J. B. Wolters — J. B. Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij (Publishing Company) — was the Dutch publishing house of Groningen and Djakarta that served as the publisher of B. ter Haar BzN’s Beginselen en Stelsel van het Adatrecht — the principal systematic account of Indonesian adatrecht — in all four of its editions (1st ed. 1939, 2nd ed. 1941, 3rd ed. 1946, 4th ed. 1950), and of the English translation published in New York in 1948. As the publisher of the standard work on Indonesian adatrecht, Wolters was the principal Dutch metropolitan venue for the publication of colonial legal science, and the imprint of the house on the Beginselen en Stelsel places it at the intersection of adatrecht scholarship and colonial legal publishing.
Role as publisher of the Beginselen en Stelsel
Wolters’s role as the publisher of Ter Haar’s Beginselen en Stelsel is recorded on the title page of every edition. The fourth edition of 1950 carries the imprint “J.B. WOLTERS — GRONINGEN, DJAKARTA — 1950,” and the Voorbericht bij de vierde druk by Soepomo (January 1950) closes with the statement “J. B. WOLTERS’ U.M.” — J. B. Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij. The book was printed at the Boekdrukkerij J. B. Wolters’ U.M. — the printing-house of the same company — and the house thus served both as publisher and as printer of the work. The choice of Wolters as the publisher of the standard work on adatrecht placed the work within the mainstream of Dutch academic publishing, and the dual location of the house — in Groningen and in Djakarta — ensured the distribution of the work to both the metropolitan and the colonial markets.
The dual location: Groningen and Djakarta
The dual location of J. B. Wolters — in Groningen (in the Netherlands) and in Djakarta (in the Netherlands Indies) — reflects the pattern of Dutch colonial publishing, in which the principal metropolitan academic publishers maintained a branch in the colonial capital to serve the local market of colonial officials, scholars, and students. The Djakarta branch of Wolters served the Rechtshogeschool (Law School) at Djakarta, where Ter Haar was Professor, and the colonial legal profession more broadly; the Groningen branch served the metropolitan market of Dutch jurists, scholars, and the interested Dutch public. The dual location ensured that the Beginselen en Stelsel reached both the colonial practitioners who applied the adatrecht and the metropolitan scholars who studied it.
The English translation
The English translation of the Beginselen en Stelsel, published in New York in 1948, was not issued by Wolters but by an American publisher — a detail recorded in Soepomo’s Voorbericht bij de vierde druk: “Intussen is dit boek zelf in het Engels vertaald en de vertaling is in New York in 1948 gepubliceerd, voorzien van een inleidend hoofdstuk over de ethnologische achtergrond van het Adatrecht en over de plaats van het Adatrecht in de organisatie van het rechtwezen in voormalig Ned.-Indië, geschreven door de professoren E. Adamson Hoebel en A. Arthur Schiller.” The translation made Ter Haar’s work accessible to the English-reading public, and it extended the reach of the Wolters-published original beyond the Dutch-language market.
Significance
For AcehWiki, J. B. Wolters is significant as the publisher of Ter Haar’s Beginselen en Stelsel van het Adatrecht — the standard work on Indonesian adatrecht that places the Atjehnese adatrecht within the wider Indonesian legal landscape. The house’s imprint on the four editions of the Beginselen en Stelsel (and on the supplementary literature list prepared by Mr. H. Th. Chabot for the fourth edition) places it at the intersection of adatrecht scholarship and colonial legal publishing, and its dual location — in Groningen and Djakarta — reflects the pattern of Dutch colonial publishing that connected the metropolitan and the colonial markets. The corpus’s entries on the Beginselen en Stelsel and on the Atjehnese adatrecht accordingly cite the Wolters imprint as the publication detail of record.
See Also
- Beginselen en Stelsel van het Adatrecht (Ter Haar, 4th ed. 1950)
- B. ter Haar BzN
- Atjeh adatrecht (Ter Haar account)
- adat
- Soepomo
- Groningen
- Djakarta
- Rechtshogeschool Djakarta
- 1939
- 1950
Source
Beginselen en Stelsel van het Adatrecht, door Mr. B. ter Haar Bzn. Vierde ongewijzigde druk. Groningen, Djakarta: J. B. Wolters, 1950. Title page, imprint, and Voorbericht bij de vierde druk by Soepomo (January 1950).