This chapter introduces the theme of our study: how colonial connections impacted womenâs work and household living standards in two parts of the Dutch Empireâthe Netherlands and Javaâin the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It provides an overview of the relevant debates in the international economic history literature and introduces several important concepts, along with the sources and methods this study has employed. This chapter also sets the stage for the rest of this book by illustrating how the metropole and the colony were in many ways similar at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but diverged notably in the course of the colonial period.
1.1 Womenâs Work and Empire
At the start of the nineteenth century, women in the two main parts of the Dutch Empireâthe Netherlands and Javaâwere remarkably economically active. 1 Foreign travellers to the seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Dutch Republic had marvelled at the outspoken presence of Dutch women in the public and economic domain, such as the marketplace and in financial transactions. Recent historical research has confirmed that in early modern Dutch cities at least half of all women performed paid work (Schmidt and van Nederveen Meerkerk 2012). Likewise, contemporaries visiting Java commented on the relatively free and hard-working indigenous women they encountered. In 1817, Sir Stamford Raffles, Governor General during the British interregnum of the East Indies (1811â1816), wrote in his The History of Java that âthe labour of the women on Java is estimated almost as highly as that of the menâ (Raffles 1817, 109). Fifteen years later, a Dutch resident (district ruler) noted: âin general, one sees women here leading a life of heavy labourâ. 2
However, roughly a century later, in 1930, the contrast between metropole and colony was striking. In the Netherlands, married women especially had withdrawn from the labour market almost entirely: only six per cent were registered in the census as having an occupationâa very low figure, even in comparison with other Western European women; and it had been consistently low since the second half of the nineteenth century (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Female labour force participation in several European countries, 1850â1930
Netherlands | Belgium | Denmark | France | United Kingdom | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
% of all women | % of married women | % of all women | % of married women | % of all women | % of married women | % of all women | % of married women | % of all women | % of married women | |
1850 | 24 | 38 | 25 | 30 | ||||||
1860 | 18 | 36 | 25 | 25 | 28 | |||||
1870 | 36 | 25 | 24 | 28 | ||||||
1880 | 34 | 24 | 30 | 25 | ||||||
1890 | 15 | 29 | 26 | 33 | 27 | |||||
1900 | 17 | 5 | 29 | 30 | 35 | 20 | 25 | 13 | ||
1910 | 18 | 8 | 25 | 19 | 30 | 24 | 39 | 21 | 26 | 11 |
1920 | 18 | 21 | 34 | 20 | 42 | 29 | 26 | 9 | ||
1930 | 19 | 7 | 24 | 19 | 34 | 22 | 37 | 26 | 27 | 11 |
In contrast, the recorded labour force participation of married women in Java was around thirty per cent, which is a gross underestimation of the actual percentage, because women working on the family farm were often not registered as gainfully employed (Volkstelling 1931â1934).
How did these remarkably divergent paths of metropole and colony come about? Part of the answer to this question undoubtedly lies in the realm of wider global economic divergence. Like many other Western European countries, the Netherlands jumpedâalbeit relatively lateâon the bandwagon of industrialisation, self-sustained economic growth and increasing living standards for the majority of its inhabitants. Conversely, the Dutch East Indies, like many other tropical regions, increasingly focused on the production and export of agricultural crops and minerals, which favoured only a small part of the indigenous population. 3 However, this book argues that colonial connections , including economic, fiscal and social policies, contributed notably to the growing contrast between womenâs economic roles in both parts of the empire, as well as between Dutch and other European women. To explore this issue, this book makes comparisons, highlights contrasts and draws connections between developments in womenâs work in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indiesâparticularly Java, its first colonised and most densely populated islandâbetween c. 1830 and 1940. I argue that, well into the nineteenth century, the fate of the majority of women in the Netherlands and Java, in terms of their functioning in the labour market, in terms of living standards and in terms of their perceived role in society and the household, developed relatively similarly. From c. 1870, the contrasts between the two groups nevertheless accelerated, although the foundations for these differences were laid in earlier decades, and they were firmly grounded in highly extractive economic policies as well as in racist-paternalist ideology.
Three questions are central: one is more descriptive; the other two more analytical. First, how did work patterns of households, and particularly the role of womenâs economic activities, develop in Java and the Netherlands? Second, to what extent were these developments shaped by colonial policies between 1830 and 1940? And, third, how did womenâs work contribute to the household as well as to the wider economy, in both the Netherlands and Java? The reader will be constantly reminded of the fact that while developments in metropole and colony might both have had partly endogenous and partly exogenous drivers, the role of the intended as well as unintended consequences of colonial policies was highly influential. This particular approach not only lends itself to addressing several important debates in economic and social history that have so far not explicitly been connected, it also has broader implications for the study of womenâs economic activities beyond the geographical scope of the Dutch Empire.
Investigating patterns in womenâs work is important for several reasons. First of all, labour relations , and in particular the position of women in the household and in the labour market, signify not only economic but also important social, cultural and political developments. Labour in whatever form (see Sect. 1.2) is required not only for sheer survival. It was also crucial in colonial relations, and the need for scarce labour in order to obtain the natural resources the tropics had to offer was a constant concern of the rulers of the British, French, Portuguese, Belgian and Dutch empires alike. For Java, this had already been the case in the VOC period (Breman 2010) and became more pressing under the Cultivation System in the period 1830â1870. As I will argue in Chapter 3, womenâs work allocation facilitated the solution to this labour scarcity . Second, in the words of Mrilanini Sinha, âgender was an important axis along which colonial power was constructedâ (Sinha 1995, 11). Thus, from the first colonial encounters, European definitions of appropriate gender roles were used to âdemasculiniseâ colonised men, particularly...