Indonesian Identities Abroad: International Engagement of Colonial Students in the Netherlands, 1908-1931

Abstract

This article describes the forging of networks and the articulation of solidarities by Indonesians in the Netherlands with various other colonial organisations and movements in European countries in the 1910s and 1920s. Living in the centre of the Dutch empire multiple factions of Indonesians, each in their own words and actions, interacted with the world beyond the confines of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Foreign news reports in Dutch-Indonesian journals and concrete journeys of Indonesians abroad will be examined to describe the variety of worldviews within the Indonesian migrant community. The article also demonstrates that the Indonesians in the Netherlands serve as a telling example in the Dutch imperial context of Alan Lester’s remark that ‘colonised subjects themselves could and did forge new, anti-colonial networks of resistance, which similarly spanned imperial space’ (Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4:1 (2006) 134).