Being Dutch In The Indies

Being Dutch in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a Creole empire. Most of colonial society, up to the highest levels, consisted of people of mixed Dutch and Asian descent who were born in the Indies and considered it their home, but were legally Dutch.

Kees van Dijk examines how in 1917 the atmosphere of optimism in the Netherlands Indies changed to one of unrest and dissatisfaction, and how after World War I the situation stabilized to resemble pre-war political and economic circumstances.

A revealing reassessment of the American government's position towards Indonesia's struggle for independence.

This examination of the formation of the Indonesian medical profession reveals the relationship between medicine and decolonisation, and its importance to understanding Asian history.

Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. This book, vol. 3 of the series, describes in depth the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago. (copyright: the Corts Foundation).

This is the first comprehensive examination of Dutch colonial literature in English. From the journals and travelogues produced by the early mariners, to the fictional recollections of repatriated colonials after the Second World War, E. M. Beekman's unique and magisterial survey of this major colonial literature places literary figures within specific epochs, provides biographical portraits, and examines works in relation not only to their own genres but also to the literatures and cultures beyond their colonial borders. Written by the leading authority in the field, this fascinating and wide-ranging study is enhanced by a consideration of the general political history of European expansion and of the Dutch East Indies.

This book examines the afterlife of decolonization in the collective memory of the Netherlands. It offers a new perspective on the cultural history of representing the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies, and maps out how a contested collective memory was shaped. Taking a transdisciplinary approach and applying several theoretical frames from literary studies, sociology, cultural anthropology and film theory, the author reveals how mediated memories contributed to a process of what he calls "unremembering." He analyses in detail a broad variety of sources, including novels, films, documentaries, radio interviews, memoires and historical studies, to reveal how five decades of representing and remembering decolonization fed into an unremembering by which some key notions were silenced or ignored. The author concludes that historians, or the historical guild, bear much responsibility for the unremembering of decolonization in Dutch collective memory.

European colonial expansion led to Dutch notions of civilised society, or the Dutch's community's flexible and relatively charitable attitudes toward 'others', being scattered (as in the Greek word 'diaspeirein') to the four corners of the earth. In some cases, the exportation of Dutch cultural values to places overseas, like North America, endowed 'Dutchness' with subtle new meanings. But in colonial Indonesia, Dutch political customs and traditions were transformed in the process of migrating to exotic locales. In this book, Frances Gouda examines the ways in which the Netherlands portrayed its unique colonial style to the outside world. Why were citizens of a small and politically insignificant European nation able to represent as natural and normal their dominance over ancient civilizations on islands such as Java and Bali? How did Dutch colonial residents explain the cultural differences between themselves and the supposedly 'primitive' peoples of the Indonesian archipelago? In trying to understand the 'gendering' practices of colonial governance in the Netherlands East Indies, Gouda also explores the interactions of Dutch and Indonesian women with European men. FRANCES GOUDA earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980. She is currently professor of history and gender studies in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam.