Max Havelaar: An Anti-imperialist Novel

Imperialism and the Novel

With the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, colonialism and post-colonialism moved to the center of literary and cultural debates in the academic establishment. In his subsequent Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western cultural formations have been structured by an imperialist vision that posits a fundamental ontological difference between Western and non-Western man, the difference residing in the superiority of the Westerner, justifying his domination over the rest of the world. Colonialism and imperialism were so profoundly influential that their existence as a formative mental structure determining the Western experience of the world was not recognized until very recently.

Said acknowledges that colonialism has had its detractors in the West, but distinguishes between anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism as follows:

During the nineteenth century, if we exclude rare exceptions like the Dutch writer Multatuli, debate over colonies usually turned on their profitability, their management and mismanagement, and on theoretical questions such as whether and how colonialism might be squared with laissez-faire or tariff policies; an imperialist and Eurocentric framework is implicitly accepted. . . . Liberal anti-colonialists, in other words, take the humane position that colonies and slaves ought not too severely to be ruled or held, but—in the case of Enlightenment philosophers—do not dispute the fundamental superiority of Western man or, in some cases, of the white race. ¹

While this may be too sweeping a historical generalization—it is difficult to detect the superiority of the white European in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville—the distinction is useful for purposes of analysis. Whereas anti-colonialism advocates the humane treatment of colonies but remains Euro-centric, anti-imperialism repudiates colonialism altogether.

For Said, narratives, and especially novels, are privileged loci of the imperialist vision, which determines constitutive elements of plot and structure such as temporality and spatiality, as well as ideological biases. In the early nineteenth-century novel the empire is taken for granted and becomes visible only when it illuminates an element of the plot or the characters; in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for instance, Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth derives from his plantation in Antigua. When the reality of the empire assumes a more prominent place in public consciousness in the later half of the nineteenth-century, it also becomes more central in the novel, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While Heart of Darkness has elements belying the imperialist vision, the dominant ideological bias reaffirms the “mission civilisatrice” of the West with respect to the non-Western world.

As Said notes, the nineteenth-century Dutch writer Multatuli does not share this prevailing imperialist vision. In fact, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar denounces that vision as the justification for the oppression of the natives of Indonesia. The novel strikingly illustrates avant la lettre postcolonial theories about colonial psychology and imperialist ideologies. The complex narrative structure of this novel makes it an aesthetic and literary success in spite of the overt political rhetoric, as is evidenced by its enduring fame both in the Netherlands and in Indonesia.

When Max Havelaar appeared in 1860, it disturbed the torpor of Dutch literary life, which had been mainly concerned with religious questions. Its author, Edward Douwes-Dekker, was born in 1820 in Amsterdam, the son of a sea captain. At the age of 18, he went to Indonesia, one of the Dutch colonies, where he became a civil servant. In 1830, the Dutch government had instituted the “cultuurstelsel,” a system of cultivation which forced native farmers to devote part of their land to crops for export; these they had to hand over to the government. This system led to the ruthless exploitation of the peasants. Often the Dutch colonial administration relied on native authorities to extract these taxes, which usually led to the intensification of exploitation. In spite of many troubles with the native as well as the Dutch hierarchy, Douwes-Dekker was eventually appointed the Assistant-Resident of Lebak in 1856.

Taking seriously his oath “to protect the native against exploitation and extortion,” he officially accused the native Regent...