Why go
Multatuli’s Max Havelaar offers a critical entry into colonial mistreatment, while Leiden’s tradition of Indonesian studies shows how scholarship became intertwined with empire. Food adds another layer: rijsttafel developed as a colonial meal, and Indonesian dishes travelled with people whose lives connected the Netherlands and the former Dutch East Indies.
The full story
The Dutch East India Company’s seventeenth-century activities formed part of a longer history of colonial expansion. Asian trade monopolies helped generate wealth in Dutch cities, while the territory known as the Dutch East Indies later became modern Indonesia. Reading these connections only as trade leaves out the exploitation and unequal power of colonial rule. Books offer different ways into that history. Published in 1860, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar criticised the mistreatment of people under colonial rule. Louis Couperus drew on the colonial setting in The Hidden Force. Both help place Indonesian connections within Dutch literary culture rather than treating them as distant overseas episodes. Migration during and after the Indonesian revolution brought many Indo people, of mixed European and Indonesian ancestry, to the Netherlands. The term Indische Nederlanders reflects that particular history. Food traditions, including toko shops, satay and nasi goreng, belong to this human story as well as to the history of empire. Rijsttafel, an elaborate spread of small dishes, carries its own colonial origins.