarter of a million — the Japanese could not arrest and intern all Chinese. Moreover, they needed our expertise to run things just as the Dutch had done before them. The majority were allowed to continue working as they had before, but were now answerable to new masters. The unstated rules in our household were simple and rigidly adhered to: respect the Japanese, treat them well, and do as they say without question. Then, hopefully, they would not harm you.

Nevertheless, the treatment of the Chinese was purely arbitrary and was entirely dependent on the local Japanese commander. In some regions of Indonesia I heard that the Chinese were brutalized, tortured, and even killed, but around Tanggul we made sure that the Japanese were treated well and we never had any problems. The family heard that my brother Tan Swan Bing, who before the war had been promoted to a senior position with Kian Gwan Trading Company in Semarang, had been interned and his house ransacked. We were all worried about his safety and that of his wife Huguette, who had just given birth to their third child.

We were told later that, by a strange twist of fate, a senior officer of the Kempeitai came across my brother when Tan Swan Bing had been imprisoned for about six months and learned that my brother spoke fluent Dutch, German and English. The Kempeitai officer was busy pursuing a PhD, which required the translation of German documents. He released my brother on the condition that Tan Swan Bing would help him complete his thesis. From that point on, my brother and his family received preferential treatment and they lived out the duration of the war without coming to any further harm.

Like me, my younger brother, Siauw Djie, returned to Tanggul from Semarang when all the Dutch schools were closed by the Japanese. He married his long-term girl friend, Khouw Mi Lien, in 1942 and turned to my parents for financial support. He said he could not find any paid work, did not know what to do and expected our father to help him. This dependent attitude was so unlike that of my sister and older brother, who never asked for parental assistance, even though they suffered much hardship on their own, including internment. I found this particularly weak of Siauw Djie but my father, who had always spoilt him, gave Siauw Djie a paid position in the rice mill to help him.

I never thought for one minute that the Japanese actually liked the Chinese. There had simply been too much bloodshed in the decade-long war in mainland China for that to happen. In Indonesia, I guess they tolerated the Chinese out of necessity. However, in our specific circumstances in Tanggul we managed to cultivate a friendly relationship with the Japanese that was like being a good and faithful servant. We were never equals, but at least the Japanese were kind and pleasant towards us, as long as we never did anything wrong.

Dutch Burghers Left Behind in Colombo, 1796

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 81-82:

The British and Dutch Burgher communities lived — quite literally — separate lives. The British settled inside the walled fortress of Colombo, while the Burghers lived in the city. An eyewitness describes an atmosphere of cool friendliness: "They meet seldom, unless on public occasions, when they are mutually friendly and agreeable to one another. Intercourse of this nature does not occur sufficiently often to breed intimate acquaintance, or lasting attachments." Yet as early as 27 August 1796, a short six months after the British occupation of the city, the first marriage was celebrated between a young woman from a Burgher family and an Englishman. And more were to follow. In addition, little by little the British fluttered forth from their entrenched position and started to rent houses in the city and surrounding districts from the impoverished Burghers.

Although we have little information about the material circumstances of Burghers in the 18th century, it is evident that after the British occupation many fell upon hard times. Before February 1796, most of the Europeans had been working for the Dutch East India Company; now they had to make ends meet in some other way. Anyone who owned land would try to manage by selling coconuts, areca nuts and palm wine, and by renting out houses to the English. Burghers gradually gained modest positions in the government, since they were very useful to the British, providing a cheap source of labour and being well acquainted with the island. The Burghers, who lived mainly in the colonial centres and traditionally worked for the government, continued to be a community of civil servants. Several prominent clergymen and lawyers emerged from their midst, but on the whole they held posts in the lower ranks of the law courts and various administrative government departments.

With the arrival of the new authority in Ceylon, the social position of the Burghers changed. Just as, 150 years earlier, high-ranking officials in the Dutch East India Company had looked down upon the Portuguese, so after 1796 the "Dutch Burghers" were dismissed by the British as a "mixed-race breed" with extraordinary habits. Only very gradually did a mixed British-Ceylonese community develop; hence, for a long time the local Mestizo community remained synonymous with the term "Burgher". Their sense of unity was strengthened by their loss of status and the arrogant attitude of their new masters. Already under the Dutch East India Company the Burghers had regularly approached the government as a group, demanding certain rights and privileges. They continued to do so under the British. They were concerned about the erosion of their social standing, as exemplified by their (privileged) custom of keeping slaves, their educational privileges, and their job opportunities, which were being threatened by the emerging class of well-educated Sinhalese and Tamils. However, they seem to have lacked a strong sense of Dutch identity. When in the mid-19th century the Burghers began to voice their own political and cultural agenda in the press, it was not to Dutch examples that they turned, but rather to British models, and they found inspiration in antiquity and the rise of nationalism in Europe. It was chiefly Burghers who supported the founding of the newspaper Young Ceylon in 1850. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy movement for the unification of Italy, Young Ceylon voiced the thoughts of a rising elite of Burghers and cautiously promulgated the sentiments of Ceylonese patriotism. It was an expression of the intellectual ambitions of a young generation imbued with Western culture yet maintaining a markedly Ceylonese perspective. Like the newspaper's founders, Charles Ambrose Lorenz and the brothers Frederick and Louis Nell, most of those working on the newspaper were descended from Dutch East India Company employees, although there were also a few Sinhalese involved.

Trade Between Makassar and Arnhem Land

Last month, while watching Ten Canoes (via Netflix), a docudrama tale of traditional life among the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in Australia's far north (charmingly narrated by the familiar voice of David Gulpilil), I recognized two Malay loanwords in the dialog: balanda 'white people' and rupiah 'money'. The former comes from the Malay word for the Dutch and other Europeans, Belanda < Hollanders. (A common Malay-language name for the long-nosed Proboscis monkey is monyet Belanda 'Dutch monkey'.)

After hearing these loanwords, I thought, "Aha! Evidence of Malay contact with Australia during the Dutch colonial period." But now I see that this contact has already been well documented.

Slavery in the Dutch East Indies, 1600-1800

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 46-47:

While Mestizo communities were growing rapidly in the colonies in South Asia, Java and the Moluccas, things were looking very different in Batavia. Here the social spectrum was, in a manner of speaking, weighed down under the burden of two opposing immigrant streams. On the one hand were the large numbers of newcomers from Europe. They continued to occupy the upper ranks in the Dutch East India Company, fashioning their world with their conventions and status norms. Among the newcomers were thousands of soldiers living in the garrisons who were not permitted to marry. On the other hand, the city swarmed with slaves who had been brought there from neighbouring regions and who, after manumission, filled the ranks of the urban proletariat. During the 17th and 18th centuries between 200,000 and 300,000 slaves were transported to Batavia. Indeed, the majority of those living in Batavia had a background of slavery. Inside the city walls, where about 20,000 people lived, at least half the population were slaves and 10 per cent were Mardijkers [interesting etymology!—J.]. Most of the extramural communities also consisted of former slaves and their children. The demographic effects of the slave trade were enormous: when slavery was abolished in 1813, population growth ceased for a long time.

The Europeans were the largest group of slave owners. There are no statistics recording how many slaves there were per household in Batavia, but figures from other comparable cities can offer some idea. In Colombo in 1694, 70 per cent of the slaves were owned by Europeans, with an average of almost 11 slaves per household; on Ambon these figures were respectively 59 per cent and almost five. In Batavia the Mardijker community fluctuated with the number of Europeans in the city, which suggests a close correlation between the number of Europeans and the emancipation of Christian slaves. There appears to have been an almost insatiable demand for slaves. The whole of Batavia — from the company's dockyards to household personnel, from orchestras to agriculture — depended on slave labour. The ubiquitous slaves also provided easy sexual contacts for their owner. Presumably, sexual relations between masters and their slaves were so common, and so much a matter of course, that they were seldom given special mention.

Slavery left other traces on the pattern of urban life. It was customary for Europeans to baptise their slaves. This practice took off after 1648, when baptised slaves were admitted to the religious celebration of the Lord's Supper in the Dutch Reformed Church. In Protestant churches it was not the sacrament of baptism but that of the Lord's Supper (Eucharist or Holy Communion) that admitted a person into the community of Christian believers. Furthermore, many Batavian Europeans took pride in emancipating their baptised slaves. They would usually do this in their wills. Some of the emancipated slaves would, not surprisingly, be the natural children of slave women and European fathers. Once they had been baptised and emancipated, these former slaves merged into the Mardijker community. The Mardijkers were a flock of varied plumage. Initially, most of the slaves in Batavia came from India and Bali. This changed between 1660 and 1670, when the VOC halted its slave trade from India and Pegu (southern Burma) and, after the capture of the southern Sulawesi kingdom of Goa, channelled the extensive slave-trade network from Makassar to Batavia. The slaves of Indian origin living in Batavia quickly became a minority group. After some decades, this shift in slave supply areas resulted in the establishment of a Malay-speaking church in Batavia. The slaves from India tended to speak Portuguese, and the lingua franca in most households with slaves would probably also have been Portuguese. Thus, after their emancipation, slaves from India as well as the East Indies joined the Portuguese-speaking community. Between October 1688 and February 1708 there were 4,426 people accepted into the Portuguese-speaking church, while in the Malay-speaking church the number is no more than 306. With time, the Portuguese language began to fade out of use, and so during the 18th century the balance shifted. In the 1780s each year saw about 30 people joining the Portuguese congregation, while 31 were accepted into the Malay church.

Extraterritoriality for Everyone

From: Being "Dutch" in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 4-5:

Segregation and extra-territoriality — the principle that foreign merchants were subject to their own laws — had many advantages. The local ruler had to negotiate with only a few representatives rather than each individual trader. Maintaining law and order — especially when it had to do with family and inheritance law — could be left to the internal authority of the immigrant community. And the advantages were all too clear for the foreign merchants: they were able to continue living under their own laws. "Legal pluralism" — that is, different groups falling under different legal systems and authorities — was characteristic of the fragmented power relations in the cities and states of South and Southeast Asia. The highest authority was the king, but he was not all-powerful. He had to deal with courtiers, regional governors, religious leaders and the representatives of foreign merchants. Each one of these had their own followers, their own servants and their own slaves who remained outsidethe reach of the central ruler.

The distribution of political power was reflected in urban space. In Ayutthaya large communities of foreign merchants lived in ban (villages or districts) situated just outside the city walls. At the close of the 17th century we find mention of communities from Gujarat (Hindustanis), Coromandel (Moors), Pegu, Malacca (Malays), Makassar, Cochin-China (Vietnamese), China, Japan, Portugal, France and the Netherlands. Each of these communities had its own headman; the large Chinese community even had two. However, although in theory the ethnic groups seemed juridically and spatially segregated, daily reality was somewhat more complicated than the above might suggest. Foreigners and their descendants were not prevented from gaining access to the Siamese community. The extensive "Portuguese" settlement — outside the city walls and facing the Dutch trading post — was peopled by "a Portuguese race descended from black women"; in other words, Mestizos, children with a Portuguese father and a Siamese mother. In other communities, too, there was considerable mixing between travellers from abroad and local women, again resulting in children of mixed parentage.

The mixing went beyond family relations; some foreigners even attained high-ranking posts at court. At the end of the 17th century, for instance, the royal guard of Ayutthaya was composed of a couple of hundred Persians, while for three successive generations the chief minister (chaopraya) came from a Persian family, only to be followed by a Greek. Other first ministers were of Indian, Chinese and Mon descent. The king of Siam also employed Englishmen — for instance, as harbour master. Evidently, the king preferred to employ foreigners in key positions, since they did not command a large band of followers who might pose a threat to the throne. But their difference stopped there. Nowhere do we find the suggestion that these families behaved as foreigners. On the contrary, it seems that they adapted themselves to the culture and customs of the Ayutthaya court. They married into Siamese families and ultimately became totally assimilated.

Along the coast of the Malay peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago, the pattern of segregation and mediation was essentially no different from that in Siam. The city of Malacca, which during the 15th century thrived on the expanding international trade and attracted many foreigners, appointed four syahbandar (harbour masters) to maintain contacts between the local government and various trading communities, and also to administer justice and act as military commanders in times of war. The syahbandar appointed from the Gujaratis of northwest India was described by the Portuguese traveller Tome Pires as "the most important of them all". Then there was a syahbandar for the merchants from Coromandel, Bengal, Pegu and Pasai (in north Sumatra); one for the foreigners from Java, the Moluccas, Banda, Palembang, Borneo and Luzon; and, finally, one for the Chinese and other traders from the East.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ayutthaya and Malacca were among the largest cities in Southeast Asia. Travellers from Europe estimated the population of these places to be as large as 200,000 — although in reality the number would have been closer to 10,000. But whatever the actual figure, there is no doubt that these were bustling emporiums, where a foreigner was not an uncommon sight. There was a prevailing pattern of segregation, but we cannot say with any accuracy how strictly this was applied.