V. Problems of Comparison: Colonial India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century

Extract

On the face of it, there ought to be many similarities between the heyday of imperialism in South and Southeast Asia. Both areas, it can be said, experienced a long period of colonial rule, and in both cases the European regimes grew out of the enterprise of small trading companies who had ventured to the Indian Ocean area in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in search of exotic items for trade. In both cases the subsequent history proves something of a surprise, for who could have foretold that a quest for the odd shipload of spices or of cotton cloth would lead, quite unexpectedly, to very small North European nations establishing dominion over very large and populous areas of Asia. In both cases, the English and the Dutch only gradually became involved in the acquisition of territory in Asia, and their involvement owed less to an aggressive assertion of superior European economic and technological might than to an insidious and creeping entanglement with the indigenous governments they found established. However, in retrospect, as the traditional historiography has it, the English in India and the Dutch in Indonesia became more and more involved in local politics and moved implacably from trade to rule. With the shift in emphasis came new imperial politics. The emphasis which had once been limited to securing tropical products and commodities for resale in Europe, switched t o broader concerns of economic development. Imperial governments were always expected to cover their own costs, and what underlay their activities were attempts to integrate colonial and home economies and to make them complementary to each other.