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4 TheAssault on Indies Culture THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN BATAVIA BY THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, when Baron van Imhoff took office, Indies society was formed. Its culture was clearly not Dutch any longer. Netherlands society at the time may be defined broadly as racially homogeneous, Calvinist, and patriarchal, its cities run by oligarchies of prosperous businessmen and its industries controlled by guilds. Thrift and sobriety were highly prized qualities. Average Hollanders lived in narrow, closed houses and their diet was based on red meats, cheeses, and bread. The upper classes were literate in French and German as well as in Dutch. By contrast, Indies society was exceedingly polyglot in composition, and its "European" elite secular before agnosticism was a common condition in Europe . This spirit did not derive from any intellectual revolt against established doctrine but was the result of life in a transplanted settlement. It was also a consequence of the immediate influence of Asian nursemaids, guardians, servants , and wives. Nor was the colonial elite patriarchal. Landed property did not remain with a family for more than one or two generations; similarly, fathers did not usually pass positions to their sons but sent their heirs to Holland in earliest youth to make them members of Dutch society in the homeland. Economic life was not controlled by guilds of master craftsmen and merchants, but dominated by a monopolistic corporation. The route to wealth lay through promotion to senior posts in the East Indies Company bureaucracy, the office-holder winning at once power, prestige, and opportunity for illegal gain on a vast scale. By the eighteenth century, access to these privileged positions was governed by connections, and the basis of connections was marriage into Indies families. The colonial ruling class was matrilineal in the sense that men passed on posts and privilege to their sons-in-law, the husbands of their daughters whom they kept in Asia. Women-based clans absorbed the immigrant males who came without wiv~s; the clan enfolded the newcomer in a network of immigrants with locally born wives, Mestizo and Asian kin. At the same time, the clan eased adoption of Indies manners for the newcomers. In contrast to the Calvinist, bourgeois thrift of Holland, there was the Mes78 THE ASSAULT ON INDIES CULTURE tizo luxury, the spending on a grand scale, the importance ofdisplay. The Indies elite lived in spacious, open villas and alongside Dutch food often ate spiced Indonesian dishes and rice. Many members, especially the women, were not literate; the languages they spoke were Malay and Portuguese, and they sponsored no written literature. In the arts they patronized woodcarvers, assembled slave orchestras, summoned ronggengs, and held perfonnances of Indonesian and Chinese puppet plays. That is to say, the entertainments and arts enjoyed by the colonial elite were not yet divorced from the tastes oftheir Asian retainers. The man set on changing this was Gustaaf Willem baron van Imhoff, member of an East Frisian patrician family who entered the VOC's employ in 1725. Well connected with the Company's directors and soon to be with the VOC Huysman family, van Imhoff rose swiftly in the hierarchy. Within a few months he was promoted from junior to merchant and chief of the accounts office. By 1730 he was senior merchant and second secretary to the government , and in 1736 he was sent to Ceylon as governor with the rank of council10r . 1 The background to his elevation as governor-general (1743-50) is the massacre of Batavia's Chinese, which occurred in 1740 when van Imhoff was back in the capital. From 1741 to 1743 the baron was in the Netherlands, explaining away his part in government actions that led to the murders and drawing up for the directors his Considerations on the Present State of the Netherlands East Indies Company. 2 Van Imhoff's colonial program recalls J. P. Coen's proposals in many points, for he too wanted to develop a distinctively Dutch character in the colonial capital by bringing in burgher families as settlers and allowing them to trade in categories of goods and in ports hitherto under Company monopoly. Van Imhoff's program was also addressed to establishing conditions that would make pennanent settlement attractive to the immigrant Dutch. Thus the early business of his government was to restore the Company's trade and revenues, encourage a return of Chinese retailers and market gardeners, build a second hospital, and provide for more medical assistants. The second part of his plan was...

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