The Netherlands as an Imperial Power in South-East Asia in the Nineteenth Century and After

Abstract

THE British historian Richard Pares once said that ‘the most important thing in the history of an empire is the history of its mother-country’.¹ We can extend his epigram by saying that the next most important thing in the history of an empire is the history of the territory towards which the expansion of the mother-country has been directed. We can also modify it in as much as the history of an empire may include a phase in which the colony, not the mother-country, assumes overriding and perhaps — for the continued existence of the empire — even decisive importance. As regards the history of the Dutch empire in Asia, we can go along with Pares until the late nineteenth century. The Dutch East Indies were ruled and exploited in accordance with the ideas and needs of the mother-country until 1870, a date which ushered in a period during which the colony’s modern, post-1900 development was prepared and initiated. It is with respect to this later period, and particularly to the years after the turn of the century, that Pares’s statement requires the correction I have mentioned, namely that the importance of the colony to the history of the empire may outweigh that of the mother-country, and may indeed ultimately determine the fate of that empire.