Abstract
Reviewed by: Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Despite their global span and impact, European colonial empires were not cosmopolitan but quintessentially national projects. States were key actors in an increasingly interconnected capitalist world and the late nineteenth century was a time of both intense globalization and of nation-states shoring up the boundaries between citizens and aliens. This basically paradoxical relationship between nationalism and globalization is articulated most pervasively in colonial projects. It is the central theme of this book on Dutch colonial history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Its 12 contributions are organized in three sections. The first is about Dutch agents in cosmopolitan worlds, in which they needed to negotiate their ‘Dutchness’. The second deals with networks and the third is about the colonial institutions. One could say that the sections increase in terms of gravity.
Gommans opens the debate on cosmopolitanism, globalization and Dutch agency in the first section of the book. He inverts the idea that we should consider merchants as cosmopolitan and courts as nationalist, thereby linking merchants to national projects. However, these Dutch merchants could hardly make an imprint on societies overseas. This point is illustrated by contributions in this book on the tiny merchant communities in the Ottoman Empire, in Nagasaki, Canton and a solitary merchant in Southeast Sulawesi. All these actors had to negotiate their way in a world where European colonial power did not amount to much. All in all, the most visible impact of early modern Dutch trading companies were the segregated niches they were able to carve out in Asian cosmopolitan worlds.
The next section on networks is particularly interesting where it discusses technological innovations. The rapid spread of telegraph cables in South and Southeast Asia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was one of them. For contemporaries, it was a sensational experience to see information travelling across the globe within hours. The repercussions for Dutch control of its colonial possessions were mixed, however. Although the telegraph kept the Ministry of the Colonies in The Hague informed about the tiniest incidents in the Netherlands Indies almost instantaneously, which facilitated its increasing grip on the colonial administration, newspapers used the telegraph too and spread information among Dutch readers in Europe and Asia as well as readers abroad. Technology thereby both empowered colonialism and undermined it, both enabling colonialism as a Dutch project and exposing it to external scrutiny. A more or less parallel development was the creation of the extensive semi-governmental maritime transport system, the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM). In the heyday of Dutch colonial rule, this connected about 200 ports throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The KPM was a crucial vehicle in the establishment of the Pax Neerlandica both in military and economic terms. At the same time the opening up of the ‘Outer Islands’ of the Netherlands Indies – a typically Java-centric colonial term for all islands except for Java and adjacent Madura – inserted them into the global economy, turning them into mass producers of rubber, tobacco, copra and, last but not least, oil. With their technology-driven character, networks are not dependent upon the nation-state and can easily turn from national into transnational. Consequently, colonial institutions were always fraught with tensions and inherently unstable as the third section of the book shows.
The Dutch empire had to cope with two cosmopolitanisms, we learn from this book. The first more or less coincided with the old colonialism of the trading companies, whereas the second attended the new colonialism of territorializing colonial states. The first cosmopolitanism ruled the world, in which the Dutch established enclaves where they could apply their own rules, although by far the majority of these enclaves were fragile and their boundaries permeable. The second cosmopolitanism came in the shape of globalization driven by fast communications and cheap transport.
Since Dutchness in the colonial context is more or less squeezed between the hybridizing forces of old pre-Napoleonic globalization and modern late nineteenth-century technologically driven globalization, it is worth asking what exactly ‘Dutch’ means in the colonial context. Dutch in the colonial empire was heavily creolized and had its provenance in a number of European countries, Gommans emphasizes. One can conclude from this book that Dutch colonial presence was driven by mercantile interests, diluted and lacking a mission civilisatrice. But was it not precisely because of their wariness of a colonial mission and their unstinting quest for colonial gain that the Dutch could maintain themselves as a small country in Europe surrounded by strong and jealous neighbours? In this excellent and enjoyable overview of Leiden scholarship on Dutch colonial history, the European context of the metropolis is conspicuously absent.