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Photographic subjects examines photography at royal celebrations during the
reigns of Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948–80), a period spanning the
zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It is the first monograph in English
on the Dutch monarchy and the Netherlands’ modern empire in the age of mass and
amateur photography.
This book reveals how Europeans and Indigenous people
used photographs taken at Queen’s Day celebrations to indicate the ritual uses
of portraits of Wilhelmina and Juliana in the colonies. Such photographs were
also objects of exchange across imperial networks. Photograph albums were sent
as gifts by Indigenous royals in ‘snapshot diplomacy’ with the Dutch monarchy.
Ordinary Indonesians sent photographs to Dutch royals in a bid for recognition
and subjecthood. Professional and amateur photographers associated the Dutch
queens with colonial modernity and with modes of governing difference across an
empire of discontiguous territory and ethnically diverse people. The gendered
and racial dimensions of Wilhelmina’s and Juliana’s engagement with their
subjects emerge uniquely in photographs, which show these two women as female
kings who related to their Dutch and Indigenous subjects in different visual
registers.
Photographic subjects advances methods in the use of photographs
for social and cultural history, reveals the entanglement of Dutch and
Indonesian histories in the twentieth century, and provides a new interpretation
of Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs. The book is essential for
scholars and students of colonial history, South-east Asian and Indonesian
studies, and photography and visual studies.
were made in imperial settings. Monarchy, photography and the Netherlands East Indies Queen Wilhelmina was by no means alone in never personally touring her colonies. Queen Victoria also preferred to stay at home. Nevertheless, royal tours were increasingly common in these queens’ lifetimes: the Belgian Prince (later King) Albert travelled to Congo in 1909; the Italian King Vittorio Emanuele III visited Somalia in 1934 and Libya in 1938; no fewer than eleven British royals toured Ceylon, from the 1860s to 1947
she had received from the people of the Netherlands East Indies: a costly bracelet made from South African diamonds set in the pattern of a crown flanked by two garuda birds. 6 Perhaps the bracelet and the jaunty young queen reminded Van Baal of better times. For in 1955 Dutch New Guinea was the last remaining outpost of the Netherlands’ former empire in Asia, which had reached its modern zenith during Wilhelmina's reign, but was formally dissolved within a year of her heir
This volume’s title, Monarchies and Decolonisation in Asia , appears to suggest a linear progression in the histories of colonies. Yet monarchies existed in Asia prior to colonial rule, and in many places they continued to exist under colonialism. Decolonisation in Indonesia, for instance, has proved to be a rejection of both indigenous and colonial forms of rule. The colony known as the Netherlands East Indies ended up as the Republic of Indonesia in 1945, 1 and yet it is worth noting that the larger, colonial-era political organisations of the 1930s
Photographs of games and competitions, traditional dances adapted to new purposes and the distinctive costumes of folk and ethnic ‘types’ at royal celebrations appeared frequently in the photographs of European elites throughout the Dutch colonial world. 3 In the Netherlands East Indies, such photographs attest to the labour migrations encouraged or coerced by Dutch colonial agriculture and industry. They depict the mixed and mobile Indonesian communities whose cultural forms were given a space for display at festivals for
Special Region amid the general disestablishment of sultans and rajas in Indonesian local politics during the 1950s. The Japanese occupation, 1942–45 Japanese forces occupied the Netherlands East Indies, displacing the Dutch, from 1942 to 1945. The Sultan of Yogyakarta and the ruler of Pakualaman used the Japanese occupation of Indonesia to strengthen their legitimacy by implementing reforms that would prove useful during the formation of the Yogyakarta Special Region. First, Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX of Yogyakarta and Pakualam VIII sacrificed their traditional
. Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, 300-plus ethnic groups, sultanates and statelets merged piecemeal into a single political entity through actions of the Dutch over three centuries. Today’s Republic of Indonesia is the successor state to the colony known as the Netherlands East Indies and has the same boundaries. Older history books narrated Indonesian history as a series of broken sequences. Opening chapters began
counterparts in the British empire, the men appointed as governors-general of the Netherlands East Indies often had a class-based affinity with the Dutch crown. 13 Of the ten men who served during Wilhelmina's reign, half were aristocrats themselves, mostly jonkheeren (noblemen) and one graaf (count). 14 Governors-general were answerable to the Dutch parliament through the Minister for the Colonies in The Hague. But in the Indies, much like the viceroys of British crown
armed services, or military commanders in bitter dispute with civil administrators. In the Netherlands East Indies by the 1920s, tension between the army and navy was such that the former was in constant fear that it might be reduced to a mere gendarmerie. The RAF, desperate to maintain its autonomy, frequently fell foul of the military in the 1920s as it argued its case for a role in the Middle East and
et al., Photographs of the Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2012); and the Dutch East Indies collection at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, outlined in S. Protschky, ‘Personal albums from early twentieth-century Indonesia’, in G. Newton (ed.), Garden of the East: Photography in Indonesia 1850s–1940s (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2014), pp. 48–55. On the development of photography in the Netherlands, see F. Bool et al. (eds), Dutch Eyes: A Critical History of Photography in the Netherlands