Next week, I am going on holiday to Indonesia – a long-cherished dream coming true. Of course I am excited about the prospect of exotic markets, vibrant cities, meeting new people, stunning landscapes and drinking cocktails on a palm-rimmed beach. But I am also very curious about what remains to be seen of the Dutch colonial period, as I have read that most of what remains in terms of colonial architecture and archives is ‘crumbling.’ The upcoming trip reminded me of a number of publications on Dutch trade and scientific activities in the colonial era in what was called ‘Oost-Indië’ (East India) or ‘de gordel van smaragd’ (the emerald girdle).

Between 1602 and 1795, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company, VOC) imported great amounts of a variety of goods from what is now Indonesia, such as tea, coffee, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and tin. Many of these goods had some kind of medicinal purpose. Nutmeg for example, was not just appreciated as a spice, but also for its hallucinogenic properties, which were used to keep slaves calm during the long, arduous sea journeys. Although excessive use could cause deliria and even death, nutmeg was a sought-after commodity among medical men and even appeared in preparations of human anatomy sometimes.[1] Yet the Dutch stationed in Batavia (now Jakarta) also wanted to have traditional European cures at hand, and many pills, potions, salves, and herbal plasters had to be made afresh as they could not be kept for long.

“The Castle and the Laboratory at Batavia” From: Batavia de
hoofdstad van
Neêrlands O. Indien, Amsterdam, 1782. Courtesy of the Nationaal Archief.

In a fascinating article on VOC laboratories that I read in a Dutch popular history magazine last year, Jeroen Bos shows that for these purposes, the VOC maintained at least two medical laboratories in Batavia. One was an independent ‘medicinal shop,’ a sort of apothecary shop; the other was the city hospital laboratory. A third laboratory was linked to the artillery and only produced gunpowder. Unlike the contemporary chemical laboratories at the universities of Utrecht and Leiden , the laboratories in Batavia were not aimed at chemistry research, but primarily at the production of drugs and quality control of the products the VOC acquired in the region, such as cinnamon and quicksilver. Unfortunately, hardly any detailed information about the lay out of the laboratories and exactly what was made and tested in them remains.

Andreas Weber’s dissertation

The VOC ceased to exist on December 31st, 1799, as it had run into financial trouble. Yet the Dutch would continue to occupy parts of Indonesia until it became independent in 1945. (Actually, the Dutch occupied parts of Indonesia even longer, until 1949 – a particular painful and unflattering period in our history) Between 1800 and 1945, East India continued to be a source of fascination for researchers working for the Dutch government. German Caspar G.C. Reinwardt (1773-1854) for example, spend about seven years collecting data on the administration, nature and economy of Java, initiated reforms of its public health services and the education system, and established a botanical garden at Buitenzorg, just outside Batavia, where rare and potentially economically interesting plants were cultivated. As my colleague Andreas Weber has vividly described in his book on Reinwardt, the king obliged him to collect rare specimens for the Dutch Cabinet of Natural History on his field trips, and Reinwardt also employed other to amass natural history collections.[2]

Another colleague, Fenneke Sysling, in her 2013 thesis on physical anthropology in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, argues that ideas about race were both made and broken in the colonies.[3] Even today, some Dutch museums have uncomfortably large collections of skulls, skeletons, measurements and photographs of indigenous people, collected to answer the great anthropological questions of the time. How many different races were there in the archipelago, how were they divided over the islands? Questions that could never really be answered of course, but nonetheless the research was done for decades, and could only be done because of the often-violent Dutch colonial presence in the archipelago.

With this knowledge, I will walk around the remains of Batavia. I am not exactly proud of Dutch colonial history, but I am grateful that my colleagues and I have the opportunity to research it. Indonesia has had a huge influence on Dutch trade and science over the centuries (not to mention on Dutch society, but that is another story), one that we should not forget, even if the physical remains of Dutch colonialism slowly disappear from the country.