Abstract
This essay is part of a broader project to explore the logos and pathos of empire. It invites the reader to attend closely to the political content in colonialism’s archival forms. Reading /along/, rather than /against/ the archival grain, it asks what we might learn about the nature of imperial rule and the dispositions it engendered from the writerly forms through which it was (mis)managed, how attentions were trained, and selectively cast. It argues that the grids of intelligibility in which colonial agents operated were neither clear nor shared. Their perceptions and practices were fashioned from piecemeal and uncertain knowledge; disquiet and anxieties disrupt rote reports when the prevailing conventions of colonial common sense failed them and when what they thought they knew, they found they did not. Wedged within these documents is epistemic, ethical, and political unease, the unsure movements of persons who could be ousted from their jobs for knowing too little – or too much. By attending closely to tone, temper, and ‘epistemological detail’, we can learn about the conceptual and political perturbations on the rough interior ridges of governance that opens to displaced histories folded within them.
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Notes
An assistent-resident was a coveted post for a young man making his way up the ranks of the Dutch colonial civil service. Depending on the region, he might preside over the governance of a sub-region and thus several districts in a residency. In this case, because the Resident was stationed a long distance from Deli, and because the East Coast of Sumatra residency covered nearly 10,000 square kilometres, Valck was largely left on his own to manage Deli. Valck’s letter was originally filed in the Verbeek Collection which had been given to the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) in the 1920s. Verbeek was a prominent geologist in the investigation of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In the early 1980s, an archivist came across Valck’s letter; having found that Verbeek had no experience or contacts in Deli, and that the letter made no reference to Verbeek, it was re-filed in a separate dossier (KITLV, H 1122/Valck.. No other correspondence with, or reference to, Valck had been found.
Stamboeken Indische Ambtenaren, Part M-330,523; Album Studiosorum Lugdunum Batavorum, folio 1362/1363. For these references and most of the documents cited here, I thank Mr. M.G.H.A. de Graff and Ms. F.van Anrooij, both of the Second Section of the Algemeen Rijksarchief who both generously helped me track down Valck’s personal and professional trajectory and the correspondence on the Luhmann family murders.
Valck is never referred to by name, but the disruptive situation in Deli in 1876 in which he found himself overburdened and without sufficient police reinforcements is referenced by R. Broersma, Oostkust van Sumatra (Batavia, 1919);
H. Blink, Sumatra’s ‘Oostkust in Hare Opkomst en Ontvikkeling als Economische Gewest’, Tijdschrift voor Economische Geographie (1918), pp. 55–156;
W. Schadee, Geschiedenis van Sumatra’s Oostkust, 2 Vols (Amsterdam: Oostkust van Sumatra Instituut, 1918–19) among others. As he was the most senior local government official in Deli [the Resident still being seated in Bengkalis, a week’s travel to the south] all comments on inept management, and backlogged judicial cases, were, in fact, direct references to him.
Anonymous, Deli-Batavia Maatschappij 1875–1925 (Amsterdam: Deli-Batavia Maatschappij, 1925), 12. Also see Schadee (1918–19), 16–17.
AR, Mr.628l, urgent, confidential, Director of the Colonial Civil Service toGovernor-General, June 18, 1877.
KITLV, H 1122/Valck.
See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Perceptions of Protest: Defining the Dangerous in Colonial Sumatra’, American Ethnologist, 12, 4 (1985), pp. 642–58;
Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast.
Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast, pp. 24, 29. The 1877 Government Almanac lists 176 Europeans in the Residency of the East Coast of Sumatra, 60, 545 Chinese, and 250 ‘others’. Among government agents were counted thirteen Europeans, Regeringsalmanak 1877, p. 214.
See R. Broersma, Oostkust van Sumatra: De Ontluiking van Deli (Batavia, 1919);
Oostkust van Sumatra: De Ontwikkeling van het Gewest (Deventer, 1921), p. 85.
This debate went on for years, culminating in the landmark 1880 Coolie Ordinance, the first of many government regulations to harness workers for the development of the expanding mining and the estate industries. Ostensibly for the protection of indentured workers, the ordinance lengthened the contract period to three years, instituted an ‘anti-kidnapping’ clause to protected planters from ‘theft’ of their workers by others estates, and in the end did little more than ‘legalize the coercive measures already in use’. See Breman’s discussion of this ordinance in Taming the Coolie Beast, pp. 38–44.
AR, Mr.518, Director of Civil Service to the Governor-General, 18 June 1877.
Ibid.
See Anthony Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Acheh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858–1898 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford, 1969).
See John Bowen, Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History 1900–1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). On the repercussions of the blockade, see Reid, The Contest, pp. 71–118.
Reid, The Contest, p. 153.
Geen Planter (No Planter), Open Brief aan den Heer H. A. Insinger over zijn aanvalen in the Tweede Kamer tegen de Indische ‘Planters’ (Amsterdam: M. M. Olivier, 1879).
The discussion of Valck’s qualifications and the decision concerning his misconduct, transfer, and dismissal appear in the decision of the Governor-General of August 13, 1877, No. 2. The Director of the Civil Service’s report ‘On the capability of Resident Locker de Bruijne and other civil servants on the East Coast’ (AN, mr.6281 dated June 18, 1877) mentioned in this decision is located at the Arsip Nasional in Jakarta. Levyssohn’s addendum to the advice of the Director of the Colonial Civil Service (Ag.404/77/geheim) was classified with the Governor-General’s decision.
AN, Mr. 628l, Locker de Bruijne is also dismissed for his ineptitude in keeping tabs on Valck, for his actions not his beliefs.
AR , Mr. 741 , 13 August 1877 Van Rees and Norman Levyssohn to the Governor-General.
AR, Mr. 741.
AR, Mr. 837, 22 October 1876
Anonymous, Deli-Batavia Maatschappij 1875–1925 (Amsterdam: Deli-Batavia Maatschappij, 1925), 11, my emphasis.
AR, Mr. 920, From Assistent-Resident Valck to Resident Locker de Bruine, 29 October 1876.
His concerns are well-founded; a year later he is criticized precisely for that delay.
George Orwell, ‘Shooting and Elephant’, in Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), pp. 154–62.
Datoe is the term for a Malay village head.
John Bowen has suggested to me that the ‘Petambiang’ cited in this report may have been the Raja Petiam[b]ang, one of the Gayo kejurun, which would ‘fit’ with what Valck reports, See Bowen (1991), p. 62.
AR, Mr.741, September 10, 1876.
AR, Mr. 844, Report of the Commander of the expeditionary column in Langkat, 21 September 1876.
Ibid.
AR, Mr. 916, Confidential report of Commander of the East Coast of Sumatra, Demmeni to Commander-in-Chief of the Department of War, 28 October 1876.
Ibid.
On ‘coolie rows’ see Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 47–92.
AR, Mr. 880, Demmemi to the Chief of Staff, 8 October 1876,
AR, Mr. 880, Journal extract from Demmemi, 6–19 October 1876.
The cold reception Valck received for accusations against the Deli planters may have had to do with his own past whistle-blowing in the administrative scandal in North Bali (only four years prior to the Luhmann murder). On Valck’s father’s reputation and Valck’s prior career as a civil servant see chapter six of my Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
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Stoler, A.L. (2012). ‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_2
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