Land en Volk van Java was the brochure by H. van Kol, published shortly before 1897, on the condition of Java and its people, which was cited repeatedly in the Atjeh debate both by its author and against him by the Minister of Colonies J. T. Cremer.
The estimate of the cost of the war
Van Kol told the chamber on 16 November 1897 that in that brochure, “een paar jaar geleden,” he had given the sum of the extra expenditure caused by the Atjeh-oorlog: from 1873 to the present some eleven hundred million had been spent on army and fleet, and since expenditure before the war had been at most thirty million a year, the extra outlay over twenty-five years amounted to three hundred and fifty million guilders, of which only a small part had been spent on Lombok and elsewhere.
He added that in a review in Insulinde Van Heutsz, then an assistant-resident, had objected that to this must be added all the extra expenditure of the civil administration, leave allowances, search vessels, travel and subsistence costs and part of the pensions.
Cremer’s use of the book against its author
Cremer quoted the brochure twice against the socialist conclusion. He noted that on p. 32 Van Kol had assigned to capital an important share in the task of bringing the Indies to development: “Geld en kapitaal is er noodig. Geld om spoorwegen en irrigatiewerken aan te leggen, geld om fabrieken te bouwen, industriën te scheppen, het grootbedrijf in den landbouw in te voeren, die nog in alle opzichten zoo ontzaggelijk veel moet verbeterd worden en nog in zijne kindsheid verkeert. De natuurlijke hulpbronnen voor volkswelvaart moeten tot ontwikkeling komen, het thans overbevolkte Java moet millioenen nieuwe bewoners kunnen voeden.” He used the passage to show a divergence between Van Kol and Troelstra on the employment of Dutch capital in the Indies.
He quoted p. 63 at greater length for Van Kol’s rejection of Multatuli’s demand “De Hollanders er uit!”, which Van Kol had said the socialists would deeply regret, since the worst Dutch administration was better than the best native administration known, and since the departure of the Dutch would mean enthroning tyranny, renewing extortion, bringing back barbarism and delivering the population to robbery and plunder. Cremer observed that those words applied to Java but that the ending seemed to him “als te zijn geknipt voor Atjeh.” — as though cut out for Atjeh.
See Also
- H. van Kol
- J. T. Cremer
- Multatuli
- Insulinde
- Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz
- Atjeh debate in the Tweede Kamer (16-17 November 1897)
- Java
- 1897
Source
Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898, uitgave van de Sociaaldemokratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br P95-178, pp. 10, 50–52.
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898 (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.