Amsterdam and Slavery: also in Asia

During the last months at least three important books have appeared on the history of Indonesia. I will later write some words on the comprehensive and rather literary works of Van Reybrouck and Bossenbroek. All three books under discussion start with (quite negative) judgments about the past. Of course, there is an opinion that academic study of history should explain how a development grew, how it must be explained against the background of its own time, not as seen by modern, critical observers some centuries later. That is value-free writing of history. It seems that there is a tendency, where ethical values of the 21 century may play a role as well. This is definitely true for this book on Slavery in East and West: the Amsterdam Research, published by Pepijn Bradon, Guno Jones, Nancy Jouwe and Matthias van Rossum in Amsterdam, Spectrum, 2020, 448pp. The book was ordered by the city council of Amsterdam, in preparation for  public apology to be expressed in 2021 for the active role people and institutions in Amsterdam had in support of the absolutely despicable institution and practice of slave-making, slave-trade and related matters. In 38 chapters here, besides introduction and conclusion, more than 40 authors write some kind of indictment of past aspects of Amsterdam history.

The book is part of the long process of growing consciousness about the global practice of slave-making and Dutch participation in it. Most studies in this field are related to the Dutch part of the trade in slaves in the Atlantic area: African people, taken slave by raids and wars in West Africa who were brought to the Caribbean and areas of North and South America, where the Dutch town on the island of Curacao and its colony of Surinam played their roles, where plantations after the 1670s until the early 1860s worked with slaves.

People are seldom absolutely free: they work for other people in order to receive salaries, they worked because they were in debt, but the most drastic loss of self-control and freedom is seen where not only labour can be asked and ordered, but where human bodies and persons are sold as if they are things: that is the ethical and philosophical anger behind this book. Pages 24-25 give all kind of definitions of slavery.

In the town of Amsterdam few real slaves were found, but institutions like the United East India Company (VOC) and the West India Company (WIC) were responsible for the practice of slavery. Matthias van Rossum (chapter 1: on the VOC) has a short review of the easy adaptation of the Dutch VOC traders in societies of Asia, where slaves were part of transport and trade. As early as 1603 Cornelis de Houtman published a Malay-Dutch dictionary with words like slave (hamba) and 'to catch people' (tawan orang), while the word mardeka was used for free persons, who were not slaves. The nutmeg culture on the Banda Islands was served by slaves, after Jan Pieterszoon Coen had killed nearly the full original population in a holocaust of 1621 (p. 58). Wim Manuhutu wrote about Amsterdam (called here Mokum) and the Moluccas, where the VOC defended a monopoly on the production and trade of cloves. In the 19th century in Java the cultuurstelsel was common, a system of obligation for villages to produce specific products (sugar, indigo,tea, coffee) for the world market and where some kind of slavery became part of the system (forced labour up to 200 days per year). There was for many time also a debate about freedom of human beings and the necessity to abolish slavery. Nowadays there is a plea for a society of memory, resulting in monuments, books like this, moral and even financial recompensation.

Multatuli as a Catholic (for some days? months?)

 Eduard Douwes Dekker, better known as Multatuli (1820-1887) is best for his novel Max Havelaar (1860) about a colonial official in the period 1840-1855 who was not corrupt, who defended the rights of poor people against the Dutch colonial system, but also against the native Javanese feudal rulers. He is generally considered as the most prominent Dutch author, at least for the 19th century. Besides the great novel about the basic evil of the colonial system, he wrote theatre plays, essays on many subjects (Ideas) and even more letters. The Complete Works/Volledige Werken count 25 volumes, each of some 800 pages! After being against colonialism, he also was the first famous, self-confident and aggressive atheist of the Netherlands, fighting religion in many of his pages. However, there was a development in this personality and even a short 'Roman Catholic period'. 

He was born in a Mennonite (anabaptist) family, where baptism of children was not the practice.To become member of the religious community was a personal choice. It was quite common to be baptised at the age of 18 or even later. Although Multatuli was educated in a pious Mennonite family, he never was baptised in this church. His father was a captain on a boat sailing to Indonesia and at the age of 18 he arrived in Batavia where he became a minor official at the finance ministry of the colony. The young man here fell in love with a Catholic girl, Caroline Versteegh, who probably was in a boarding school in the colonial capital. Her father worked in a plantation, 30 km south of Semarang. It would be impossible at that time to marry the Catholic girl, without converting to Catholicism and so we may understand that Eduard Douwes Dekker (later better known as Multatuli) was baptised on Saturday 28 August 1841 in the chapel of the government hospital of Batavia (by lack of a proper church or even Cathedral). The father of Caroline, however, did not take this conversion serious: Multatuli was fond of fighting and gambling, had serious financial debts and showed lack of discipline in some of his duties. The marriage never was effectuated.

There is an interesting article on the contacts of Multatuli with Prefect Apostolic Joannes Scholten (1797-1865). In mid-1841 Multatuli showed much sympathy for this 'gentle and nice person' who was already in bad health. During the time Scholten suffered of typhus, the young official Douwes Dekker took care for him, watched him at his bed. Also several letters of the correspondance between the two have been saved. As late as the early 1870s, thirty years after their meetings in Batavia, Multatuli wrote four nice and emotional pages in his Ideas (Volledige Werken VI:243-246), in which he praised Scholten as the brave and helping army chapain during the Java War. - There is a special journal Over Multatuli, where Wilfried Dierick wrote an interesting article 'Een 'roomsch' intermezzo' (vol 17:1986, 28-41). While reading this (also through the  summary in the biography of 2002 by Dick van der Meulen), I saw again that my three volumes on Catholics in Indonesia, 1808-2010 have very little information about the European and Eurasian Catholics in the colony. I concentrated on the start of the great Indonesian group of Catholics, although they were until 1920 still a minority! So,  this may be seen as a small correction to my earlier research on Catholics in Indonesia.