DANGEROUS COMPETITORS

The Dutch Ethical Policy (1901) and the Establishment of Craft Schools in East Java

by Marjolein van Pagee







How can we understand the crafts education initiatives at the time of the Ethical Policy in Dutch-occupied Indonesia at the turn of the century? While the rhetoric of the Ethical Policy was aimed at the ‘betterment’ of Indonesians through education, who was it that actually profited from education and at what scale? In this text, historian Marjolein van Pagee shows the importance of understanding the racialised apartheid system to gain a better understanding of the motivations to develop a labour force of craftsmen as well as the realization of these initiatives.
Marjolein van Pagee (1987) is a historian and writer from the Netherlands. She obtained a master in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University and is specialized in the history of the Dutch occupation of Indonesia. She is the author of Banda. De genocide van Jan Pieterszoon Coen (Banda. The Genocide of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Omniboek, 2021) and Bung Tomo. De revolutie van 1945 (Bung Tomo. The Revolution of 1945, Omniboek, 2023). She is the founder of the Histori Bersama Foundation (www.historibersama.com) and of Media Mondo (www.media-mondo.com/en), an anti-imperialist news website on geopolitics from a historical perspective.  





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COLOPHON


AUTHORS
Marjolein van Asdonck
Raistiwar Pratama
Saut Situmorang
Marjolein van Pagee
Rosa te Velde

READERS
Fitria Jelyta
Lisa Baumgarten
Mark Oomen

EDITING/PROOFREADING
Harriet Foyster
Iris Pissaride

Marjolein van Pagee

IMAGE RESEARCH
Rosa te Velde

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Zuzana Kostelanská
CC BY-NC-ND

This project is published under CC BY-NC-ND license, which enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

Some of the texts were published before by the Wereldmuseum (02 ‘Yes, but...’; 03 A Firm Nudge & 06 A Rejuvenation Cure?).

Questions/corrections/suggestions? Contact us at
recallrecalibrate (at) gmail.com
2025

This project was funded by Het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie.




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