The Dutch in Indonesia were by now a second-rate European power-another unshapely piece in the jigsaw puzzle of British dominance in Asia-and their defense relied mainly on security arrangements with their cross-channel allies. In Dekker’s time the Dutch regime in Java sat atop a system of coerced cultivation of high-value cash crops for which the native peasant was paid a cutthroat price set by the Dutch Trading Company, itself a diminutive descendent of far more powerful and rapacious ancestors. Max Havelaar was suppressed in Indonesia till the Japanese drove out the Dutch in 1942, but since then its translations (to every language from Estonian to Urdu) have flourished in the formerly colonized parts of the world. And, at the half-century mark between Candide and Max Havelaar, the widely read Surinam writings and grisly sketches of John Gabriel Stedman (many of them memorably engraved by a yet unknown artist named William Blake ), on the slave revolts, would infuriate and empower abolitionists everywhere. Max Havelaar also reminds one of Dutch colonialism’s peerlessly brutal history.Ī century before Max Havelaar, Voltaire had tested Candide’s optimism by having him cross paths with a mutilated slave in Dutch Surinam. Yet no anti-colonial tract more effectively debunked the, by then, three-century-old system which-tweaked and window-dressed to pacify the progressives of each generation-had enriched Europe while shredding colonized societies everywhere. In a 1999 essay, which serves as an introduction to the new NYRB translation of Max Havelaar by Ina Rilke and David McKay, the preeminent twentieth-century Indonesian writer, Pramaoedya Ananta Toer, called Max Havelaar “The Book that Killed Colonialism.” Ananta Toer’s label is obviously spiced by postcolonial hyperbole-to say Max Havelaar killed colonialism is like saying Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring killed pollution.
In 1856, after an almost twenty year stint in the Dutch East Indies, Eduard Douwes Dekker-arguably the most disgruntled colonial employee of the nineteenth century-returned in disgrace to Europe to write and, three years later, to publish, under the plaintive pseudonym Multatuli ( Multa tuli : Latin for “I have suffered much,” attributed most often to Horace’s Odes ), the mistitled satirical novel Max Havelaar or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. from the Dutch by Ina Rilke and David McKay
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