Two Colonial Empires: Comparative Essays on the History of India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century

by C.A. Bayly (Editor)

by C. A. Bayly and D. H. A. Kolff The papers published in this volume were originally presented at two meetings of the Cambridg~-Leiden group for the comparative study of colonial India and Indonesia he1d in June 1979 and September 1982. These meetings were jointly sponsored by the Centre for the History of European Expansion at Leiden and the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge. The Cambridge Centre had been restricted to the study of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Nepal but had recently incorporated Southeast Asia into its area of interest; the Leiden Centre, which had encouraged comparative study from the beginning, necessarily found itself concentrating attention on Indonesias as the most important region of the former Dutch colonial empire. The meetings were intended to be exploratory, as much to alert the participants to work being done in the respective countries and to their different types of academic discourse as to compare 'India' and 'Indonesia'. Nor were the meetings intended to be exclusive. Scholars from several British and Netherlands Universities were involved from the beginning. More recently a wider series of conferences has been inaugurated. This brings scholars in India and Indonesia into a project wich seeks to develop the comparisons between the * two colonial societies on a more systematic basis.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

246 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1986

About the author

Christopher Alan Bayly was a British historian specializing in British Imperial, Indian, and global history. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2007 for achievements as a historian.

Reviews

[Hilm · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most readable essay in this volume is by W.R. Hugenholtz, who wrote about Famine and Food Supply in Java 1830-1914. I did not learn of the famine in various years in Demak, Grobogan, etc. in grade school history lessons so it was new information for me.

However I’m fairly disturbed by the presentation of the Dutch colonizers as a government who merely administer a region, almost as if they were comparable to present day democratic government who are accountable to their subjects.

Probably the only reference to the ills of colonization in this book is this anodyne sentence:

“These payments [from the Cultivation System] were not commensurate with the market value of the products or with the efforts required from the planters.”

The above sentence was from C. Fasseur’s essay on the Cultivation System and Its Impact on the Dutch Colonial Economy and the Indigenous Society in 19th Century Java. This essay is also one of the more informative essays in the book, it was well written and structured. Nevertheless, the quoted sentence above was all the more remarkable really because the essay as a whole advocated the reader to look at the Cultivation System more favorably, claiming that it didn't have many negative effects.

I really don’t know how to judge the claims, not having read many literatures about the Cultivation System. I must admit it bothers me a lot though. I know I should probably read more about the Indonesian colonial history.

Comparisons with the British Indian colony in this book’s essays mainly went over my head because my lack of familiarity with the subcontinent.