why after over 300 years of dutch rule, contrary to other former colonies, Indonesia neither has significant leftovers of dutch culture nor is the dutch language spoken anywhere.
In: 9430
The Indonesian legal system was developed by the Dutch, the existence of Christianity there was almost entirely the Dutch, the use of a Latin alphabet. Although there are linguistic influences, it seems that there was no push for the locals to learn Dutch until the government took over from the Dutch East India Company, around 1800.
As far as I remember they mostly just wanted money.
There was a *ton* of influence in the other direction though, Indonesian food and other stuff is super popular there now.
“Colonialism” wasn’t always exactly the same.
In some places, colonial powers moved a lot of people into the colony, who settled and pushed out the native population, partly by warfare and partly by disease. (Example: The English in what became the United States.)
In some places, colonial powers moved some people in, took over and religiously converted the natives, and intermarried. (Example: The Spanish and Portuguese in South and Central America, and Mexico; and *some* of the French in Canada.)
In some places, colonial powers mostly genocided the natives, brought in African slaves, and extracted value from slave plantations. (Example: Various European powers in most of the Caribbean.)
In some places, colonial powers ran the place from on high and extracted value from the native populations via spices, tea, opium, or other wealth. (Example: the Dutch East Indies; British India; for an especially horrific example, Belgian Congo.)
And in a few places, it was more like “um, we’re a European power so we’re supposed to have overseas colonies, but we don’t really know what to do with them.” (Example: German Cameroon.)
They run a business less than a political initiative. Their business model was that it’s expensive to set up administration and truly colonize the place so they did that as little as possible.
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Some older Indonesians speak Dutch. There are some Dutch influences in architecture, food and culture. But colonialism has manifested in different ways among different people in different times. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘significant leftovers’. The Dutch, like all colonial powers stole labour and resources, destabilised indigenous cultures and were resisted, in that struggle Indonesia developed a national identity
Indonesia consists in over 10,000 islands.. it must be a nightmare to administer for a central government. Even by today’s standards
Instead of promoting dutch language, they promoted Indonesian language (based on Malay) for communication between at least 10 major language speakers in Indonesia (from total 727 local languages).
Later on, this policy helped on forming Indonesia as a country.
For some reason, I really wanted to see how GPT-3 answered this, so… here’s what AI thinks is the answer to your question:
“There are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, the Dutch East India Company only had control of parts of Indonesia for around 100 years, and even then they weren’t always successful in enforcing their rule. The rest of the time, Indonesia was governed by native rulers. So there wasn’t really a stable period during which Dutch culture could take root.
Secondly, when the Dutch did have control, they tended to keep to themselves and didn’t try to spread their culture or language to the people living there. They also brought over relatively few Dutch settlers compared to other European colonies.
Finally, after Indonesia gained independence in 1949, the new government made a deliberate effort to promote Indonesian culture and discourage anything perceived as foreign or colonial. This included getting rid of any remaining traces of Dutch culture and promoting the use of Indonesian (which is closely related to Malay, spoken by many people in Indonesia).”
There are some influences.
The main difference between Indonesian language and Malay language is that Indonesian language has more Dutch loanwords.
Indonesia uses Civil Law, like the Netherlands. The old criminal code were from the Netherlands’ pre 1960 criminal code.
The more educated independence war era generation actually can speak Dutch. Soekarno, Hatta, Soepomo, Sjahrir, etc – all can speak Dutch.
However, the main reasons there aren’t as much Dutch influences are:
1. **The Dutch don’t want to create a creole culture.** It’s more similar to South African apartheid. Even the Ethical Policy starting from late 1800s where they let some native Indonesians learning Dutch, it’s more likely restricted to local nobles.
2. **On 1945, only 3% of Indonesians can read and write**. This helps building new culture, identity and nation from “scratch”.
3. **The Dutch’s style of colonialism is more of “Imma get as many as I can, fuck the natives” rather than “We must civilize them savages and save them women”.** So they don’t bother teaching the language or making Indonesians to be more “Dutch”.
4. **(Very aggressive) promotion of Indonesian language and “national culture” as national language and “national culture”.** It happened under 1950s democracy, and shifts to dictatorship started from 1959 Presidential Decree only helps this very aggressive promotion.
5. **Blunders of Papua negotiation in 1950s gave Indonesians more and more justification of getting rid of Dutch influences.** (eg. Nationalization of Dutch enterprises from failure of negotiation to bring Papua into Indonesia in 1950s. When Indonesia get rid of their trams, it’s literally because Soekarno said it’s “IT’S TOO DUTCH REEEEEEEE”).
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