Comparison of English, Dutch imperialism
Published on: Thursday, March 03, 1938
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So interesting and important a work would this appear to be that we print below extracts from a revue which appeared in a recent number of The Crown Colonist.
Professor Emerson’s book forms an objective analysis of the development and present aspect of British rule in Malaya and Dutch rule in the Netherlands Indies.
After introductory chapters describing “the setting of the problem” and the historical background, the author takes first British Malaya and then the former is much the smaller territorially it occupies the greater portion of the book.
In successive chapters Professor Emerson describes the extension of British rule over Malaya, the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated States, the Straits Settlements and Malaya today.
Two further chapters are devoted to the Dutch forward movement, and indirect rule in the Netherlands Indies, while the final chapter sums up the author’s conclusions on British and Dutch rule, with some comparisons.
We should like to give numerous extracts from the 300 pages or so which are concerned directly or indirectly in this detached and independent study with the methods, arms and tendencies of British rule in Malaysia, but this would be impossible, and we must confine ourselves to one or two brief quotations from the conclusion. Every Englishman interested in British Malaya should, however, read this friendly but critical American view of his country’s record there. Referring to education Professor Emerson says:-
In Malaya as elsewhere in the dependent world the denial of political advancement has regularly been justified by the imperial rulers on the ground of the general back wardness, ignorance, and illiteracy of the subject peoples, but such a plea can be accepted only if the imperial government is in a position to demonstrate that it is throwing its full energies into the task of education. That this is not the case in either Malaya or the Netherlands Indies is too obvious to require any elaborate statement.
In both countries the government has, to put it at its mildest, tolerated the draining off of huge profits by private European concerns, has set its own salary, leave and pension costs at a figure far beyond the standards of the country, and has furthermore, under the principle of indirect rule, bought the support of the feudal chiefs and nobility by the allotment to them of huge sums from the public revenues.
These things are the continuing and inevitability accompaniments of imperialism, even though the mass of the populace is either receiving no education at all or so little as to accomplish no more than a most tenuous contact with literacy at its lowest level.
Without blinking the tremendous difficulties inherent in the construction of any scheme of education for alien peoples of a totally different culture pattern, the conclusion must still be that neither the British nor the Dutch have ever seriously set themselves the task of educating their own home populations to be educated.
At the best their schemes do not go beyond – and their actual educational systems are far from reaching – a bare literacy for the peasent and working masses, who must basically not be disturbed in their ignorant contentment with economic insufficiently and alien rule, and the extension of higher education to a selected few who will fill the intermediate gaps between the European aristocracy and the native populace.
In conclusion, he says:-
Imperialism appears always to be committed to perpetuating its own rule unless it is challenged by a force which makes it necessary or expedient for it to withdraw.
It seems the tragic truth that if subject peoples must rely upon the persuasive power of their arts and virtues in the struggle for freedom from imperialist domination their hopes may be deferred until doomsday imperialism has established itself by force and it is normally the persuasive power of force to which it is most responsive.
In the Netherlands Indies relatively far greater strides have been made toward politics independence than in British Malaya, and the essential condition of that advance has been the existence of an increasingly strong and determined nationalist leaders, see as their goal, but the Dutch are being driven forward by the gathering force of the new era.
In Malaya, in part as the accidental result of the British, concentration on making the country profitable by flooding it with alien labour and in part because of its disjointed political structures, no nationalist movement worthy of the name has as yet developed, and there has, in consequence been no tendency on the part of the British to concede even the first elements of political freedom.
Repression
That there is still much which the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya might learn from their imperial masters seems to me a self-evident proposition, but it is by no means so evident that these masters will be prepared to teach them.
“The first essential for the raising of the standard of living, for the awakening of a new sense of freedom and worth, which Europeanisation brings with it for the indigenous masses, for the creation of a fuller, richer, and finer human life is the possession of a government which feels itself to be intimately associated with the native population and its interests.”
No imperialist government being by definition alien, can posses this intimate association with a people and, even if it should be endowed with the most lofty attributes of altruism, it would still fall short of interpreting the will of that people for its own destiny.
The possession of the power of self-government is in the modern world the most vital instrument in the struggle for both economic and cultural survival.
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