Abstract
In August 1930, a young woman from Shanghai named Xiao Xian was travelling to Ambon in the Dutch East Indies aboard the SS Tjibadak, a ship of the Netherlands-owned Java-China-Japan Line (JCJL). During the voyage, she made an allegation of sexual assault against two of the vessel’s officers. Although some conservative Chinese opinion attacked Xiao herself as an example of the baleful impact of western influences, her case aroused widespread popular sympathy. When it became clear that JCJL was taking no action, a boycott was called by a front organization of the Guomindang (GMD) Chinese Nationalists, based in Shanghai, on JCJL ships in the key port of Amoy. The GMD used the boycott to ventilate a much wider range of grievances about the treatment of the Chinese minority in the Dutch East Indies, and Dutch attitudes and business policies toward China more generally. JCJL agonized about how to head off the boycott, eventually firing the officers involved, instructing crews to be sensitive in their treatment of Chinese passengers, and seeking to solicit the support of the Chinese community in their colony. It was however not until well into 1931 that the boycott fizzled out. Tragically, Xiao Xian was treated with little support from the Chinese population in Ambon or even from her own family. Finding herself ostracized, she burned herself to death.
The story of Xiao Xian and the Amoy boycott is one of the many fascinating facets of the world of Dutch colonial shipping in the early part of the twentieth century explored by Kris Alexanderson in her book, which makes an excellent contribution to both maritime and colonial social history. Despite the objective importance of shipping to imperialism and the richness of the archives of shipping firms, there are remarkably few studies of particular shipping companies or groups of companies, and their role in imperialism, during the period from about the 1870s to the 1940s. There are of course some notable exceptions, including Michael B. Miller’s magisterial study of several different companies, Europe and the Maritime World, and Frances Steel’s Oceania Under Steam, which is a model of what company-focused studies can achieve. By and large though, the opportunities have been missed by scholars, leaving the history of modern shipping lines to enthusiasts who, though often highly expert, tend to be more interested in technology than people.
In this context, Alexanderson’s rich and deeply researched account of shipping lines centred on the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) as a field of colonial political contestation is much to be welcomed. She focuses on the two main lines running between the Netherlands and the Indies, the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland (SMN) and the Rotterdammsche Lloyd (RL); on the coastal service for the Indies created by those two companies, the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, and the already mentioned JCJL. She also gives attention to the Kongsi Triga organization focusing on carrying Haj pilgrims to Arabia, set up by the SMN and RL together with the mainly British Holt Line-controlled Nederlansche Stoomvaart Oceaan.
Alexanderson’s main interest is in showing how the political contestations between colonial subjects and their overlords played out on the vast maritime spaces open up by these lines. She highlights the fears of the Dutch colonial authorities and shipping companies about indigenous insurgency, whether leftist, nationalist, or Islamic. This became especially intense after the Communist-led uprising in the Indies in 1926–7. Ship’s passengers and crews were subject to the most intense regimes of surveillance, both by captains and officers and by colonial police. Alexanderson gives an outstanding description of the organization of the Haj voyages, demonstrating how the Dutch authorities and company management were preoccupied with the perceived threat posed by the wealthy Hadrami Arab community of the Dutch Indies and the Meccan Shayks who organized the pilgrim parties. The JCJL is discussed in a very interesting chapter which outlines the tensions provoked by the conflicts between the company’s desire to break into lucrative Chinese markets and its fear of Chinese radicalism. There is an insightful account of how the voyages of SMN and RL from the mother country to the Indies served to induct Dutch newcomers into the social norms of colonial society and especially the maintenance of racial boundaries. A chapter on Pan-Islamism and the policing of Indonesian colonial subjects in the Middle East is outstanding: the Dutch operated extensive spy networks, not only along the Haj routes, but also in Egypt, which was a place of particular suspicion, because Indonesian students and intellectuals in Cairo were in a position to produce their own literature. The analysis of the Kamaran Island Quarantine station on the pilgrimage is especially interesting in that this paradoxically filthy ‘health’ facility morphed into a place of political surveillance. The remarkably strong and early emergence of Communism in Indonesia, which connected the careers of such remarkable leaders as the Dutch trade unionist Henk Sneevliet and the later Indonesian national martyr Tan Malaka, provides the basis for a fascinating account of policing. Arms smuggling – whether that of mass quantities of weapons from Europe to customers in China’s civil wars, or small scale trade by sailors and others – is well dealt with, although scepticism about the Dutch police’s tendency to read these activities as a Communist plot is advisable. Finally, Alexanderson points to the tensions between Japan and the Netherlands in the 1930s, showing the extent of Japanese economic self-assertion in the region and Dutch fears about it, and thus enriching our understanding of the background to the coming war.
For all of this, historians of the sea and of colonialism should be grateful to Alexanderson. Having said that however, I had a few reservations about the work. At a pragmatic, editorial level, given the likely (if unpardonable!) ignorance of many Anglophone readers about Dutch colonialism in this period, more general political and social background material would have been helpful. More seriously, the work is, as I read it, grounded in categories of analysis derived from post-colonial theory, and this brings both some important strengths and some significant blind spots. On the positive side, the author brings a deep understanding of the processes of domination and of the ways in which racial categories are constructed and imposed. On the other hand though, some of the tensions in post-colonial analysis are also manifested here. There is a tendency to, on the one hand, present the colonial state as all-powerful and controlling, and yet on the other hand to present colonial subjects as in a constant state of resistance. In fact, much of the specific narrative material in the book does not fit easily into such a polarity, suggesting relationships between coloniser and colonised which involved, along with intense conflict, important elements of negotiation and collaboration. It would not in any way have undermined a recognition of the brutality and racism of Dutch rule to have given greater acknowledgement to this evidence of ambiguous social relationships. The Dutch colonials tend in the book to be analysed as a rather unitary community, again despite quite a number of individual narratives that point in a different direction. Lanver Mak’s excellent study of the British in Egypt points to the added complexity of analysis that can be gained by highlighting the divisions amongst colonizers. The post-colonial turn has to some extent been a turn away from a recognition of how deeply anti-colonial nationalism in the early twentieth century was also linked to the critique of capitalism. The book thus also reflects the relative decline of interest within post-colonial studies, in labour questions. The workforces of the Dutch lines and their work processes get relatively little attention. We do not see that much of the world of the crew quarters, the stokehold, the engine room, the dockside boarding houses or the homes of migrant labourers in the book. We do learn a bit more about the ships’ officers, but one would like to have more of a sociological portrait of them. Lastly, there is a certain ambiguity in the book’s promise to follow the post-colonial theoretical injunction to ‘provincialize’ Europe by exploring the specific dynamics of the maritime world. In fact, there is so much emphasis on the power of the European authorities that it is not really clear to me how far the metropolis is moved to the margins. And though we learn an enormous amount about multiple dimensions of shipboard life, and about the specific problems faced by the Dutch state and companies in organizing their social control across a vast marine theatre, I did not find a sense of real theoretically innovative insights into the specificity of the semi-autonomous world of the ship and its complex relationship to the shore. But the overall value of this splendidly researched and clearly written book is indisputable. It adds substantially to our knowledge of twentieth-century imperialism, and of the ships which were a crucial condition of its existence.