Merchant Kings: Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870 9781800730519

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Merchant Kings

Merchant Kings Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870

Albert Schrauwers

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Albert Schrauwers

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2021930025

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-050-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-051-9 ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: Corporate Governmentality

1

Part I. State Formation in the Greater Netherlands Chapter 1. Aristocratic Restoration in the Nineteenth-Century “Greater Netherlands”

29

Part II. Corporate Governmentality in the Realm of the Merchant King Chapter 2. Policing the Pauper in the Realm of the Merchant King

51

Chapter 3. The Cultivation System

74

Chapter 4. Manufacturing Commodity Chains: The NHM and Cotton

99

Chapter 5. “Sweetening the Pot”: Rule by Experts in the Sugar Industry

121

Chapter 6. Weaving an Empire: G. & H. Salomonson and the “Social Question”

144

Part III. The Credit Mobilier and Corporate Assemblage Chapter 7. Political Economy, the “Self-Regulating Market,” and “Economic Governance”

167

Chapter 8. The Credit Mobilier: Constructing an Economic Sovereignty

187

Chapter 9. The Credit Mobilier and the Railways

210

Conclusion: Assemblage, Corporatization, and the Government of the Economy

227

References

242

Index

261

Illustrations

Maps Map 1.1. Territorial Evolution of the “Greater Netherlands.”

31

Map 1.2. The Residencies of Java, 1834.

37

Map 2.1. Map of the Free Colonies in the Northern Netherlands. Source: TU Delft.

64

Tables Table 0.1. Partial List of the Capitalization of the Largest Dutch Corporations in the Early Nineteenth Century. Table 0.2. Colonial Surpluses as Percentage of Dutch Tax Revenue. Table 4.1. Export of Textiles to Java and Madura.

7 20 110

Figures Figure 1.1. “Netherlands’s most precious ornament,” De Amsterdammer, 14 October 1916.

35

Figure 1.2. King Willem I.

39

Figure 2.1. Count Johannes van den Bosch. Source: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

53

Figure 2.2. The Institution at Veenhuizen, an “Unfree Colony.” Source: National Library of the Netherlands.

66

Figure 2.3. The Prince Frederik army barracks. Source: National Library of the Netherlands.

67

Figure 3.1. The “instituted market” of the Cultivation System.

84

Figure 3.2. The Javanese village as “Benevolent Colony.”

86

illustrations

| vii

Figure 8.1. The harbor and canal project constructed at “Holland at its smallest.” Source: Fotonummer 52.00233, Collectie Gemeentearchief Zaanstad.

189

Figure 8.2. The Palace of Industry, Amsterdam. Source: Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

190

Figure 8.3. The Corporate Assemblage of the General Society and its balanced management between the Heukelom/Clercq and Poolman groups.

200

Figure 9.1. State railways corporate management (year graduated in brackets).

224

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of some twenty years of research, and the list of debts I have acquired in the process are countless; some of them have been acknowledged in those articles produced piecemeal over the first decade, parts of which have been incorporated into this text: “The Benevolent Colonies of Johannes van den Bosch: Continuities in the Administration of Poverty in the Netherlands and Indonesia” (2001); “Regenten (‘Gentlemanly’) Capitalism: Saint-Simonian Technocracy and the emergence of the ‘Industrial Great Club’ in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Netherlands” (2010); and “Policing Production: Corporate Governmentality and the Cultivation System” (2011). These articles coalesced into this project via a key article: “A Genealogy of Corporate Governmentality in the Realm of the ‘Merchant-King’: The Netherlands Trading Company and the Management of Dutch Paupers” (2011). The book in its current incarnation emerged from this article: from its major thesis about corporate governmentality, I then added the secondary theme (the “sociology of rule”) and the development of gentlemanly capitalism from the earlier articles. One personal debt must be explicitly acknowledged: Tania Li has served as a generous and inspirational sounding board over this entire period, shaping my understanding of both Indonesia and governmentality. I give my thanks to her, and to those others without whom this book would not have come to completion.

Introduction corporate governmentality

In July 2018, the British government leveled its largest fine ever on social media giant Facebook for breaches of the Data Privacy Act; the £500,000 fine (equal to approximately five and a half minutes of the company’s revenue), resulted from its role in selling the personal profile data of 50 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, whereupon it was used to influence the Brexit referendum vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A year later, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission applied a $5 billion fine for the same offense. Singling out Facebook, however, obfuscates the larger issue. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are the five largest corporations in the world by market capitalization, and all operate on a similar model: that of the surveillance of their active users, the silent shadowing of their activity as they traverse the wider web, and the use of this data in behavioral targeting to subtly influence their market choices and—as the Facebook fine underscores—their political views. It is this combination of individual surveillance with the subtle behavioral swaying of populations, of managing the “conduct of conduct” that French philosopher Michel Foucault argued was the core principle of “governmentality,” a Western form of instrumental rationality that buttresses modern forms of power. This strategy is not restricted to technology corporations, I will argue, but is inherent in the very genealogy of the corporate form itself in the nineteenth century. One of the most transgressive aspects of the concept of governmentality, or “governmental rationality,” is the underlying assertion that the Western state is not the “origin of government” but that at a specific moment in time the “state was governmentalized.” The focus on governmentality was Foucault’s way of drawing our attention away from the state and its structure to the plethora of independent agencies that shared its strategies of social control in order to regulate the health and prosperity of a population; agencies that I argue should include corporations. At a critical juncture in the early nineteenth century, the state began to connect itself to a series of groups “that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals” rather than simply extend the absolutist state’s repressive machinery of social control (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006: 87). Foucault focused attention on the manner in which both the state and these civil organizations came to share a set of programs that were applied to a population as a whole in order to secure “the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health.” Governmentality educates

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desires and instills habits by artificially arranging the disposition of things so people “do as they ought” (Foucault 1991: 100). As the Facebook example underscores, since people remain unaware of how their conduct is being shaped, or why, the question of consent never arises. By focusing on a new area of concern, corporate governmentality, I shift attention from the state to the corporation, one such social technology for implementing these governmental programs of improvement; “the practice of chartering corporations can be thought of historically as state-building at one remove—the building of a ‘franchise state’” (Ciepley 2013: 151).1 As delegations of state sovereignty, early corporations were frequently indistinguishable from states themselves; trading companies like the East Indies Company, for example, acted like a “company-state” or “a state in the disguise of a merchant” (Stern 2011). These companies exercised territorial rule and were able to wage war and sue for peace, raise taxes, and administer justice. As they developed in the early nineteenth century, corporations continued to serve as delegations of state sovereignty to favored subjects for public purposes, usually municipal, educational, or religious. They were, in other words, quasi-state enterprises accountable to all in the public sphere rather than private businesses as conceived today. Even Adam Smith concluded that corporations were incapable of efficient management and should only be created to handle highly capitalized, low-profit projects (Smith 1999: 700; Pearson 2002). “In all cases, while private profit was served, what justified the delegation of state powers were the public benefits resulting from incorporation” (Taylor 2006: 4). Following Foucault’s lead, the focus of this book shifts attention from the formal apparatus of the state to those corporations that contributed to the governmentalization of society. Despite a clear tie between capitalism and the development of liberal governmentality, little attention has been focused on the role of the corporate form in that development (Nadeson 2008: 55ff.). The co-emergence and codependence of the modern nation-state and the corporation needs to be underscored, especially at the moment of their ideological differentiation in the mid-nineteenth century. It was only later that corporations “shifted from a quasi-public agency—in principle accountable to all, embedded within an institutional structure that served the public sector—into a private agency, protected from government accountability by individual rights and legally accountable to no one but its owners” (Roy 1997: 41). In that shift, corporations did not lose their governmental functions; they continued to manage the early nineteenth-century market transition by means of a concomitant corporate revolution. Corporations were a political strategy that delegated state (not specifically “economic”) tasks to ancillary jurisdictions. Foucault’s earlier work focused on the enclosed spaces of total institutions where every departure from the norm elicited an automatic corrective disciplinary intervention. It was consideration of the disparate nature of the nineteenth-century global market transition that led Foucault to move beyond this earlier theoretical concern

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for disciplinary institutions like the prison, asylum, and clinic to governmentality, so as to deal with the enormous growth in national and international markets and the development of capitalism under liberalism. Governmentality invoked a regime of power that works on a broader scale, on populations as a whole, through an “apparatus of security” where the risks of such an intervention must first be calculated (Foucault 2007: 44–45). I thus shift attention from the state to its “franchise,” the corporation, as one such apparatus of security for implementing governmental programs of market improvement. By emphasizing the governmental aspects of corporations, their perceived relationship to the market is altered. They are no longer the simple market participants of economic theory but, in Alfred Chandler’s (1977) inversion of Adam Smith’s classic metaphor, they act as the “visible hand of the market” displacing market transactions with more efficient hierarchical administration; like Facebook, they act by instilling habits, educating desires, and “artificially arranging things so that people, following only their own self-interest, will do as they ought” (Foucault 1991: 100). This new form of governmentality defines a population—whether of “the poor” or “the native”—and enframes it in these “mechanisms of security” such that these populations could be managed in an “economic” way. The idea of an “economic government” has, as Foucault points out, a double meaning for liberalism: that of a government informed by the precepts of political economy, but also that of a government which economizes on its own costs: a greater effort of technique aimed at accomplishing more through a lesser exertion of force and authority. (Gordon 1991: 24) Chandler’s insight thus underscores a paradox: just as nineteenth-century liberals were preparing a legislative program to create laissez-faire markets, those markets came to be replaced by a newly emergent corporate order hierarchically organizing economies of scope and scale. As liberal capitalist regimes developed, in which those states that “governed least,” and therefore most economically, “governed best,” the transfer of that economic government to corporations was one such means of “economic governance” in this dual sense. I explore these themes through the example of the royal corporations in the realm of the Dutch merchant king, Willem I, through which he economically governed an empire over the course of the nineteenth century. The Netherlands had been an early creator of the corporate form, and of the world’s first stock market. At the start of Willem’s reign, the Netherlands was a rural backwater with little industry, high unemployment, and a hard-won and costly colonial empire inherited from an earlier golden era, as likely to succeed in the competitive industrial revolution as Portugal (Zanden and Riel 2004: 85–120). Over the course of his reign, a series of royal corporations led the empire’s market revolution, organizing global commodity chains that enriched the state, fostered the market, and disciplined recalcitrant peasants and

4 | merchant kings

paupers into a disciplined working class imbued with “productive virtue.” This transformation is the product, I will argue, of “corporate governmentality.”

Assembling the Corporate Order Foucault’s approach to governmentality envisioned it as an “assemblage” (dispositif ): as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power” (Foucault 1991: 102). In his analysis of government, he was less concerned with questions of who or why, and more with the overriding concern of how; what social technologies, what sets of ideas and practices were deployed in order to meet a pressing governmental challenge? (O’Malley 1996). This assemblage has “as its target population, its principal form of knowledge political economy and its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (O’Malley 1996). Foucault referred to such technologies of rule as an “apparatus of security” to distinguish this form of power relationship from his earlier concerns with individualizing disciplinary regimes in total institutions. An apparatus of security is, in other words, a “human technology” with aspirations to shape conduct and produce desired effects while calculating and averting associated social risks at a societal level. As delegations of state sovereignty, corporations utilize many of the same technologies of rule, and may be an integrated part of a larger governmental assemblage. In pointing to an “ensemble” or “assemblage” (dispositif ) of institutions, practices, and tactics, the concept of governmentality decenters the state and directs us toward the ways in which social control is exercised through dispersed forms of “power/ knowledge,” that is, forms of authorized knowledge that enable specific programmatic forms of intervention, like psychiatry, public health, or medicine; the discourse of liberal political economy serves this role in governmentality studies. The analytic focus of governmentality studies thus shifts from the state apparatus to the historical processes by which social problems are formulated as objects of intervention, and the specific technologies of rule are drawn in to address them. These new forms of social control operate more efficiently in that individuals are induced to govern themselves through them; they hence become “technologies of the self ” through which the “free” liberal individual constructs, regulates, and normalizes their identity. Foucault’s work on the development of “bio-power” analyzed the plurality of authorities who developed the programs deployed to optimize the health, welfare, and life of populations; this was a productive rather than repressive power. Foucault’s earlier studies on the panopticon-like regulatory strategies of these agencies are thus enfolded within a larger, encompassing concern to trace the linkages, the underlying governmental logic, shared by the assemblage of independent agencies and the state in executing programs to ameliorate social problems. In order to address an “urgent need” and invest it with strategic purpose, a heterogeneous and shifting assemblage of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms,

introduction

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regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” were cobbled together in a bricolage of existing practices; these are not the grand visionary schemes of high modernist social planning but the mundane practices that come to hand of everyday rule (Foucault 1980: 194). However, there has been a tendency since to essentialize such assemblages and avoid the question with which Foucault began, of how they emerged and were cobbled together in particular programs of intervention (O’Malley 1996: 310). Given his concern with the rationality of government, it is not surprising how little attention Foucault in fact paid to the ways by which mechanisms of rule circulated between sites, “save for occasional asides whose credibility depends more on rhetorical resonance than analytical rigor” (McKinlay 2010: 1019). This is due to the fact that the circulation of programs and their social technologies was “not a process in which rule extends itself unproblematically across a territory, but a matter of fragile relays, contested locales and fissiparous affiliations”—of politics, in other words, rather than a rationality of government (Rose 1999: 51; O’Malley, Weir, and Shearing 1997: 510). Li emphasizes that it is crucial to return to these how questions: how, in the face of such fissiparous tensions, can alignments be forged between those authorities with the will to govern and the personal projects of individuals and organizations who are subject to that government? She underscores that “assemblage” as a theoretical concept “flags agency, the hard work required to draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension” (2007b: 264). She emphasizes the verb form of assemblage to underscore that the practice of assembling should remain the center of analysis. We should not treat such an assemblage as a fait accompli, as a set of sites laid out for examination. In order to do so, she argues that we need to introduce a different analytic approach—of histories and sociologies of rule—into governmentality studies without collapsing the two (2007a: 26). Such histories and sociologies of rule help answer how questions and expand governmentality studies without loss of focus. Such an approach to politics “would examine the ways in which creativity arises out of the situation of human beings engaged in particular relations of force and meaning, and what is made out of the possibilities of that location”—including class—in the process of assemblage (Rose 1999: 279). It is a politics that addresses resistance, and the ways in which it can alter programs of intervention; something Foucault asserted was endemic, but which studies of the rationality of government fail to address (O’Malley 1996). With an eye on the question of how such alignments are forged, it is thus important to address the politics of corporate strategies and examine how they were intended to engage both domestic and colonial elites in the state-building project. A sociology of rule must address the specific relations between individuals, corporate projects, and the larger apparatus of security they conditionally craft; a move beyond the mentalité of those with the will to govern to a critical understanding of “the realization and deployment of resources, tactics and strategies in the relations of contest

6 | merchant kings

themselves” (O’Malley, Weir, and Shearing 1997: 510). A sociology of rule complements the “mentalité of rule” approach by pointing to those who also seek to resist and subvert them, leading to real limits in governmentality. A sociology of rule in this case must focus on the interests of a unique social class of regents in the Netherlands expected to implement these governmental programs, and on providing an analysis of the actual social and cultural relations comprising the patrimonial state form in the greater Netherlands; governmentality is not a cross-cultural universal feature, but one highly specific to each state formation. This analysis situates the political class of regents that implemented state policy, or alternately its own ends through state institutions, within the national and international context of its emergent colonial empire. This dual analytic approach has important methodological implications; the set of genealogical tools appropriate to the analysis of governmental rationality requires supplementation with class analysis. My primary theoretical project, the application of theories of governmentality to the corporate sphere, is thus supplemented by an analysis of Dutch and Javanese governing elites. The secondary project of this book is thus an exploration of the particular social and economic form of “gentlemanly capitalism” that emerged through the application of corporate governmentality in the Dutch context. By focusing on this class of “merchant kings” I underscore how the political process of incorporating enterprises was a means by which the governing elite of the Netherlands was able to appropriate royal sovereignty and establish a separate sphere—the “economy”—beyond the Crown’s reach by which they could maintain their traditional, hereditary rights to rule. This class analysis attends to relations of production within corporate enterprises but addresses them with a concern for their governmental implications.

Corporatization In discussing the specific sociology of rule that undergirds corporate governmentality in the early nineteenth-century Dutch empire, I introduce the concept of corporatization. Corporatization refers to the legal and political processes through which the corporate form is strategically used to solidify or fix in place the disparate elements of the messy assemblage of a governmental program in order to lend it institutional consistency, efficiency, and permanency. Once institutionally frozen in this way, the format of the assemblage can be circulated through the creation of new corporations; and these corporations can be tied into larger assemblages through overlapping boards of directors who ensure the further circulation of new practices between them. Focusing on corporatization is a means of addressing how particular governmental strategies circulated within and between corporations and the state despite resistance in order to create a networked assemblage capable of managing global commodity chains. Corporatization specifically refers to two key technologies of rule utilized in order to solidify assemblages: the use of contracts, and of accounting, by which they hierarchically organize and manage their personnel and internal economies. In focusing

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on the sets of governmental practices that are used to manage corporations, I put minimal emphasis on the typical legal features of the corporation by which it acquires its delegated state sovereignty, such as separate personality and limited liability, that are at the core of most business history. Corporatization, as a process, thus refers less to “incorporation” than to a set of practices that circulate through a broader range of enterprises and is thus of wider analytic usefulness (see table 0.1).2 Corporatization thus covers a range of public institutions in the period, from municipal corporations to “societies,” as well as businesses that had a recognized legal identity granted by the Crown. In this book, for example, I analyze how corporate practices originating in the Society of Benevolence circulated within the Netherlands Trading Company, and later in the unincorporated family partnership of G. & H. Salomonson, “governmentalizing” it. Thus, I am less interested in the evolution of the institutional form of the corporation in a legal sense, and more with the substantive practices (the mentalité) by which corporations organize production and sales to create economies of scale. In approaching these extensively discussed practices I underscore the political work Table 0.1. Partial List of the Capitalization of the Largest Dutch Corporations in the Early Nineteenth Century. Royal Corporations (NV)1 General Netherlands Society for the Patronage of Industry

Founded Royal capitalization (f ) Total capitalization (f ) 1822

33,000,000

50,000,000

Netherlands Trading Company

1824

2,000,000

37,000,000

Netherlands Bank

1814

1,200,000

5,000,000

1828

1,000,000

5

1,000,000

1822

55,000,000

55,000,000

1838

24,000,000

24,000,000

100,000

200,000

Java Bank Nonincorporated State Companies2 Amortization Syndicate 3

Dutch Rhenish Railway

Royally Supported Companies4 Society of Benevolence

1818

Royal Factory

1826

1

Notes: Royal corporations include those founded by the state, with charters (NVs, naamloze vennootschap). 2 Nonincorporated state companies were an integrated part of the state apparatus, but granted separate personality. 3The Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg-Maatschappij was built by the state and privatized as a chartered company in 1845. 4Royally supported companies received significant support from the Crown but maintained nominal independence. 5Capitalization of the Java Bank was divided equally between the state and the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM). Sources: Algemeene Maatschappij voor de Volksvlijt (Société Générale), Riemans 1935: 65–68; Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM), Mansvelt 1924: 72–75; Nederlandsche Bank, Jonker 1996: 171; Javasche Bank, Furnivall 1976: 102–3; Amortisatie-Syndicaat, Riemans 1935: 72–98; Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg Maatschappij, Broeke and Meerkerk 2001: 5–6; Koninklijke Fabriek van Stoom- en andere werktuigen Paul van Vlissingen & Dudok van Heel, Jonker 1996: 75.

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they do. I take seriously Alfred Chandler’s argument that the corporation replaces the market through the hierarchical administration of economies of scope and scale and displaces less efficient market-based processes organized by the price mechanism; this organizational approach is taken in order to counter the reductionist individualistic economic arguments of the New Institutional Economists (Bratton 1989: 1473). As Chandler first emphasized, the competitive advantage of corporations lies in their “administrative coordination” through which they are able to engineer “greater productivity, lower costs and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms”; to this I would add the more explicitly political function of administering a restive working class. In his words, this hierarchical administrative coordination makes corporations the very visible hand guiding the market (1977: 6). In contrast, the New Institutional Economists, led by Jensen and Meckling (1976), reduced all market transactions to reciprocal individual contracts instead, and considered the corporation as a “nexus of contracts” with an “internal market” that remains organized by the price mechanism; they thus equate individualized anonymous market exchange with the hierarchical administration of accounting transactions within the corporation (Eisenberg 1999: 822–23). Such an approach explicitly ignores the hierarchical nature of corporate administration, and hence the very politics of contracting between unequals within an organization rather than on an open market where all parties can simply walk away. By invoking the Chandlerian metaphor of the corporation as the visible hand of the market, the hierarchical administrative role of the corporation in replacing the market with sets of accounts and contracts in the political management of colonial commodity chains is emphasized (1977). By invoking Foucault’s neologism, governmentality, the continued disciplinary aspect of this corporate economic administration, is emphasized; the account books that replaced actual market transactions were a means of holding producers accountable (Miller 1994, 2008). Corporatization as a political process can be illustrated by the imposition of the Cultivation System on Java beginning in 1830, a core subject of this book. The Cultivation System is usually described as a system of forced cultivation in which Javanese peasants were induced to farm export crops like coffee, sugar, and indigo for the Dutch. However, the Dutch conceived of this extortionate system as a “market exchange,” as codified in contracts between the colonial state and local villages. These contracts fixed in place the institutional complex through which the Javanese were obliged to farm export crops and framed their “sale” as a contractual obligation enforceable by law; it was an “apparatus of security” governed by a particular form of governmental rationality. The contracts allowed the state to one-sidedly determine the amounts to be grown, the way in which they were to be grown, and the price to be paid; they thus went beyond mere sale to incorporate management of production itself. This is therefore a form of governmentality that manages “the market” by arranging the disposition of things in order that Javanese farmers “do as they ought.” As I will later explore, these kinds of contracts invoke a “liberal illusion” in order

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to hide “monetary exchange asymmetries” (Reddy 1987) as market exchanges. The contract is a way of establishing consistent, efficient deliveries at administratively set (not market) prices; and accounting is used to record these “sales” and manage the resultant commodity chains tying these villages to the larger colonial empire. It is in these ways that corporations achieve their hierarchical efficiencies of scope and scale. The analysis of corporatization takes seriously the framing of administrative exchange as a market while exposing the disciplinary technologies being brought to bear to fix this assemblage in place. Accounting, in this model, serves a key role in transforming contractual hierarchies into “internal markets” through which workers are managed. The disciplinary role of accounting systems as a panoptic tool in shaping the management of the labor process in corporations has been widely explored in contemporary settings, although its genealogy has only begun to be fully explored (Miller and Rose 1990; Miller 2008; Hoskin and Macve 1986, 2000). These approaches focus on the means by which accounts discursively represent a numeric reality, and the means by which these can be used to hold people accountable. Accounting, it has been noted, is a way of exercising “control at a distance” through the use of “inscription”; it allows for centralized comparative inspection that offers both global and individualized perspectives (Rose and Miller 1990: 10). While not innately panoptic, such accounts are crucial to the “reciprocal hierarchical observation” and “normalizing judgement” at its disciplinary core (Hoskin and Macve 1986). That is, accounts provide an “objective” measure of individual performance from a global perspective, allowing for them to be graded on a normal curve, and offering the rationale for the application of individualized discipline to address their failures. Disciplinary accounting systems were used to shape and mold the Dutch and Javanese working classes in a specifically corporate order. These class identities cannot be read off of their structural place in the labor process alone. Theorists such as Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller have argued that, from the perspective of government, work was as significant as a site of subjectification as it was as a site of economic exploitation, and economic life, from the workplace to the national economy, was crucial in programs for social government. And those gray and tedious sciences of economics, management, and accounting could be seen once again—as they had been by Marx, Weber, Sombart, and many other theorists of capitalism—as crucial for making up and governing a capitalist economy. (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006: 95) Indeed, organization theorists have argued that Foucault has replaced Marx and Braverman as the anointed heir of labor process theory, which is now largely subsumed in critical management studies, as well as having broad impact in the related fields of critical accounting, industrial sociology, and economic anthropology (Carter, McKinlay, and Rowlinson 2002: 515). It could be argued that there is a potentially

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significant degree of overlap between Marxist studies on the constitution of working-class subjectivity in the labor process on the factory floor and neo-Foucauldian studies of management and accounting in the shaping of the calculative subjectivity of “economic man” in the business enterprise.3 This overlap is not accidental. In his texts, Foucault elided the Marxist sociology of rule that shaped the broad structure of his own analysis. Foucault, like this book, simply accepted Marxist political analysis of the market transition as his starting position (McKinlay 2006: 88). However, unlike Marxist analyses, the Foucauldian literature on disciplinary practices does not attend to the ways in which the corporation became a key site of the normalization of “worker” (and hence class) identities, a fault that I will address here through the analysis of corporate governmentality. Nineteenth-century Dutch academic economic texts were obsessed with the moral overtones of labor, viewing it as the source not only of wealth but also of the order and virtue necessary of a citizen (Boschloo 1989: 60–61), which Dutch historian Siep Stuurman refers to as the discourse of “productive virtue.” Governmental programs administered through corporations thus sought to address questions of ideal citizenship through work. Productive virtue . . . called for a minimal amount of economic autonomy based in the capacity and the will to contribute to the productive effort of the national community. A sharp distinction was therefore drawn between those who performed labor (usually skilled) because it was their trade and their pride, and the more lowly proletarians (usually unskilled) who had to be put to work by severe discipline and the fear of starvation. (Stuurman 1997: 34) The need for reformed worker subjectivity was demonstrated by the social and political tensions that were tearing the new empire apart. By 1830, the tense relations between the Northern and Southern Netherlands had exploded with the secession of Belgium, and an expensive war in Java against Dutch rule that left two hundred thousand dead had just been brought to a conclusion. The indolent paupers behind these revolts needed to be transformed into socially responsible “industrious workers” through these governmental discourses of “productive virtue.” According to Simon Vissering, one of the foremost Dutch liberal economists of the period, “it was a grave error to identify economic liberty with selfishness: on the contrary, it was by engaging in productive activities that men came to appreciate the value of co-operation, and more generally the moral nature of the social bond” (cited in Stuurman 1997: 42). In reviewing the importance of governmentality in the shaping of these class subjectivities, this book remains focused on the how questions; what technologies of rule were applied? I draw on Hoskin and Macve’s conclusion that “the genesis of modern business is not the result of economic or technical innovation in the usual sense. Instead the significant first technologies of change are invisible technologies: technologies that work first on humans, not on machines” (1993: 29). These strategies

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are explored in the Netherlands Trading Company (among others), which managed the millions of producers entrapped in colonial commodity chains, as a governmental program. The company was not driven by profit motives alone, nor was it driven by the unmitigated logic of capital; it was given the task of managing the political dangers of pauperism and of the development of proletarianization in an economic(al) manner. The Netherlands Trading Company rejected the most technologically advanced forms of production precisely because its primary consideration was the management of people and the prevention of class conflicts such as they saw at the root of the Belgian secession of 1830. To forestall a revolutionary consciousness in their workers, they delayed the industrial revolution and encouraged a transformation in business organization so that they could better police the economy and its economic actors. These examples thus exemplify Foucault’s argument that corporal disciplines constituted the dark side of formal judicial liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; [but] panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The “Enlightenment,” which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (1979: 222) Panopticism, that uniquely modern form of coercion, is predicated upon the continued surveillance of its subjects by an unseen anonymous viewer, leading them to self-censor their behaviors and thereby transform themselves into their own subjugators. Panopticism is a metaphor for a range of surveillance techniques that accomplish this end, including that of management accounting. It was Facebook’s use of this “Big Brother” strategy with which we began. In tracing the genealogy of the corporate use of account and contract making in the Cultivation System, I begin with the Colonies of Benevolence, a royal corporation that deployed a disciplinary accounts system in order to manage paupers. I use this example to extend Foucault’s analysis of Bentham’s panoptic strategies in prisons to the related panoptic strategies Bentham advocated for use in “charity companies” (Schrauwers 2020). The Colonies of Benevolence were an early example of this panoptic use of accounting; they used accounts to assess inmate productivity, to level fines for misbehavior, and to reward those adjudged sufficiently virtuous, all in terms of monetary units of account that reduced incommensurate phenomena to a single monetary scale. Designed to securitize the state from a rebellious pauper class, these colonies appropriated land and labor in a grand project of social engineering, a “charity company” that used money as a “unit of account” in order to create a disciplined working class, an “economic man” motivated by something grander, that is “productive virtue.” Tracking and managing the range of behaviors and the comparative grading of pauper families created a system of accounts that kept workers

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accountable. It is these techniques that continue to be the focus of organizational theorists of business accounting today. In tracing their genealogy back to the Colonies of Benevolence, I underscore the forms of hierarchical “benevolence” driving Dutch governmental efforts through corporations to manage the pauper, the working poor, and the laborer. As a theoretical framework, governmentality can thus provide a balanced approach to class formation. Class must be approached as more than a simple mechanical reading derived from the worker’s position in the labor process; it must incorporate the broader “structured totality” of relationships fostered by both production and social reproduction, including governance, through which worker subjectification takes place (Kalb 1997; Burawoy 1983, 1985). Such an approach examines class formation through the broader array of management techniques deployed both inside and outside the factory floor; a governmental approach focused on an apparatus of security. To paraphrase Foucault, this approach is thus focused on “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target [workers], its principal form of knowledge political economy and its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (1991: 102, my interjection). By approaching class through the lens of an “apparatus of security” (dispositif ), such as the royal corporation, we can incorporate governmental programs like the Benevolent Colonies that sought an “economical” means of instilling productive virtue in criminalized paupers into our analysis of class formation, and then further trace how the sets of management practices developed there circulated more broadly through other corporations like the Netherlands Trading Company operating in both the Netherlands and its colonies. In the remainder of this work, I trace how the disciplinary practices of this accounts-based system circulated through other projects of rule, including its introduction to factory sugar production in Java in the Cultivation System and then the cotton-weaving industry of the eastern Netherlands by the Netherlands Trading Company.

The “Visible Hand” of the Market The sociology of rule approach detailed above requires a class analysis of a specific political-economic class of “gentlemanly capitalists” that emerged in the process of corporatization in the Netherlands. In the remainder of this book, I trace the origins and development of corporate governmentality from its roots in the “enlightened absolutism” of the “merchant king,” Willem I, through the mid-nineteenth century “Liberal revolution” when the corporation assumed its modern, private form under the leadership of this class of gentlemanly capitalists. While this necessitates exploring the frequently idiosyncratic nature of the Dutch state, the general pattern of corporate governmentality as it has emerged in the Euro-Atlantic world remains the focus; the lessons learned here have much wider applicability, and they provide a

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comparative riposte to dominant academic narratives predicated on the British or American experience. The Dutch example is particularly useful as a case study of the processes involved due to its small size, extensive empire, early development of the corporate form, yet late industrialization. The Dutch example thus provides a window through which to explore the evolution of the corporate form as a franchise state “policing” the newly developing “free market” sphere in dynamic synergy with a lately introduced laissez-faire liberalism. During his twenty-five-year reign (1815–40), King Willem I founded a series of corporations to which he delegated aspects of his absolutist sovereignty, including the rights to exploit royal domains (i.e. granted them “separate personality,” or, in the terms I pursue in this work, granted a state “concession,” as in a railway concession). As William Roy has pointed out, the public nature of corporations in this period was widely accepted internationally: “The corporation, that most ‘modern’ of economic organizations, thus is the continuation of a premodern system. Its legally binding by-laws are a delegation of state sovereignty, a vestige of its public origins. Why the business corporation (along with municipalities, churches and universities) was able to escape the sword of liberalizing egalitarianism is something that needs to be explained” (1997: 46). Willem’s nominal objective was to broaden his rule in respect to an already weak Staten-Generaal (legislature). In the first half of the nineteenth century, this ideological separation of state and corporation was necessitated by Willem’s need to govern through corporations to preclude parliamentary oversight and hence bolster his absolutist rule. The budgets of these corporations lay outside the purview of legislative review and hence allowed the new king to implement unpopular policies for which he could not otherwise acquire tax revenue (Coopmans 1989: 588; Stuurman 1992: 108ff.). The early Dutch Republic had pioneered in the development of the corporate form with the founding of the United East India Company (VOC) through which it ruled its far-flung colonies, and which Willem now adapted for domestic purposes with enormous success as well. These corporations were a specific delegation of royal sovereignty created through royal decrees (Koninklijk Besluiten); there was no process for the general registration of companies. Unlike other jurisdictions where incorporation required legislative approval, the Dutch royal corporations could be proclaimed outside the formal parliamentary process through police law (Jonker 1996: 61–63). Like corporations before and since, they were governed by shareholder-elected boards. The king frequently had controlling interest through his delegates although they did not always follow his express wishes. It is thus important to underscore that these corporations were not part of the nascent Napoleonic state bureaucracy Willem inherited and through which he ruled, and herein lies their governmental importance. They were, rather, delegations of royal sovereignty to an emerging civil sphere (Miller and Rose 1992: 180; Barkan 2013: 18–39). Willem founded the largest of the 137 corporations in the Netherlands before 1850 in order to meet governmental needs, including the provision of transport,

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welfare, trade regulation, and banking (Camfferman 2000: 79; see table 1).4 The most important of this set of state enterprises (for the purposes of this book) was the Netherlands Trading Company (NHM, Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij), a royal chartered corporation founded by Willem in 1824 to exploit the trade with the newly reacquired Netherlands East Indies (Mansvelt 1924). With a nominal capitalization of f 37 million, it dwarfed the average-sized incorporated company of 1841 with their f 50,000 capitalization, or the major Amsterdam trading houses with about f 2 million capitalization. (Jonker 1996: 69–70). The NHM was patterned on the Prussian Königliche Seehandlung (Royal Overseas Trading Corporation) founded by Willem’s grandfather, Frederick the Great, in 1772 for similar purposes (Zappey 1981: 28–29; Bakker 1995b: 97). Unlike the VOC during the time of the Dutch Republic, the NHM was not intended to govern the East Indies colony, although as we shall see, it retained many governmental functions such as the management of pauperism. This ideological separation of state and economy, however, is belied by the hyphen in Willem’s epithet, the “merchant king.” The NHM was a hybrid trading company, bank, manufacturer, and instrument of social welfare for the reduction of pauperism. The cameralistic policing techniques developed to govern this corporate economy were later adopted more widely during the Netherlands’ second industrial revolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as the corporate form became increasingly independent from the king and itself became a separate site of power/knowledge like the prison, asylum, and clinic. By examining the NHM in its wider—colonial—context, we can truly appreciate its role in the emergent liberal governmentality of the Dutch nation-state. In industrializing the production of textiles in the Netherlands, the NHM specifically sought to reshape the subjectivities of paupers into “virtuous” workers by instilling “industry” through managerial policing techniques borrowed from the cameralistic poorhouses—and specifically, from the Colonies of Benevolence. The management sciences by which economic subjectivities were shaped in industrial factories had their origins, in other words, in the management of pauperism. Much of the process of early state formation in the “Greater Netherlands” (including the colonies) was thus the result of corporate governmentality under the leadership of Willem and his designated board members, a closed group of aristocratic capitalists that simultaneously controlled both state and corporate administrations, who thereby encouraged the circulation of technologies of rule between them. As a direct delegation of royal sovereignty, the modern corporation emerges precisely at the moment of modern nation-state formation in the Netherlands. This complex set of interlocked corporations extended royal power into civil society, into the financial service sector, trade, and national industrial production in new ways that a state bureaucracy increasingly subject to liberal-inspired political obstacles could not. These corporations were thus an autonomous means of policing an emergent economy (Barkan 2013: 18–39). The policing of a rebellious population in the “police state” (nachtwakerstaat) of King Willem thus had very different connotations to current usage. Since there was

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no division between executive (royal) and legislative power, the series of edicts proclaimed by Willem were identified as “police law” (Coopmans 1989: 588). Trained officials administered this police law in the various departments of the state bureaucracy and in the new corporations. Foucault traced the development of modern forms of liberal governmentality from the early police sciences (polizeiwissenschaft) developed by the German Cameralists (or Mercantilists) in the German states under the patronage of Willem’s grandfather, Frederick the Great of Prussia (2007: 68ff.; Pasquino 1991). The logic of governmentality spread from these various sites of the deployment of the police sciences to the state, thereby transforming the very nature of “enlightened absolutist” royal sovereignty (Gorski 1993: 269–70; Wakefield 2014). They were specifically developed to govern more economically, so as to maximize state revenue. Police government, finally, is in Foucault’s terms a form of pastoral power . . . a kind of economic pastorate. . . . The ruler is the shepherd (German Hirt), but also a husbandman (German Wirt). The population of the governed is likened to a herd as well as to a flock; welfare is conjoined to exploitation, as the police thinkers are coolly capable of recognizing. Mercantilism, Weber remarks, “means running the state like a set of enterprises.” (Gordon 1991:12) The merchant king extended this pastoral police-state metaphor even further by partially managing his realm through an actual series of incorporated enterprises (Woud 1987: 537–44). The royal corporations utilized cameralism as a means of efficiently husbanding state resources; the corporation, qua corporation, “governed economically,” yet not through the market mechanisms touted by liberalism. The Netherlands Trading Company, by which the Dutch sought to organize Javanese export production and create a textile industry in the Netherlands to serve that colonial market, managed its own internal economy through an accounting system like the later corporations of the second industrial revolution described by Chandler (1977). The NHM created vast commodity chains that linked motherland and colonies into an integrated assemblage—a managed “command economy”—with few of those links in that chain involving market transactions or market prices. Such coordination reduced risks and the costs of information in the market and helped mold a working class instilled with “productive virtue” in the process. The process of corporatization by which the NHM fixed this vast assemblage of producers and processors in place forms the subject of the first half of this book. This policing of the economy faced critique in the Liberal revolution of 1848, by which a new constitution predicated on rule of law was reluctantly accepted by the Crown. Liberalism hypothesized the autonomous market as a limit to the scope of state sovereignty; according to Locke, private property preceded the state, and hence its absolute authority (Nadeson 2008: 51). It was only by the mid-nineteenth century that the new discipline of liberal “political economy announced the unknowability

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for the sovereign of the totality of the economic process and, as a consequence, the impossibility of an economic sovereignty” (Gordon 1991: 16), and hence ushered in laissez-faire governmental programs to foster free markets. It was in this period that arguments were made to “emancipate” the economy, the corporation, and the NHM in particular from the state. This liberal critique, however, had had limited initial impact on the late-enlightened absolutists like Willem who had invested their personal fortunes in corporate bodies that they chartered to meet public needs and in which they personally indemnified investors against losses in what can be likened to today’s public-private partnerships (Woud 1987: 542). The now-hegemonic division between public and private sectors is not natural and inevitable but itself a historical construct, the result of this prolonged political contestation and ideological development after the Liberal revolution. The earlier cameralist political economists had viewed the sovereign as the pivot between state and economic administrations. That the analysis of governmentality focuses on the broader technologies of governance rather than the state apparatus itself reflects this earlier ideological context. “The” state in its Weberian sense of a bureaucratic whole holding a monopoly on the use of violence and hence the sole source of legitimate authority within a territorial sphere has lost its analytic edge (Rose 1999: 1ff.). By shifting attention from the imaginings of a homogenous and coherent sovereign state to self-directed sites of governmental practice, “the” state is shown to lack institutional or geographic fixity. This approach has been appealing to anthropologists, who have typically studied peoples at the margins of state power where its presence and effects are most inconsistent; it has been an important corrective to an earlier emphasis on “local communities” seemingly isolated from the state “above it” (Trouillot 2001: 126). Paraphrasing Benedict Anderson’s cogent metaphor on the “imagining” of nations, Ferguson and Gupta point to the ways these otherwise inchoate state structures were given that ideological unity; they are “constructed entities that are conceptualized and made effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that require study” (2002: 981). Corrigan and Sayer had earlier emphasized that “States, if the pun be forgiven, state”; they point to the multiple performative acts from court rituals to health inspections that are all evocative statements about what the State is and does (and importantly, what it is not), such that it appears “‘the State’ never stops talking” (1985: 3). Anthropologists have thus focused on the ways in which the dispersed agencies of the state such as these, each in their different ways, contribute to the construction of the image of a singular sovereign state as an agent sitting “above” and separate from civil society and the economy that it “encompasses” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Timothy Mitchell has called this “self ”-referential process the state effect; the state as we imagine it to be is an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which

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create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society. The essence of modern politics is not policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by the other, but the producing and reproducing of this line of difference. (Mitchell 1999: 89) The sum of the statements made about the state by its dispersed agents gives it a concrete yet abstract ideological unity that discursively differentiates it from the society, and in particular, the economy, in which it remains an integral embedded part. As Foucault emphasized, however, although the state is ideologically distinguished from society and economy, its delegated sovereignty continues to be exercised there. Understanding the development of corporate governmentality thus requires that we attend to the process by which the economy came to be constructed as a distinct and independent entity from the state, and how the discourse of “political economy” was ideologically shorn of the political. I alluded to this elision of politics earlier in the analysis of the Cultivation System, in which the extortion of cash crops was framed as an “economic” exchange by means of a contract, and the politics of state exploitation thereby occluded. This ideological process has been referred to as “economization” by economic sociologists Caliskan and Callon (and is thus the alter of the “state effect”). Economization is the process by which “behaviors, organizations, institutions, and objects which are tentatively and often controversially qualified as ‘economic’ by experts and lay persons” are ideologically reified as “the economy” and distinct from the state (2009: 370; Mitchell 1999). They thus place the emphasis on the discursive effects of experts in shaping the cultural reality of the economy as an object of intervention. The economy, once it gains its cultural reality, can be mobilized to justify governmental programs, and to set limits on direct state intervention, yet leaves open the possibility of continuing corporate governmentality. The literature on “economization” can be broadened by attention to the genealogy of corporate accounting in delineating this new sphere of civil society (Klamer and McCloskey 1988; Kalpagam 2000). Through their totalizing reach, these accounting systems made it possible for the first time to imagine this new entity, the economy, separate from the Crown. When corporate accounting systems were applied on a grander scale in order to manage the Cultivation System in Java and the commodity chains linking metropole and colony, the management accounts that were created could reflexively be used to portray a self-regulating (i.e. corporately led) economy. The NHM’s corporately administered economy spanned continents, capturing the transactional minutiae of millions of individual commodity producers in Java and the eastern Netherlands, all of which could be laid out in a grand calculus of national accounts; a balance sheet for the empire. Recognizing that imposing these ideological limits on sovereign power in the economy was a highly contentious issue, in the second half of this book I carefully attend to the political processes by which private corporations were successfully estab-

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lished yet retained their governmental functions in the assemblage managing colonial trade in the new liberal era. If the Dutch state and its major royal corporations came to share a common “liberal” governmental rationality predicated on the separation of state and economy, we need to attend to the means by which that contentious process was accomplished, and that, in part, entails locating the nodes of intersection where programs, techniques, and strategies could be transmitted, shared, contested, applied, and, most importantly, coordinated. I focus, in particular, on the political class of aristocratic regents that served as administrators in both state and corporations; they developed and implemented the various projects of rule with which we are concerned. At the center of the sociology of rule that I outline here, I underscore that many aristocratic regents sat on multiple corporate boards and served as coordinating interlocks between corporations and between corporations and government, hence ensuring a common governmental logic in the larger project of state—and class— formation (Schijf 1993; Roy 1983). Although from an aristocratic or regent background, they were more rentier capitalists than a feudal remnant. They came from a small number of families—estimated at about three hundred—that were accustomed to rule in the earlier politically decentralized Republic of the United Netherlands. These aristocratic holdovers were able to retain their family’s elite social positions through the nineteenth century by adapting themselves to the new governmental and corporate order. By the turn of the twentieth century, “of all members of the Dutch Second Chamber of Parliament in 1901, 34 percent belonged to a patrician [regent] family, while 19 percent was still from noble birth. Of all government ministers between 1888 and 1918, 40 percent belonged to patrician and 24 percent to noble families” (Kuitenbrouwer and Schijf 1998: 72; cf. Hoogenboom 2003: 215). Similarly, a detailed study of Dutch corporate directorships in the same period showed that the same few, intermarried regent families from Amsterdam played an inordinately large role in linking a whole series of major Dutch corporations into coordinated wholes (Schijf 1993: 39: Bossenbroek 1996: 85–115). It was these gentlemanly capitalists who, as directors of corporations like the NHM, sought to “render technical” the complex social problem of pauperism and depoliticize it such that it was withdrawn from public debate and subjected to the “rule of experts” (Bossenboek 1996). It was they who developed new management discourses from the cameralist police sciences they inherited, and who later consolidated their status in a new school of governmental sciences, the “Royal Academy” at Delft (Fasseur 1993). It is these few extended families of “gentlemanly capitalists” that exercised considerable power in both government and on corporate boards ensuring a common governmental logic in the larger project of state formation. In this work, I provide a genealogy of how this class of regent capitalists came to be. This book examines the process by which this regent capitalist class was created in the crucible of the royal corporations, eventually to wrest control of the processes of state

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formation and corporate governmentality from the merchant king’s hands alone in the aftermath of the Liberal revolution.

Colonial Governmentality in the “Greater Netherlands” In tracing the development of these royal corporations, I follow the circulation and reach of their sets of governmental practices throughout the Dutch empire. In doing so, I go beyond the current bounds of the Dutch historiography on business development and industrialization in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, which largely ignores the impact of colonialism on that development (Mokyr 1976; Griffiths 1979; Sluyterman 2005; Wintle 2000; Zanden 1996; Zanden and Riel 2004; for exceptions see Mansvelt 1924; Meerkerk 2019). This neglect is a reflection of a wider reticence of Dutch historians and publics to embrace postcolonial studies, and acknowledge the impact of colonialism, empire, and imperialism on the processes of state and class formation in the homeland—and on the elite noble governing class of gentlemanly capitalists in particular (Raben 2013). In the introduction to a recent panel and essay collection, Koekkoek, Richard, and Weststeijn (2017, 2019) note that while Dutch colonialism has been extensively studied, there is no equivalent to the emergent large literature on British imperialism and empire. The Dutch, they note, have been both the subjects of imperial rule and imperial agents, but themselves had no Dutch word for empire (2017: 81–83). As C. J. Lammers noted in an early analysis, the concept of the Netherlands as “‘occupying power’ does not fit into our national self-image. We are not used to seeing ourselves and our ancestors as ‘occupiers,’ but rather as ‘occupied,’ as victims of Germans and Japanese in the recent past, of French in the 19th century, and earlier yet, of Spanish rulers” (2003: 7). The recent Dutch historiography has thus largely disregarded the incorporation of “colonial” in national history; it acknowledges that “the early Dutch ventures overseas since the late-sixteenth century were partly motivated by the Netherlands’ emergence as an independent state, fusing national liberation and overseas conquest, but the raison d’être of the Netherlands was not grounded in any imperial motivation. The Netherlands themselves were never perceived as an empire and Dutch colonialism retained a strong business-oriented and technocratic bent” (Raben 2013: 9). In addressing the “imperialism debate” in regard to Dutch expansionism in the Indonesian archipelago, Kuitenbrouwer summarized the arguments against including the Dutch in models developed to account for the “scramble for Africa” and concluded that they should be considered “reluctant imperialists” at best (1998). As a result, the Netherlands and its colony on Java have each been analyzed in isolation, but little scholarly effort has been devoted to a comparison of their state-formation; indeed, the English-language literature on the United Kingdom of the Netherlands is negligible (Laarse 1999: 4) in comparison to that on Java under the Cultivation System in the same period.

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In returning to these debates, I begin from a simple fact: the revenues from the Cultivation System in Java provided the bulk of the Netherlands Trading Company’s considerable profits, as well as more than a third of the state revenue of the Netherlands, enabling it to embark on its largest national industrialization project, the construction of a national rail network (see table 0.2). The centrality of the colonial empire to state and economic development in the Netherlands clearly needs to be addressed. In addressing the centrality of empire, I underscore what has become a dictum of postcolonial studies: we must “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989: 4). In this book I pursue a comparative analysis of the common forms of state formation throughout the empire, and the role of corporate governmentality as an “apparatus of security” in particular. That the corporation served as an “apparatus of security” with governmental functions should not be surprising if we remember their original critical role in the development of colonialism. Colonialism in the mercantilist era had frequently been experienced as “corporate rule,” with the corporation serving most state functions. Colonialism first presented itself with a corporate face, whether as the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, the East India Company in India, or the United East Indies Company (VOC) in the Netherlands East Indies. Recognizing the state-like features of these corporations, it is clear that the liberal Dutch state did not develop in the Netherlands, only later to transform “its” colony. Rather, the modern state system simultaneously developed in both metropolitan territories and colonies, utilizing a common set of governmental strategies. It should come as no surprise that colonial strategies of control might be redeployed in the metropole at a later date. The conditions in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands inherited by Willem I were not unlike those in Java—both were rigidly hierarchical agricultural societies devastated by war, with a high degree of decentralized local autonomy and only a rudimentary patrimonial royal bureaucracy. Both landscapes were transformed as the Netherlands Trading Company utilized the new sciences of policing the market to regulate the production and flow of export commodities and hence augment both the wealth of the state and the formation of ideally productive citizens. The Netherlands Trading Company is one means by which we can reinsert the rest of the world into Foucault’s Eurocentric genealogy of the development of biopower (cf. Scott 2003). Table 0.2. Colonial Surpluses as Percentage of Dutch Tax Revenue. Period

Colonial Surplus

1831–1840

f 150,600,000

1841–1850

f 215,600,000

3.6

38.6

1851–1860

f 289,400,000

3.8

52.6

1861–1870

f 276,700,000

2.9

44.5

1871–1877

f 127,200,000

1.7

26.5

Source: Meerkerk 2016: 148.

Percent of Dutch GDP Percent of Total Tax Revenue 2.8

31.9

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The programs implemented by the Netherlands Trading Company drew on these discourses, applying them to Dutch “paupers” and “lazy natives” alike, with the profits generated from the colony finally enabling, only later, the development of a specifically liberal gentlemanly capitalism in the mid-nineteenth-century Netherlands. The approach taken in this book to colonialism borrows heavily from the postcolonial critiques of Ann Stoler and David Scott, who push for a more reflexive analysis of colonizers. According to Scott, the theoretical absence of Europe in the recent postcolonial literature is the result of programmatic attempts to refocus the study of colonialism on the colonized as a counter to prior emphasis on Europe as the determining factor in colonial history. Scott argues that postcolonial critics have largely taken two rhetorical tacks that direct attention away from colonial powers. On the one hand, these critics have demonstrated that colonialist discourse was produced by a variety of orientalist scholars, German Romantics, and social Darwinists, among others, that fabricated distorted representations of the colonized; they fashioned an ideology of innate and unbridgeable colonial difference, usually construed in racial terms (Bhabba 1990). On the other hand, critics have challenged the colonialist claim to have transformed their colonies through the introduction of liberal Enlightenment ideals, thereby enabling a modern transition from the “rule of force” to the “rule of law” (Scott 2003; Shani 2006). Scott argues that these two strains in the critique of colonialist discourse have “constituted itself as a kind of writing back at the West” and in so doing, obscured the “varied forms of Europe’s insertion into the lives of the colonized.” Without dismissing postcolonialist scholars’ impact in restoring indigenous voices, he argues that this does not “decenter” Europe as they claim but rather makes the “varied forms of Europe’s insertion into the lives of the colonized” invisible (2003: 193). If we are to take seriously the injunction to tease out the “tensions of empire” and “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989: 4), we need to focus on the governmental technologies used in both overseas empires as well as the newly conquered territories that were becoming the cores of emerging European nation-states. The point of such a comparative approach is not to deploy Europe as the “universal subject of all history” but to refocus analysis on the ways “in which colonial power is organized as an activity designed to produce effects of rule” (Scott 2003: 25)—hence in this case, to illustrate how this colonial power was utilized in both in Java, and in projects of “domestic colonization” as well. The Dutch state was as much shaped by its imperial project as the colony itself was transformed by European hegemony. Scott calls for a new problematic, an examination of colonial governmentality: “The emergence at a moment in colonialism’s history of a form of power—that is, therefore, a form of power not merely coincident with colonialism—which was concerned above all with disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions, and with constructing in their place new conditions so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige—new forms of life to come into being” (2003: 25). He

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calls, in other words, for analysis of those projects for the improvement of populations (the apparatuses of security) that fall under the rubric of “development” both at home and abroad, but that end up serving as “everyday forms of state development” instead (Li 1999: 296). This book then, comparatively examines the deployment of a corporate apparatus of security in both internal and external colonialism: the creation of domestic colonies as well as imperialist colonies abroad. Scott’s focus on governmentality as “a form of power not merely coincident with colonialism” builds on Stoler and Cooper’s injunction to identify the specific continuities in projects of rule across the colonial divide. For that reason, I problematize the concept of “colonial” governmentality by highlighting the relationship between colonialism in the overseas colony and internal colonialism in the metropole. By substituting “corporate” for “colonial” governmentality, I wish to underscore the historically specific discourses, practices, and projects introduced by figures like Johannes van den Bosch in both the newly integrated Dutch territories like Drenthe and Twente that were becoming the industrializing core of an emerging European nation-state, as well as in their overseas empires. A focus on corporate governmentality allows us to trace the colonizing assemblage that spanned the Netherlands and Java, and the common projects of rule used to entrap both Dutch paupers and Javanese peasants in the global apparatus of security fixed in place by this company. Both Van den Bosch’s “Colonies of Benevolence” in the eastern Netherlands and the Cultivation System in Java are products of a particular strand of corporate colonial discourse that provided new forms of discipline in the name of economic development. By focusing on the continuities in the underlying economic discourse tying these two cases together, the role of the colony in the formation of the metropolitan state is highlighted. Throughout the course of the book, I develop an argument that this forms a distinctively Dutch kind of “benevolent colonization” (irony intended) that was applied equally in the Netherlands and in Java. Such an approach allows us to apply the insights derived from studies of colonial governmentality to the analysis of Europe’s development. Kalpagam, for example, has argued that “making up ‘individuals’ was an important agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism, but liberalism in the colonial context did not seek to recreate the citizen-individual, i.e. the individual as bearer of rights, but as an individual who by being forced into a new sphere of commercial exchange would become the Homo economicus of the market economy” (2000: 420; Bhimani 1994). Kalpagam’s insight highlights the narrow range of those considered capable of bearing liberal rights in Europe (restricted to those of property) and hence allows us to examine colonizing projects of rule there in the same terms as in Java. In particular, this refocuses attention from the discourse of the “powers of freedom” that the progress of liberalism was said to have unleashed and redirects it to the dark side of those judicial liberties: panopticism, “the technique, universally widespread, of coercion” being used to shape “economic man” (Foucault 1979: 222).

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Ann Stoler has developed this idea by extending Foucault’s concept of the “carceral archipelago” to empire (2016: 78). Foucault theorized the “carceral archipelago” in relation to the “birth of the prison” and used it to describe the plethora of civic institutions outside the prison that were infused with the same disciplinary practices. Foucault asked, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (1979: 228). It is this focus on the extension of disciplinary power into civil society that led him to declare Mettray, a French “agricultural colony” for delinquent youth, to be the “completion of the carceral system.” “Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the[se] coercive technologies of behavior” (1979: 293). Foucault, however, was notoriously Eurocentric and studiously avoided mention of Mettray as a “domestic colony” (Arneil 2017: 156–62). Stoler, picking up on this absence, notes that all of the institutions that Foucault lists as examples of the carceral archipelago—whether domestic or overseas—were explicit colonies of one type or another. She thus views colonialism as a key feature of what she redubbed the “carceral archipelago of empire,” a colonial experiment “beyond the frontiers of criminal law.” The colonies are kept in a dependent “relationship to a broader biopolitical norm and legal status that those in the colony are imagined to aspire to and desire but, by design, cannot attain” (Stoler 2016: 78). Stoler highlights the various means by which liberalism applied its exclusions; by race, gender, and class. Those relegated to colonies, whether by class in the Netherlands or by race in Java, were defined as incapable of bearing liberal rights; their mere physical presence in colonies defined them as appropriate targets of governmental intervention that need not take liberal freedoms into account. Hence in this book, I trace the application of the same colonizing ideology developed by Johannes van den Bosch to frame his various governmental projects of reformation, what I refer to as “benevolent colonization.” Van den Bosch was to argue that those who did not own property were abject creatures forced by their natural needs to take any waged work they could find, and since they lacked realistic choice, the state could make that choice for them. The application of this kind of force was permissible only insofar as it was educative of a “degenerate” type: “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. I am referring to a form of governmentality that in marking out a ‘subject nation’ appropriates, directs and dominates its various spheres of activity” (Bhabba 1990: 75). The use of “force” in the reconstitution of “irrational” and “lazy” paupers and peasants into proper “economic men” was thus part and parcel of the larger liberal project to create laissez-faire markets. Such “free” markets depended upon individuals “doing as they ought” as rational economizers; it was dependent, in other words, on instilling “productive virtue” in them. The elaborate corporate assemblage that organized the global commodity chains linking the Netherlands and its colony was an

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apparatus of security that, through its hierarchical administration, organized this use of disciplinary force in an economical manner, as a graded response to ensure proper “economic” behavior. The use of force could only be rationalized by colonial processes of marginalization and exclusion, which I argue explicitly tie domestic colonies to imperial expansion in the East Indies.

Organization of the Book This book presents these arguments through a series of case studies highlighting aspects of the governmental assemblage that knit the Dutch empire together through their coordination of global commodity chains in cotton, cloth, and sugar. Each case study thus focuses upon a particular governmental problem in the construction of those commodity chains, and analyzes both the governmental rationality brought to bear upon it, as well as the implications of these technologies of rule on the development of corporatization. The focus of analysis remains dual: on the sets of practices adopted to manage the problem at hand and on the sets of governmental elites called upon to implement them. In order to clarify the unique character of the governmental elites at the core of these processes, I begin with a discussion of the form of the Dutch state in the early nineteenth century and how it differed from the earlier Dutch republic(s) and the later Liberal constitutional monarchy. It is crucial to keep the form of the state, and its ideological position vis-à-vis the emerging civil sphere and “economy,” front and center to ensure that we do not prematurely disembed business history and corporate development from its political context. It is also important to underscore the essential similarity of state formation in both the metropole and the colony to undermine those orientalist discourses that differentiate Java as a patrimonial backwater. This chapter thus focuses on the governmental roles of the class of aristocratic regents that evolved into “gentlemanly capitalists” by the end of the century. The first section of the book focuses on the construction of the royal colonial trade empire, an assemblage of projects of rule to instill productive virtue, foster the production of trade goods, and manage that trade through hierarchical corporate means. I begin with an analysis of a Benthamite “charity company,” the domestic Colonies of Benevolence, which introduces the main themes of the book. The Colonies of Benevolence introduced specifically colonial practices of coerced production as a means of instilling productive virtue, and of “benevolently” organizing the production of crops. The sets of practices adopted in the Colonies of Benevolence were then applied, by their creator Johannes van den Bosch, on a far broader scale in the colony of Java, where this assemblage of practices became known as the Cultivation System. This chapter traces how accounting systems and contracts were used to ideologically disembed “market exchanges” from a coordinated system of government coercion (an apparatus of security); this assemblage of practices was then “corporatized” by the

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Netherlands Trading Company to organize the manufacture of cotton cloth among the paupers of the eastern Netherlands. The resulting royal assemblage corporately organized these colonial commodity chains while simultaneously utilizing this apparatus of security in order to instill productive virtue and solidify state rule. The second section of the book examines the transformation of this royal assemblage in the transition to Liberalism at midcentury. Chapter 7 discusses the various ideological frames available in the period seeking to influence the porous boundaries between state, society, and economy. I underscore that despite the “Liberal revolution” of 1848, Liberalism as a political force was relatively weak in the Netherlands. I contrast this discussion of Liberalism with several variants, each of which sought a different role for the state in the economy. Thus, I draw on the development of Benthamite panopticism to elaborate a model of “Utopian Development,” as utilized in the Colonies of Benevolence, and compare that with that of Saint-Simonian “Socialist” development. Both had important influence on how Dutch corporations were framed as “Charity companies.” I then return to the Javanese sugar industry and the Dutch cotton industry to examine the implications of these ideologies on the evolving corporate development of the colonial assemblage in the early Liberal era. The concluding section of the book examines how the Liberal transition attenuated royal absolutism and fostered a shift from monarchy to oligarchy. It examines how the slow ideological creation of “free markets” allowed an illiberal, conservative faction of “gentlemanly capitalists” to assume control of aspects of the royal assemblage managing colonial trade. This conservative elite had been fostered by the technocratic rule of the Crown and adopted both Benthamite and Saint-Simonian strategies of organizing production and trade. In particular, they created Saint-Simonian “Crédit Mobiliers,” innovative finance banks, in order to create and network the corporate network through which they managed aspects of the royal colonial assemblage. It is important to emphasize that in the “emancipation” of the corporation in a “free market” that resulted, the new network of corporations continued to serve governmental functions as “charity companies” and to do so under continuing governmental constraints. I lastly examine how these strategies were applied in the railway industry. The railways have repeatedly been cited as the first example of the “modern” corporation due to their innovations in management. This chapter thus highlights how the development of this industry in the Netherlands merely perpetuated earlier patterns of corporate governmentality.

Notes 1. Compare with Joshua Barkan’s conception of the dualism of state/corporate sovereignty (2013). 2. For example, the Dutch legal framework for company law allowed for an intermediate form between the limited liability corporation and the private partnership: the “sleeping partnership” (CV, commanditaire vennootschap) that offered limited liability to nonmanaging shareholders but not ownermanagers (Jonker 1996: 61–62).

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3. For the Foucauldian studies, see Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006; Miller and Rose 1990; Miller and Rose 1992; Bhimani 1994. For a summary of the Marxist studies, see O’Doherty and Willmott 2001; and Bryer 2000a, 2000b. 4. The standard economic histories of the Netherlands in English are Griffiths (1979); Jonker (1996); Mokyr (1976); Wintle (2000); Zanden and Riel (2004); ‘t Hart, Jonker, and van Zanden (1997).

Part I

State Formation in the Greater Netherlands

CHAPTER 1

Aristocratic Restoration in Nineteenth-Century “Greater Netherlands”

The aim of governmentality studies is to decenter the state in our narratives of governance, and to highlight the capillary nature of liberal forms of biopower that work through a multitude of nonstate sites such as the prison, clinic, and asylum, where governmental processes and practices also take place. It is in this sense that I speak of the corporation as one of the decentered nonstate sites of governmental practice, as one particular form of apparatus of security for fostering the health and productivity of the population. While the primary focus of this book is on these decentered corporate sites through which governmental programs, strategies, and practices were developed and circulated, in this chapter I examine the role of the sovereign in defining the political class, those regents and aristocrats who served as the patrimonial rulers of these decentered domains in the new “united kingdom.” This is part of a general anthropological concern to “study up” and provide an analysis not only of working-class formation but also of the development of the nascent capitalist class, underscoring its unique composition and relation to the state. It was these regents who, through “corporate governmentality,” were transformed into “gentlemanly capitalists” over the course of the nineteenth century. I focus on the discourse of “legitimate leadership” here since no mature state bureaucracy existed in the “Greater Netherlands” in the modern sense; rather, the “civil servant” was an “officeholder” (ambtenaar), and the office came with specific rights and obligations, as well as a fair degree of independence. I underscore, given my emphasis on regents as office holders, that “in all patrimonial states, state officials had two concerns: securing the state that provided their office, and maintaining the status and wealth of their families and lineages.” Officials pursued these rewards “assiduously throughout early modern Europe—a practice known as kuiperij (machinations) or ambtsbejag (hunt for office)” (Adams 1994b: 505–6)—which we too easily include in a liberal discourse of “corruption” that lends itself rather easily to barely concealed stereotypes of the Third World (Gupta 1995: 378). Determining who could assume

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such a patrimonial office in the Greater Netherlands was a complex negotiation between Dutch and Javanese imaginings of the state. My aim here is to also provide a comparative analysis of state formation in both metropole and colony in order to demonstrate that the same kinds of governmental reforms were pursued simultaneously in both jurisdictions, hence providing a common ground for the development and circulation of corporate forms of governmentality. This chapter clarifies the complex changing nature of the Dutch state over the course of four centuries and a variety of state formations, from the early Republic of the Seven United Netherlands to its lesser-known, short-lived successor states: the Batavian Republic, the Kingdom of Holland, and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, unlike most historical narratives of Dutch national development, I include the colonies as an integral part of that narrative of modern state formation. The intention is not to draw attention to the conceptual breaks and revolutions that are the key tropes of nationalist narratives, and hence to whiggish sentiments of “progress,” but to trace the continuity in governmental institutions and the political class. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (the “Greater Netherlands”) that emerged from the chaos of the Napoleonic wars was a complex layering of ancient overlapping governmental forms whose shadowy imprints were retained in often archaic institutions in new guises. I am concerned with tracing the history of the deployment of this unique governmental structure to their colonies, to Java in particular. Postcolonial theorists have long pointed out that European narratives of colonial rule too often depend on an “imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms” and “asymmetric ignorance” (Chakrabarty 2000: 4, 28). In a recent survey of the literature, Barker and Van Klinken have argued that the “storylines” produced by Western scholars on the Indonesian state explicitly contrast a stereotypical colonial Dutch “beambtenstaat” (a Weberian rational bureaucratic “iron cage” unresponsive to society) with an equally stereotypical patrimonial Javanese ruling elite concerned only to concentrate mystic “power,” as in Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation (Barker and Van Klinken 2009: 3, 8). In these orthodox academic storylines, the preservation of the Javanese aristocracy represents an assertion of orientalist difference, a marker of backwardness (cf. Stoler and Cooper 1997: 3–4). This chapter, in contrast, directly addresses the stereotype of the modernist Dutch legal-rational bureaucracy as based on a similar “asymmetric ignorance,” and I focus instead on the “anti-[French] revolutionary” policies of King Willem I that fostered a parallel aristocratic restoration (or “refeudalization”) at home, as well as in Java. The analysis of the regent class pursued here is intended to address an inadequacy in abstract Foucauldian approaches focused on mentalities of rule to address the failure of these conceptual programs on the ground in the face of resistance and subversion—the limits of governmentality. The aim is to supplement the analysis of the mentalité of rule that is the focus of this book with an analysis of the actual social and

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cultural relations comprising the patrimonial state form in the Greater Netherlands and of the unique social class of regents that governed it; this analysis situates the political class that implemented state policy, or alternately its own ends through state institutions, within the national and international context of its emergent colonial empire. It was this class who served as the conduit for the circulation of governmental strategies between the state bureaucracy and those corporations that managed the vast commodity chains that knit this empire together.

Aristocratic Republicans The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century was one of the most successful of the early European states, a small nation of less than 1.5 million people that established itself as the first truly global commercial power against the combined competition of Spain, Portugal, France, and England. The roots of the modern Dutch state begin in 1648 when the Protestant northern Dutch-speaking provinces exercised their independence as the “Republic of the Seven United Netherlands,” leaving the southern Catholic Dutch-speaking provinces as part of the Habsburg Netherlands under the control of Spain (Parker 1979) (map 1.1). After the republic’s revolt from Spain, the dominant local ruling merchant families of port cities like Amsterdam came to command its federated provincial governments. These local elites jealously guarded their local rights and privileges from central rule. The quirkiness of Dutch political culture results from the relative power of these urban, non-aristocratic regent families within a decentralized patrimonial state. In

Map 1.1. Territorial Evolution of the “Greater Netherlands.”

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the absence of the Spanish king, the new republic had no monarch, hence no one to ennoble an aristocracy. Power was concentrated at the provincial level, and it was up to each of the seven united provinces to recognize—or not—the suzerainty of the House of Orange, the old stadhouder (regent) of the Spanish king for the coastal province of Holland. The relatively decentralized form of the state in the Dutch Republic was quite different from that of its patrimonial rivals, and its hegemonic success as well as the continued eccentricity of its successor states can be attributed to this complex difference in structure (Adams 1994 a, 1994b, 2005). It’s complex, particularistic, and highly decentralized political form, and its delegation of government to corporations makes a Foucauldian emphasis on governance rather than the state necessary. The republic was a federation of only loosely integrated provinces and subordinate territories and contained numerous cities like Amsterdam that remained under the relatively autonomous rule of the oligarchic patrician class of these non-aristocratic regents. Each province had its own representative ruling body, or estates (Staten), although they varied in how this was organized; unlike most other provinces for example, Holland, the largest and most powerful, had completely marginalized the aristocracy in favor of regent representatives from its eighteen cities (Adams 1994b). Each of the provincial estates appointed representatives to the Staten-Generaal (Estates General, national assembly) that represented the republic in foreign affairs and directly ruled over the “internal colonies” of Flanders, Drenthe, and Brabant (the “Generality Lands,” or internal colonies) as well as the Dutch East and West Indies Companies. These internal colonies had no representation in the Estates General (Lammers 2003: 14–21). While the countryside was a patchwork of aristocratic estates, great farmers, and autonomous semifeudal commons, the urban regents dominated the state and economy of the republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a “golden age” characterized by an “embarrassment of riches” derived from its global trade empire (Schama 1991). This intermarrying hereditary rentier class of urban regents differentiated itself in lifestyle and social status from both the rural aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in that they largely lived off the interest from their investment in the national debt. It is a unique social class not found in other European powers of the era. It is possible, however, to overemphasize the distinctions between city regents and rural aristocrats; in the period, “aristocrat” referred less to a closed social or economic group than to a political category of persons who had rights to sit in traditional governmental bodies through birth or cooptation (Stuurman 1992: 90). The greatest of these regent families was the House of Orange, from whom the stadhouder (lands’ steward, from the same root as the French lieutenant) was appointed; the stadhouder’s primary role was to lead the military, although some sought to enlarge their political role within the Estates General. The stadhouder was appointed independently by each of the provinces, not the Estates General, hence at many points he ruled only a portion of the republic, and for sixty-seven of its two

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hundred years there was no stadhouder at all—these periods were known as the “true freedom” (ware vrijheid) (Stuurman 1992: 62–66). The republic was thus a unique polity in the period, and it has been characterized by Julia Adams as an “estatist” patrimonial state, with estatist referring to the relative insignificance of the sovereign and the dominance of the regent and aristocratic estates in the Estates General. This distinctive form of rule is typified by a segmentation of sovereignty between rulers and corporate elites. Patrimonial rulers rule by granting exclusive politico-economic rights and immunities to self-governing corporate groups, which are liable for certain reciprocal obligations to the ruler. In doing so, rulers are simultaneously gathering funds and deploying their power, while corporate elites in turn get economic concessions, political representation, and derived symbolic status. Sovereignty is institutionalized in a set of interdependent relationships among rulers and the corporate bodies (clans, estates, towns, guilds, chartered companies, and so forth) that undergird their rule. It is dual, not unitary, with pronounced tendencies toward further segmentation and fragmentation. (Adams 1994a: 506) The republic was thus a highly decentralized polity whose regents and aristocrats stridently retained their jurisdictional autonomy—and a resulting set of idiosyncratic customs, laws, and regulations—from interference by higher levels of government (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988: 17–42). This seventeenth-century Old Republicanism was an antimonarchal movement that sought to preserve the rights and privileges of the federated provinces, patrician city regents, and the aristocracy (adel) of the eastern Netherlands from inroads by the stadhouders. Hence, in its original sense, sixteenth-century Dutch republicanism celebrated only the liberties of urban regents and regional nobles who controlled corporate bodies “against, consecutively, the King of Spain, the stadholders, the French emperor, and finally the king of the Netherlands” (Laarse 1999: 16). This Old Republicanism was to remain a dominant political ideology through which the state was imagined throughout the period of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. I have underscored the complex federative nature of the United Provinces since the form of that patrimonial polity similarly informed the political organization of its progeny, the “company-state” through which it ruled its colonial empire and Java in particular. The wealth of the regent families was intimately tied to their partnership in the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). The VOC challenged Spanish, English, and Portuguese naval supremacy and established a watery empire based on mastery of the sea that touched almost every continent. The federative structure of the republic was mirrored in the innovative organization of the Dutch East Indies Company, one of the first of the limited liability trading companies and the first to issue tradable shares, giving it all of the

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formal characteristics of the modern corporate form (Carlos and Nicholas 1988). The VOC itself became a powerful corporate force within the estatist patrimonial state, jealously protecting its trade hegemony, even against the interests of the republic as a whole (Adams 1994b: 337ff.). The company was granted state-like powers, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, and establish colonies. Like the republic that gave it life, it was organized as a federation of cities represented by their urban regents, each seeking to protect their local prerogatives. Its shareholders were divided in six chambers (Kamers) from the port cities of Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, Middelburg, and Hoorn, whose managing directors elected the Heeren XVII (seventeen lords) who ran the company. The federated company’s business was divided among the six chambers, each of which built and furnished its own ships but whose cargoes and profits were proportionally redistributed (Adams 1994b: 333). For almost two centuries, until its eventual bankruptcy in 1800, the company was the most successful in Europe, establishing colonies in New York (Nieuw Amsterdam), South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Java, the Moluccas, and Taiwan. Of its colonial possessions, the island of Java was the jewel in the crown (figure 1.1). The VOC factory at Batavia (now Jakarta) in Java had been established in 1611 in an effort to take control of the spice trade from Portugal and soon became the center of intra-archipelagic trade and Dutch rule. Its trading success made it a target of attacks from the central Javanese kingdom of Mataram. Mataram, which at one point had conquered the entire island, was divided into its self-ruled core domain in central Java and the mancanegara (outer territories) ruled by the regents of the Susuhunan (king). In a policy of divide and rule, the VOC increasingly turned to the kingdom’s peripheral regents to guarantee the delivery of export crops, leading those regents to assert their independence and aristocratic pretensions against the royal court. The weakened kingdom of Mataram was increasingly forced to cede those regions to the VOC, and itself became a vassal state in 1755 with the division of what remained of the truncated kingdom into four rival courts in central Java (Sutherland 1975). As the company-state’s organization was much like the Estates General, so too the VOC drew on the republic’s governmental strategies for its internal Dutch colonies, the “Generality Lands” of Flanders, Brabant, and Drenthe, in order to rule Java. Both these internal and external colonies were considered wingewesten, dependencies subject to economic exploitation and the exaction of tribute (Lammers 2003; Bruin 1996). The VOC thus divided the island into province-like “regencies” ruled by an indigenous aristocratic regent under the supervision of a Dutch resident answerable to the central stadhouder-like rule of the governor-general. The political terminology was not accidental. Java was thus as complex an estatist patrimonial polity as the Republic of the Netherlands itself, with aristocratic regency governments jealously protecting their particularist laws and culture from the corrosive centralizing military power of the VOC as avidly as the provincial estates resisted the stadhouders of the House of Orange. By the time of the VOC’s bankruptcy in 1800, it had established

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Figure 1.1. “Netherlands’s most precious ornament,” De Amsterdammer, 14 October 1916.

a complex polity on Java composed of the north coast “Government Lands” (directly ruled regencies) known as the Pesisir, a directly ruled Sundanese-speaking western region governed by the “Priangan System” of forced crop deliveries, and the south-central “self-governing” (indirectly ruled) courts of the former kingdom of Mataram known as Kejawèn.

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Birth of the Centralized Liberal Bourgeois State For two centuries, the vast trade wealth generated by the VOC had fostered the Dutch enlightenment, the development of bourgeois liberalism, and a growing opposition to the oligarchic regent government of the republic, laying it bare to a new form of liberal republicanism that sought to radically alter these forms of federative government. The golden age of Dutch naval and commercial dominance was greatly affected by the slowly declining fortunes of the company, leading to broad urban poverty that destabilized the oligarchical rule of the stadhouder and the city regents and created overwhelming support for the French Revolution of 1788–89. The modern Dutch unitary state apparatus was born in the allied Batavian Revolution of 1795, during which the last stadhouder fled to England and a new republican government was briefly established. This New Republicanism was an anti-aristocratic enlightenment movement of urban patriots that established a unitary, centralized state and abolished the feudal rights and privileges of the Ridderschappen (the noble electoral colleges). This vassal state of France imagined the state in a radical new way: it traded local civic rights for national citizenship on a property-based franchise and associated land tax system and began the process of subordinating provincial and city freedoms to a hierarchically organized bourgeois state with a unitary legal code (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988: 19). The struggle between old and new republicanism, between patrimonialist regional rule and a unitary bureaucratic state (whether patriot or royally led) was to define the politics of the Netherlands for the following century. Both the old and new republicans described themselves as economic liberals; both were free market adherents united by their opposition to the absolutist Orange monarchy, although they divided on the need for a centralized, bureaucratic state to replace it (Laarse 1999: 8–13). The old republican regent elite objected to centralized state intervention in their traditional local control over education, welfare, and religion. Neither form of republicanism was radically democratic. The new republic was soon annexed by France and reestablished as the Kingdom of Holland in 1806, ruled by Napoleon’s brother Louis (Knippenberg 1997: 28–31). Louis accelerated the governmental reforms introduced by the Batavian Republic. He eliminated the federative structure of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and established a unitary state with a centralized bureaucracy, national citizenship, national taxation, and a national system of decimal currency, weights, and measures. The centralizing policies first introduced by the Batavian Republic were almost immediately applied to the Dutch colonies. The moribund Dutch East Indies Company had been heavily in debt to the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, leading the now patriot-controlled Estates General to dissolve the company in 1796 and assume all of its overseas possessions. By 1800, Java was legally declared a colony of the republic under executive control. Although they ordered the governor-general “to impose the then prevailing system of freedom and popular rights [of the Batavian

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Republic] in the Indies territories,” little was accomplished until the new French king appointed Herman Willem Daendels governor-general in 1807 (Somers 2005: 82). Daendels was a Dutch patrician turned patriot general who had led the “Batavian Legion” in the French revolutionary army and had led several coups in the Batavian Republic to promote the new unitary constitution (Sas 2004: 315–28). Daendels arrived in Java in 1808 and governed until the British interregnum of 1811–15. During this period, he followed a dualistic policy of respecting Javanese adat (culture) while ending the aristocratic privileges of local regents. They were stripped of their feudal privileges, military roles, and hereditary positions and demoted to bureaucratic appointees of the governor-general serving at pleasure, just as the aristocrats and regents in the Netherlands itself were (Somers 2005: 91). The variety of aristocratic domains were reorganized to increase efficiency into standard province-like residencies with a common set of bureaucratic officials that could be easily transferred as needed. A strengthened centralized state ruling standardized Dutch-led residencies was thus introduced throughout Java (map 1.2). The first steps to establish a unitary territorial state apparatus were thus taken in both metropole and colony at about the same time as part of the same French liberal impetus. These reforms were extended under Sir Stamford Raffles during the British interregnum. A territorially organized village administration was imposed on Java between 1811 and 1815. Seeking to curb the exactions of indigenous nobles, Raffles imposed a corporate autonomous village under the leadership of a single head answerable to the Indies’ state—intermediate levels of indigenous functionaries that crosscut territorial boundaries that had linked farmers to nonlocal aristocrats were eliminated (Niel 1992: 127–28; Elson 1994: 29–31). Raffles applied this form of village organization in order to strengthen the collection of a new property tax (land rent) and to weaken aristocratic rights to land and labor. Raffles set the tax rate at the cash value of 40 percent of the average rice harvest (using 40 percent of the land). The land rent was ideally envisioned as an individual property tax by the British so as to encourage investment in land improvement.1 Raffles, a liberal, imposed a cash tax as a means of encouraging the commodification of agriculture and the growth of a local cash economy (Elson 1994: 35). This entailed a shift to a tax on land similar to that

Map 1.2. The Residencies of Java, 1834.

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which the Netherlands was itself undergoing in this period; i.e., the land rent was a tax on property’s productive capacity, like the Dutch system, and not on a property’s value (hence the reference to rent rather than tax). The tax could thus be administered according to Dutch principles.2 The Netherlands itself was to acquire a similar form of municipal government and land taxation after the restoration of the House of Orange. Although the incorporated cities and their regents had had representation in the Estates and Estates General in the Dutch Republic, the Netherlands was a complex “archipelago of regions and communities” (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988: 17–42) and lacked a uniform system of local rural government until 1819. The platteland (countryside), unlike the cities, was divided up into a checkerboard of provincially defined manors, markes, parishes, waterschappen, and a host of other administrative forms (Woud 1987: 65). In 1819 (that is, five years after Java), a centralized system of territorially organized rural municipal administration (gemeente) was imposed in the aftermath of the dissolution of landed estates and aristocratic hereditary rights resulting in a vast increase in the power of the Crown (Pot 1934: 296). After 1824, these regulations were further altered, and rural municipal government was split between an elected council and an administration led by a mayor (burgemeester) directly appointed by the Crown (Woud 1987: 68). The new centralized system strengthened the power of the central state in assessing and collecting property tax by isolating the Crown-appointed mayor from his council of elected property holders/taxpayers.

Aristocratic Restoration in the (Dis-)United Kingdom of the Netherlands These Napoleonic reforms were short-lived and soon attenuated in the restoration. None of these centralizing reforms had time to establish deep roots before Napoleon’s defeat in the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 opened the way for the return of the exiled stadhouder, now seeking recognition as king. Willem I, the “merchant king,” was to rule his new kingdom as the result of English largesse rather than by historic right (figure 1.2). The new independent United Kingdom of the Netherlands created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars saw the retrenchment of the aristocratic rule of the House of Orange and was predicated on older German notions of “enlightenment absolutism.” The new king was heir to the House of Orange and grandson of Frederick the Great of Prussia; he also married his cousin, Wilhelmina, a sister of Frederik Willem III, then King of Prussia. The “Greater Netherlands” that resulted was a disparate and unstable realm stitched together by the European powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the collapse of the Napoleonic empire (Uitterhoeve 2015). This “Greater Netherlands” was not a single state but a federation of domains cobbled together out of the Batavian Republic of the Netherlands, the Austrian Nether-

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Figure 1.2. King Willem I, pointing to a map of Java. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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lands (now Belgium), Luxembourg, and a series of colonies spanning South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, each with its own rudimentary patrimonial state apparatus but all unified under the “personal union” (rule) of the House of Orange (Sas 1992) (map 1.1). The Estates General had no say in the management of the colonies; royal executive power there was unchecked. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was a constitutional monarchy where autocratic royal executive power was limited only nominally by the Estates General, now with a British-style appointive legislative upper house and an indirectly elected lower house, both dominated by the regents and aristocrats. Complementing these titled nobles was a renewed untitled patrician (regent) estate composed of officials, administrators, and minor landed gentry, as well as those merchant bankers who “refused to buy their dignity from the king” (Laarse 1999: 14). In order to limit the governmental role of the French-influenced and bureaucratically minded patriot republican elite, Willem followed a policy of “restoration and reconciliation” of the aristocracy that played off their divisions. Some feudal aristocratic privileges were restored, large numbers of the old regent and the new patriot elite were granted titles and named to the new noble provincial electoral colleges (ridderschappen) and to the upper house. The new state’s constitutional commission specifically restored the province to a “self-governing” level of government, distinguishing it from the bureaucratically subordinate French departments of the Patriot Republic, specifically in order to give the aristocracy of the eastern Netherlands a political platform in the new state: “If the national government wished to include a class of ‘nobles’ in the political system and create support for the new Prince, the most obvious way, therefore, was through provincial representation” (Deseure and Smit 2018: 104). The electoral franchise remained property based and highly restrictive so that elected leaders to the Estates and Estates General were largely drawn from this new class of “notables.” This reintroduction of the provincial level of government remains largely unexplored in the historiography of the Low Countries (Deseure and Smit 2018: 100), even though, as we shall see, it provides an important window to understanding the aristocratic restoration that was to occur in Java, and the preservation of Javanese regencies as a similar “self-ruling” level of government. Despite the diverse historical backgrounds of the renewed ridderschappen (nobility) Willem created, it is important to underscore the increasingly homogenous class position of the group and its dependence on the financial services sector for income. The new republicans had eliminated feudal estates, and many aristocratic rights were not restored in the new constitution. The wealth of the old aristocracy was, perforce, invested as they made the transition to rentier capitalism, in which they lived off interest payments on the national debt (cf. Cain and Hopkins 1993: 66–67); the Netherlands lacked the class of landed aristocrats that became the bulwark of the Tories in Britain and hence a strong parliamentary conservative tradition. Similarly, the rentier capitalist regent families of the province of Holland were ennobled, and many of them were granted the same privileges as the now nonfeudal aristocracy. Both groups

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increasingly shared in the “squirearchical cult” of land, family, and honor marked by a shift to “bourgeois seriousness, utilitarianism, respectability, sobriety, and conventionality” (Laarse 1999: 43), but of a distinctly “liberal” cast. Willem’s centralized rule was ameliorated by his need to draw on the oppositional “liberal” old and new republican aristocrats and regents as state officials. Moes’s study of three hundred aristocrats in the second half of the nineteenth century found that two-thirds of the nobles and “old patrician leaders” were active at court, or as upper level administrators in the bureaucracy; four-fifths if legal institutions are included. The last fifth worked in trade, industry, and financial services (2012: 89). Given the highly restrictive electoral franchise, these same members of the regent class were elected to provincial and national parliaments that thus became the focal point of the weak liberal opposition (in both old and new republican senses) to Willem’s absolutist state-building efforts. It is this elite that is central to this study’s analysis of corporate governmentality and gentlemanly capitalism. Both the new patriot republican elite and the old ruling regent and aristocratic families were appointed to positions in the state, in royal corporations, and in the new national and religious bureaucracies (Stuurman 1992: 66–68; Laarse 1999: 13). The old corporate elites whose power had ultimately derived from the wealth generated by the VOC were inducted into a patrimonial royal bureaucracy where they now retained their offices only at the personal discretion of the new king (Ijsselmuiden 1988: 95–99).3 Most of Willem’s administrators (including those in the royal corporations) were drawn from this patrician regent bourgeoisie. The new polity imposed a highly centralized absolutist rule atop the complex diversity of patrimonial cities and provinces, all of which now became dependencies of the Crown. The king had the right to appoint members for life to the senate as well as all provincial governors, mayors, court presidents, and the church administration. Willem’s governmental reforms were derived from an alternate, “antirevolutionary” source. While in exile, Willem had ruled the German duchy of Fulda and the principality of Orange-Nassau; he was thus intimately aware of the Prussian reforms undertaken to modernize Prussia’s “enlightened absolutist” state by Karl Freiherr vom Stein, the Prussian cameralist statesman, eventually leading to the unification of Germany (Bakker 1995b: 98; Koch 2013: 169–90; Woud 1987: 541). Over the course of the eighteenth century, many German universities had created chairs of police science under the patronage of Willem’s grandfather, Frederick the Great, to train his patrimonial bureaucratic officials; the universities of Leiden, Utrecht, Groningen, and the Military Academy at Delft served a similar purpose in the Netherlands (Moes 2012: 86–87; Woud 1987: 538–40). These schools of police science trained the administrators of the royal Kammer (treasury) in “the collection of taxes, the supervision of agriculture, the administration of manufactories and workhouses, the direction of mines, and the management of forests, to name a few” (Wakefield 1999: 2). Foucault traced the development of modern forms of biopower, such as the asylum and prison, to these early police sciences.

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Stein renewed these cameralist policies by abolishing serfdom and establishing internal free trade, mandatory universal military service, and a modern system of municipal government. Importantly, these policies were pursued to modernize the iconic enlightened absolutism of Prussia—and ironically, to strengthen local rule— in defense against Napoleonic bureaucratic centralization (Anderson 1991). This was the moment in which Foucault argues that the German state was increasingly “governmentalized” by the introduction of new cameralist discourses for managing populations and a shift initiated from the heavy-handed administrative policing of the sovereign to the new liberalized discourses of a disciplinary society (Foucault 2007: 318–19). Baron vom Stein was later leader of the administrative council of the post-Napoleonic German Confederation. King Willem, as duke of Limburg and grand duke of Luxembourg, remained a member of the German Confederation after assuming the Dutch throne, and thus had a firsthand comparative perspective for his own political project, the unification of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. These antirevolutionary governmental strategies ensured that the new Dutch state apparatus was never unitary as it had been in the French period; Willem quickly established a new set of patrimonial corporations on top of the unified state bureaucracy he inherited from the French regime in which he delegated his sovereignty to this renewed regent class. These corporations were extensions of his patrimonial rule, serving governmental functions, but whose operations were independent of parliamentary intervention. These companies introduced many of the modern financial instruments developed by the British “Court Party” following the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, including the Bank of England (1694) and the “Sinking Fund” (1786), which were intended to strengthen central power by freeing the court from its financial dependence on Parliament.4 The new patrimonial state was thus as estatist as the old republic, with royal sovereignty delegated and segmented between a series of corporate elites with independent management over different aspects of the royal domains. It is through this renewed corporate mechanism that corporate governmentality was introduced.

The Patrimonial State on Java After Java was reclaimed from the British and a new constitutional regulation issued in 1818, a patrimonial civil service dominated by this same Dutch aristocratic elite came to govern Java in association with indigenous regents (Doel 1994: 54–57). This elite Dutch bureaucracy (BB or Binnenlands Bestuur, “interior administration”) supervised a separate renewed Javanese patrimonial elite appointed to the indigenous bureaucracy, the Pangreh Praja (Javanese, “rulers of the realm”) or Inlands Bestuur (Dutch, “native administration”) (Sutherland 1979: 1). At the apex of colonial rule, there were about twenty Dutch residents, with seventy-odd Dutch assistant residents assigned to an equal number of Javanese regents (bupati) and their regencies, rul-

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ing over almost four hundred subordinate district chiefs (wedana/camat) (Sutherland 1973: 114) (map 1.2). However, the centralized bureaucracy instituted by Daendels and Raffles was radically reformed, as the NEI state, under Willem, sought to restore some aristocratic privileges as he had done in the Netherlands itself, and instituted a policy of “decentralization” after the Java War. This entailed a strengthening of an intermediate, province-like level of government “self-governed” by indigenous regents with the “cooperation” of Dutch residents. The residencies, governed by a Dutch resident, thus came to maintain a complex relationship of devolved power with their constituent regencies, ruled by indigenous aristocratic regents. This should not be conceived as a direct hierarchy but rather as a federation of “aristocratic” realms (regencies), each retaining their nominal jurisdictional independence and exerting limited “self-rule,” coordinated by a centralized Dutch bureaucratic state implementing central policies with their “cooperation” (Elson 1994: 181). The Javanese regencies thus came to exercise the same limited form of jurisdictional authority as the new Dutch provinces, which had been introduced in order to give Dutch aristocrats a renewed political voice. Over time, these regencies were “refeudalized,” as regent bureaucrats were increasingly treated as hereditary rulers. This policy of establishing parallel Dutch and Javanese administrations was known as “dualism” (Kuitenbrouwer 1986: 86). Whereas Daendels and Raffles had sought to strip aristocrats of their feudal rights and responsibilities in pursuit of a unified bureaucratic hierarchy, the emphasis of the policy of dualism applied after the Java War was to restore the noble pretentions of regents. Daendels’s and Raffles’s liberal reforms had tried to shape the Javanese aristocracy ( priyayi) into a native bureaucracy directly subordinated to Dutch bureaucrats; they were deprived of their feudal apanages, limited in their economic activities and military roles, and were regularly transferred between regencies to prevent their establishing deep local loyalties (Sutherland 1975: 58). These reforms were deeply resented, more so in the core domains of the dominant courts (principalities) of the old kingdom of Mataram in central Java than in its mancanegara (outer territories), which had long been directly ruled by the VOC. Between 1825 and 1830, these resentments had contributed to the Java War, a rebellion led by the crown prince of Yogjakarta, with an estimated two hundred thousand casualties (Ricklefs 1993: 116). As a result of this action, the traditional feudal rights of the aristocracy were preserved, but only in these indirectly ruled central Javanese principalities of the Kejawèn. The restoration of the aristocracy was less clear in the regencies of the directly ruled territories where the policy more closely resembled the restoration of the Dutch aristocracy after 1815. In the aftermath of the Java War, Dutch general Johannes van den Bosch was appointed governor-general, and he, like Willem I, implemented a restoration policy that granted equal status to aristocrats and to the appointed regents in the directly ruled Pesisir. Van den Bosch strongly argued that the Dutch had no ideological legitimacy in the eyes of the Javanese and so had to rule, as did the VOC,

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through the cooptation of indigenous elites. He sought to hide Dutch rule, in other words, behind the façade of these nominally “autonomous” (self-ruling) traditional regional statelets (regencies). Thus, in both Dutch and Indonesian cases, the new bureaucratic ruling class was defined and nominated by the state from among old elite families and clothed in the traditional honors accorded aristocrats. Titles were recognized, political positions assured, but all feudal economic dues were eliminated in favor of royally granted salaries to ensure loyalty to the Crown. As a result of this policy of restoration, Java acquired a renewed aristocracy that, as in the Netherlands, was composed of a feudal aristocracy and nonfeudal regent class, the difference between which was obscured by the common forms of respect, titles, intermarriage, and bureaucratic roles granted to all of them in the new state system. This is not to claim that the two national aristocracies were the same, or that they followed the same lifestyle or values; rather, it points to their position in similar state apparatuses, as Willem followed consistent governmental strategies across his domains to reign in their autonomy. From a governmental position, the complex social reality of Java could be simplified and a uniform, “rational-legal bureaucracy” introduced (Sutherland 1973, 1974, 1975). The residencies and constituent regencies that developed after the imposition of the “Fundamental Law” of 1818 were similar in organization to the new Dutch provincial administrations. In the Netherlands, the provincial governor sat as a representative of the Crown, leading the provincial executive council, the Gedeputeerde Staten (provincial deputies), who oversaw the provincial bureaucracy; the provincial Estates themselves met rarely, only to elect the Council of Deputies and members of the Estates General. The provincial deputies were appointed by the provincial Estates according to their status, and their ranks included a balance of aristocrats, city regents, and large rural landholders. They were appointed for life. The aristocratic and regent deputies elected by the provincial Estates represented provincial interests on this executive committee, while the commissioner chaired their meetings as “first among equals” to ensure the implementation of national programs. The task of the commissioners would be to check, not to govern, that the Provincial Deputies executed the Kingdom’s laws, and governed their own provincial business, in both cases independently, subject only to the supervision of the Commissioner as representative of the national government’s interest (Wilde 1927: 60). The centralizing power of the governor was strengthened by the fact that the provinces lacked an independent source of revenue and depended on the Crown for the resources to implement their decisions (Wilde 1927: 61; Woud 1987: 67). Java was similarly divided into patrimonial province-like residencies governed by a landraad (like the provincial deputies), composed of the resident (as governor), his secretary and treasurer, and the regents within his residency, who also served as the lo-

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cal court (Ravensbergen 2018). The component regencies of that residency had their own native bureaucracy with frequently variable practices following local norms, but they were beholden to the Crown for the resources to implement their rule. The regencies with close ties to the court culture of Mataram thus varied enormously from those only weakly influenced by Javanese high culture in the frontier regions of the Priangan. The variability between regency bureaucracies became particularly clear in the initial implementation stages of Van den Bosch’s Cultivation System, which encouraged each regency to experiment with what worked locally within general centrally issued guidelines. Just as the provincial governor was a ruler who did not govern, so too the resident was to “rule with” not “over” the regents, leading them as an “older” to a “younger brother” (and indeed, unlike the resident, the assistant resident had no right to command the regent to whom he had been assigned). As Furnivall long ago noted, the Dutch colonial administration was paternalistic, treating the Javanese more like a father studying to promote the welfare of his children than like a ruler governing his subject. They laid the foundations of the present tradition of Dutch colonial administration that administrative officials are primarily police officers, but officers of police in a sense extending far beyond the modern conception of a policeman and covering “the spontaneous and autonomous (zelfstandig) promotion of the interests of land and people”; police officers in a sense which Adam Smith implied in his Glasgow Lectures when he included all his economic teaching under this head, officers of “policy.” (1976: 91)5 The Binnenlands Bestuur was thus less concerned with direct control of the implementation of the law—which it largely left to the Pangreh Praja—than with the cameralistic concern to foster the growth and management of the royal domain through “just programs” of economic action (Furnivall 1976: 190; Ravensbergen 2018). This paternalism was expressed most fully through the “educative” coercion imposed during the Cultivation System after 1830 (see chapter 3; Gibbon et al. 2014: 182). The renewed aristocracies of the Netherlands and Java thus grew to have similar rights, governmental roles, and sources of income dependent upon the Crown in the state apparatus established by King Willem I. It is important to underscore the nonfeudal nature of the new aristocracy; these aristocrats derived their status and wealth from the new state system and not from their rights in the land and labor of serfs. Both state apparatuses had similar centralized absolutist control over the patrimonial bureaucracies of a diverse federation of aristocrat- and regent-dominated territories. Whig interpretations of the “progress of liberalism” fail to note how the Napoleonic reforms of the Batavian Republic were reworked in the Dutch restoration. Few analyses of the aristocratic restoration in Java take into account the changed governmental

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situation in the Netherlands after 1815, and the renewed nobility there; nor do they note the Dutch regent status of many of the residents and assistant residents serving as “elder brothers” to the Javanese regents.

The Renewed Patrimonial State While complex variations in forms of noble land ownership, usufruct rights, and local patterns of authority existed internally within both the Netherlands and Java, it should be clear that the Dutch state under Willem utilized a fairly consistent set of governmental policies in both territories. The enlightened absolutist patrimonial state that Willem envisioned was to be administered by a regent class of independent wealth but answerable to him alone for their positions. He introduced a uniform municipal government that was to serve as the vehicle for extracting the national taxes upon which the new state depended, but he excluded the provinces/regencies from tax collection, making them dependent on the central state for the revenue to implement governmental programs. The state sought to maximize those taxes by transforming the productive relations within the territory and encouraging market production through a series of cameralistic economic policies, some of them administered by royal corporations. Indeed, the maximization of government revenue through the capitalist transformation of its territorial hinterlands is the governmental project that lies at the center of this book. A clear comparative conception of the common forms of rule developed in each of Willem’s royal domains emerges when the Greater Netherlands is viewed as “a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989: 4); although it had its roots in an estatist patrimonial state, a federation of semiautonomous domains each of which jealously sought to preserve its local prerogatives, the new enlightened absolutist state that replaced it was reshaping the social and economic basis of local and central power. The new forms of local governance and taxation provided the Crown with a source of central state revenue. The regents were further weakened by their new dependency on the Crown for their appointment to positions in the state. The taxation collected by the new municipal governments went directly to the Crown, not the provinces/ regencies. These changes insinuated the central state in the everyday lives of Dutch and Javanese farmers in ways that made it inescapably direct and concrete. It would be too easy to overemphasize the strength of this absolutist monarchy. Although Willem had access to new forms of tax revenue, they remained subject to parliamentary review—weak though it was. The absolutism that the kingdom projected was largely imagined, a “talking point” of the Crown’s agents; the Greater Netherlands they imagined remained, in the words of its dissidents, “a sleeping beauty who would not rise” (Sas 1992). The very policies that Willem pursued to weaken the old and new republican opposition to his usurping power awakened new “tensions of empire,” as the Belgian secession and Java War so clearly indicate. Willem thus found it necessary to reintroduce forms of corporate governmentality.

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It is not difficult to understand the tensions of empire that fostered the policies of aristocratic “restoration and reconciliation” pursued by the House of Orange in the Greater Netherlands. The political and economic challenges facing the Netherlands and Java were broadly similar in 1830, and the royal projects of rule were construed in similar ways. Both were relatively underpopulated agrarian countries with a surplus of unused land and little industry. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands, with a population of 6.4 million, was to shatter with the secession of an industrializing Belgium, leaving the northern rump of 2.6 million people under Willem’s rule. Java, with a population of 6 million, was split between the directly governed coastal Dutch territories and the rebellious inland kingdoms seeking to put an end to Raffles’s liberal system of land rent and tax farms and the widespread impoverishment they created (Carey 1976: 64–65). Both territories had nascent and recently imposed centralized Napoleonic bureaucratic states that had failed to successfully unite these complex polities in the face of violent resistance. In order to survive the persisting tensions of war and revolt, the new kingdom required the complicity of its traditional ruling classes. If indeed “the state” never stops talking, then it spoke most clearly about who would have a voice within the state apparatus. Willem’s policy of “restoration and reconciliation” meant that delegated rule in both the Netherlands and in Java now lay in the hands of a renewed class of rentier capitalist nobles. In the Netherlands, these nobles assumed prominent positions within the state apparatus marked by long-established forms of hereditary honors, although, as noted, they were stripped of real power and made dependents of the Crown wherever possible. They thus dominated the city and municipal government, the provincial Estates, both houses of the Estates General, as well as all elite positions in the government bureaucracy, although each of these political forums was now weakened, token honors offered to a symbolic elite. Similarly in the directly ruled regencies of Java, the renewed aristocracy assumed positions of honor as Bupati (regent), and in the pamong prajah, but found that land taxes and the village bureaucracy were now in the hands of the Dutch resident; regent figureheads were increasingly shunted aside and made irrelevant by the increasingly professional lower nobles staffing the “native administration” at the district and village level. The approach to state formation taken here has emphasized the consistency in the governmental policies pursued by the Crown across the “archipelago of regions and communities” that formed the federative domains of the Greater Netherlands. As such, it is an initial theoretical refusal to differentiate colonial from home rule and to underscore the sets of shared governmental practices. Such an approach focuses on the mentalité of rule, the programs of state action, its governmental technologies, the strategies it deployed, and the sets of practices by which it sought to regulate lives. This approach was supplemented by attention to the means by which “the” state was imagined. Here then, colonialism made its difference. These strident conversations and governmental interventions combined to define “the” state differently in each jurisdiction; the “enlightened absolutism” at home was obscured in the colony by

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indirect rule and the need to root the legitimacy of Dutch colonialism in the preservation of the Javanese nobility. Both aspects of state formation must remain in constant focus so that the differing imaginings of the state do not obscure the common rationality of governmental practice at home and abroad.

Notes 1. Van den Bosch argued, in opposition, that a land rent of 40 percent made it too expensive for a Javanese farmer to expand his landholdings, as the tax that had to be paid exceeded the capacity of the farmer to cultivate (Deventer 1866: 538–39). 2. The Dutch imposed a “verponding” tax on urban properties, which, like the same tax in the Netherlands, taxed the income that the property generated, not its value. 3. The primary studies on the processes of state-building and the formation of the Dutch bureaucracy in this period are Woud 1987, IJsselmuiden 1988, and Knippenberg and de Pater 1988. See also Randeraad 2012. 4. These financial innovations had been transferred to Britain from the republic in the “Dutch invasion”; the “Glorious Revolution” was led by William III, Prince of Orange (Willem’s great-grandfather), who invaded England from Holland to depose his father-in-law, King James II. William ascended the throne as King William III, ending the period of toleration for Catholicism. The Bank of England was created to raise loans for the Crown five years later. Cain and Hopkins (1993) argue that this “Revolution Settlement” was at the core of the developing British “military-fiscal state” and of “gentlemanly capitalism.” I draw a similar argument here in the Dutch case, although with significant differences. Shortly after his coronation, Willem I founded the Netherlands Bank, a “sinking fund” to manage the national debt (the Amortization Syndicate), and the Java Bank. 5. This was characterized by the Dutch as a “police state” in the sense discussed above for the Netherlands itself in this period (Logemann 1934; Coopmans 1989: 588).

Part II

Corporate Governmentality in the Realm of the Merchant King

CHAPTER 2

Policing the Pauper in the Realm of the Merchant King

The development of the disciplinary techniques of biopower in the early nineteenth century was driven by the need to securitize newly developing modern nation-states while improving the health and welfare of the population. According to Foucault, private and public authorities achieved that securitization by developing and disseminating a multiplicity of new disciplinary spaces like clinics, schools, and prisons that utilized panopticon-like techniques of surveillance. The authorities in charge of these carceral spaces developed new discourses of power/knowledge such as criminology, hygiene, and psychiatry based on earlier cameralist police sciences to organize them; I have argued that political economy served this role in a variety of programs of market improvement. As the development of these spaces and discourses for social control of the population became an object of government policy—governmentality—the dispersion and circulation of these technologies within and between state, civil society, and market emerged and ultimately transformed the state (Nadeson 2008: 22–23). In this chapter, I examine the means by which the Dutch state sought to securitize its population from the threats of pauperism through the development of a new disciplinary space, the domestic “benevolent colony.” This exercise of biopower over the indigent poor became a disciplinary discourse that later circulated in other governmental spaces, colonies of a very different kind. A large literature on the innovative uses of discipline introduced in this period has followed from Foucault’s pathbreaking study, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979). Disciplinary power first developed in enclosed pastoral institutions such as monasteries, which sought to instill individuals with a “will to obey” (Asad 1993) and spread during the “Great Confinement” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into new, broader institutions of social control such as penitentiaries, mental asylums, and clinics. Foucault pointed to the reformatory at Mettray (France) in 1840 as exemplary of this new kind of “prison created in order not to be a prison” (Foucault 1979: 293–94)—that is, as an institution working within the limits of a “science” of human nature in order to reform, not punish. In the Dutch context, such techniques were first directed at “paupers,” the criminalized poor whose unrest

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had stoked so much of the revolutionary fervor of the patriots in the Batavian Republic. This poverty was accentuated by the Napoleonic wars, making the resolution of pauperism critical to the securitization of the new Dutch state; King Willem appointed state commissions to propose solutions to the pauper problem (and a tax to fund them) in 1815, 1818, and 1822, but they failed to elicit parliamentary support (Windt 1984a: 15). With those failures, he turned to a retired military engineer, Johannes van den Bosch, for a corporate solution, a Benevolent Society (Maatschappij van Weldadigheid) outside of their jurisdiction (figure 2.1). The Benevolent Society was established on 5 March 1818 under royal patronage with Crown Prince Frederik as chairman, Prince Willem leading its Committee of Oversight, and with the royal favorite General Johannes van den Bosch in charge of the Permanent Committee with responsibility for daily management (Kloosterhuis 1981: 13). The heavy involvement of the House of Orange in the new company should be clear. The Benevolent Society was innovative in the period in that it sought to resolve the problem of pauperism through a series of agricultural penal colonies; these colonies were to serve as an inspiration for both Mettray in France and for the English utopian socialist Robert Owen. The society opened three “free colonies” in the Northern Netherlands between 1818 and 182 and one in the Southern Netherlands (Belgium) in 1822, and subsequently three much larger “unfree colonies” composed of multiple carceral institutions from 1823 to 1825 under government contract, each of which could house four thousand orphans, five hundred families, or fifteen hundred or more beggars (Windt 1984: 27). Willem personally solicited membership in the society from provincial governors and through them the urban regent class (Kloosterhuis 1981: 34). Their participation was to prove pivotal as Willem struggled with these regents to reduce state welfare expenses. The society assumed the standard corporate form of the era; hence, it was composed of local chapters of shareholders (like the chambers of the Dutch East Indies Company) that recommended colonists, and a central administrative committee that oversaw the operations of the colonies. The first colonies of the society were located in the isolated province of Drenthe where it was hoped they would hasten the capitalist transformation of the semifeudal communal subsistence farms found there. Drenthe was a former “Generality Land,” a “region for profit” (wingewest) that now formed an internal colony. The total membership of the local chapters peaked at 22,478 in 1819 but sank to 12,900 by 1827 (Kloosterhuis 1981: 61). The apparent rapid growth of the society fell far short of Van den Bosch’s projection of the 100,000 members needed for the fulfillment of his plan; the resultant financial difficulties played a large role in the evolution of the colonies during this period. In this initial stage, Van den Bosch himself served as the director of the facility and wrote extensively for the Benevolent Society’s journal De Star to explain his complex economic rationale for this disciplinary revolution, to publicize the accomplishments of the colonies, and to raise public consciousness. Van den Bosch’s economic, social, and political articles were part of a larger discourse on pauperism

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Figure 2.1. Count Johannes van den Bosch. Source: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

within political economy that had begun before the Batavian Revolution; his own colonies were in many ways state-sponsored versions of a much older experimental workhouse scheme, the Fatherlands Society for Shipping and Trade, in which the House of Orange had invested some fifty years earlier. Van den Bosch’s economic ideas, especially those regarding the use of forced labor, were formulated to answer a specific set of governmental problems facing the new nation-state: a radical rise in the number of criminal poor, a war-torn economy, and the need to reform agricul-

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ture in the eastern provinces of the Netherlands where production was still organized in semifeudal markes. We thus need to situate this disciplinary revolution in penal reform within the much larger context of a “development project,” a state-directed attempt to maximize the use of resources and foster national prosperity; hence I root the genealogy of development in this much older cameralist discourse that rejected the indifference of laissez-faire liberalism and sought to directly encourage economic growth and transformation. I begin, however, by focusing on the innovative nature of Van den Bosch’s disciplinary revolution, his use of the corporation as a disciplinary force. This agricultural colony, organized around the management of the criminalized poor through the “economical” use of disciplinary force was a new kind of penal institution which defies easy definition or classification. This colony was to serve three ends. First, it was to transform pauper subjectivity through its disciplinary attempts to instill “productive virtue”; paupers, it was argued, lacked the “will to labor,” a moral weakness that required moral reform. The colony was also intended as a development project that helped effect a capitalist transformation of the relations of production of the eastern Netherlands. The crucial feature of this experiment was that it simultaneously taught labor discipline, relieved paupers (i.e., provided for their subsistence), and, like a plantation, profitably produced cash crops in an area previously deemed a feudal backwater. But perhaps most importantly the colony removed the costs of pauper administration from the national budget, allowing the state to govern more “economically” as liberal political economists were stridently demanding. This example of economical governance was not, however, inspired by liberalism; it was the product of the monarchy’s weakness and inability to usurp the traditional rights of local municipal and religious elites to administer poor relief, resulting in a plan administered through what the English utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, called a “National Charity Company” (2001 [1797]). The Benevolent Society, under direct royal control, implemented a colonial project in a classic example of development as “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1990).

The Dutch Discourse on Pauperism and Its Relief The need for new policies to deal with pauperism was pressing in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. The Netherlands had lost its colonial trading hegemony and had been reduced to an agrarian backwater with little industry (Zanden and Riel 2004: 85–120). Prices had doubled over a twenty-five-year period, yet wages had remained static. On average, one person in eleven in the new kingdom lived on some sort of public support; the problem was concentrated in the old cities of the province of Holland such as Leiden where one out of every two people lived in poverty (Windt 1984a: 10–11). The situation was compounded by a widespread subsistence crisis in the Netherlands between 1816 and 1817 that resulted from a volcanic eruption in Java that spread ash worldwide.1 The tax burden strained the resources of the newly

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restored monarchy; in 1819, 22,704 people sought refuge in the poorhouses at a cost of ƒ126 per person, 49 percent of which represented a state subsidy. This humanitarian crisis sparked a royal commission as well as a new journal to discuss possible solutions, the Magazine for Poor-Relief in the Netherlands. Poverty relief efforts until this time had been administered by a combination of municipal and denominational charities at significant cost to the Crown (Gouda 1995; Leeuwen 2000). These charities were managed by the local merchant-dominated regent class who used relief as a form of social control and as a means of maintaining a reserve army of labor since relief proved cheaper than raising wages. Given the importance of paupers to their economic interests, these local regents resisted royal attempts to centralize and rationalize a national system of poor relief that would reduce the costs to the Crown (Leeuwen 2000: 185–88). This impasse led to national debate and a growing discourse on the best means of dealing with the poor. The leading expert, R. Scherenberg, a philanthropist from Den Haag and coeditor of the Magazine for Poor-Relief in the Netherlands, published a number of articles as well as a pamphlet (1816) calling on the king to centralize all the existing workhouses and organize them commercially (Mansvelt 1924: 1:18). Scherenberg drew on the cameralist workhouses of Hamburg (the “German Amsterdam”) as his inspiration and had started a carpet factory near Utrecht in 1802 in order to employ the poor (Scherenberg 1816: 15–16). These cameralists had rejected the view that poverty was the result of sin and viewed the workhouse as “a school in which a ‘work methodology’ and a new work ethic would be imparted” (Lindemann 1990: 75). These new institutions for the poor, Scherenberg argued, should be run as businesses, so as to provide work, not charity. This emphasis on work creation as a form of poverty relief was a leitmotif that ran throughout the Magazine for Poor-Relief, as well as throughout the parliamentary commissions examining the pauper problem. Scherenberg’s pamphlet was to have great influence on the Netherlands Trading Company and the means by which it developed the Dutch cotton industry in the 1830s (chapter 3). He called for all of the country’s workhouses to become spinneries, producing thread and yarn for either private factory owners ( fabrikeurs) or for a central office, the “General Poor Inspectorate” that would be in charge of the commercial leadership of the workhouses. By producing a basic consumer good and increasing its supply, these workhouses would aid weaving factory development rather than competing with it. Scherenberg’s ideas were not new, and similar plans had been floated broadly internationally. The Fatherlands Society for Shipping and Trade (Vaderlandsche Maatschappij van Rederij en Koophandel) was an early experiment in this kind of commercial employment creation founded by the Mennonite minister Cornelis Ris in 1777 in the North Holland port of Hoorn (Mansvelt 1924: 1:16). Structured like the Dutch East India Company, this venture combined trade with workhouses and schools to provide employment for paupers, since “to be unoccupied and to lead a useless life is both shameful and contemptible for every reasoning being, since man is required by nature to live a useful life in the interests of society” (Ris, quoted in Hake

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2004: 24). The House of Orange, including the future King Willem I, held shares in the venture, which still employed 260 people 25 years later (Eerenbeemt 1977: 218–33). It was one of 26 pauper workhouses spread throughout the Netherlands (Jeune 1816: 146–48; Kloosterhuis 1981: 44). In England and France, Jeremy Bentham, the radical utilitarian philosopher behind Britain’s Poor Law reforms, had similarly advocated in 1797 (in French) for a national “charity company” that would apply discipline in a national chain of local workhouses (Dean 1991: 177–92). These workhouses would produce basic subsistence goods for their inhabitants, so as to reduce the costs of offering relief to paupers, but as a national company it could organize production more efficiently by having each workhouse specialize in one product and distributing it to the others, a known captive market. Such efficiencies of scope and scale, he argued, would allow them to sell cheaply priced surplus goods in the free market, thereby producing the profits that would draw investors to the company. A corporate solution to pauperism had thus been widely discussed long before Van den Bosch published his call in 1818 for a “Benevolent Society.” This turn to workhouses in the late seventeenth century was part of what Foucault referred to as the “great confinement”—the introduction of a new set of “total institutions” within which problem populations could be isolated and “normalized.” In the Netherlands, as in Germany, workhouses that provided employment as a form of relief like the Fatherlands Society were increasingly criticized by liberals for distorting both labor and commodity markets. The products produced by cheap pauper labor directly competed in the market with that of more expensive skilled labor. The “Benevolent Colonies” introduced by General Johannes van den Bosch in 1819 were an early Dutch attempt to develop a national system of confinement for criminalized paupers that could withstand the market test of the liberals without abandoning the “worthy poor” seeking charity. Van den Bosch was an active participant in this early discourse. Although a military engineer, he read widely in the classical literature on political economy, including the works of Adam Smith, J. B. Say, and the Dutch economist G. K. van Hogendorp among others (Boerma 1927: 212). However, Van den Bosch’s attention rapidly shifted from political economy, the increasingly narrow study of the wealth of nations, to the more marginalized, administratively derived literature on pauperism.2 Key theorists in what is now contrastively called social economy include Malthus and the French economist Sismondi, a list to which I would add the utopian socialist Saint Simon. Poverty concerned Van den Bosch, a senior military officer for whom the convulsions of the French Revolution served as a vivid example of what such economic crisis might breed. Van den Bosch turned to political economy for solutions but found that the discourse on the “wealth of nations” failed to address this pressing administrative problem. Ricardo and other classical authors of political economy dismissed all poor laws as indefensible constraints on the market and hence provided no means for managing the poor: for them, “poverty must simply be eliminated; even if in reality,

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as we have seen, it is an integral part of the discourse on wealth” (Procacci 1991: 155). Van den Bosch was thus not an antiliberal, but, rather, he was concerned with a governmental problem that could not be resolved within existing economic discourses. Van den Bosch came to lead the Dutch debate on pauperism in a roundabout way. His early career was as a military engineer in the East Indies. His arrival in Java coincided with the dismantling of the bankrupt VOC by the French-led government of the Netherlands (Boerma 1927: 3). After serving as an adjutant to several governors-general he married the daughter of the commandant of the East Indies Army, General Simon de Sandol Roy. This period of upward mobility ended with the arrival in 1808 of the new liberal governor-general, Herman Willem Daendels. Daendels’s dictatorial and zealous reforms of European administrative corruption accomplished little but produced a number of victims, which included Van den Bosch’s father-inlaw General de Sandol Roy. Van den Bosch voluntarily left the military soon after and moved to Sudimara (near Batavia), a purchased estate in which he converted several thousand hectares of wastelands into wet-rice terraces (Sens 2019: 85–89). This entrepreneurial period outside of government service was to have an ironic effect on his future governmental concerns to instill “productive virtue” in the poor. The rise of this disgraced colonial military engineer, expelled from Java in 1810, to darling of the newly restored King Willem I in 1818 derives in large measure from his military success in the 1813 Dutch revolt against French rule. Van den Bosch was banished from Java by Daendels in 1810; after a three-year return trip he arrived in the eastern Netherlands shortly before the French capitulation there in February 1814 (Boerma 1927: 5–6; Sens 2019: 118–20). By late 1814 Van den Bosch was again in military service and leading attacks on the cities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. He was soon promoted to the rank of colonel in the General Staff with special responsibility for troops destined for the colonies. On 1 April 1815 he was named chief of the General Staff, and the following year he was promoted to major general. However, Van den Bosch very quickly soured on military life, and in early 1818 he gave up his military career to explore the possibilities of agricultural colonization as a form of poverty relief, as explained in a pamphlet, Discourse on the Possibility . . . of a Public Institution for the Poor . . . (1818) (Boerma 1927: 9). His pamphlet was clearly a response to the Royal Commission on Pauperism of that year and led directly to the formation of the Benevolent Society and its penal colonies. Van den Bosch’s short experiment in plantation management between 1808 and 1810 appeared to be of great importance in explaining his proposed agricultural colonies for the poor in Drenthe (and the Cultivation System he later developed in Java). In the conclusion to his book, Van den Bosch guarantees the success of his proposed agricultural colonies based upon his prior experience in Java: I am prompted to make known universally my thoughts on how to establish a colony of poor people since I have already brought a not wholly unfruitful, largely uncultivated piece of ground of several thousand mor-

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gens into cultivation; and taught a considerable number of people who formerly made bad use of their time to labor. The fortunate result is that this property has doubled in value each year for eight years. And although circumstances here are certainly not the same, it appears to me that the principles and rules followed so beneficially in the one case, could also with suitable alteration be adopted as the appropriate foundation, in my opinion, to reach this beneficial purpose. (1818: 226–27) While we have no information on how Van den Bosch actually ran his plantation, the suitably altered “principles and rules” he made known in 1818 were applied with much fanfare in the agricultural colonies of the Benevolent Society that he founded with the support of the House of Orange. The success of Van den Bosch’s proposal lay in the manner he redressed liberal political economy’s laissez-faire dismissal of all poor laws as indefensible constraints on the market. It is important to underscore how liberal political economy set the governmental limits to his project; it was a discourse that established the natural order, a “regime of truth” that good governance needed to work in accordance with so as to achieve maximum effectiveness (Foucault 2008: 10–19). Van den Bosch’s theoretical resolution to the administrative problem of poverty without disrupting free markets in land, labor, and products was spelled out in a series of articles published in the Benevolent Society’s journal on National Industry in General, and the Netherlands in Particular . . . (1819), in which he affirmed the basic liberal dogma of the social contract. The book begins with a review of the basic principles of political economy: the right to property, capital, and the division of labor (101–56). Van den Bosch argued that although innate human needs give rise to industry (i.e., the motivation to work), the emergence of private property provides the strongest drive for its further expansion. Natural needs are limited and easily met in the “state of nature.” The emergence of private property comes about as population rises, causing a relative constriction in available resources to a particular technology; this dearth prompts the development of new productive techniques that depend upon the division of labor and the accumulation of capital. Capital accumulation and the division of labor, while making wealth possible, also created poverty; since production without capital by labor alone is impossible, a class of poor workers is an inevitable consequence and a necessary prerequisite of wealth. Given the high population densities of Holland, it was impossible to set the clock back and return to the original “communal” first state of nature. Not only was private property necessary for the continued survival of the population but its resultant class relations were also crucial to the continued existence of the state (Bosch 1818: 5). In recapitulating these basic tenets of political economy, Van den Bosch was establishing the economic boundaries for any governmental attempts to redress poverty. The poor could never be eliminated; they could, however, be made more productive through evolving technological change. The resolution of the pauper problem thus had an important impact on the “wealth of nations.”

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After affirming the theoretical doctrines of liberal political economy, Van den Bosch turned to his governmental problem: political unrest rooted in poverty. Competition between laborers in combination with the power of employers could push wages below the necessary subsistence requirements of the worker and his family (1818: 36–38; 1819: 826). His treatment of this Malthusian dilemma focused on the moral and administrative problem this created for the state: How can [the poor’s] good trust, moral strength and national virtue continue to exist when every sacrifice of their own interest is met with the egoism [of the wealthy] which brings [the poor] to their destruction. The spirit of every community depends upon the circumstances within which they live; and a society in which all social virtues are in opposition to the undivided interests of a large and increasingly more numerous part of the nation creates what kind of conditions? It is not only the poor who must be virtuous, but those with wealth who must help avert disasters. It is apparent that we need to follow the lead of nature, and attempt to increase the amount of subsistence goods, and second, to ensure society isn’t burdened with too many people whom it can’t feed. (1819: 150) The crux of Van den Bosch’s solution to the administrative problem of poverty (rather than poverty itself ) thus lay in increasing the amount of subsistence goods in a manner that wouldn’t distort markets in either labor or goods. This could only be accomplished by increasing the production of surplus subsistence crops in a way that was consistent with market mechanisms. Such an approach had obvious parallels in the work of the French physiocrats who saw all national wealth as derived from agricultural production. Van den Bosch, in other words, rejected the inevitability of the Malthusian population dilemma and felt that it could be postponed for centuries through expanded agricultural production (Bosch 1819: 155). Inspired by the work published by the agricultural institute established by J. D. Lawaetz in Denmark and Albrecht Thaer in Germany, Van den Bosch argued he could productively settle 200,000 paupers in Drenthe’s 750,000 morgen (1 morgen = 0.85 hectares) of “wastelands” (Boerma 1950: 26). Agriculture was distinct among the various branches of industry, he argued, in that it alone produces an absolutely necessary means of subsistence for which there was no substitute. Any attempt to meet subsistence needs through increased industrial production would increase market competition and lower industrial wages; as a result, workers would still be unable to buy an adequate amount of the static supply of subsistence goods despite their increased productivity (1819: 142–43). This was the essential problem of attacking poverty through the introduction of machine manufacturing. Industrial production increased productivity but required fewer workers, leading to further unemployment and the impoverishment of both owners and workers. Those owners who benefited from decreased production costs and commodity prices found their newfound profits eaten up by increased poor rates.

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While Van den Bosch argued that unemployment could only be countered through the simultaneous and harmonious expansion of all branches of industry, especially agriculture, this is not to say that he sought to encourage subsistence production. Rather, the expansion of market-oriented agriculture, unlike the expansion of factory production, decreased the price of subsistence goods in the market, an absolute boon to all. Such a solution stayed within the boundaries established by political economy and did not introduce distortions in labor or commodity markets. Van den Bosch argued that every member of society had the right to earn his own livelihood rather than the “right to life” (thus avoiding the problems of the Speenhamland system of poor relief in England; cf. Polanyi 1957a: 77–85). The means by which the poor would be guaranteed a right to work would be through a series of market-oriented agricultural colonies established on wastelands.

Benevolent Force So far I have underscored Van den Bosch’s liberal economic orthodoxy in developing his model penal colony for the poor, which in large part explains its ready acceptance by the Crown. It is equally important to underscore the governmental aspects of the plan given that the Benevolent Society that ultimately operated these colonies was a private charitable corporation. The colonies can be compared to the “anti-politics machine” of current development projects: “If one considers the expansion and entrenchment of state power to be the principle effect—indeed, what ‘development’ projects . . . are chiefly about—then the promise of agricultural transformation appears simply as a point of entry for an intervention of a very different character” (Ferguson 1990: 255). If the intent had simply been to alleviate poverty by encouraging the poor to farm, this aim could have been more flexibly administered through the individual placement of paupers on dispersed, already available farmsteads rather than a penal colony. We must remember that in the Netherlands, as in many European nations of the period, pauperism was considered a social danger and had been criminalized in the eighteenth century; the amelioration of pauperism was conceived as a moral as well as an economic problem. Van den Bosch was thus proposing an innovative, paternalistic, social-welfare asylum but a penal colony nonetheless. The aim was to take paupers “who formerly made bad use of their time” and transform them like the Javanese he had earlier “taught to labor” (Bosch 1818: 226–27). The aim was not only to alleviate poverty but to mold model citizens through the application of discipline so that they developed productive virtue. Van den Bosch’s experimental colonies eventually drew a great deal of international attention, including that of numerous French officials who later applied the lessons they learned at home (Berends et al. 1984: 79–95; Gouda 1995: 237–42). Foucault’s comments on the agricultural reform school for juvenile offenders at Mettray in France are equally applicable to the colonies of the Benevolent Society, said to be its inspiration:

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Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system . . . I would choose . . . 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray. . . . Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behavior. In it were to be found “cloister, prison, school, regiment.” The small, highly hierarchized groups, into which the inmates were divided, followed simultaneously five models: that of the family . . . the army . . . the workshop . . . the school . . . lastly the judicial model . . . the entire parapenal institution, which is created in order not to be a prison, culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters: “God sees you.” (Foucault 1979: 293–94) From the start, there is thus a clear dependence on the use of discipline in this Foucauldian sense rather than force (the word used in relation to the Cultivation System) in the economic development plans of Van den Bosch. He thus proposed a panoptic colony in which surveillance would transform the poor and lead them to selfdiscipline themselves. Legitimating this use of disciplinary force depended on the dual ideological move of criminalizing pauperism but also on erasing the boundary between “free” and “bound” labor at the core of liberal market theory. In his recommendations on the East Indies colonies to the king in 1829, Van den Bosch made the linkage explicit by pointing out that discipline is as much at work in situations of wage labor as in the penal colony he proposed. The foundations of all labor above and beyond that required immediately to fulfill natural needs is the result of force; this force oppresses the subsistence of the laborer most frequently where he appears to be most free. And where such force does not exist or can’t be introduced, man no longer works as he would to meet the absolute demands of those pressing natural needs (1851 [1829]: 316). Van den Bosch had earlier argued that the evolution of private property and the division of labor had similarly been based upon the basic force exercised by brute need, the motor of history (1819: 104–13). He was scathing of those political economists who treated wage labor as an exception to this rule, as a voluntary, noncoercive contract (1851 [1829]: 317); this “liberal illusion” (Reddy 1987: 62–74) obscured the fact that wage laborers were not voluntarily entering contracts. They were, rather, being forced to hire themselves out because they lacked access to the means of production, and hence their pressing natural needs could only be met through the sale of their labor over which they had no choice. Personal slavery is, indeed, abolished; but, we must not fool ourselves into believing that this last class no longer exists. Those who cannot exist except under the conditions dictated for them by others are too dependent to be

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considered free beings.—It is fruitless to object that our social institutions have considerably altered the circumstances of the laboring and indigent classes which are thus not wholly unbearable: we need only fix our eyes on the thousands of unlucky who, despite their abilities and willingness to work, suffer real hunger and thirst. They are unclothed and grow numb in the winter cold in their humble huts, heaped one on the other, deficient in the necessary hygiene. They are offered up as prey to vermin and descend to the greatest possible moral debasement in their pestilent holes. They are finally blessedly relieved by death after their struggle with all the torments of nature degrades their double measure of experience.—Has the number of actual slaves in the whole earth ever been greater than that now of these unlucky ones in Europe, and were the circumstances of the first ever, in balance, ever comparable to the last? (1818: 20). That the force applied in “wage slavery” was that of basic “natural” needs did not, according to Van den Bosch, make it any the less coercive, nor did it guarantee higher rewards to workers than slavery itself (1851 [1829]: 316–17). Van den Bosch’s ready acceptance of disciplinary force and his conflation of wage labor and slavery needs to be placed in the broader context of Dutch attitudes toward the slave trade. Unlike England and France, the Netherlands was broadly tolerant of slavery and other forms of bound labor in this period and had no abolitionist movement of any note. “As a result, Dutch colonial policies regarding labor were based on cost effectiveness and not on ideology” (Emmer 1995 208). Liberal free labor arguments were directed against recently abolished feudal labor dues not slavery. Indeed, Van den Bosch’s use of “forced labor” in both the Netherlands and Java was based on careful, dispassionate, and fairly accurate calculations on the actual costs of labor in each system of labor recruitment (Emmer 1995: 214). In these calculations he highlighted that the common wage laborer in the Netherlands worked far longer to meet his basic needs than either a Caribbean slave or Javanese peasant resulting— paradoxically—in Dutch laborers facing the strongest compulsion to labor (1851 [1829]: 316–17). It is important, however, to emphasize that Van den Bosch was not proposing an alternative to wage labor in turning to force. The point of underscoring the underlying coercive aspect of “free” wage labor was not to challenge capitalist relations of production, for, as we have seen, Van den Bosch accepted the broad constraints of political economy in his poverty relief experiment; rather, he uncovered this “liberal illusion” to justify his use of discipline in resolving the governmental problem of the poor by shaping and molding good workers in the colonies (variously conceived). These workers would not be granted relief or charity but would be forced to engage in wage labor with no choice of employer (which, he argued, they didn’t have anyway); they were to be imprisoned in the colony until its complex evaluative system concluded that they were now morally transformed and responsive to market forces. Van den Bosch’s

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problem was after all not just economic but also governmental; how could paupers be disciplined economically so as to be willingly more productive? Such moral transformation, he felt, could only be achieved through his “benevolent colonies.”

The Colonies of Benevolence Drenthe, one of the old “Generality Lands,” was an isolated province composed of a high-lying sand plateau surrounded by large peat bogs; about 70 percent of the province was composed of these latter wastelands (Windt 1984a: 16) (map 1). The sandy plateau was home to a number of largely subsistence-oriented farm communities organized as semifeudal markes. Van den Bosch, like many of his compatriots, viewed the marke as an obstruction to the settlement of the Drenthe wastelands (commons), where he argued one to two hundred thousand poor families could potentially be settled (Bosch 1818: 191). Attempts at settlement had been undertaken as early as the seventeenth century when Amsterdam capital had sponsored the creation of the city of Hogeveen. But the markes owned 90 percent of Drenthe’s unused land and were viewed as a conservative institution whose communal aspects hindered the adoption of modern, intensive agricultural methods. An agricultural commission established in 1805 inventoried these wastelands with the aim of reclamation. In 1809 a law was passed allowing for the division of marke lands with a simple majority vote of members rather than the prior requirement of complete consensus (Bosch 1818: 17–18). The Colonies of Benevolence were thus very much the product of these earlier marke reforms (Kloosterhuis 1981: 95). Van den Bosch’s proposal was less a technological revolution in farming than a social one—an Enlightenment project in social engineering. His was a high modernist “state project of legibility and simplification” (Scott 1998). The colonies he built were hierarchically organized parapenal institutions whose discipline would inculcate industry through the keeping of detailed individual accounts, which collated reams of figures covering a range of activities into a simple chart of monetary equivalences; the “force” he sought to apply was accomplished through this accounting system, which replaced market discipline, just as in any corporation. The use of accounting as a means of discipline was innovative and needs to be underscored; inscription, as Latour notes, is a means of acting at a distance and hence an ideal surveillance technique. Complex forms of surveillance were reduced to simplified mobile, stable, and combinable inscriptions laid out in a simple table that could be utilized by an unseen hand to control the actions of the entire colony (Robson 1992; for an example from the colonies, see De Star 1819: 673ff.). The society moved quickly and established a total of seven Colonies of Benevolence (five in the Netherlands, two in Belgium) between 1818 and 1823 on almost 80 square kilometers of former peat colonies and wastelands. The initial “free colonies” were laid out in individual three-hectare farms, each fitted with a standard farmhouse (over 410 farms in all) (map 2.1). The first, Frederiksoord, with 52 farmsteads, in-

Map 2.1. Map of the Free Colonies in the Northern Netherlands. Source: TU Delft.

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cluded a warehouse, a school, a spinning house, and two overseers’ houses. Van den Bosch’s grand plans for rapid expansion of the colony quickly ran into financial problems due to rapidly declining membership of the Benevolent Society. Given the lack of financial viability, Van den Bosch proposed that the society be directly integrated into the state as a new Ministry of Welfare with responsibility for the urban poor, prisons, and the Benevolent Colonies. His proposal received only lukewarm royal support, sparking only another state commission on pauperism in 1822. This commission rejected the proposed ministry and suggested the contracting of this governmental problem to the society instead to assure it a more reliable revenue stream; the state thus concluded a contract with the society to colonize more hardened, criminal paupers in newly designed penal institutions built at nearby Ommerschans and Veenhuizen. The society thus received a state “concession” (a state-granted monopoly) to house and reform criminal paupers in “unfree” colonies that utilized the disciplinary methods of the free colonies in new panopticon-like prisons that would house 4,000 orphans, 500 families, and 1,500 beggars. To meet these needs, the society built what Van den Bosch claimed was the largest building in the Netherlands in the wastelands of Drenthe, followed by three more in 1823–24 (Boerma 1950: 41–42). Further free and unfree colonies were established in the Southern Netherlands about the same time. The implied contrast between “free” and “unfree” colonies is misleading, as both types were marked by collective farming, social segregation, confinement, constant supervision, and systems of punitive measures and fines. The “free” and “unfree” colonies should be distinguished by the source of colonists (Society of Benevolence– sponsored vs state-sponsored) and the method by which they were funded, which prescriptively defined their inmates as either “deserving” or “undeserving” poor (and hence deserving less or more supervision). Colonists in both kinds of colonies followed a gradated path based on ceaseless surveillance and evaluation that determined the degree of limited “freedoms” they would be allowed. As previously noted, Foucault’s oft-quoted synopsis of Mettray as the confluence of a range of disciplinary regimes applies equally to all the Colonies of Benevolence (1977: 293). Foucault noted that small hierarchized groups of inmates followed five disciplinary models simultaneously: family, army, workshop, school, and judiciary. Each of these disciplinary models sought to transform individuals through the application of one of “three great schemata: the politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and normalization” (Foucault 1977: 248). These three schemas shared a new “mechanics of power” or “political anatomy” that instilled discipline so that others’ bodies do what “one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines” (Foucault 1977: 138). In this case, it is possible to trace the circulation of specific disciplinary techniques between the family, army, workshop, school, and judiciary models in the Dutch domestic colonies and, through them, to the broader carceral archipelago of empire as a unique system of Dutch “benevolent colonialism.”

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The first of the five disciplinary models applied in the colonies was that of the “regiment.” Van den Bosch had conceived of the colony as a comprehensive, hierarchical institution whose discipline succeeded not because of its harshness but “through the certainty that every transgression would be fined, that crime would be forestalled, which last was best obtained through strict supervision, as is most clearly seen in military discipline” (1818: 223, emphasis in original). Van den Bosch implemented military discipline to forestall any deviation from detailed colony regulations specifying dress, comportment, and schedule of activities. To accomplish this, he initially employed former army commanders as supervisors. Colonists, like soldiers, were dressed in a common, distinctive uniform and ranked according to their medals. They were summoned to daily roll call by a bell and divided into platoons for work (Mens 1984: 45). The application of the military model is best seen, perhaps, in the barracks-like institutions of the unfree colonies, which embodied Bentham’s panoptic surveillance principles (figure 2.2). The barracks has been described, using the kinds of mixed metaphors typical of the carceral archipelago, as “a kind of discipline factory” producing the “perfections of the cloister” (Black 1995: 110–11). This last form of discipline was relatively new in the period, with the first Dutch barracks only being built between 1822 and 1825 (Mens 1984b: 4–6). The new barracks brought thousands

Figure 2.2. The Institution at Veenhuizen, an “Unfree Colony.” Source: National Library of the Netherlands.

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of civilians together in a regimented space that emphasized discipline and hierarchy and sought to foster their transformation into soldiers. Dutch mercenary armies in the eighteenth century had been quartered in civilian housing; in the post-Napoleonic shift to a conscripted civilian army, barracks became an important tool in isolating conscripted soldiers from civilian routines and disciplining them in their new roles as docile bodies following commands without question, in unison (Woud 1987: 486–88). The residential institutions in the unfree colonies all took this same form using the same techniques. Placement within the barracks was a marker of a colonist’s rank in the gradated hierarchy. The most “undeserving” of families were broken up and subjected to the harshest surveillance and discipline. Men and women were separated and housed in large same-sex dormitories in the inner courtyard; “moral” families were placed in the individual rooms on the outside façade of the institution. Colony supervisors lived in apartments fitted with surveillance windows in between the dormitories; as in Bentham’s panopticon, colonists could never tell when they were being observed and hence were induced to police themselves. The architectural forms necessary for this kind of discipline were similar in colony and barracks. The three colony institutions constructed at Veenhuizen in 1822 all resemble the “Prince Frederik barracks” built in 1825 in Leeuwarden (figure 2.3). The barracks were named after Prince Frederik, minister of war and royal patron of the Benevolent Society, and their architect was Major General J. G. Siderius, director of fortifications for Zutphen and member of the oversight committee of the society (Mens 1984: 52).

Figure 2.3. The Prince Frederik army barracks. Source: National Library of the Netherlands.

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The second of the disciplinary models utilized in the colonies was the family. Approaching the family as a disciplinary apparatus and not a natural unit, I underscore its political usage within the colonies as an implement to instill hierarchy and obedience and as an ideal but rarely realized unit of coercive production. Van den Bosch’s proposal called for an ideal family of two parents and a minimum of one boy and two girls over twelve, some six to eight people in all, to co-reside in the farm dwellings in the free colonies; a family of this size was required to meet the labor demands of the “family” farm. Few pauper families came so ideally constituted. Indeed, a family required at least a patriarchal head, hence an alcoholic or morally destitute one frequently resulted in the natural family being torn apart and reassigned to the same-sex dormitories of the unfree colonies (Kloosterhuis 1981: 250–21). Natural families frequently had to be supplemented with orphans or institutionalized beggars to meet the economic demands made on the colony’s ideal family. Constituting this ideal family thus became part of the gradated hierarchy of the colonies, a stage in an evolutionary pathway from unfree to free institutions, and from there to the free market—that is, from day-laboring individuals in the inner courtyard of the unfree institutions, to reconstituted families living in the outer ring of apartments who still worked the collective farms, to families in their own farmsteads collectively farming the free colonies’ land, to those, having demonstrated the family ideal, who graduated to becoming mere tenants on a society farm. These transitions were marked by medal ceremonies (worn on their uniforms) that indicated the gradated freedoms they were allowed. The self-sustaining patriarchal family was thus the concerted product of the “normalizing” disciplinary efforts of the colony. The increased standard of living as one traversed this progressive path was thought to incentivize adherence to colony discipline. Hence, the construction of blended families to achieve the “self-sustainment” of a colony farm (even when they, as a “family,” were merely so many individual wage-workers for the society) was not an erasure of the tender ties of kinship but an enlistment of them as a form of social control of disruptive outsiders. Affective ties were being actively encouraged as a disciplinary tool since each family was an economic unit with a shared income that could most effectively deal with the “free rider” problem through intimate emotional appeals and coercive patriarchal demands. The third of the disciplinary models emulated in the colonies was the workshop based on compulsory work. Van den Bosch declared the object of the colonies was to provide work, not charity, and that “he who did not work did not eat.” He rationalized this compulsion in disciplinary terms, not economic ones; work was to be the transformative means by which ideal productive citizens would be formed. This benevolent purpose sits uneasily with Van den Bosch’s invocation of the plantation model for the collective organization of labor. It is important to underscore, therefore, that it was not agricultural labor itself that had this transformative effect but rather its supervised, collective nature. This economic model underlies the organization of labor in both the free and unfree colonies, and Van den Bosch was later to apply it

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to a colony of a very different type, Java, in the form of the “Cultivation System” a decade later when he became governor-general there, transforming the island into a “para-penal colony writ large” (Schrauwers 2001). As disciplinary strategies in the Dutch system of “benevolent colonialism” circulated in the carceral archipelago of empire, there are no distinctions to be made between domestic and foreign colonies (cf. Arneil 2017: 221). This collective organization of labor is somewhat obscured in the free colonies. There, a semblance of family ownership and responsibility was given to colonists settled in individual houses on three-hectare farms. This, however, was merely a residential arrangement little different from the ring of family apartments on the outside façade of the unfree institutions. The families of the free colonies, one grade above the individualized beggars in the dormitories, were an economic unit made economically responsible for “their” small farm. They paid rent for the land (equal to a third of its production) but had no say over what was grown there or how it was grown, and the crops could only be “sold” to the colony at the prices it specified. Family income was largely derived from individual members’ daily wages for coerced labor in the collective farm crews. These supervised crews collectively did all the tasks on the family farms, in effect transforming the entire free colony into a single collectively worked, hierarchical plantation growing crops for the society in the manner it determined. This collective model was obscured, however, by the imposition of family responsibility at harvest time; then there was a grand reckoning. The “family crop” was sold, but from that was deducted the following: the rent for “their” land; their share of the wages paid to the work crew to farm “their” land; repayment of their debt to the society for their clothes, farm implements, and cow; and administration fees for health and education, among others (Windt 1984b: 61). In the first years, barely half the colonists broke even. In the unfree colonies, being accorded this level of family responsibility required demonstrated good behavior and the ability to earn full wages—only then might families be reunited in the outward apartments. This residential arrangement, however, did not change the organization of work. In the unfree colonies, large collective farms worked by collective platoons of colonists earning a daily wage were created. As in the free colonies, these wages were largely held for the colonists, pending fees and enforced savings; the amounts were recorded daily in their family account book, as were their expenses. What “money” was turned over was in colony script, which could only be spent at the colony store where variety was kept limited to combat “the sweet-tooth of women” (Kloosterhuis 1981: 193–94). The entire “economy” of the colony was thus a highly refined accounting system used to hold colonists to account; to measure their individual productivity and to punish them with fines. This accounting system did more than balance the colony’s books; it was the basis by which the colonists’ subjectivity was shaped through the awarding of medals and concomitant freedoms. As McKinlay (2006) has argued, panoptic discipline (of which this accounting system is an example) is in play only when such a gaze is complemented

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by systems of accountability that lead to self-reflective behavioral change. Fabre and Labardin (2019) point to the similar usage of disciplinary accounting in the French overseas penal colonies. This points, in other words, to the use of these accounts as a pedagogic tool. The fourth of the five disciplinary models applied in the colonies was that of the school. The Colonies of Benevolence were pedagogic experiments seeking a moral transformation in their pauper pupils, whose poverty was attributed to their moral lassitude. Van den Bosch strongly believed in the malleability of character, which could be improved through education. He believed the lower classes could only be “civilized” by guaranteed sustenance, education, and religion and through association with an enlightened bourgeoisie. He thus required mandatory schooling even though mandatory primary education was only legislated in the Netherlands as a whole in 1900 (Huussen 1994: 23–24). In developing an innovative educational system for colony children, Van den Bosch drew on the vocational pedagogic techniques of the Swiss educator Baron Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg’s model farm school at Hofwyl (Kloosterhuis 1981: 142–47). Von Fellenberg adapted the pedagogy of his one-time Swiss collaborator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who had rejected rote learning for a graduated, skill-building curriculum. Von Fellenberg applied this to the practical education of the poor with the social purpose of acclimatizing them to their lot in life (Bestor 1959: 138–39). The self-sustaining model farm at Hofwyl thus had a stream of liberal education for the children of the rich, who, like communitarian Robert Owen’s own children, were to thereby learn about and gain sympathy for the lot of the poor; it also had a vocational stream for poor students whose labor on the model farm made the school self-sustaining. Von Fellenberg’s school was the single most influential model of public education in the period, and it was widely emulated in the United States and Europe. Van den Bosch’s choice to educate through the Fellenberg method can be attributed to the shared aims of class-appropriate vocational training for the poor, and to the self-sustaining nature of his model farm. Mandatory primary vocational education from ages six to thirteen for both boys and girls was introduced to all the colonies to prepare them for their lives as farmers. Society members also funded an employee, Kornelis Mulder, for three years of teacher training at Hofwyl. On Mulder’s return, the society founded an agricultural institute on one hundred hectares of land at Wateren, near the free colonies, where he trained pauper students to become neighborhood supervisors of work platoons who would teach new colonists the most up-to-date agricultural practices (Kloosterhuis 1981: 142–47; 218–25). The institute thus combined vocational primary and adult education together through a stepped curriculum that produced the “ideal” farming family. Foucault noted, “The disciplinary technique became a ‘discipline’ which also had its school” (1977: 295). Wateren became one the Netherlands first agricultural colleges. The entire colony was thus a unified pedagogic experiment that married education to a disciplinary apparatus in a way that schooling heretofore had not done (Deacon

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2006: 125–33). Schooling was thus an integral part of the accounting and reward system noted above: schooling (as opposed to education) was based on hierarchy, a gradated curriculum, surveillance, examination, and normalization. School attendance was enforced and truancy dealt with by the neighborhood supervisors and noted in the family’s account book with a fine. In working through the gradated curriculum, children in an “ideal” family were “normalized,” and they progressed through the series of medals, gaining greater freedom of action only after it was established that they would not abuse it. The discipline applied to training in domestic colonies assumes a positive, and not a negative, punitive aspect and hence has been promoted by “progressive thinkers (socialist, liberal, African-American civil rights activists) who rejected domination, punishment, and banishment in favor of colonies at home” (Arneil 2017: 225); but I argue, when applied in a domestic colonial context predicated on segregation and exclusion from full liberal citizenship, it must be recognized as a particularly modern form of domination. The last of the disciplinary models applied in the Colonies of Benevolence was the judiciary. This model was of particular importance for its role in acclimatizing colonists to the constant application of disciplinary measures. “The most important effect of the carceral system and of its extension well beyond legal imprisonment is that it succeeds in making the power to punish natural and legitimate, in lowering at least the threshold to penalty” (Foucault 1977: 301). The colonists of both “free” and “unfree” colonies faced a similar system of fines and punishments for breaches of discipline in the pursuit of training quite different from the judicial system that relegated them to the colonies as punishment in the first place; yet, the two “court” systems mutually reinforced each other and the application of disciplinary punishments “beyond the frontiers of criminal law” (Stoler 2009: 131; 2016: 68–121). As a system of normalization, the colonies implemented a system of constant surveillance and graded disciplinary punishments for deviations from the colony rules; this was integrated into the accounting system based on monetary equivalents and used to hold them accountable. The “Regulations for the Ordinary Colonies” contained seventy articles that specified standards in all areas of activity and included family budgets using a common fixed tariff for all labor and agricultural products (Kloosterhuis 1981: 255–61). Each colony had a “disciplinary council” composed of the colony director, the neighborhood supervisors, the bookkeeper, plus one “community representative” that could impose fines, corporal punishment, confinement, or transfer to an unfree colony (Kloosterhuis 1981: 196; Windt 1984: 65–66). The application of a graded series of punishments was intended to be minimally applied to the smallest offences so as to rehabilitate and avoid major transgressions; “between the latest institution of ‘rehabilitation,’ where one is taken in order to avoid prison, and the prison where one is sent after a definable offence, the difference is (and must be) scarcely perceptible. There is a strict economy that has the effect of rendering as discreet as possible the singular power to punish” (Foucault 1977: 302).

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The Disciplinary Edifice If we place Van den Bosch’s experiments in poverty relief in the larger perspective of both the development of penal institutions and the reform of the communal marke, long-term trends become apparent. From the beginning, Van den Bosch was concerned with a governmental problem, criminalized paupers, whose origins lay in the workings of an economic system whose liberal principles he could not attack; he did not seek to reform capitalism so much as to protect the state from the political threat of the poor that was its inevitable product. Unlike liberal political economists, however, he argued that all surpluses were the result of coercion. In waged relationships, coercion was used to restrict the poor’s access to the means of production so that they could fulfill their “natural needs” only by yielding a surplus to a wealthy minority. However, this recognition of the implicit coercive potential of wage relations was not offered as a critique of capitalism but as a tool for the resolution of his administrative problem; a more direct coercive discipline could thus be legitimately used to train, civilize, and educate paupers into productive laborers. As biopolitical reforms of the sort described by Foucault took root early in the nineteenth century, the systematic use of discipline was applied through new kinds of institutions such as Van den Bosch’s agricultural colonies, “parapenal institutions . . . created in order not to be a prison” (Foucault 1979: 293–94). Here, I have provided a fairly standard Foucauldian account of one country’s experiment in the development of the biopolitical institutions of the Great Confinement. However, it is the less-frequently noted economic aspects of this penal reform that requires emphasis. Three royal commissions had established the boundaries for governmental action, limiting direct state intervention and calling for the commerialization of the country’s local workhouses. It was the impetus to provide work, not charity, that led to the widespread proposal and establishment of corporate solutions, such as the Benevolent Society, to the problem of poverty. This corporate solution however, was to provide work while also instilling productive virtue, since pauperism was believed to be the product of a moral failing. Van den Bosch’s parapenal administration thus sought to replace the inadequate discipline of the invisible hand of the market with the economic governance of the corporation. That is, Van den Bosch’s colonies substituted an accounts-based system of discipline that mimicked market prices but left workers indebted and accountable to the society. By tracking the colonists’ every action and assigning a monetary value of account to itself, the society could reduce their trajectory to a scripted path in which, as accountable persons, they either demonstrated their moral worth and were allowed their freedom as citizens in the free market or were transferred to the stricter institution of Veenhuizen for criminalized paupers. The corporate side of this exercise of biopower had other implications. Van den Bosch’s agricultural colonies were not just parapenal institutions for the poor, they were also intended to further a capitalist transformation of the communal markes

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that dotted Drenthe’s landscape. Van den Bosch’s plan for the wastelands of Drenthe were the culmination of over twenty-five years of state attempts to intensify agriculture and encourage commodity production among subsistence farmers by breaking up the markes’ communal rights to land. Van den Bosch sought to create a sturdy class of sharecroppers able to provide for their own subsistence while simultaneously producing a surplus for sale in the market—without the ultimate need for coercion. I have argued, in other words, that the Benevolent Colonies were a development project in the modern sense, a high modernist “state project of legibility and simplification” (Scott 1998). But moral transformation remained his central problem, for he had himself argued that it is only the driving force of natural needs that induced people to work, and once these needs were met, only coercion could keep them producing surpluses. Over time, Van den Bosch became increasingly aware that the transformation of paupers into productive commodity producers required more incentives and discipline than he had initially supposed, and he responded with new and harsher disciplinary techniques. The unfree institutions at Veenhuizen displayed little compunction in tearing apart families and herding them in barracks, all in the name of relief. The irony of Van den Bosch’s discovery was that the further intensification of discipline that it necessitated, as at Veenhuizen, involved embracing communal forms of production; that is, an increasing dependence upon the community as a disciplinary mechanism when individual incentives for household-based production failed. Such “communal” (village-based) forms for the management of production are not communist (Van den Bosch was not a proto-socialist); rather, they utilized the community’s administrative organization as a means by which discipline and hence individual productivity could be heightened. They were an adaptation of the traditional forms of village-based production, as in the marke, under corporate guidance. This assemblage (or dispositif ) of communal production under contract and disciplinary accounting are, I will argue, the particular governmental practices adopted by Van den Bosch in all of his subsequent state-building projects, especially those in the other colonies, such as the island of Java a half a world away. As we will see in subsequent chapters, this resulted in a unique feature in the development of Dutch industrialization, in which corporate-led village-based production became a norm.

Notes 1. In 1815, the volcano Tambura in the Sanggar peninsula of Sumbawa produced the largest eruption in historic time, causing the “year without a summer” in Europe and North America. Abnormally low temperatures were recorded from late spring to early autumn of that year resulting in a widespread subsistence crisis. The alteration in world climate patterns continued into 1816 and 1817 and prolonged the agricultural crisis (Boers 1995). 2. The only work cited by Van den Bosch (1818) in his colonization proposal was by a Dutch civil servant, J. C. W. le Jeune (1816), which provided an extensive summary of the existing literature on poverty reduction and alleviation. The work is interesting for an appendix recommending the establishment of colonies for the poor on wastelands (166–92).

CHAPTER 3

The Cultivation System

By 1827, the Benevolent Society had established a string of parapenal agricultural colonies throughout the province of Drenthe through which it sought to instill productive virtue in a degenerate Dutch pauper class; this apparatus of security should not be viewed in isolation but was itself part of a larger governmental effort, a development project in the form of a charity company to colonize the eastern Netherlands and effect a capitalist transformation of the feudal markes found there. The disciplinary techniques developed in the Colonies of Benevolence were later adapted more broadly when applied by Van den Bosch to whole populations in a colony of a very different sort in the Netherlands East Indies through what is now referred to as the Cultivation System. The Cultivation System fostered the production of cash crops that incorporated large parts of Java in the world trade system and similarly initiated the capitalist transformation of the Netherlands East Indies (map 1.2). The Cultivation System is typically characterized as the method of “forced” crop deliveries by which the Dutch extracted coffee, sugar, and indigo from Java. It is typically contrasted with the later liberal period as a throwback to the mercantilist policies of the VOC. Here, I focus on the circulation of a wide range of disciplinary techniques between these apparently disparate examples of colonialism at home and abroad. Although Van den Bosch’s organizational role in pauper relief projects and in Java have been widely noted in the literature, little comparative analysis has been directed at the link between his economic ideas and the governmental practices underlying them; the regime of truth within which the Cultivation System operated. In the grand liberal metanarratives that emerged out of the dismantling of the Cultivation System, this “company man” was said to have reintroduced the bankrupt policies of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which proved immensely profitable for the Dutch Crown in the short term but which retarded the development of free markets (Fasseur 1992; Bosma 2007). The current literature ignores Van den Bosch’s own corpus of economic texts, a collective amnesia that obscures his status as an early liberal and too readily subsumes Dutch colonialism to the broad outlines of the British experience. These texts reveal a single-minded determination to create a governmental strategy using a common toolkit of disciplinary technologies that would eventually foster a free market out of the entrenched traditions of a primarily agricultural society (Van den Bosch in Deventer 1866: 537; Vitalis 1857: 8–10). Viewed in this way, both the Colonies of Benevolence and the Cultivation System can be regarded

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as early development projects in the modern sense of the word—that is, as state-led exercises furthering socioeconomic advancement and creating the conditions for idealized markets. This chapter thus focuses on a comparison of the common strategies, programs, and technologies of rule introduced by Van den Bosch for regulating problematic populations and molding productive workers in these new, economically administered spaces. Within these spaces, Van den Bosch deployed a development discourse consisting of “theories which explain reality only to the extent that they enable the implementation of a program” (Donzelot in Rose et al. 2006: 88). Such development discourses frame the boundaries of acceptable policy and determine the range of permissible interventions (Escobar 1995: 41). As Rose elaborates, this discourse allows program developers to isolate the relationship between a social problem and the empirical procedures that are thought to relieve them (1999: 57). Drawing on the work of social economists on the problem of pauperism, Van den Bosch rationalized the deployment of the disciplinary technologies he used in the Colonies of Benevolence in and through the new Javanese village administrations to the same ends. By transforming a social problem into a technical problem to be resolved through a bricolage of tried-and-true bureaucratic processes, pauperism was reframed as an issue that could be resolved without addressing patterns of exploitation and domination—and indeed, using those inequalities as a technique of rule in reaching an ultimate “solution.” This chapter thus begins by reviewing the development discourse that bounded the actions of Van den Bosch’s Colonies of Benevolence in order to demonstrate their application in this new context. Viewed through this lens, the Cultivation System can be characterized as a parapenal colony like Frederiksoord writ large, as the “closed corporate village” was deployed as a means of transforming traditional “feudal” agriculture, disciplining “lazy natives,” and instilling productive virtue through the organization of communal labor. I emphasize in particular these two projects of rule’s shared use of accounting as a disciplinary strategy, allowing for management by the numbers from a distance. Accounting secondarily allowed the ideological “disembedding” of village production as a specifically “economic” or market phenomena, separate from the actual bureaucratic framework providing the force driving production. In pursuit of this comparison of the two types of colonial systems, it is important to underscore the corporate strategies utilized by the state in order to implement this development project. While not asserting that the Cultivation System was a corporation, I here seek to trace the development and circulation of the sets of practices that were circulated among later corporations, including the Netherlands Trading Company (NHM). These corporate management strategies included the use of accounting, as well as that of standard contracts to organize production into commodity chains, themes to be explored at greater length in the next chapter. These corporate strategies transformed Java into one large state plantation, producing more than a third of the Dutch state’s revenue (see table 0.2). Their common deployment in state

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and corporations eventually allowed the Cultivation System to be privatized in the later Liberal period and assume a more familiar modern business form.

Van den Bosch’s Governmental Strategies In 1823, a financial crisis spurred by “extravagant overspending” and the need for a f 6 million loan from a British merchant resulted in the censure of Indies governorgeneral G. A. G. P. van der Capellen and the liberal policies he had pursued by an outraged king (Bosma 2007: 277). These loans spurred the renewal of a prolonged and acrimonious debate on the ideal principles for the exploitation of the Netherlands East Indies and led to the creation of the Netherlands Trading Company in 1825. In 1829, a decade after he had founded his Colonies of Benevolence, Van den Bosch was called upon by the Crown to participate in this debate by providing advice on a “System of Colonization” (1851) for Java that would return the colony to profitability for the mother country in the aftermath of the Java War. Van den Bosch’s response drew on the ideas he had developed to rationalize the creation of the Colonies of Benevolence and its disciplinary apparatus. This discourse was used to frame this governmental problem and shape the programs and disciplinary technologies that were to be introduced piecemeal as the Cultivation System over the next four years. The red thread in these governmental strategies is the use of “forced labor”—a rancorous issue seemingly at odds with the basic principles of liberal political economy. Van den Bosch’s advice invoked the earlier discursive regime on pauperism by which he had strongly argued that poverty could be relieved and national productivity improved through the coercive use of the underutilized labor of paupers on wastelands. This continuity across colonial contexts should be no surprise. Van den Bosch had rooted his own plans for the Colonies of Benevolence in his early experience exploiting a profitable plantation in Java (1818: 226–27). Not only was he preoccupied by these issues, but social and economic conditions in Java and the Netherlands were broadly similar at the time. Van den Bosch thus construed the demand to make Java profitable as a familiar governmental problem amenable to the methods he had been developing for a decade. By focusing on the “Advice” of 1829 [1851], the “Report” of 1830 [1862] and the “Memorie” of 1834 [1863], I hope to emphasize the underlying governmental logic of the system he introduced piecemeal and without apparent consistency between 1830 and 1833. Seen through the lens of the Colonies of Benevolence, the Cultivation System is revealed as a parapenal colony writ large, an apparatus of security in the larger carceral archipelago of empire (cf. Breman 1982b: 210: “one massive official labor colony”) that imposed economic discipline in order to correct a moral failing in “lazy natives.” The emergence of the trope of the lazy native has been clearly tied to the introduction of the Cultivation System; ethnographic portraits of the Javanese such as that found in Van den Bosch’s On National Character (1820–21) increasingly portrayed their “nature” as inherently flawed “and sought the means of its rectification”

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(Philpott 2003: 251). Van den Bosch argued that Java’s fertility and the ease with which basic needs could be met resulted in congenital indolence, unlike those northern climes where the press of wintery desolation enforced industriousness. As noted in regards to the Colonies of Benevolence, these kinds of discourse widely construed “the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (1990: 75). Van den Bosch’s focus on “character,” later construed as “culture,” then “race,” would be linked through a broader ethnographic project of “educational” initiatives aimed at correcting these flaws (cf. Mitchell 1988: 104–5). Thirty years after its introduction, a sugar factory owner could still assert that the Cultivation System “can in no way be called disadvantageous; and even if the native derives nothing but the wages for his work, he always has the great advantage of working, and of learning to work” (B. R. P. Hasselmann 1862: 49). The use of force was cited by Van den Bosch’s liberal critics as indicative of his mercantilist leanings derived from the VOC, although as we have seen, his economic texts provide a much more nuanced argument on the use of force that provided the rationale for these “educational” initiatives. His critique highlighted the implicit political and economic means by which the poor were deprived of access to the means of production in a capitalist society and hence forced to produce surpluses for the wealthy.1 In Van den Bosch’s economic texts, paupers and lazy natives stand as populations on the periphery of political economy who require constant discipline to ensure the production of marketable surpluses since they would naturally cease work once their own basic needs were met. This critique of the ideological basis of free wage labor was not aimed at reforming or overthrowing capitalist wage relations but at legitimating his administrative use of coercion to produce marketable surpluses in his colonies variously construed; it authorized specific technologies of rule. In both cases, Van den Bosch argued that poverty should be relieved and national productivity improved by the use of the underutilized agricultural labor of paupers (now “natives”) through a hierarchically managed disciplinary apparatus. Key to linking the governmental rationality of the Dutch pauper colonies and the Cultivation System was the role of colonial discipline in the creation and control of a “market” in export crops. The economic bureaucracies he established in his Colonies of Benevolence were designed to provide this discipline in a cost-effective manner, with management of the charity company replacing the ineffective hand of the market with a system of monetary accounts that would be carefully monitored to produce willing productive workers. Most writers refer to the “Advice” as a clear statement of Van den Bosch’s rejection of the liberal principles of his immediate predecessors and a reversion to the earlier system of forced cultivations of the VOC. Their readings of this document do not place it in the context of his well-developed economic ideas (1818, 1819, 1829). The “Advice” itself is largely responsible for that interpretation. There Van den Bosch outlined three possible ways in which the colonies could be exploited: (1) allowing

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the Javanese the free disposal of their products and labor against the payment of a fair land rent; (2) cession of land to Europeans to be cultivated by free laborers; and (3) “the old system of the former company, or that of forced cultivations” (1851: 313). Van den Bosch summarily rejected the first two options as an impractical means of meeting Dutch (i.e. royal) needs, since the colony could not compete with cheaper slave-produced crops from the Caribbean (1862 [1830]: 346–51). Further, the “natural needs” of the Javanese were easily fulfilled in the tropics; if left to themselves, they would cultivate nothing but rice, a product of no use to the state treasury (1862 [1830]: 356). The plan favored by the former liberal colonial administration for the establishment of European plantations was admitted as a theoretical possibility, but Van den Bosch argued that it was impractical in the short term since Dutch planters were few in numbers and it also raised various legal difficulties associated with land tenure. A similar plan practiced in the princely territories in the previous decade had been one of the causes of the Java War (Carey 1976: 63–64). By his own admission then, Van den Bosch opted for the “old system of the former company” in the short term.2 We should be careful, however, about taking Van den Bosch at his word. The difference between the Cultivation System and the liberal plan for private European plantations has been overdrawn due to the later prolonged ideological debates leading to the system’s dismantling (Niel 1992: 13; Boerma 1950: 89–90). Private planters (particuliere landerijen) in the central Javanese principalities did not own land but merely rented an appanage from one of the Javanese aristocrats; they thereby obtained access to the traditional labor obligations of villagers within that appanage whom they then directed to grow export crops for the European market instead (Niel 1992: 208). As described by one resident, The production of produce for the European market through the cultivation system in the government territories simply rests on the same principles as that by land rental [by the private planters]. What the renters do for their own benefit in the kingdoms of Surakarta and Yogyakarta to produce the designated crops is done in the government residencies by civil servants. . . . This doesn’t prevent one every now and again from hearing the naïve claim that in land rental “free” and in the Cultivation system “forced ” labor is used (J. J. Hasselmann 1862: 22).3 The use of such discipline, however, remained a contentious ideological issue. It bears repeating that the Dutch lacked an abolitionist movement and that, initially, liberal objections to the Cultivation System were less about the use of force and largely directed at the Crown’s monopoly. In the “Advice,” Van den Bosch thus recapitulated the argument made in his earlier publications in defense of his pauper colonies (1818, 1819), that all labor above what is required to meet natural needs is the product of force, and that, frequently, this force is most oppressive where the laborer appears most free (1851 [1829]: 316; Emmer 1995: 214–15). His argument

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foreshadowed the analysis of anthropologist William Reddy on the “monetary exchange asymmetries” that lie behind the “liberal illusion” of “free” labor; money “becomes an instrument of discipline just insofar as the money involved has different significance to each party, essential for survival for one, a matter of indifference for the other. This difference in significance cannot be expressed numerically. It makes the whole notion of a fair or accurate price irrelevant” (1987: 101–2). Citing figures derived from the colonies of the Benevolent Society, Van den Bosch demonstrated that the average wage in the Netherlands bought the worker little but “dry bread and potatoes with salt, minimal clothing, and as much fire and light as needed to prepare sober mealtimes and protect his sleeping quarters from the adverse weather” (1851 [1829]: 316). Since the rich controlled the means of production by which these essential needs were met, the “freedom of disposition over [the worker’s] labor profits him little since he will seldom find someone who pays him more than the usual daily wage” (1851 [1829]: 317). It is for these reasons that Van den Bosch did not dismiss liberal economic policies as impossible but simply as impractical in the short term (Vitalis 1862: 63). Having established to his own satisfaction that coercion equally underlay relations of “free labor” in the few existing private plantations in the principalities, Van den Bosch proposed to apply the disciplinary technologies he had developed in Drenthe as a means of encouraging the market production of export crops in Java. Without some kind of external economic discipline, market forces in themselves could not increase productivity if peasants were to be allowed to select the crops that they grew. By conceiving the problem of economic development through the lens of the Dutch experience of marke reform, Van den Bosch was evoking his own experience with agricultural colonization by “benevolent” means. This experience was marked by the discovery of culture or “national character” as an obstacle to individual economic development and the use of communal (i.e. village-based) forms of discipline with increased direct hierarchical supervision to overcome this problem. In this sense then, Van den Bosch conceived of Java as a parapenal colony like Frederiksoord writ large. Van den Bosch constructed an individual pathway in Drenthe leading from unfree to free colonies and from there to the free market. In Java, the Cultivation System, when placed in evolutionary sequence, was to be a transitional phase toward an ultimately capitalist goal. Whereas the individual colonists of the Benevolent Society were theoretically allowed to progress to a free market, no such progression was possible in Java under the Cultivation System. Although both types of colonies engaged in the market-oriented production of commodities based on an apparent wage-like relationship, the wage was not a real wage (i.e., it was set administratively and not by the market), and these communities precluded the accumulation of capital since other factors of production such as land could not be commodified. That is, “there are elements of capitalism but not the specifically capitalist mode of production”; the Cultivation System can thus be characterized by its formal subsumption to capitalism rather than by its real subsumption to it (Smith 1989: 162). In Java, the ultimate goal

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of a free market lay in the future, not outside the colony’s walls. Under the Cultivation System, the Javanese were trapped in an administrative system designed to discipline and not a capitalist economy per se. It is here that I draw a comparison with the administered internal economy of the charity company where accounts come to replace market transactions. Van den Bosch’s various colonies are an early attempt at agriculturally led development; unlike the British Empire, whose expansion was fueled by the industrial revolution and its needs for markets in free labor and industrial products, the rebirth of the Dutch economy was grounded in agrarian capitalism (Koning 1995: 43; cf. Webster 1998). Van den Bosch’s various colonies were designed to create work for, govern, and reform potentially revolutionary paupers, and hence they share a common characteristic; clearly developing elements of capitalism such as marketoriented cash-crop production were trapped within a disciplinary apparatus that worked through an invented tradition, the closed corporate village. The paradox of developing and governing an agrarian capitalist “free market” through the application of penal discipline is related to the particularly modern forms of governmentality invoked by Van den Bosch: by his need to govern economically, that is, both in keeping with the broad tenets of political economy as well as through the more judicious use of the techniques of governance. That the particular strain of colonial discourse resulting from Van den Bosch’s poverty relief experiments bears such a striking relationship with postcolonial development discourses should be no surprise for those who argue that “development” is less about economics and more about establishing relations of power and dependency (Ferguson 1990, Escobar 1995). Van den Bosch’s instructions to “make Java profitable” had the complementary effect of extending state power ever deeper into village life shortly after a period of widespread rebellion.

The Cultivation System as State Plantation The Cultivation System is a definitional conundrum. Analysts consistently argue that this system was “more a patchwork of accommodations to particular customs and practices than a uniform application of a single set of concepts” (Niel 1992: 136–37) and note that it is not mentioned in any of the constitutional regulations for the colony (Fasseur 1992: 26; Niel 1992: 89). As a state project, it proves surprisingly difficult to locate. However, colonial officials such as Governor-General J. C. Baud, Governor-General Rochussen, former resident J. J. Hasselman (1862) and a range of scholars including Clifford Geertz (1963: 53), Roger Knight (1992) and Cornelis Fasseur have argued that “it is no exaggeration to say that the Cultivation System made parts of Java into a huge ‘private estate’ for the Crown” (1992: 31–32). It transformed Java into a state-managed plantation involving 46 percent of the Javanese population and about 6 percent of its landmass and eventually produced a third of the Netherlands state income (map 1.2). This conundrum is resolved, I will argue, by highlighting how the state sought to “economize” this governmental problem by

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ideologically framing it as an economic problem to be resolved by a “market-based” solution, just as they had approached the problem of pauperism in Drenthe. Here I underscore how this private plantation for the Crown was organized at the village level, drawing on a comparison with the disciplinary techniques employed in the Colonies of Benevolence. The confusion around the “economic” initiatives of the Crown is reflected, I argue, in Willem’s epithet, the merchant king. The Colonies of Benevolence have largely been described in the literature as government-led disciplinary experiments in penal reform for the criminalized poor (Berends et al. 1984; Gouda 1995; Kloosterhuis 1981; Schrauwers 2001; Woud et al. 1994). However, the colonies were also intended to serve as charity corporations solving the problem of pauperism commercially through market means, and thereby avoiding parliamentary interference. The Colonies of Benevolence utilized a panoptic accounting system as a surveillance tool through which the moralizing discourse of productive virtue could be applied, yet profits realized. These economic aspects of the colonies, however, have largely been ignored. The Cultivation System in Java has also been treated as a state-organized means of forcibly extracting wealth in the form of cash crops such as coffee, sugar, and indigo rather than on its ideological framing as a market relation. Here, the attention has again been on the discipline applied, with little attention paid to the means by which the system operated through closed administered markets. In pursuing this line of reasoning, it is important to underscore the unique features of this state plantation that differentiate it from the Caribbean and American plantation model predicated upon private property and slavery. Careful comparative calculation of the costs of different kinds of labor regime had convinced Van den Bosch that Java could not compete with the plantation use of slave labor in the Caribbean (1829 [1851]: 309–12). The colonial requisition of land and labor in Java for state plantation formation was only “feasible because of the colonial Government’s ability to harness a labor-service regime of some antiquity which it inherited from the pre-colonial state” (Knight 2014a: 5, 98). The NEI state proclaimed that it had acquired the rights of Javanese rulers through conquest and hence retained their ultimate ownership of all land; this legitimated its demand for land rent. This state plantation was built on the Crown’s eminent domain, and thus it was little different from those demands made on villagers by the aristocrats in the principalities. The Crown’s exploitation of these lands to produce cash crops was little different, as already noted, from that of the “private planters” there who leased these rights from aristocrats. The Cultivation System was applied to only those parts of Java where aristocratic rights to land and labor had been curbed and direct rule and the land tax applied. However, in at least one respect, Van den Bosch very clearly differentiated the Cultivation System from the aristocratic demands for tribute in the principalities, or in the VOC’s system of tribute-taking in the Regency of Priangan (which continued uninterrupted). That difference lay in the way it was economically framed with the Cultivation System to be predicated on purchases, not tribute. This also distinguished

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it from most North Atlantic plantation systems based on some form of indentured labor (Knight 1992: 70). This was an ideological attempt to redefine a demand for state tribute as a market exchange. Van den Bosch was well aware of the shaky ideological ground on which he was building: “One could say . . . that the Indian administration will accept a product for European consumption, or raw materials for useful products, in payment of the land rent. I acknowledge that it may often be necessary to not shock existing prejudices, and to use such descriptions” (Bosch 1851 [1829]: 322, my emphasis). The market transactions he instituted here were as fictive as those using “card money” and ledgers in the Colonies of Benevolence. Van den Bosch’s logic was questioned and contested by liberals; nonetheless, this governmental determination became an operational truth of state policy, the basis for the sets of bureaucratic procedures by which the system operated. The system for making these purchases would be an “administered market” where the heavy hand of the state replaced market discipline. Its true kin were the Colonies of Benevolence. The Cultivation System was a form of economic management built atop Raffles’s liberal state reforms during the British interregnum and was not a simple reversion to the practices of the VOC as many English-language histories have argued (Niel 1992: 6–7). As noted in chapter 1, attention must be focused on the petty, everyday bureaucratic means through which the state is imagined and the ideological line of differentiation drawn as a result between itself and the market, what Mitchell called the “state effect” (1999: 89). The Cultivation System was not a direct feudal exaction of tribute; rather, the Javanese were to be forced to engage in the production and sale of export crops rather than rice on their own land in order to pay their normal land taxes. The Cultivation System did not substantially alter the land rent system, nor were forced cultivations either in addition to land rent or intended to supplant the land rent;4 rather, the sale of forced cultivations to the state was to be the means by which the land rent was to be paid. It had been Raffles’s liberal hope, when he imposed a cash-based land rent system, that it would encourage peasant market participation to pay it. Van den Bosch did not seek to change that, just the types of crops that would be grown. Van Niel, paraphrasing Van den Bosch, outlined the system as follows: If the Javanese cultivated one-fifth of the village lands in a given crop which he delivered to the government after it was harvested, the value of that crop (calculated at a price that would allow processing and distribution of the product at a cost that would be competitive on the world market) should have been sufficient to pay the land rent of the lands of the village as this land rent would normally have been assessed on the value of a single rice crop (1992: 17; cf. Bosch 1864: 426). The force that Van den Bosch proposed to use would only be applied to determine the kind of crop grown in order to pay the land rent, inducing a shift from the production of surplus rice destined for domestic markets to crops exported to Eu-

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rope. Van den Bosch proudly argued that a Javanese peasant would earn ƒ5.50 more through forced cultivation of government-selected export crops than he could make under a system of free disposition of product and labor despite only one-fifth rather than the normal two-fifths of the village’s land being utilized (1851 [1829]: 320). Where their production exceeded the stipulated amount of land rent, they were to be paid in cash, as had the paupers at Frederiksoord. Like Van den Bosch’s povertyrelief experiments, the application of force served as a form of tough love necessary to transform undisciplined subsistence peasants into more productive simple commodity producers of cash crops. Although analysts express confusion on the limits of the Cultivation System, all of Van den Bosch’s own pronouncements about the system as system limit themselves to this basic formula, and thus restrict discussion to how this economic exchange with the Javanese peasantry would be organized. The 1834 summary of the “System of Cultivations” published in the official Netherlands East Indies state gazette (Staatsblad 1834, no. 20) is of particular interest for the manner in which it carefully distinguishes the “new system” from the old, reasserts the NEI state’s rights to charge land rent, and defines the basic principle of the system as the sale of crops to pay land rent with little mention of the need for force. It then proceeds to offer detailed calculations and resultant regulations on the contractual terms by which these sales will be arranged, specifying amounts of land, labor, and responsibilities in great detail for sugar, indigo and other crops. This 1834 description of the “system” is a summary of the arrangements made over the previous three years, yet it makes no mention of the Directorate of Cultivations created in order to manage these contracts and the commodity chains that resulted. The ideological emphasis, and the bureaucratic structures and procedures it enabled, were predicated upon defining this as a “market” exchange. The Cultivation System operated much as Van den Bosch hoped by means of its general decentralized logic to stimulate a shift to cash crop production. Each form of cash crop made its own demands and was implemented differently in each regency according to locally available land and labor resources and the degree of established hierarchical authority. Historian Cornelis Fasseur argues that crop payments were generally more than sufficient to pay the land rent owing; the governmental limits of Dutch accounting measures, however, meant that the money did not always make it into the right hands, that payments made were well below actual market prices, and that farmers assigned the same cultivation and doing the same work received wildly different compensation across different regencies (Fasseur 1992: 38, cf. Niel 1992: 70–71). At the global level, “crop payments in coffee, sugar, and indigo cultivations combined amounted during that period [1840–1860] to an average of 11 million guilders per year, and land rent assessments were on average almost 9 million guilders” (Fasseur 1992: 41). A breakdown of payments to growers on a per capita basis after deduction of land rent for 1840–1850 by crop shows an average of f 12.34 to f 17.24

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for coffee; f-2.75 to f 5.87 for indigo; and f 1.53 to f 6.30 for sugar (Elson 1994: 116–17). Payments thus varied enormously depending on the crop, with those forced to plant indigo suffering the most, those planting coffee benefiting the most, and those planting sugar being further supplemented by payments for ancillary work such as cutting and transporting cane (Fasseur 1992: 43). One of most significant implications was that peasants now had the means to pay the land rent without having to sell the bulk of their food crops at depressed prices or to borrow money at usurious rates from Chinese moneylenders (Elson 1994: 100; Fasseur 1992: 41).

The Javanese Village as Benevolent Colony The first measure taken by Van den Bosch in 1830 was to encourage his residents to strike “market” contracts with whole villages to grow prescribed amounts of sugar cane and indigo for exclusive sale to the NHM (the commission agent of the state) (figure 3.1).5 The process of assembling villages into a hierarchical multiunit enterprise was accomplished through the imposition of these standard contracts by which the “system” was bureaucratically enframed as a “market transaction” (Niel 1992: 33ff.).6 It is important to underscore that, as in the Colonies of Benevolence, Van den Bosch opted for communal production by closed corporate villages. Under the leadership of its headman and council, every village was obligated to enter a multiyear written contract for the production of these crops at predetermined prices on no more than 30 percent of village lands. These contracts specified, in detail, the production processes and allocation of land and labor such that the crops produced should, when “sold” to the state, result in revenue equal to the villages’ collective land rent; both the land rent and the price paid for crops were administratively set with the balance between them used to increase the pressure to produce (Elson 1994: 47 for indigo; Fasseur 1975: 40). Under the terms of the contract, the headman was required to keep an account of what each villager had individually contributed to crop production and was to be paid; he would then change hats and collect their land rent.

Figure 3.1. The “instituted market” of the Cultivation System.

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Van den Bosch’s village-based disciplinary edifice for regulating crop production was thus built upon the transformation of the role of village head that had begun under Raffles; this was a new “economic” layer laid atop their primary state functions. When first imposed by Raffles, the primary role of the village headman was the collection of land rent and the organization of corvee labor—he was an essential cog in the administrative machine by which the land rent was raised to pay for the Indies state apparatus (the Landelijke stelsel, Territorial System). This was the revenue stream in the Indies budget that paid the salaries of all government officials, the village head included. Atop this was now laid an “economic” contract, distinct from taxation for which they were paid separately. If the Cultivation System is to be considered a staterun plantation, it must be remembered that it was managed through village-based units, each, as in a corporation, with “its own administrative office. Each is administered by a full-time salaried manager. Each has its own set of books and accounts which can be audited separately from those of the large enterprise” (Chandler 1977: 3). The Landelijke stelsel and the Cultuur stelsel were two distinct systems that utilized a common set of hierarchically organized, Janus-faced functionaries. Predicating this “market” system on communal contracts remained a sore spot for Liberals who contested Van den Bosch’s use of village-based contracts that contravened individual peasants’ right to the “free disposition” of land, labor, and produce. Van den Bosch (speaking from personal experience as plantation owner) rebutted that wage relations in areas like Batavia (Jakarta) cited by liberals as an example of what might be achieved in a free labor market were themselves predicated upon the force of traditional relations just as they were among the private plantations of the principalities. Dispossessed laborers who accepted wage contracts did so only at the behest of indigenous contractors who provided laborers with the wet rice fields they needed to grow their subsistence crops; i.e., even these free wage contracts required the lure of sharecropping before they would be accepted (1830: 342 ff.; Deventer 1866). It made no sense, Van den Bosch argued, to speak of the bulk of peasants having the free disposition of land, labor, and produce in these circumstances, necessitating the involvement of village leaders. Van den Bosch’s resort to communal production processes was enabled by his fundamental misrecognition of the Javanese village as a Dutch marke (Deventer 1866:237, 259–68, 304–5, 326). This comparison to the marke was based on the “communal ownership” of land in the desa, a right of ownership that accrued only to an internally differentiated village elite (sikap) distinct from non-owners or dependent sharecroppers (buyang). Landholding was communal only insofar as the location (but not size) of a landowner’s delegated cultivation plot could vary from year to year. This communal village was otherwise riven by great inequalities both among those who had rights in land and those who did not; the village was in no way egalitarian. Each landowner headed a cacah, a production unit with a number of landless sharecropping families commensurate in size with the amount of land owned (Bosch 1830: 347–48; Niel 1992: 162). Relations between the landowner and sharecroppers

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within a cacah were patriarchal, he argued, with the landowner controlling the disposition of the sharecroppers’ land, labor, and produce. In his view, the patriarchal village sikaps formed the village council with whom the government contracts were signed. As cacah leaders, they already organized village rice production and hence could utilize that authority in order to manage cash crop production as well (1830: 423). It is here, specifically, where the “force” of traditional authority was invoked in the implementation of the system. In Knight’s summary, “coercion of the workforce was only possible in a sustained and systematic way because of a political economy in the countryside which left increasing numbers of rural workers dependent for their survival on something other than their own means of subsistence” (2014a: 131). The communal organization of production entailed by these contracts set aside up to a third of the village’s cropland for growing sugar cane or indigo; this was the village-managed part of the larger state plantation (figure 3.2). This land was to be contiguous, communally worked, and as close to the processing factories as possible, yet it needed to be rotated on a regular basis to prevent soil exhaustion. It therefore necessitated the yearly redistribution of the remaining land among the landowners (cacah heads) as it moved; they in turn allocated sections of their rotating share to their buyangs. Only landowners subject to land rent were required to “communally” work the land set aside for export crops, but they frequently utilized their sharecroppers’ labor instead through variable local arrangements not recorded in the contracts, which accounts for a large measure of the variability in the system across Java (Praetorius 1843a: 12, 35). The village head was thus responsible for organizing this mixed workforce in order to fulfill the villages’ contractual crop obligations according to

Figure 3.2. The Javanese village as “Benevolent Colony.”

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the terms specified. The village head was paid for the collective production of the village depending on the amount and quality of crops delivered and was to divide this “plantloon” (crop payment) among the landowners depending on their contributions (which ideally were proportionate to the size of their landshare and hence dependent labor supply) (Fasseur 1977: 274). The bulk of this crop payment was then deducted as land rent. The organization of labor, the ascription of ownership of land, and the attendant obligation to grow state-determined crops thus mirrored that of the free Colonies of Benevolence. As in the free colonies, “landowners” had no choice of how or what crops were grown on “their” land, but “ownership” obligated them to take part in its collective cultivation. Van den Bosch drafted local aristocrats and village chiefs to supervise the collective production of sugar cane, indigo, and coffee on this land just as Frederiksoord’s village supervisors led work platoons of colonists. These supervised crews collectively did all the tasks on that part of the individual peasants’ land dedicated to cash crops, in effect transforming a third of the village into a single collectively worked, hierarchical plantation growing crops for the state in the manner it determined. Although each villager had their own free-standing house, and cultivated their own land, as in the Colonies of Benevolence, this collective, supervised labor on state/society-determined crops was “educative” and meant to instill productive virtue. Although they labored collectively, under supervision, individual accounts balanced their land tax obligations against their share of the eventual “sale” of the crop to the state at low fixed prices, offering them a potential chance for some personal profit as on the free colony family farm. The cultivation system was an accounting system that balanced individualized debits and credits to the state to hold farmers to account and ensure their participation in the collective work crews. In all these cases, accounting was used as a substitute for actual market transactions. Van den Bosch had turned to the closed corporate village as a tool to organize and manage production just as he had opted for communally organized production in his Colonies of Benevolence; the Cultivation System was as much about bolstering state control of the countryside as it was about the production of cash crops. Communal production provided tools by which “lazy natives” could be instilled with productive virtue in the service of the state. Van den Bosch’s contracts sought to use the traditional authority of village leaders over their communal villages to command labor, although the nature of this tradition may have had less to do with proverbial Javanese subservience and more to do with the patterns of land ownership. These contracts, however, ideologically framed bureaucratic practices as market transactions, thereby rendering these hierarchical relations in monetary terms, as something to be administered through village-based accounts as they were in the Colonies of Benevolence. These accounts left villagers accountable, subject to a management tool for organizing the commodity chains on which the Dutch state was increasingly dependent. The new contracts thus imposed the management of a whole different set of “economic” accounts on the village head. Their records allowed for the administrative

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coordination of cash crop flows, ensuring low risk, stable production, and reduced transaction costs. Bureaucratic processes of inscription by government officials translated crop production into market accounts that allowed them to manage the Cultivation System as a global commodity chain. Although the same farmers were separately inscribed in each set of books by the same village chief, the differentiation of accounting systems allowed for the conduct of the Cultivation System as a business enterprise distinct from the taxation levied by the civil service. Accounting was used, in other words, to “disembed” the economy from the hierarchical village social relations that organized production; this is the specific bureaucratic means by which the economy was made visible and subject to management. The cultivation of sugar cane provides an example of how this market was “instituted” (Polanyi 1957b). Villagers worked for fourteen to twenty months to produce a crop of sugar cane with an ostensible payment made only after the entire crop had been harvested. At that time, the village head, the district head, and the Dutch controleur met to review the village accounts and make an initial payment—after a year and a half of work and a half year after the land rent was due. These “fictive” payments7 were immediately applied to the persisting tax debt. This crop payment was supposed to be from the sugar manufacturer to the village for the cane but was in fact an advance from the state on behalf of the sugar manufacturer; this transaction clearly gave to villagers with the state’s right hand and took with the left.8 The factory owner processed the cane into sugar, which was then transferred to the state at a fixed contractual rate with no relationship to market prices, and the advance of the village crop payment deducted. The “sale” of the crop by the village to the manufacturer was in fact a bureaucratically administered accounting maneuver by the state, as was the “sale” of the processed sugar by the manufacturer to the state; these were all arbitrary state accounts defined as market transactions. Once the sugar had been processed by the factory and its yield assessed after almost two years, a final crop payment might be made to the village for having produced better quality cane, about the time another round of land rent was due (Fasseur 1977: 288–90; Niel 1992: 50). While I would not suggest that the Cultivation System is a slavish recreation of the Colonies of Benevolence, there is sufficient overlap in governmental strategies, methods, organization, and ideological legitimation between the two to call for a reexamination of Java as a parapenal colony for paupers writ large. This marks, in other words, a transposition of the disciplinary techniques used to reform the behavior of designated groups in carceral institutions in the Netherlands to the level of the Javanese population at large; a shift from discipline to governmentality, that is, a way of “artificially arranging things so that people, following only their own self-interest, will do as they ought” (Foucault 1991: 100). At this level it is impossible to regulate individual action in minute detail, but as a form of power that operates at a distance, it served to educate desires, habits, and beliefs. As Scott writes, it is a form of European power that targets colonial subjects and is “concerned above all with disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions, and with constructing

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in their place new conditions so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige—new forms of life to come into being” (2003: 193). By 1836, the Dutch civil service had assembled a massive state enterprise composed of village-based units of production growing sugar, indigo, and coffee under contract, which transformed Java from a rebellious drag on royal finances into an impoverished yet highly profitable colony. Each of these villages was an apparatus of security that shared a governmental logic (the “system”) but varied in the crop, the manner in which it was cultivated, and the local relations of authority by which it was produced, giving the system its uneven appearance on the ground. This system was framed as a market exchange through the use of contracts, thus distinguishing it ideologically from the state apparatus that was its matrix; when the new “Foundational Law” (Regerings-Reglement) for that state was introduced in 1836, it made no mention of either “the Cultivation System” or of “the crops introduced by high authority,” as they later came to be known (Cornets de Groot van Kraaijenburg 1862: 132). It is important to underscore that this entire internal “market” was predicated upon arbitrarily set prices that served as the basis for managing Javanese production. The management of this market, as a project of rule, was achieved through a process of active assemblage, of establishing fragile contractual links by a new bureau, the Directorate of Cultivations.

Mimicking Markets: The Directorate of Cultivations and Corporate Hierarchy Given the framing of the system as a market exchange, it is important to underscore that the management of the vast global commodity chains that resulted was not dependent on market mechanisms despite the constant use of monetary units of account and the language of contracts; rather, the means by which this framing was accomplished resembles the internal accounting by which corporations manage their internal markets and coordinated their commodity chains. This kind of hierarchical administrative coordination allows for economies of scope and scale and lower transaction costs as Bentham said of his charity company. This loose assemblage was organized and managed through the disciplinary use of accounting to allow the “economic” use of force (in its dual sense), just as it was in the Colonies of Benevolence. As Miller notes, “accounting is defined here not as a narrowly technical mechanism for recording transactions. It is understood as a process of attributing financial values and rationales to a wide range of social practices, thereby according them a specific visibility, calculability, and operational utility . . . Defined in these terms accounting is that process that, as the artist Paul Klee said of painting, does not reproduce the visible but renders visible” and therefore an object of management (Miller 1990: 317). Accounting provides an instrument for translating diverse Javanese activities into economic-financial terms, rendering them recordable, transposable, and calculable, and hence subject to control from a distance (Robson 1992). By invoking

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the Chandlerian metaphor of the corporation as visible hand of the market, I seek to underscore the role of accounting in replacing the market in the management of colonial commodity chains (1977). In similarly invoking Foucault’s neologism, governmentality, I also seek to emphasize the disciplinary aspect of this corporate economic administration; the account books that replaced actual market transactions were a means of holding producers accountable (Miller 1994, 2008). According to Chandler, hierarchal administrative coordination using accounting methods in modern multiunit corporations offered greater productivity, as well as economies of scope and scale hence lowering costs and producing higher profits than market mechanisms (1990). The modern multiunit corporation came about by internalizing the activities that would otherwise have been carried out by several independent businesses (such as these contracted Javanese villages) and the market transactions that would have occurred between them, replacing those transactions with this internal administrative accounting system. The development of this process of internalization is evident in the evolution of this state plantation, as the market exchange of cash crops was bureaucratized and managed through the imposition of standard contracts in which prices and processes were predetermined, not negotiated, between nominally independent units of the state (Niel 1992: 33ff.). I am not arguing that the Cultivation System is an example of the modern corporation, but that as a precursor, all of these sets of practices can be found to develop and circulate (and hence it is an example of “corporatization”). I thus start from Polanyi’s position that institutions mediate market formation, but I do not view institutions like the Cultivation System as bounded structures; rather, I see them as the “arena of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations” (Rankin 2008: 1965) necessary to conduct these commodity chains. If the comparison of the Cultivation System to a vast state-run corporate plantation is valid, it rests upon the manner in which the system was organized as a hierarchical multiunit enterprise (an assemblage) linked by contractual obligations, regulations, and accountability (rather than market exchanges between free parties) through which economies of scope and scale could be organized. This form of hierarchically organized multiunit managerial enterprise was relatively new in the 1830s, and Chandler ascribes its appearance to the technological demands of the railways. Chandler argued that the contribution of plantation management to managerialism was limited because neither the overseer nor the drivers of slave gangs kept detailed financial accounts, and therefore they failed to “manage by the numbers” (1977: 64–67). This was certainly not the case in the Cultivation System where the village headman was charged with making detailed accounts through which the overall commodity chains were managed and discipline administered. I therefore turn to Hoskin and Macve (1988, 1994a, 1994b) in rejecting Chandler’s technological reductionism. They argue that managerialism was introduced by military engineers (like Van den Bosch), not businessmen, as a “disciplinary revolution.” They view it “as a new

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kind of power-knowledge relation,” a response to the need to manage people, not machines, through new governmental technologies. Rather than view managerialism as a product of the technological needs of the industrial revolution, we should look for its emergence with the need to govern whole populations of “degenerate types” and educate them in productive virtue. What sets the modern corporation apart is its replacement of market coordination with coordination by hierarchy (Chandler and Daems 1980; Williamson 1980). In this case, such hierarchical coordination was achieved through a newly created Directorate of Cultivations, which managed the conduct of conduct of producers through its subordinate ranks of managers. Little attention has been devoted to the directorate other than its production of the yearly “Cultivation Report” that reified these complex productive arrangements into a set of monetary accounts, a numerical representation of the state-run Javanese export economy as a whole (Fasseur 1992: 8–9). The directorate was created in 1832 as part of the Directorate General of Finances to organize and inspect the production of export crops and hence the flows in the commodity chain that stretched between Java and the Netherlands (Staatsblad 1832, no. 15). The director’s function also included protecting the Javanese from abuses and ensuring they received the prescribed benefits of the system, goals that were sadly neglected as management of the system became increasingly fixed and localized after 1840 (Fasseur 1992: 45). The directorate was not responsible for the everyday management of village production, a job left to residents and regents and their village subordinates. Rather, the directorate was responsible for specifying crops to be grown, setting production quotas, and especially crafting and improving the framing mechanisms (the contracts) by which that production was organized and assembled into a commodity chain. Most analyses of the Dutch administration of the system have focused on the roles of residents and their subordinates, hence accentuating the variability of the system across the island. However, the regulation establishing the directorate subordinated both residents and controleurs directly to the director and his three inspectors, thereby transforming the civil bureaucracy into managers of cash crop production. Residents’ access to the governor-general was now to be funneled through the directorate, a restriction they much resented (Niel 1992: 67, 99). The directorate’s concerns were largely commercial, as indicated by location in the Directorate General of Finances. In this restructuring, civil servants’ roles in the cultivation system, like the Janus-faced village heads, were given an “economic” frame separate from their role in the Landelijke stelsel that helped ideologically separate this market from the force that ensured its operation. This everyday accounting procedure helped keep the accounts of the Cultivation System separate from those of the East Indies administration, just as the different account registers maintained by the village heads did. Residents, regents, and controleurs were, like the village headmen, now Janus-faced functionaries serving two separate administrations, for which they were paid separately; they were paid additional “percentages” (kultuurprocenten, commissions) for the

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work they performed in managing cash crop production (Deventer 1866: 2:162–68, 320). These amounts were distinct from their salaries as state employees (and indeed, frequently exceeded them) (Reinsma 1980). The percentages were first implemented by Van den Bosch in 1830 as a 1 percent charge on village crop sales to be divided on an arbitrary scale, with residents and regents getting the largest share. Beginning in 1836, new rules for coffee were introduced that placed the emphasis on expanding production; hence these managers received only half their percentages on existing production and received the full amount for new trees only (Staatsblad 1835, no. 11). So successful was this regulation in spurring production that it was applied to sugar cane and indigo in 1841 (Staatsblad no. 41).9 The explicit goal of the administration was that territorial expenses would be met by the income from the Landelijke stelsel and tax farms (a goal finally met in 1840), and this budget expense was frozen at its 1834 level (Fasseur 1975: 37). The “culture expenses” (uitgaven voor de cultures) such as these percentages were known as “commercial expenses”; they doubled from f 10 million to f 20 million in the same period and were charged against the Indies Budget Surplus from cash crop sales in the Netherlands (Deventer 1866: 95). The importance of the Cultivation Report produced by the directorate is that it summarized all of these accounts (as a profit and loss financial statement would), allowing for the final calculation of Crown profits (Indies Budget Surplus, or Batig Slot) (Weeveringh 1855: 350–55 for 1840; Mansvelt 1924: 1:374). This surplus was declared the property of the motherland and was to be remitted to the Ministry of Colonies entirely in export crops (Staatsblad 1834: 48). To implement that, a further contract (the “Consignment System”) was signed with the NHM as monopoly agent of the state to transport and auction these crops in the Netherlands in 1836 (Deventer 1866: 24). This completed this instituted market process and reimbursed the Dutch government for the expenses it had incurred in the colony. The “commercial” costs of the management structure (comprised of village heads (5 percent of their village’s production), district heads, controleurs, residents, and regents (sharing 1 percent of the residency’s production) and the NHM (2.75 percent of the total goods shipped) were thus disembedded from the “territorial expenses” as a fixed overhead expense of this private estate of the Crown. As the NHM became the conduit for remitting the budget surplus, “the advances and debts between the Department of Colonies and the Indian Government, as well as those of the NHM in relation to the Government were settled in [its books in] a simple way” (Mansvelt 1924: 2:403). The internal economy of this assemblage utilized monetary accounts as a management tool, yet it is important to underscore that it bore little relationship with the ultimate market price these crops earned at auction in the Netherlands. As a management tool, bookkeeping proved remarkably effective in allowing the directorate to supervise from a distance and has been too easily dismissed. The Cultivation Reports were a natural draw to historians as they provided the clearest and most regular documentation of the systems’ effects. Yet they, and hence the directorate, were quickly dismissed as of little use in active management since they were

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completed several years after the year on which they reported (Niel 1992: 68). This preemptory dismissal ignores the directorate’s role in preparing the yearly budget and crop quotas on the basis of its preliminary reports,10 and its active management of residents’ implementation of these quotas through the director’s mandatory accompaniment of the resident on their annual tour of their residency (Staatsblad 1836, no. 26). Failure to meet targets resulted in an investigation of the particular problem areas by its inspectors, who made prescriptive recommendations on how to resolve them.11 The Cultivation Reports they produced ultimately made comparisons across residencies possible and helped identify sites for further intervention and intensification, as well as providing the basis for major revisions in the standard contracts, as occurred in 1836. The directorate shows clear evidence of active management of the Cultivation System as a whole, as it was consolidated in 1836 with the introduction of the new “Foundational Law” for the colony. Although the Cultivation System was generally considered complete in 1833, this loose and messy assemblage did not achieve its consolidated form, including the Consignment System, until 1836. Firstly, the directorate managed the managers. The directorate set the production quotas for each crop in each residency, and the director accompanied each resident on their annual tour of their residency in order to discuss the means of implementing them. They introduced new regulations governing the roles of inspectors (Staatsblad 1836, no. 54) and controleurs (Staatsblad 1837, no. 20). Secondly, the directorate developed the standard (or model) contracts determining the production processes by which crops were grown and processed and the arbitrary prices to be paid for them. Although historians’ accounts of the Cultivation System emphasize local variability, the directorate accomplished a fair degree of standardization over time, especially in the means by which production was carried out through village-based disciplinary methods, as will be shown in the 1836 consolidation of the sugar, indigo, and coffee contracts. And lastly, the directorate also managed a short-lived agricultural facility at Krawang for training controleurs in agricultural techniques, and for testing new crops like tea before rolling them out more broadly (Deventer 1866: 2:339–44; Chijs 1903). By 1836, when the new “Foundational Law” for the colony’s government was imposed, thereby ideologically excising the cultivation system from territorial rule, the directorate developed new model contracts for indigo and sugar and introduced new regulations for coffee production (reproduced in Muller 1848: 56–64). On departing Java in 1833, Van den Bosch had issued a summation of the local regulations for the system for the cultivation of sugar and indigo that included model contracts for future use (Staatsblad 1834, no. 22; Elton 1835: 164–202). Van den Bosch then also appointed the directorate’s second director, B. J. Elias (1833–1836), who broadened, reassembled, and further standardized these contracts as the “market system” was consolidated in 1836. As resident of Cirebon, Elias had been instrumental in reorganizing the highly resented cultivation of indigo there, for which he was promoted to director. As director he introduced a new process for rationalizing the production of

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sugar, thereby excluding non-Westerners from the highly profitable factory management. And in the same year, he introduced the changes that added coffee production through “plantations” (tuinen, gardens) to the system. Under Van den Bosch’s original regulations, the government financed large processing factories for sugar cane and indigo; they initially proved expensive and unproductive. As resident of Cirebon, Elias was well aware of an 1830 riot by peasants against indigo cultivation that threatened to spread more widely (Deventer 1866: 2:195–96, 310; Manse 2014: 78). These peasants objected to having to cart heavy loads of indigo leaves over great distances on nonexistent roads for pennies on the pound, and then having to work for free in the distant processing factory; Elias pointed out that they earned, collectively, only f 93,000 toward their f 221,357 land rent bill under those contracts (Elton 1835: 199–202). Elias’s innovation was to dispense with the large European-run factories and devolve indigo processing to small village-based facilities that would see villagers paid for the more highly valued final product rather than just the leaves, and without the need to invest in expensive cattle-drawn carts (Elson 1994: 48). Elias received permission to implement his plan in Cirebon in 1833, and as the new director of cultivations, he did the same in the other three major indigo-producing residencies of Banyumas, Tegal, and Pekalongan (Deventer 1866: 2:388, 558–60). This procedural change had the effect of consolidating production, and hence accountability, within the village unit of production. Elias similarly revolutionized sugar processing. By 1833, three-quarters of the 175 to 180 sugar processing contracts had gone to Chinese manufacturers using Asian processing methods; exceptions were the five government-run factories in Madiun using imported West Indies technology (Leidelmeijer 1997: 115, 121–22). The contracts with the Chinese were highly variable, and few adhered to Van den Bosch’s regulations. The government-run factories using Western refining methods were considered the ideal, but as Van den Bosch expected, the state was initially unable to find enough European contractors to take up the contracts given the unprofitability of the government-run facilities and the still largely untested technology. A new model contract was devised in 1836 that specified the methods of refining as a means of excluding Chinese manufacturers, and these contracts were to be publicly tendered in 1837. The tendering proved unsuccessful, and despite the overall number of contracts being reduced from 175 to 100, only 34 initially went to Europeans (Fasseur 1975: 150ff.; Gorkum 1877: 306). The directorate thus increasingly turned to issuing highly profitable patronage contracts to retiring bureaucrats and army officers, while providing them with loans by which to finance the shift to Western production methods. The shift to modern steam-powered sugar processing was thus, from the start, a state-driven exercise (Leidelmeijer 1997: 262–68). Coffee was added to the system after 1833 because neither sugar nor indigo were immediately profitable. Although there was a large, existing trade in coffee, it had not originally been included, as new trees would have taken three to five years to come into production, and the dispersed nature of its production was not easily

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disciplined (Elson 1994: 63). Villagers were initially encouraged to expand their production of coffee in village hedgerows and nearby forests and forced to sell to the state at government-set prices. As villagers frequently sold this coffee to private merchants rather than to the state, policy changed in 1836 to encourage consolidated “coffee gardens” (koffie tuinen), where the same kind of discipline over cultivation by village heads could be exercised (reproduced in Steijn Parve 1852: 125–27; Steinmetz 1865: 62–65).12 These coffee plantations were first permitted under contract by villages on Crown land after 182913 but were introduced more widely after further policy changes in 1836 (Cornets de Groot van Kraaijenburg 1862: 137). The proportion of coffee grown on plantations on “state land” grew from 25 percent in 1836 to 46 percent by 1845 and accounted for almost all the considerable growth in coffee production (Elson 1994: 70). Although this land was, like village fields, “state-owned,” the state sought to prevent the Javanese from asserting traditional use rights through being first to clear the forest; the directorate was particularly concerned that after the trees had died, villagers would utilize the land for growing food crops rather than allowing them to lie fallow for the decade needed before they could be replanted in coffee trees (Steinmetz 1865: 67–69). In the new coffee-growing contracts, no land rent was charged on the land, thus rejecting any hint of village ownership of the land; instead, the villagers would be “paid directly” for their crops at an arbitrary price of twenty-five guilders per pikul of coffee (which remained unchanged for a decade), framing this as a market transaction (Elson 1994: 69–70). In a major change, the “rent” for leasing state land was charged on production instead, with a 40 percent deduction from the nominal price. With other transportation charges leveled, villagers received twelve guilders per pikul, which was to be shared among all those who worked on the cultivation, including landless buyangs (Cornets de Groot van Kraaijenburg 1862: 137, 142; Niel 1992: 115–16). The village landowners, however, were still on the hook for paying land rent on village rice land with their share. All of this, as with sugar, remained an accounting exercise, as most coffee was delivered to distant state warehouses through communal labor, with direct individual payment for individual production rare (Bosch 1863: 440; Niel 1992: 116). The new Fundamental Law and the consolidation of the Cultivation System and the Consignment System in 1836 thus marked the end of a six-year experimental period during which this huge “private estate” for the Crown was ideologically excised from the Netherlands East Indies state and instituted as a market managed by the directorate through standard contracts. Each village in the affected areas was transformed into a state contractor, producing the cash crops specified by the directorate. Each village was transformed into an apparatus of security that disciplined its producers using techniques borrowed from the Colonies of Benevolence; this accounts-based system largely replaced actual market transactions but could be used to hold Javanese peasants accountable, as crop payments were directly applied to land taxes. But these accounts were also used by the directorate as a tool to manage the

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commodity chains leading back to the fatherland; the management structure of the directorate managed by the numbers through an administrative hierarchy like that of a corporation, to accomplish economies of scope and scale.

The Circulation of Governmental Technologies I began this chapter by emphasizing the shared governmental rationality between Van den Bosch’s Colonies of Benevolence and the Cultivation System as projects of rule: they were development projects meant to morally transform paupers and lazy natives alike by instilling productive virtue and effecting a capitalist transformation of state wastelands. Each of these experiments created an apparatus of security that served to protect the fragile state from the unrest historically unleashed by this transformation, as manifested in the Belgian secession and the Java War. The primary strategy in Van den Bosch’s developmental toolkit was the use of village-based authoritarian regimes to manage production. Prompted by Liberal critiques of the use of force (or discipline) in these colonies, he framed these experiments as market transactions; he commercialized pauper relief. Noting that the propertyless in both the Netherlands and Java had no freedom of disposal over their labor or produce, he compared their servitude to that of slaves, and hence legitimated his “educational” use of discipline as a viable alternative in his colonies. Such discipline was measured out in monetary units of account within closed colonial economies. Accounting was used within these apparatuses of security to both hold workers to account and to mimic markets such that market discipline was instilled. In the Javanese case, Van den Bosch built atop the liberal village reforms that had been introduced in the British interregnum by Raffles. Raffles had attempted to shift taxation from trade, as under the VOC, to land ownership as a means of inducing the Javanese to produce cash crops. To implement this tax, he created a common village government across the island, charging it with collecting this tax. This tax was turned over directly to Dutch residents, thereby undermining the economic independence of regents, the representatives of the autonomous indigenous states. Van den Bosch built on this Landelijke stelsel, this land tax system, by imposing new “economic” demands. Each village was to become a unit of production, growing government specified cash crops in order to pay their taxes, and they were to only sell these cash crops to the state at the prices it dictated. These “market” transactions became a contractual obligation of the village as a whole, and thus utilized the patterns of landlessness and dependency as a means of disciplining production; only landholders were taxed, but they could use their authority over sharecroppers in order to meet village contractual obligations. The Janus-faced village head thus became a key accounting node in the developing system, managing cash crop production to raise the money he then collected as land tax. It is important to underscore the ideological separation of land tax accounts from that of village market accounts, that is, of the pragmatic means of disembedding the economic from the relations of state force by which production was organized.

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I have emphasized that the Directorate of Cultivations, which coordinated the standard contracts in indigo, sugar, and coffee, assembled these village-based units of production into a coordinated commodity chain able to effect economies of scope and scale. The directorate is a rarely remarked-upon key to the operation of the Cultivation System as a private plantation of the Crown, ideologically excised from the state. The directorate was responsible for the assemblage and coordination of production units through standard contracts, a form of management akin to that of modern corporations as outlined by Chandler; this is a process I call corporatization in the next chapter. The corporation depends upon hierarchy to replace market transactions with its subsidiary units, using accounting and standard contracts as its tools. In recounting this process of consolidation, I have emphasized the messiness of assemblage, of piecing a wide variety of projects of rule into a coordinated whole, a managed commodity chain. Despite the lack of consistency across this vast assemblage, it remains possible to discern the shared governmental rationality driving each project of rule, giving them a visibility as a system where no actual state structure existed.

Notes 1. A critique that was demonstrated by the Coolie laws in the liberal era (see Breman 2015). 2. Van den Bosch argued that the implementation of the system over a period of ten years would accustom Javanese laborers to the extra labor required for producing export crops, after which the civil service would withdraw from agriculture to the benefit of private business (Vitalis 1862: 63). 3. J. J. Hasselman was a resident and later governor-general; his brother, B. R. P. cited above, was a “private” sugar manufacturer under contract to the state. This conjuncture was quite common in Java under the Cultivation System. Both men were nephews of Van den Bosch. 4. Indeed, the Cultivation System was implemented only in those areas where Raffles’s land rent system was in place. The princely territories were excluded. The land rent system had not been applied to the regency of Madiun, a part of the princely territories until the Java War but which was incorporated in the Cultivation System; a hybrid system was developed for use there. See Elson (1994: 42–98) for a description of the extent of the Cultivation System. 5. The instructions sent to residents by Van den Bosch are quoted, in part, in Deventer 1866: 157, 168, 172ff.; Bartholo 1863: 21–24 for sugar and 24 for indigo. Early example contracts were reproduced in Deventer 1866: 162, 168, 170, 172–73, 177–79. The terms of a “standard contract” were revised in the 1834 instructions on the new “system” and included two sample contracts in its appendix (Staatsblad 1834, no. 22). The law under which these contracts were established was revised in 1838 to limit them to a maximum of five years (Staatsblad 1838, no. 50). 6. It is important to underscore Bosch’s use of contracts and not markets. Chandler has argued that the modern corporation, as a hierarchical multiunit enterprise, came into being by “internalizing” separate businesses through internal contracting with which it would otherwise have engaged in market transactions, replacing the market with hierarchical administration. Most complex businesses in this period engaged in processes of “internal contracting,” which effectively subcontracted production to worker-controlled units, thereby freeing owners from needing knowledge of production methods. Capitalist profit-taking was thus from the increased “sweating” of labor and not from technical improvements (Hopper and Armstrong 2002: 416). I here argue that the Cultivation System was typical of the era in this respect, subcontracting production to workers (Javanese peasants), but that like the modern corporation, it “internalized” these “separate businesses” through active management by the Directorate of Cultivations, which did actively specify production processes seeking to increase their technical efficiency (in addition to depending on “sweating labor”).

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7. It was former resident E. Francis (1835: 215ff) who referred to these payments as “fictive” and who highlighted how the process required constant calibration so that land rent and crop payments were equal. See also Deventer (1866: 570). 8. This was explicitly recognized by the Umbgrove Commission (see chapter 7) on sugar production, which asked, “What’s the point of a high crop payment (plantloon) when it is paid as such with the one hand and taken back as landrent by the other” (quoted in Fasseur 1977: 291). 9. These percentages were to come under increasing disrepute by the 1860s for having incentivized bureaucrats and regents to prioritize production over peasant livelihoods (Reinsma 1980). When introduced, however, “managerial” roles such as these were rare. Adam Smith had argued that the security of fixed salaries would lead to “idleness, negligence and profusion,” and recommended treating managers as contractors to be motivated by profits (Hopper and Armstrong 2002: 415). This seems concurrent with Van den Bosch’s stated reasons for implementing the percentages: “The worker is worthy of his wages, and he who contributes much to the common good also ought to share in them himself ” (quoted in Deventer 1866: 163). 10. For an example of this budget role, see Deventer (1866: 569–71) for the 1833 budget year, and the changes made in coffee transport charges in different residencies as a result. See also “General Overview of the Indies Administration in 1836” (Steijn Parve 1852: 97–140). 11. A clear demonstration of how this worked is provided in the memoirs of one of the first inspectors, L. Vitalis, who was appointed to investigate production in the residencies of Pekalongan and Tegal in 1833 (Vitalis 1851: 2ff.; Deventer 1866: 574–75). E. Francis, resident of Madiun, contested his report after being honorably discharged after an investigation by “an inspector” who laid the blame for underperforming sugar plantations in his residency at his feet (1859: 209–55). 12. See Breman (2015: 221ff.) for a discussion on the organization of labor in these coffee plantations as they were introduced in the Priangan region, technically not part of the Cultivations System. 13. 1836 Fundamental Government Regulation (Regerings-Reglement), art. 102.

CHAPTER 4

Manufacturing Commodity Chains the nhm and cotton

Analyses of governmentality stress the rationality of government and the circulation of technologies of rule between the state, civic institutions, and the market. In the previous two chapters, we examined the development of a series of governmental programs and technologies for managing paupers variously conceived as the criminalized poor or the “lazy native.” Both programs, I have argued, can be conceived of as development projects seeking a capitalist transformation in the modern sense of the word; they seek to “frame” a specific kind of economy as an outcome (Callon 1998). These programs created disciplinary spaces for instilling productive virtue that supplanted market mechanisms with administrative coordination using monetary units of account to hold workers accountable. The ironic use of nonmarket disciplinary spaces in order to instill a capitalist rationality in paupers and peasants needs to be underscored. In this chapter, the circulation of these strategies into a third project of rule is examined, although the focus shifts somewhat from labor discipline to the process of “corporatization” by which transcontinental commodity chains were economically framed, fixed in place, and managed. The initial circulation of strategies, programs, and disciplinary technologies between the Benevolent Colonies and the Cultivation System was the result of the application of a common discursive frame by one man—Major General Johannes van den Bosch—in a variety of projects of rule as he moved through his career. This discursive frame was derived from “social” not “political economy” and rationalized interventions in the market in the name of securitizing the state from the political dangers of the disaffected poor. Van den Bosch had served as Benevolent Colony founder and as governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies, where he introduced these novel strategies, and in his final governmental role he was promoted to minister of colonies where he was charged with overseeing trade in the export crops produced through the Cultivation System. The Netherlands Trading Company (NHM) had been officially commissioned to manage this trade—a commodity chain that we saw was characterized by administrative rather than market coordination. Van den Bosch now commissioned the NHM to create and manage the return trade in

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cotton goods. It is by this means that Van den Bosch’s developmental program was introduced into the Netherlands Trading Company and further circulated within the wider cotton industry that they administratively coordinated. The result of these collective efforts was a synchronized assemblage of commodity chains that succeeded due to the economies of scope and scale they introduced through the imposition of standard contracts. The Cultivation System—in part state enterprise, in part managed market—was an immediate success for the Crown and generated large state surpluses through the profits from the NHM auctions of government crops (Fasseur 1975: 204; see table 0.2). A secondary effect of the trade was the production of much smaller cash surpluses for peasant cultivators after their land rents had been paid. These small cash remittances spurred local markets, especially in imported cotton cloth. These local markets were dominated by English trading houses, which had created a thriving trade in cotton manufactures produced in technologically advanced factories with which neither the Dutch nor the Javanese could compete (Bosma 2007). Van den Bosch realized that the NHM cargo vessels that left Java heavily laden with coffee and sugar needed competitive trade goods for the return voyage to balance the trade. In August 1831, long before the success of the Cultivation System was known, he called on the Crown to create a cotton industry in the Netherlands to meet this need and further reduce the threat of domestic pauperism. It is of the greatest importance to ensure that Holland acquires the means to provide this land [i.e. Java] with necessities. The demand for woolen, and especially cotton goods is increasing day by day and is likely to increase further as rising sales of Javanese products in the European market enable the Javanese people more fully to satisfy their needs and requirements. Our towns, like Leyden, Haarlem, Delft, Gouda, etc, need an industry to feed their impoverished populations. If English and Belgian manufacturers could be persuaded to establish themselves [in these towns] and make the goods which are in such great demand in the Indies, the needs of our towns would be met, whilst, at the same time, the manufacturers could be guaranteed sales they would be unable to obtain elsewhere. (Van den Bosch cited in Kraan 1998: 26) In April 1832 the government reached an agreement with the NHM to promote the development of a cotton industry in the Netherlands; indeed, the NHM had been founded in 1824 to specifically market the cloth produced in the now lost Belgian factories in Java (Mokyr 1976: 30ff.). The NHM appointed one of its directors, Willem de Clercq, to investigate the means. It is important to underscore that the intent of the project was primarily work creation for paupers. It was that shared governmental objective that led to the circulation of those strategies, programs, and technologies developed by Van den Bosch in his Benevolent Colonies within the NHM and the cotton industry it managed.

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Constructing Commodity Chains The circulation of governmental technologies of power into the corporate sphere promoted the assemblage of these three projects of rule into an integrated set of commodity chains linking metropole and colony. I return in other words, to the original question, the “how” by which the “fragile relays, contested locales and fissiparous affiliations” in the active assemblage of projects of rule such as these commodity chains are accomplished (Li 2007b: 264). Although global commodity chain analyses are rooted in world-systems theory and the dependency tradition (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977), their focus has changed and shifted to the analysis of “global value chains” as this literature has developed, with a more specific focus on their organization and governance and little attention paid to how such chains come into being. In the dominant approach drawing on the New Institutional Economics, “economists, sociologists and geographers have often mobilized a final vocabulary such as ‘the market,’ ‘the firm,’ ‘the commodity,’ ‘value,’ ‘capital,’ or ‘price,’ which serve as stable and unquestioned artifacts of explanation that exist a priori” (Ouma 2015: 7). In questioning the organizational power of the essentialized invisible hand of the market and pointing instead to the visible hand of the corporation, I hope to underscore the political and governmental processes influencing how these commodity chains were originally assembled and how they functioned. I therefore wish to challenge the common theoretical dictum that treats the market as the preconfigured and essential coordination mechanism for such commodity chains. The use of standard contracts (like those used with Javanese villages) was the NHM’s hierarchical means of replacing market transactions. Chandler has argued that the substitution of administrative coordination using monetary units of account to replace market coordination is typical of the internal accounting of the corporate form; today it is estimated that “the closely governed, non-market movement of goods and services within corporate hierarchies represents as much as one-third of international trade” (Mitchell 2002: 294). The commodity chains in sugar, coffee, and cotton cloth linking the greater Netherlands into an interdependent whole in the emergent world system was accomplished through the same kind of nonmarket administrative coordination by the NHM as was used in the Cultivation System itself. To ascribe the coordinating function of these chains to a reified market is a theoretical rejection of the original impetus of world-systems theory with its specific focus on how households, commodities, firms, and territories were integrated in globally dispersed production and distribution networks marked by a global division of labor. As Anna Tsing has argued, “world market integration” is messy in practice and requires “friction: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2005: 4). Without friction there is no traction for universals such as “the market.” The reified market needs to be engaged locally before it can become global. It is through friction with local cultural realities “that universals [like the market] become practically effective”; but as a result, “they can never fulfill

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their promises of universality. Even in transcending localities, they don’t take over the world” (2005: 8). The analysis of the embeddedness of commodity chains in local social realities (such as the Cultivation System) challenges the explanatory force of “the market” and raises the question in its stead of how such a market was historically constructed through particular projects of rule. The theoretical work necessary for such an analysis has been proposed by Caliskan and Callon (2009). They focus on the process of “economization,” i.e. the means by which complex cultural transactions are defined as “economic.” Unlike the neosubstantivists of the New Economic Sociology whose overarching ambition is to embed the “economy” in “society” (and hence submerge economics in an expansive sociology), Caliskan and Callon propose that economic discourses are themselves “performative” and serve to prescriptively “frame” institutions, behaviors, and mentalités as “markets” that have a real effect on the world, in fact becoming a part of the actor-network that they prescribe (cf. Carrier 1998 on “virtualization” of the economy). We saw an example of this in the way Van den Bosch framed the extraction of cash crops as a “sale,” using a framing process of standard contracts with Javanese villages. Caliskan and Callon call for a shift in attention from the study of the economy to those “behaviors, organizations, institutions, and objects which are tentatively and often controversially qualified as ‘economic’ by experts and lay persons” (2009: 370); that is, a shift in focus from the object, to how that object is socially constructed and instituted through specific actor-networks. Attention can thus be focused on those tense moments of friction, the controversies over the candidacy of particular behaviors, objects, and persons as “commodities” in particular localities so that they can enter “the market” as properly “economic” (cf. Appadurai 1986). The considerable theoretical work that Caliskan and Callon put into theorizing “economization” is, however, quickly elided as they lay out their research program for the study of “markets” and of “marketization” rather than “economization” per se (2010). It is not surprising that they should focus upon one of the major narrative tropes of economics in the neoliberal era. However, it is not immediately clear how a focus on marketization would apply to the administrative coordination of commodity flows by corporations that replace markets. Here, the New Institutional Economics does provide an analytic edge by directly addressing the issue. Although the New Institutional Economics prioritizes market relations, it has radically reworked the meaning of “market” transaction as it applies to the corporation and its “internal market.” They have now redefined the market itself as a series of contracts and the corporation as a “nexus of contracts,” i.e. of market contracts that have been “internalized” by the firm (Birch 2017: 10). In economics of late, there was a shift from a representation of the market order as a multilateral system of simultaneous, anonymous relations to a representation in terms of bilateral relations that are necessarily personal, and from coordination through prices (and equilibrium) to coordination through negotiation

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and contracts. This made it possible to reduce the opposition between market and firm, or even reduce the firm to a particular market. (Weinstein 2012: 28n69) This redefinition of “market transaction” so that it can be applied to exchanges within the corporation misleadingly obscures these important differences between markets and corporations, which I seek to keep distinct (if only because free market advocates in the period adhered to the earlier definition of multilateral anonymous market relations). The focus on the internalization of contracts within the corporation is, however, an important insight pointing to how such internal transactions are “economized” in Caliskan and Callon’s sense. Following the New Institutional Economics, I will argue that corporations and the management discourses they produce “frame” these internal transactions as “economic” through two means; the internalization of standard contracts and the imposition of an “economic” logic through the application of accounting tools. I thus propose a secondary area of analysis to marketization focusing on these two processes, what I will call corporatization. The process of corporatization, or internalizing market contracts as administrative accounts through standard contracts, provides an inroad in analysis to how complex commodity chains spanning continents are assembled into a workable whole. By corporatization I refer to those economizing discourses that frame the internal market of the corporation, and in this specific case, with those economic discourses derived from governmental strategies for the social control of paupers. Corporatization thus explains how corporate governmentality is established. The slow process of assemblage of the Cultivation System examined in the last chapter is an early example of the application of this discourse, as standard contracts were applied to village production, framing the exaction of taxes as “market exchanges” in a controlled command economy. It is the political contestation on what is included (or not) in such basic accounting practices as cost and price in the internal market of the corporation that lies at the heart of corporatization; we shall examine a similar case in this chapter in which the NHM determined the “middle” (not market) price it paid its contractors. In focusing on the economic discourses of corporate management, I am contrasting the standard economic concern for “externalities” and “externalization” with a focus on the process of “internalization”; i.e., the political processes by which “costs” are determined and included in accounts. This is where inequities in power enable corporations to insert themselves into the lives of the colonized. As I have just noted, the New Institutional Economics characterizes the corporation as a “nexus of contracts” by which transactions are translated into administrative coordination yet continue to be framed as economic (market) exchanges. The initial assertion of power, as we saw in the case of the Cultivation System, was in the imposition of binding contracts on Javanese villages and sugar manufacturers, whose production was thereafter controlled by the Directorate of Cultivations. In an extension of Coase’s theory of the firm, they argue that the “internalization” of mar-

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ket transactions becomes viable only when the costs of contracting (e.g. negotiating, writing, enforcing, etc.) are more cheaply achieved by that means. They view the internal market of the corporation as a “set of contracting relationships among individuals” and that these “contractual relationships are the essence of the firm, not only with employees but with suppliers, customers, creditors, etc” (Jensen and Meckling 1976: 310, emphasis in original); they thus flatten hierarchy and corporate power into an internal “free market” based on voluntary contracts between equal individuals. They ignore, in other words, the impact of corporate hierarchy and power in the enforcing of unequal contractual terms, as was so evident in the contracts imposed by the NEI state on individual Javanese villages. Their emphasis on such internalized contracts constituting an internal corporate market ignores the role of contract law and its enforcement by the state. Birch notes that such one-sidedness is in fact characteristic of 99 percent of standard contracts that are neither negotiated, negotiable, nor free and voluntary, since one party cannot alter the terms (2017: 124). As we shall see in this chapter, the contract remained a key way for the NHM to gain control and internalize cloth production in the eastern Netherlands as well. The second means by which such administrative transactions are framed as economic is through the mundane power of double-entry bookkeeping. Miller and Power, like other critical accounting theorists, highlight the role of accounting within the corporation in “territorializing” calculable spaces, “mediating” between arenas and actors, “adjudicating” behavior, and “subjectivizing” as a form of social control (2013: 557). Critical accounting theorists have noted that accounting—once at the center of the sociological thought of Marx, Weber, and Sombart in their analysis of the calculative agency necessary for capitalism to function—has disappeared from the literature until recently. Accounting is a pragmatic practice and generally untheorized, its representational strategies unexamined. Beginning with the axiom that “accounting is the master metaphor of economics,” critical accounting theorists argue that accounting’s prior conventions and analytic devices have provided economic science with its untheorized basic concepts and data (Miller and Napier 1993: 635). Adopting a Foucauldian approach, they have focused on the role of accounting as a “technology of power” for managerial practice, and as a discursive tool for defining the “economic.” They thus fill the theoretical lacunae that an emphasis on marketization rather than corporatization in commodity chain analysis has created. In the remainder of this chapter I examine how these two processes affected the NHM’s cotton-weaving experiment in the eastern Netherlands in the construction of an intercontinental commodity chain. We see once again the circulation of accounting practices as a means of securitizing paupers through the creation of a disciplinary regime to impose hierarchy and hold them accountable. As in the previous cases we have examined, these practices created a set of internal accounts, an internal corporate market; we are concerned, however, to see how this internal market was economically framed, and how the concern to securitize paupers resulted in a process by which the NHM determined the “middle” rather than market price that they paid

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their contractors. Their ability to frame their internal market as they did depended on the unequal power by which they could execute standard contracts that imposed “philanthropy” on their producers. These management decisions had real effects that framed the “economic” transactions within the organization and its effects on local weavers’ lives in radically different ways than free market mechanisms would have. By attending to the process of internalizing and externalizing, we do not lose sight of the factors that are usually excluded from account; those externalities that provide the friction that allows for global market integration. I refer specifically to the “traditional” relations of power and authority that make production possible.

Securitizing the Cotton Industry In hailing the NHM into being, Willem had declared, The purpose of the NHM is to provide the opportunity of full industry thereby bringing about a great movement, and in this way to produce the possibility that every Netherlander be in a position of such desirous and willing co-operation to insure their own welfare and subsistence. (Broeze 1977: 236, my emphasis) This royal instruction to the directors of the NHM prompted them to govern economically by influencing the “conduct of conduct.” The purpose of the NHM was not simply to create industrial factories; rather, it was to create work and so instill industry in the nation’s citizens, to engage their “desirous and willing co-operation to insure their own welfare and subsistence.” In other words, the NHM was to exert pastoral power through all available means to discipline a recalcitrant and rebellious population to become ideal productive citizen/workers, and as such, was typical of the corporation in this period (Barkan 2013: 28–39). Firth, echoing Polanyi, has emphasized that all Western governments were faced with this dilemma and “addressed this problem in a number of different ways, each of which represents a ‘tricky adjustment’ between a liberal element concerned with commercial freedom and a pastoral element concerned with the welfare of the population” (1998: 19). The NHM was to do so by borrowing the disciplinary strategies and techniques adopted from the cameralists and developed in philanthropic workhouses like those of the Benevolent Society. Willem de Clercq (1795–1844), the man charged to direct this new program, was as precocious as Van den Bosch himself. De Clercq was the scion of a broad, wellplaced Amsterdam regent merchant family and is equally well remembered today for his literary gifts and for his leadership of an influential aristocratic religious revival (Clercq 1999). De Clercq had initially been appointed secretary to the NHM at the exceptionally young age of thirty due to his familial merchant connections and the publication of a treatise on freedom of trade (Tielhof 2002: 300). He was charged by the NHM with developing a cotton industry in the wake of the Belgian secession;

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it was the link between the proletarianization of Belgian cotton workers and their ultimate rebellion that again raised concerns for securitizing the Dutch state and developing a more comprehensive disciplinary framework for this development project. The goal of both the Benevolent Society and the NHM was not simply to create prosperity but also to defuse and administer the political problem of restive paupers. The politics of this production regime were driven by the desire to prevent the divisive class tensions associated with factory regimes in Belgium and England. There, immiserated laborers worked in situations that “as had been shown by the Belgian secession . . . were hotbeds of sedition and revolution” (Kraan 1998: 28). Willem de Clercq visited a transplanted Belgian cotton spinnery in the eastern Netherlands in 1832 and noted that “the hours of work for the laborers, who include many women and children, are fixed at 15 hours per day, and when the lack of any opportunity to improve their minds on their free day is taken into consideration then the situation can have no other effect than a pitiable contempt for and degeneration of religion and morals” (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 150). De Clercq thus sought to depoliticize these tense labor relations when introducing cotton manufacturing to the Netherlands. De Clercq’s focus on the degeneration of morals underscores the religious elements of his concerns for the pastoral alleviation of poverty and points to the ways in which religious movements could help circulate these governmental strategies within civil society. During this period, De Clercq was also a leader in a German-inspired aristocratic religious revival (Reveil) that infused his project with Pietist social reform concerns (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 150–51). The German Pietists were an integral part of the German Aufklärung (enlightenment) sciences supporting the Prussian enlightened absolutist state. The religious dimension of this moralizing discourse points to a key difference between the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung. The Aufklärung was equally concerned with freedom of thought and the perfectibility of man through education but differed in its acceptance of Christianity on the one hand and cameralism on the other (Ingrao 1986: S174–75). The cameralists’ conception of the “well-ordered police state” was deeply infused with the Pietism of theology professor August Hermann Francke, who established a series of philanthropic institutions at Halle, a center of cameralist studies (Raeff 1975: 1225, 1232). Under Frederick the Great’s reign, the relationship between the social reformist wing of German Pietism led by Francke and the Prussian state became close, and those with Pietist backgrounds were given preferential access to positions in the civil administration, the officers corps, and the ministry. Cameralism and pietism were thus at the core of the disciplinary revolution of the German enlightened absolutist states that had inspired Willem I (Gorski 1993: 269). De Clercq organized groups of aristocratic “Christian Friends” who implemented social and educational projects among disadvantaged groups in a manner not unlike his cotton-weaving experiment (Reenders 1991: 35–38). An important example of this Pietist process and the means by which governmentality circulated between institutional contexts were the religious colonies for the poor established after 1845

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on reclaimed polder land by the philanthropist, revivalist, and “Christian Friend” Ottho Heldring in reaction to the “godless” colonies of the Benevolent Society (Reenders 1991: 58–62). De Clercq sent circulars to all of his subcontractors infused with Pietist appeals for the relief and moral regulation of the poor (Mansvelt 1924: 2:303–4). This religious movement was not unlike Christian Political Economy, an English evangelical theological “science” that played a far greater role in popularizing laissez-faire economic policies than the “scientific,” or nonreligious, liberal political economists (Hilton 1988). The theological and moral reasons for supporting these policies was often quite different from the economic rationale, yet they had greater popular impact. A serendipitous meeting with an exiled English cotton manufacturer, Thomas Ainsworth, provided De Clercq the technical means for introducing Van den Bosch’s strategies for managing paupers through disciplinary accounting. Ainsworth convinced De Clercq that urban factories filled with power looms were less desirable than the introduction of the flying shuttle to the hand weavers of the rural east of the Netherlands. Ainsworth pointed out that wages in Twente, a region in the eastern Netherlands, were only a quarter of that in Manchester and about the same as in the north of Ireland; however, cloth produced with the flying shuttle in Ireland was sold competitively in the Manchester market with cloth produced there on power looms (Kraan 1998: 32). He induced De Clercq to “instill industry” through home-based weaving using the flying shuttle in the eastern Netherlands rather than in factories in the old industrial cities of Holland. Although the flying shuttle was invented in 1733, it was unknown in this region; it greatly speeded up the weaving process by allowing wider cloth to be woven with a single hand, allowing the other to compact the cloth with the comb. De Clercq and Ainsworth thus introduced a series of schools between 1832 and 1836 to teach the use of the flying shuttle to home-based weavers to compete with the more technologically advanced English factories. The NHM established its first weaving school and warehouse under Ainsworth’s direction in the village of Nijverdal on the Regge River in 1832. Nijverdal was to become the Netherlands’ New Lanark, the cotton mill town created by utopian socialist Robert Owen where he introduced the panopticon-like strategies of Bentham to create a uniquely productive and well-ordered cotton factory village. Nijverdal was easily accessible by river and centrally located for weavers in the regions of Twente and Achterhoek, the easternmost part of the provinces of Overijssel and Gelderland bordering on Germany. The region had a history of linen weaving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a supplement to subsistence farming on its poor sandy ground, hence the new technology was gladly welcomed. Other schools were quickly added although most closed by 1836 as the new techniques diffused widely (Mansvelt 1924: 1:280–83). Home-based weaving could potentially create its own governmental problems, as the development of the Benevolent Colonies illustrated, and the selection of individualized production methods made the application of discipline more difficult.

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Van den Bosch could have more easily resolved the problem of pauper subsistence by placing individual families on already established farms; securitizing the state, however, required a disciplinary framework. The Benevolent Colony, as a community, allowed the introduction of discipline through administrative coordination using monetary units of account to hold workers accountable. The subsistence-oriented communities of markes in the eastern Netherlands and the gemeente that replaced them could also be utilized to discipline more productive workers just as the Javanese desa administration was used to coordinate the Cultivation System. A key element of Van den Bosch’s disciplinary experiments was the dependence on communally organized production. The plan to introduce cotton weaving with the flying shuttle thus involved the same set of governmental issues faced by Van den Bosch in Drenthe and the deployment of similar strategies and technologies rationalized by the same discursive regime.

The Disciplinary Framework: Managing the Commodity Chain De Clercq’s aim, like Van den Bosch’s, was a capitalist transformation of the subsistence-based farming of the eastern Netherlands and the creation of a stable commercial farming class. To accomplish this he initially introduced cotton weaving as a secondary occupation to provide much-needed capitalization for peasant farmers as their communal markes were dismembered and privatized. As De Clercq was to argue, The persons who have learned to weave will return to their households to become new teachers and the province should profit extraordinarily, since the extensive uncultivated lands that are available here give the weaver the opportunity to supply a part of their subsistence on a small field or garden site and to avail of that at the same time as his loom. Although the profits of this arrangement are just about the same as those of a powerloom, surely anyone with any humanity would more highly recommend the first over the second. (Clercq cited in Mansvelt 1924: 1:272) His sentiments were echoed by the president of the NHM, G. Schimmelpenninck, whose estate lay in the area (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 151). De Clercq’s pleasure in this solution equaled that of Van den Bosch’s when he crowed that forced cash crop production by Javanese peasants would give them greater profits than mere subsistence production. On first view, De Clercq’s decision to reject the introduction of factory-based power looms may be interpreted as the backward-thinking act of a mercantilist turning away from modern production methods, as Van den Bosch had done with favoring forced labor in Java. It is thus important to underscore the nature of the alternate disciplinary apparatus that De Clercq introduced to manage this capitalist transformation in the hinterlands of the eastern Netherlands. The “independent”

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production of cloth in a multitude of peasant farm households was nonetheless to be carefully managed through an extensive, accounts-based disciplinary system administered through contracts with municipal welfare institutions managed by the traditional Dutch regent elite. The NHM schools for weavers frequently had an associated central production site, or weeflokaal, where workers were brought together to form a central core for production (Hooff 1993: 54). The corporation policed these multiple sites of production through its ability to set prices, establish production quotas through contracts with municipal welfare institutions, and hence impose a pietistic, moralizing discourse of productive virtue on peasant families. By this means, the NHM corporatized the cotton industry; they determined what counted as an acceptable economic transaction by imposing contractual terms that internalized the costs of this discipline. This export “market” in cotton cloth was a corporately managed economy in the same sense as the Benevolent Colony of Frederiksoord or the Cultivation System in Java, where “prices” were administratively set with only passing reference to “market forces.” Before the arrival of the NHM, cloth production was organized in fabrieken (factories), where spinning was concentrated, with weaving largely conducted in local farmer’s homes. This form of proto-industrialization thus depended on a variation of the putting-out system where yarn was advanced and exchanged for finished calicoes. As the NHM took increasing control over production in the region, weaving was increasingly centralized in new weaving factories (weeflokaals) in order to maximize discipline. The number of these factories grew exponentially, but their size was carefully managed by the NHM system of placing orders. Insofar as it was possible, De Clercq spread production as widely as he could and appointed just one coordinating agent per village (Mastboom 1996: 247–49). Individual peasant weavers could “sell” to the NHM only through these designated intermediaries. The NHM contracted the production of cloth to two kinds of contractors: “philanthropists” and “entrepreneurs” (fabrikants). Like later corporations created during the second industrial revolution, the NHM used vertical integration and managerial hierarchies to gain efficiencies in mass production without recourse to the market (Chandler 1977: 1). These economies were achieved through a system of guaranteed orders offered to its philanthropic contractors at a “middle” price rather than the lowest. This is an example of how an economic discourse was utilized to frame the internal market of the NHM. Rather than accept the lowest bid (usually from the entrepreneurs), the NHM would average the bids of both to determine this middle price, but it offered the contracts to its philanthropists first. This encouraged the workhouses to seek efficiencies and lower costs; whatever orders they could not fill at the stipulated price would then go to the entrepreneurs, who would obtain higher profit margins as a result.1 The entrepreneurs could sell the remainder of their more cheaply produced cloth through other Amsterdam export houses at a lower price. As all of the contractors became more efficient, the average price declined. Thus, the means by which the NHM calculated the price it would pay for cotton

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goods and distributed its contracts illustrates the degree to which this export market was transformed into an internal corporate accounting system in which accounting practices and standard contracts substituted for market mechanisms. On the one hand, the NHM served like later corporations by organizing production administratively to produce economies of scale; on the other, they served like later corporations by schooling their dependents in industriousness like the Benevolent Colonies. This corporate hierarchy, like the Directorate of Cultivations, was thus critical to the policing/managing of production and a means of disciplining workers such that they became industrious and increased production at lower cost. The success of the NHM in this regard proved outstanding. The entrepreneurs of the Twente region, for example, had been paying an average wage of four cents per el of cloth. The NHM began by offering wages 23 percent above this price, but within a few years it had reduced the price to two or two and a half cents per el, a price at which this handwoven cloth could compete with that wove by power loom (Mansvelt 1924: 2:300). The value of exports to the Indies climbed from f 6,000 in 1832 to f 6 million in 1840, while the price of cloth declined by 37 percent. The NHM successfully recaptured more than half of the market in woven cotton in Java from the English (Mansvelt 1924: 2:326). De Clercq gave clear preference to contracts with “philanthropists,” the local regents charged with poor relief such as the Heer (gentleman) J. Fabius, and the pauper factories that had been established by towns such as Oldenzaal.2 Fabius lived in Amsterdam but owned an estate in Westervlier in Twente next to the president of the NHM. De Clercq was to write, “His aims are humanitarian, and it is of the highest importance to persuade people of his status in society to take up such employments, where we would expect they would not spread that sense of self-interest Table 4.1. Export of Textiles to Java and Madura. Year

Total (in guilders)

Dutch imports

British imports

1830

3,800,000

2,300,000

1,200,000

1831

2,900,000

1,300,000

1,200,000

1832

1,900,000

60,000

400,000

1833

3,900,000

90,000

2,500,000

1834

4,400,000

330,000

3,400,000

1835

4,100,000

1,500,000

2,200,000

1836

6,100,000

3,200,000

2,600,000

1837

7,100,000

3,600,000

2,900,000

1838

9,700,000

5,700,000

3,200,000

1839

10,500,000

7,300,000

2,500,000

1840

13,100,000

8,800,000

2,800,000

Source: Mansvelt 1924: 1:333.

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one so frequently finds among the fabrikants [entrepreneurs]” (Griffiths 1977: 142). The contract to provide jute sacks and “imitation cotton” was granted to the Benevolent Society. The production of coffee sacks was granted to municipal workhouses in the city of Oldenzaal in Twente (where four hundred paupers were employed), in Amsterdam, and elsewhere (Mansvelt 1924: 1:261–62). Although “philanthropic” in intent, each of these contractors presented themselves as a business much like the Fatherlands Society for Shipping and Trade, providing work rather than charity. The NHM proudly proclaimed in its 1834 annual report that under its tutelage it was creating an industry that would “outgrow these lead strings, and will develop a factory life built on trade and industry of the most useful effects, at which point it will cost us but a penstroke to obtain our orders for calicoes at a cost the same as other lands” (Clercq in Mansvelt 1924: 1:200). Although the NHM hoped that these businesses would eventually outgrow its reins, the commercial industry they were fostering was clearly to remain under the rigorous policing of municipal regents and the overall management of the NHM. It is important to underscore the role of the NHM in determining and shaping the character of its “community” contractors through its standard contracts; De Clercq’s rejection of competition and the selection of only one philanthropic contractor per village radically altered the scope of action for the other entrepreneurial contractors, leading them to adopt the same form. The second class of contractors, petty entrepreneurs (fabrikants) such as the family firm G. & H. Salomonson, had traditionally organized the putting-out system in the Twente region. They supplied farmers with yarn and collected and finished the woven product. These entrepreneurs received contracts for those orders that the philanthropic businesses were unable to fill, usually no more than a third to a half of the NHM’s requirements (Mansvelt 1924: 1:300). These manufacturers complained bitterly that the NHM did not place orders on the basis of lowest price for similar quality of goods.3 The NHM’s response was that it did not have a monopoly on the trade of cotton in the Netherlands East Indies, and the Salomonsons were free to sell their goods there through any of the large Dutch trading houses of Amsterdam. Indeed, this alternate “free trade” was a critical means by which the NHM sought to create a free market and by which it calculated its “middle price” for cotton goods solicited from philanthropic institutions. Importantly, these entrepreneurs utilized the same production techniques as mandated by De Clercq for those philanthropic institutions; they continued to use the “improved” putting-out system with the flying shuttle and failed to industrialize. The entrepreneurs recognized the benefits of a system that allowed them flexibility in production without having to make permanent investments in machinery (Mastboom 1990: 215). However, one of the more interesting implications of the corporate governmentalization of the cotton industry was the adoption of the NHM’s philanthropic strategies and pastoral discipline by these entrepreneurial fabrikants. Through their preferential grants of contracts, the Ministry of Colonies and the NHM were able to increasingly

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governmentalize firms of fabrikants such as G. & H. Salomonson such that they too recognized that their orders depended upon philanthropic motives and that they conducted their business in coordination with welfare authorities so as to manage the risks of a recalcitrant working class. Although the Salomonsons had complained to the king about the limits on their sales to the NHM in favor of the philanthropic factories, they began by 1838 to imitate the NHM’s philanthropic function after being asked by the Department of Colonies to help foster the cotton industry in the province of Zeeland in partnership with local welfare authorities there (Mansvelt 1924: 1:305). The Salomonsons found the philanthropic role highly profitable, allowing them to eventually establish the Netherlands’ first steam-powered textile mill in 1852 (Burgers 1954: 70–74; see chapter 8). Although in moving from proto-industrial to industrial strategies, they retained the disciplinary techniques they had learned from the royal corporations and workhouses to help them control their factory floors. The NHM was ultimately successful in fostering the more general capitalist transformation of Dutch agriculture in the eastern Netherlands as the communal markes there were disbanded. Historian Joyce Mastboom has shown that the weavers employed by the NHM in the neighboring Achterhoek region successfully converted the markes’ pasturage and commons into medium-sized farms of up to twenty hectares in size by shifting from arable farming to cattle breeding. The farm animals produced the manure that allowed for increased fodder crop yields (1990: 161, 168, 176). Both the largest and smallest farms declined in number, but the medium-sized farms increased by 93 percent, and the overall number of farms by a third (Mastboom 1996: 246). The capital for the farm expansion and improvements was provided through weaving as a secondary occupation. In fact this transition to capitalist farming was so successful that fewer and fewer farmers needed to resort to weaving, creating a labor shortage in the cotton industry by the 1850s (Mastboom 1996: 249; Rensen 1982: 109–10). Mastboom thus emphasized that as a result of this symbiotic relationship “commercial farms emerged out of industry, just as factory-based industry emerged out of agriculture” (1996: 240).

The Circulation of Governmental Strategies in Corporate Economies The Salomonson brothers, Godfried and Hermann, formed the largest entrepreneurial cotton-manufacturing firm, which produced almost half of the cotton cloth sold by the Dutch in Java. They had formed a partnership in the city of Almelo, in the Twente region, importing tea, general goods, and cotton thread about 1819 (Burgers 1954: 10–21). Their business dealt primarily in tea, but as the NHM moved to establish a cotton-weaving industry for export in the area, their control of the trade in cotton thread from relations in England left them well situated to take advantage. The NHM’s attempts to encourage a cotton-spinning industry to produce yarn had only limited success; a single mill to produce fine cotton thread was built in 1835 with the help of the Crown, the NHM, and a number of fabrikants in nearby Enschede, but it

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was unable to compete with English thread and thus turned to producing rough yarn for domestic cloth production only (Burgers 1954: 38). Most of the other fabrikants thus continued to produce for the domestic market. The Salomonsons, as the major importer of the finer English thread, had a near monopoly on this crucial resource for the production of the calicoes the NHM required for export to the Netherlands East Indies. All of the traditional fabrikants in the region, including the Salomonsons, used the putting-out system, which was similar to the type of subcontracting used by the NHM among its philanthropic suppliers. Since the Salomonsons had the largest and most secure supply of fine cotton thread, they were able to recruit the largest number of home-based weavers and secure higher profits; they did not need to be more efficient as long as their products were cheaper than those produced by the philanthropic workhouses. As the demand for cotton cloth increased, they subcontracted the supervision of weavers to other “managers” (zetbazen) to whom they provided cotton and capital and paid a commission; by 1840 they had 21 managers and 2,441 weavers (Burgers 1954: 57). Most managers were former fabrikants (rather than the philanthropic regents favored by the NHM) who lacked the capital or access to thread that would allow them to compete with the Salomonsons. The position of a zetbaas was highly insecure; they were the last hired and first fired (see the case of C. T. Stork cited in chapter 6). This subcontracting system allowed the Salomonsons to quickly expand to the point where they could have singlehandedly filled all of the NHM’s needs. As already noted, however, De Clercq gave preference to the municipal and diaconal workhouses. The Salomonsons retaliated by having their managers pose as independent entrepreneurs seeking an equal share of the NHM’s orders; but the NHM discovered the ruse and refused to take on new suppliers, leaving the Salomonsons with the more difficult task of selling their wares on consignment to those Amsterdam trading houses who conducted business in the Netherlands East Indies. Between 1841 and 1845, the NHM sold more than 80 percent of Dutch-produced cloth in the colony (36 percent of it produced by the Salomonsons); the remaining 20 percent was sold by private traders, and was primarily produced by the Salomonsons and, to a lesser extent, the Benevolent Society (Boot 1935: 242–43). The success of the cotton-weaving industry in Twente led other regions to seek similar initiatives; in 1838, the governor of the southern province of Zeeland convinced Minister of Colonies Van den Bosch to set aside f 500,000 (approximately 100,000 calicos) of the NHM’s export budget for cotton cloth woven in that province. When the NHM declared itself unable to organize production there, Van den Bosch called on the Salomonsons to organize weaving schools in Zeeland (Burgers 1954: 64–71). The NHM was already overextended in Twente but did agree to accept the cotton goods produced by the Salomonsons at a premium since wages were higher there. Since houses in Zeeland were smaller, there was no possibility of home weaving, and production had to take place in municipal workhouses. The Salomon-

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sons took over these workhouses to establish handweaving “factories” under a salaried manager, and in exchange for the free buildings they were obliged to implement the morally laden discipline of the municipal workhouse and employ only paupers. The Salomonsons also operated workhouses around Hilversum to the east of Amsterdam on the same terms. After 1838, the Salomonsons moved the greater part of their production to these workhouses because of the higher quality of goods produced there and the guaranteed market and higher prices they obtained from the NHM (Burgers 1954: 78). In 1852, the Salomonsons decided to challenge Britain’s remaining market dominance in Java in the production of the wider machine-produced cloth used by the Javanese Batik industry. They founded the Royal Steam Weaving Mill that year and built a factory town next to the NHM warehouse in Nijverdal. There they recreated the disciplinary apparatus of the Zeeland workhouses in Twente, resettling many of the weavers from Zeeland and the Benevolent Colonies to staff it. Nijverdal can be viewed as a fully commercialized “Benevolent Colony,” lauded by social reformers of the period for its philanthropy to workers. The disciplinary edifice and the labor relations that resulted are dealt with in chapter 6. It would thus appear, on the one hand, that the Salomonsons’ business was governmentalized as they adopted the Pietist discourse of productive virtue, embraced the discipline of the workhouse, and viewed production as a form of employment creation for paupers. That is, these entrepreneurial businessmen increasingly adopted strategies and practices developed by the royal corporations to “instill industry” and manage the recalcitrant poor in the production of goods for the controlled colonial market. On the other hand, it is equally important to underscore that the formerly independent municipal and diaconal workhouses were now being centrally managed by these new commercially organized corporations. Just as the Benevolent Society attempted to nationalize and centralize the poor relief system, the NHM and the Salomonsons similarly placed these independent philanthropic workhouses under central commercial direction and managed and disciplined them through a series of central accounts to obtain economies of scope and scale. A further example of the process can be found in the municipal workhouse of the town of Oldenzaal, which was “privatized” in the same way as the Salomonsons “corporatized” the workhouses of Zeeland. Oldenzaal’s municipal workhouse had significantly expanded as a result of NHM orders for coffee sacks, eliminating begging in the town’s streets: “In my youth you would see the beggars daily, and Saturday a whole band of 70 or 80 clothed in tatters would visit the wealthy citizens to obtain 1 or 2 cents. . . . [After the workhouse was established,] any who sought work could earn their bread there; the men wove in the factory or in their own home and the women knit the sacks; the giving of alms was no longer necessary” (Stork 1888: 24). The manager of the workhouse was the one-time mayor of Oldenzaal, Johannes F. Peese Binkhorst, one of the philanthropic regents that De Clercq was so eager to encourage. When the NHM was forced to reduce its orders in 1840 the town found

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it could no longer support the institution, and it was sold to Peese Binkhorst and his partners (Harten 1927: 101–16). They later mechanized the factory and became one of the largest of the new cotton manufacturers in the region (Hommen 1964; Fischer et all 1991: 47ff.). As opposed to the entrepreneurial Salomonsons turned philanthropists, here one of the NHM’s philanthropists was transformed into a businessman. Although the product of contention and competition, the end product of these various processes resembled Scherenberg’s original proposal to the king in 1816 to centralize all the existing workhouses and organize them commercially (see chapter 1). This same dynamic also came to ensnare the Benevolent Society, which like the workhouse in Oldenzaal found its pauper relief efforts increasingly dependent on cotton weaving; whereas Van den Bosch had created his benevolent colonies to instill industry in subsistence farmers, Frederiksoord’s “independent” farm producers increasingly turned to home-based weaving as an important secondary income, just as it was for the farmers of Twente employed by the NHM. The colony received regular contracts from the NHM to produce coffee sacks and was the largest private exporter (after the Salomonsons) of calicoes to the Netherlands East Indies in 1841–42. The Benevolent Society even attempted to overcome the lack of fine thread by working with a state-supported machine shop to create a steam-powered spinnery (Burgers 1954: 154–55). There is, then, an increasingly shared governmental rationality organizing the productive discipline of all of these pauper relief experiments as they were drawn into the larger commodity chains binding the colonies of the Greater Netherlands together.

The Regent Class, State-Building, and “Gentlemanly Capitalism” So far, I have described the manner in which the NHM framed and managed the production of cotton cloth through the application of a standard philanthropic contract by which it internalized the cost of disciplining paupers. In the previous chapter, we examined the means by which the NEI state externalized the costs of disciplining village production and charged them to the budget of the NHM, which paid them through percentages. In both contexts then, a process of corporatization was at work in which the obligations and costs of a disciplinary apparatus that exerted its influence beyond simple control over the labor process was internalized by corporations. I turn now to the social implications of the development of this disciplinary apparatus on the state in both territories. Although the NHM paid for the disciplinary apparatus, internalizing these costs (through the payment of the “middle price” and “percentages”), it contracted the application of the discipline to Janus-faced state functionaries. State power was thus an integral and critical element in the manner through which the NHM was able to manage its global commodity chains. It is important to underscore the state-building effects of this transformation in the eastern Netherlands and its interlinkage with similar changes occurring under the

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Cultivation System in Java. The Belgian secession, the Java War, and the growth of liberal opposition in parliament all point to the fragile nature of the royal assemblage of strategies, projects, and technologies of rule utilized by Willem to foster a “Greater Netherlands.” The (dis-)United Kingdom of the Netherlands was wracked by economic and political crisis. The state apparatus was small, underfunded, and weakened by local resistance to the centralizing policies of the king. By engaging the regent class at home as well as in the colonies in the NHM-managed commodity chains in sugar, coffee, and cotton cloth, the Crown was able to provide economic incentives to its royally appointed delegates. Although the economizing state was unable to directly buy their loyalty, it could offer them patronage positions in the Cultivation System, the Consignment System, and in cotton manufacturing by which they could profit; these systems were interwoven with the state apparatus into a coordinated assemblage of technologies of power each applied to a specific project of rule through a shared governmental rationality. This corporate assemblage thus buttressed the enlightened absolutist rule of Willem I as well as consolidated the social status and economic wealth of the now dependent regent class. However, in doing so, it married this conservative regent class with new forms of corporate organization—a process of “gentlemanly capitalism”—that were to become of increasing importance as royal power itself eventually waned. As previously documented, the creation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815 introduced a radical transformation in the role and status of the Dutch ruling class. Similarly, the imposition of the land rent system in Java and its expansion under the Cultivation System changed the scope and status of the aristocracy there. In both cases, a host of aristocratic privileges were swept away with one hand while the demeaned status was offered to a broader dependent constituency who were to staff the new state and corporate bureaucracies on the other. These projects of rule were implemented by these—frequently petulant, disgruntled, and rebellious—elites, charged with the “everyday forms of state formation,” yet eager to challenge Willem’s larger project of centralized state formation with “everyday forms of resistance.” If liberal governmentality, as a strategy, works through frequently uncoordinated dispersed agencies and institutions, it is important to underscore that the process of “forging alignments” between these diverse projects of rule involves “providing room for maneuver and opportunities for compromise, with all the nuances of that term” (Li 1999: 298). This process of assemblage into a coordinated whole had longer-term instrumental effects and faced what Li characterizes as the “limits of governmentality” (2007a: 17–19), but which I have here described as “friction” in the process of corporatization. It has already been pointed out, for example, that Van den Bosch’s original plan to centralize the administration of pauper relief in his Benevolent Colonies was subverted by the city regents charged with the cameralistic policing of the poor who resisted losing their local reserve army of labor to distant work camps and who sent only hardened, criminalized paupers who resisted discipline instead. Similarly, I noted that the burgermeesters of the eastern Netherlands, Zeeland, and Amsterdam

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more enthusiastically embraced the NHM’s deployment of a similar disciplinary assemblage as cotton-manufacturing projects could be implemented in situ, affording them local patronage as well as disciplined workers. The rough process of “forging alignments” with local elites made the adoption of governmental projects of rule contingent on the leverage they afford to those charged with the radical refiguring of other people’s lives. If such projects to refigure the social and economic conditions of life are too vigorously pursued and impinge on elite incomes, as they did in Van den Bosch’s benevolent colonies, their effectiveness was limited; where they opened up spaces of compromise, as in the NHM’s cotton-manufacturing experiments or the Cultivation System, they facilitated “success” of a kind. Here then, I focus on what participation in these specific projects of rule did to the evolving role and status of the new regent elites of the Greater Netherlands as they circulated from civic leader to corporate contractor. In the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands, city regents proved a powerful parliamentary check on Willem’s centralizing aspirations, leading Willem to differentiate incorporated city governments from the local government ( plaatselijke bestuur) of unincorporated rural areas in 1824 in an effort to strengthen central rule (Woud 1987). Village mayors, many of them nominal aristocrats, were thus more tightly integrated into the royal machinery of state, their status directly dependent on royal patronage. This was equally true of other rural offices, such as the clergy of the important Dutch Reformed Church parishes. Rural areas were now fixed into geographically demarcated villages (gemeente) governed by a local elected council under the authority of a mayor (burgemeester) now directly appointed by the Crown; aristocrats lost their presumed governing privileges, although they were frequently chosen in the role. Rural areas had their boundaries more clearly fixed and all property registered for the first time so that the mayor could more accurately assess and collect property taxes, being responsible not to the local council or taxpayers but to the Crown (Woud 1987: 64–68; cf. Mitchell 2002: 84–94). Some of these mayors were simultaneously drawn into the corporate administration of the Netherlands Trading Company as it centralized and commercialized pauper relief. It is to these members of the regent class, the philanthropic overseers of municipal workhouses, that the NHM turned to organize its weaving experiment. Hence, the Janus-faced mayor and council were at once local government and, secondarily, contractors to the NHM for the production of cotton cloth for sale in Java. This same governmental logic included the Benevolent Colonies, which became a major contractor to the NHM (Boot 1935: 242–43). By delegating cloth production to the NHM, the Crown was able to eliminate welfare expenses from the state’s accounts and charge them to the NHM instead. Payments for cloth to individual producers by the NHM were then partly recouped by the Crown through local land taxes as they were in Java; the newly privatized farms replacing the communal markes bolstered the wealth of the realm and paid the salaries of the civil service, including these mayors.

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While the conceptual and cultural divide between colonizer and colonized was being increasingly emphasized, a very similar transformation in rural local government was nonetheless being made to implement the Cultivation System in Java. Van den Bosch’s political solution to the Java War was built atop the fundamental reform of the role of village heads during the English interregnum. As with the Dutch rural mayor, desa heads were drawn from “traditional” local elites with local authority, yet made appointees of the Crown in a territorial hierarchy (Elson 1994: 155–57). As in the Netherlands, this system was intended to strengthen the authority of the traditional social hierarchy as delegates of the absolute sovereignty of the Crown. Like the Dutch mayor, the primary task of desa heads was to assess and levy the property tax; secondarily, the Janus-faced desa head became a commercial contractor of the NEI state and the NHM for the delivery of cash crops grown to pay those property taxes. To ensure that their sympathies lay with the state and not with the locals, they were paid a commission on the export crops that their communities delivered. In both the Dutch and Javanese cases, local aristocratic municipal authorities (police in the cameralist sense) were drafted into a nationalized, corporate economic discipline; they formed a loose assemblage within which shared techniques and strategies of rule circulated. This corporate assemblage’s various pauper-management projects depended on the discipline applied by this traditional governing class in order to maximize production of export goods by recalcitrant peasants; and the wealth generated through their management of commercialized cash crop or cotton cloth production gave them new patronage power with which to exert that discipline. In other words, the one-sided emphasis on the use of “traditional authorities” to administer “forced labor” in the production of goods for the NHM’s global commodity chains in Java underestimates a parallel process occurring in the Netherlands.

Building a Corporate Empire In the decade after the Java War and the secession of Belgium, the merchant king successfully assembled a series of integrated commodity chains spanning the globe that were managed through specific territorial projects of rule in far-flung domains that nonetheless shared a similar set of governmental strategies and disciplinary technologies. These projects were employed in “colonial” contexts—both within and outside the Netherlands—where recalcitrant populations were othered and placed under corporate care beyond the liberal sphere of propertied individuals with selfdetermining passions and economic interests. They were consequently subjected to the pastoral discipline of a paternalistic Crown that used forced labor in order to securitize the state and ensure the wealth and prosperity of the realm. The Cultivation System, the NHM, and the Consignment System were complex projects of rule whose management drew on and commercialized the older cameralistic police sciences for the management of workhouses in order to instill industriousness; corporations remained an important locus of biopower not usually considered. They

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“economized” rule, placing these assemblages in a distinct economic sphere where they could effect efficiencies of scope and scale. In their overall intent and structure, these were development projects for the introduction of markets and the capitalist transformation of colonial dependencies. In this particular assemblage of commodity chains, the specific projects of rule through which development was introduced were managed by corporations. The NHM, the Benevolent Society and the Salomonsons drew, I argued, on the disciplinary techniques developed by the German cameralists and Pietists but exceeded these earlier strategies through the corporate scope of application on a national and global level. The Benevolent Society, for example, was an attempt to shift control of the numerous local municipal and diaconal workhouses to a centralized national system under royal—but not state—control. Similarly, the NHM served as the “working hand” of the Crown in the cotton-weaving work-creation schemes of the eastern Netherlands. The Cultivation System transformed Java into a Crown plantation managed by the Directorate of Cultivations. All of these cases are examples of corporatization, the process by which corporate governmentality is established. Willem utilized the corporate form to govern economically as an alternate to the state bureaucracy; that is, to escape parliamentary opposition (to policies and taxes), and hence to remove the costs of pauper management from the national budget. Corporatization involved two related processes: first, it used accounting in order to manage its internal “market”; second, it created that internalized market through the imposition of standard contracts by which they assembled vast commodity chains linking metropole and colony. These two processes were a means of framing forced labor as market exchanges distinct from the state. The representational use of accounting was used to manage the “economic man” infused with productive virtue who was responsive to the cues of these internal markets; he was its object and subject, a necessary precondition for the overall prosperity of the realm. In order to train unruly paupers to respond to market cues, an intensive disciplinary apparatus was constructed that reduced all behavior to monetary units of account that could be summed and graded and used diagnostically to determine a worker’s degree of industriousness, and hence their suitability for the “free marketplace.” Accounting was an important social technology by which this discipline was applied; internal corporate accounts were a means of keeping workers accountable and not just a means of calculating profits. The imposition of standard contracts, whether between the NEI state and Javanese villages or between the NHM and the Twente philanthropic cotton manufacturers, were used to frame these market transactions in which the corporation predetermined the conditions of production and arbitrarily set prices. As Rose notes, “It is not just that the domain of numbers is politically composed, but also that the domain of politics is made up numerically” (1999: 199). These standard contracts were particularly important because they were also used to frame the character of the contractors; by means of these contracts, communal forms of disciplinary apparatus were specifically created. The liberal free market actor was replaced by the Benevo-

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lent Colony and its doppelgangers, the Javanese village and the municipal Dutch workhouse. As the governmental strategies and programs of the Benevolent Society circulated between state and corporate actors such as the NHM, they diffused outside the royal public corporations to governmentalized entrepreneurs like the Salomonsons and other gentlemanly capitalist municipal authorities. It is this broader transfer of these governmental strategies to a newly emerging private sphere in the liberal era that concerns the second part of this book. In tracing this transition, it is again important to underscore continuities in the general narrative of radical breaks. As the corporate form became available as a general private economic vehicle, it nonetheless remained constrained by the wider need to maintain social order and instill industriousness in a restive working class; this required a disciplinary edifice beyond that found on the factory floor itself. The decentering of the absolutist state and the circulation of the technologies of power outside the royal corporations opened the way for forging new alignments with the old republican regent elite. When Willem founded the Netherlands Trading Company in 1824, the weakened regent elite of the old republic were deprived of their traditional entitlements within the state apparatus and had little choice but to follow his lead. Liberal ideology, which sanctified personal property, could not attack the king’s wealth per se; his property was his own to do with as he pleased, thereby fusing politics and economy in the king’s realm. Willem’s corporations had fused his wealth with that of rentier regent shareholders under his control. However, the separation of ownership from management is a cardinal feature of the modern corporation as expressed in the doctrine of its “separate personality” from its shareholders. During the subsequent reign of Willem II, this compromise was unsettled, and the separation of ownership from management became a resource of power that allowed other gentlemanly capitalists than the king to usurp control of the wealth of the realm (as well as the ship of state). The shift from absolutist state to liberal democracy was thus marked by a parallel shift from monarchy to oligarchy to be explored in subsequent chapters of this book.

Notes 1. See ARA 2.20.01 Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM) inv. nr. 1246 Oldenzaal Stads (Armen) Fabriek (Oldenzaal city pauper factory) 1832–39 (see also Harten 1927); G.&H. Salomonson 1841 inv. nr. 1245. 2. The Oldenzaal pauper institution was operated by the Gelderman brothers, who later became the owners of the town’s largest mechanized factories (Fischer et al. 1991: 32–42). 3. It is important to underscore that the Salomonsons achieved lower prices through their access to cheaper English thread, and not through greater increases in productivity. See the next part.

CHAPTER 5

“Sweetening the Pot” rule by experts in the sugar industry

In this and subsequent chapters, I trace the development of the management techniques developed by the royal “charity companies” as they evolved in the Liberal era and were given ideological form in a new school of neocamaralist government. The Royal Academy at Delft was a key institutional lever for the dissemination of shared forms of governmentality. The shaky patrimonial state bureaucracy of the earlier period was revisioned as the “rule of experts”—by engineers. This was the start of an aspirational heroic age of a heroic king. In this period, the state undertook vast projects such as the draining of lakes, the building of a national rail network, and the industrialization of the Javanese sugar industry, frequently over parliamentary resistance. It was from this academy that technocratic ideals were spread through governmental programs by these agents of the Crown. This ideology was used to depoliticize rule by the civil servants educated at the new academy as they moved into state and corporate governance (Keurenaer 1870). They embraced the notion that the state should be managed by technical experts loyal to the Crown and not by laissez-faire politicians who sought to abandon governance to the market. The royalist ideology that developed at the school drew, in part, on the technocratic Saint-Simonian engineers responsible for constructing the French railway system. Saint-Simonian utopian socialism developed into a technocratic ideology at the French version of the Royal Academy, the École Polytechnique, whose engineers played a similar political role in the Second Empire of Napoleon III (Picon 2007). These new experts were trained to manage the Cultivation and Consignment Systems and eventually their associated corporations like the NHM, cotton-manufacturing firms, and the crédit mobiliers (see chapters 7 and 8). The ideal of technocratic governance legitimated their management of new industries, such as the railroads and sugar refining in Java, and depoliticized it; in so doing, it ideologically separated state from economy while encouraging the circulation of governmental technologies into the corporations regulating these industries. The origins of the Royal Academy lie in the need for improved management of the vast colonial commodity chains discussed in the first section of this book. Through-

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out the 1830s, the Cultivation System appeared an enviable success, a seemingly limitless revenue stream that funded Willem’s prolonged resistance to the Belgian succession as well as his numerous infrastructural enthusiasms such as railroads and canals. Yet, as domestic financial pressures mounted, Willem extorted ever larger advances from the NHM, the consignment agent for the system, and the means by which the Indies government surplus was realized. Between 1830 and 1837, Willem’s financial demands on the system grew from f 10 million to f 22 million annually, more than the colonial harvest was actually worth and leaving no slack in the system. His increasing demands led to a national emergency in the wake of the general Anglo-American banking crisis of 1836 (Mansvelt 1924: 1:410–22). English and American traders in Java had increasingly used bills of exchange drawn on London banks rather than silver to pay for the purchase of export crops auctioned in Java. When those banks collapsed in 1836, it sparked a worldwide debt crisis and a reversion to payment in now scarce silver. The contraction in credit bankrupted a series of trading houses and sugar manufacturers in Java and left the NEI state unable to pay either government salaries or crop payments to the Javanese (Bosma 2007). The disappearance of the Javanese auctions in turn necessitated total dependence on the NHM and the Consignment System to manage the flows of export crops and advances on which both the NEI state and Dutch government depended after 1836 (Mansvelt 1924: 1:245). The near bankruptcy of the Dutch state finally forced Willem’s recognition of Belgian independence in 1839. This recognition required the amendment of the Dutch constitution, to which the Estates General also added cabinet accountability to parliament to preclude further evasions by the Crown. Willem I was unwilling to accept this limitation on his sovereignty and abdicated in 1840; he was succeeded by his son Willem II (Laarse 1999). Cabinet accountability opened the colonial books to parliament for the first time and heightened the debate on colonial policy, without, however, radically altering the Crown’s control. To stave off catastrophe, this vast colonial assemblage needed to be put on a more businesslike basis; that is, to deliver more profits at the expense of mere job creation. The greater the financial returns that could be wrung out of the colony, the greater the independence Willem II could maintain from parliamentary review. This shake-up in the Cultivation System did not include liberal economic reforms; indeed, it was a rejection of them. The administration of the “well-ordered police state” clearly required better policing to produce greater surpluses; that is, specialist personnel better able to implement Willem’s cameralistic policies in a more efficient manner. This did not entail any great change in function, as thanks to the Cultivation System, “state bureaucrats were less administrators than production managers” anyway (Doorn 1994: 113). These reforms thus required the development of a new technocratic elite better able to police the production of commodities in this complex assemblage of state and corporate bureaucracies. After several fitful starts, these technocratic administrators came to be trained at a new Royal Academy at Delft founded in 1842 (Fasseur 1993: 101; Lintsen 1980:

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151–70). The academy was first proposed in 1826 by a French-trained engineer, Antoine Lipkens, manager of the national land register. Lipkens was to become the school’s first director (Lintsen 1980: 147–48). The minister of the interior, W. A. baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (a military engineer), promoted the plan with King Willem II, who had received a similar proposal for the training of colonial civil servants from J. C. Baud, the minister of colonies, on the model of Haileybury College, England, the training school for the East India Company’s civil servants (Fasseur 1993: 101ff.). In combining the two proposals into one school, Willem II was able to fund it entirely out of colonial revenues and hence retain total control without parliamentary interference. Crown prince Willem (later Willem III) made weekly visits to the school and became a close personal friend of its second director, Gerrit Simons (Raak 2001: 117). It was a bulwark of the regime, producing civil servants loyal to the Crown, not the Estates General. Most commentators on the Royal Academy have remarked upon its idiosyncratic combination of training for colonial civil servants and of engineering, or, worse yet, they ignore one half of the school or the other in favor of more compartmentalized disciplinary histories (Lintsen 1980; Fasseur 1993; Caljé 1998). Such a categorical rift disregards the first two common years of curriculum of the four-year program at the academy (Doorn 1994: 114).1 However, the dual “sciences” of Dutch engineering and of “colonial culture” that developed in the Royal Academy were the recognizable Janus faces of the growing ideological divide in the Cultivation System discussed in chapter 3. Michael Adas (1989) has shown that this dichotomy was widely referenced in developing the “civilizing mission” ideology used to justify European domination in many colonial contexts (cf. Moore 2006: 12–14). Although Dutch rural municipal government was similar in form to that in Java, the Javanese regents whose “traditional” authority provided the “force” that made the system function were increasingly contrasted with “modern” Dutch regents trained in the Royal Academy. The educational emphasis in the Royal Academy was in training technically qualified administrators in “useful knowledge” for royal service in the technical and inspection bureaus of the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies civil service. Both professions and their attendant sciences of “useful knowledge” emerged out of their specific place within the governmental bureaucracy where they provided the “rule of experts.” The Royal Academy’s students formed a distinctive cohort, drawn largely from the traditional regent class. Dutch universities had trained the lower elites: the provincially active lawyers, jurists, and ministers. The Royal Academy, in contrast, attracted a far greater proportion of elite students from the families of high officials (regents), army officers, colonial elites, and nobles. While the universities can be characterized as middle-class institutions, the Royal Academy was clearly an elite institution representing the centralizing, enlightened absolute rule of the Crown (Caljé 1998: 90–93; Disco 1994: 375). This elitism was intentional; Baud had lauded Haileybury for only drawing on those from the “decent [gentlemanly] class” who, as colonial bureaucrats, easily gained the “respect” and “admiration” of Asians, “which explains the ease with

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which a people as populous as that of Hindustan are able to be constrained by means which are small in comparison with their object” (quoted in Fasseur 1993: 150). These students had a strong self-identity fostered by the “Delft Student Corps,” a semi-military student association that included both the engineers and the colonial civil servants (Fasseur 1993: 93–94). This tight, self-conscious identity was further encouraged on graduation, when they became eligible for membership in the exclusive Royal Institute for Engineers (Konijklijk Instituut van Ingenieurs, KIVI) or the Royal Institute for Linguistics, Geography, and Anthropology of the Netherlands Indies (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, KITLV). These two institutes asserted their members’ professional standing and were dominated by some of the nation’s most powerful bureaucrats. The Royal Academy and its instructors had been key to the creation of these royal institutes for engineers and “indologists,” and, through them, of their journals and the development of their specialized “applied” sciences (Fasseur 1993). One of the school’s greatest defenders, internationally renowned biochemistry professor and physician Gerrit-Jan Mulder,2 argued that higher education, even in the sciences, should be geared toward training the regent class for their governmental positions (Mulder 1848; Raak 2000: 62, 118); he placed the emphasis on the development of “useful knowledge” rather than on “pure science” (Leidelmeijer 1997: 197). The academy’s emphasis on applied science was predicated on the French model of the École Polytechnique, but it also served to ideologically situate the school’s graduates in their professional careers (Disco 1994; Verbong 1994: 296). It was their scientific training that differentiated them from an older generation of apprenticed bureaucrats with whom they competed for control of the state apparatus. Their applied sciences and their projects of rule played a pivotal role in depoliticizing state intervention in the name of technical necessity. When practically applied, these new sciences were governmental in effect, managing “the conduct of conduct” of the public across a broad range of social problems. The Royal Institute of Engineers was founded in 1847 as a means of formalizing the scientific foundations of engineering, and of engineering education. The institute made its home in the Royal Academy. It was founded by director Simons and two engineers, F. W. Conrad and L. J. A van der Kun, who had established their reputations building the Netherlands’ first two railways. The three were elected to the institute’s board for life and continued to dominate the organization and ensure its close relationship to the academy, the National Water Service (Rijkswaterdienst, of which Conrad was the head), and the military (Lintsen 1980: 205–8, 228). The institute’s annual journal (Verhandelingen) quickly became the official record of the projects of the National Water Board, which included canals, dykes, bridge-building, and railways. The Royal Institute for Language, Geography, and Anthropology of the Netherlands East Indies was founded at the Royal Academy in 1851 by Gerrit Simons with the help of academy professor Taco Roorda and former minister of colonies J. C. Baud (Fasseur 1993: 150). The KITLV sought to emulate for NEI bureaucrats the

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KIVI’s success in uniting engineers serving in the various government and military bureaucracies (Kuitenbrouwer 2013: 28). Baud’s inaugural speech hoped the KITLV “would never evoke judgement of the government’s actions by others nor express such itself,” but would rather serve “as a powerful tool for promoting not only scientific studies, but also the aims of a just, enlightened and benevolent Government” (Kuitenbrouwer 2013: 30). Its close association with conservative governmental aims was reinforced by the first issues of its scholarly journal, the Bijdragen, which were filled with Baud’s attempts to scientifically defend his own policies as governorgeneral in managing the government’s opium monopoly (Baud 1853). Like the KIVI, the KITLV’s home was the Royal Academy, where three of its professors served as the editorial board (Baud 1853: 30). These three institutions were the core of a developing royalist technocracy aimed at extending biopower projects of rule over populations at home and in the colonies. By invoking the term “technocracy,” I highlight the governmental aspects of this developing royal assemblage. As in the French educational system on which it was based, the centralization of recruitment and training of state experts in the Royal Academy helped develop a homogenous professional culture and a “homogenous bureaucratic universe characterized by its own values and references” (Belhoste and Chatzis 2007: 216). This professional culture included the development of new applied sciences focused on “population” that Foucault saw at the root of biopower and governmentality. As state-sanctioned experts in these new sciences, they stood apart from the intellectual bourgeoisie, the “chattering classes” who populated the pages of the new, influential liberal publication, De Gids (The guide), and who dominated the salons and electoral clubs of Amsterdam (Aerts 1997). The development of royal technocratic rule was, in part, a response to liberal critiques of Dutch industrial backwardness—what the liberals referred to as the “spirit of Jan Salie.” Jan Salie was the lead character of a highly popular satire published in 1841 in De Gids. Salie was among the last generation of many increasingly dissipated and similarly named descendants in the story and a fictional symbol of the fall of the Dutch nation from its seventeenth-century golden age. Liberals used this image to characterize the technical conservativeness of the Dutch, who they argued were sadly lagging behind the English and Belgians in the industrial revolution (Stuurman 1995: 66–67). Willem de Clercq’s rejection of cotton factories for handweaving in the eastern Netherlands is a pertinent example, given the irony that his son Gerrit was one of De Gids’ editors and was to replace him as secretary of the NHM. The liberals argued that it was not until the country overthrew the “spirit of Jan Salie” and its reverence for the rentier capitalism of the old republic that the Netherlands could achieve a technological renewal and industrial boom. The Royal Academy and the technocratic ideology it promulgated were thus the means by which the Crown could usurp this powerful critical narrative. The technocratic ideology they developed borrowed from the Saint-Simonian supporters of Napoleon III and sought to promote the autocratic rule of the Dutch Crown.

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These technocrats broadcast a vision whose “tone was partly set by the nineteenth-century view that technological innovation was a tale of famous discoveries and heroic inventors, of gleaming tools in an almost sacred environment. Technical progress was such a universal good that society should give itself over to it” (Bakker 1995a: 22). Engineers overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to perform miracles for the public good, such as building the Amsterdam-Cologne railway (1838–45) and draining the Haarlemmermeer between 1837 and 1849 (Woud 1987: 290–1). The Haarlemmermeer was a rapidly expanding lake covering over 18,500 hectares that was endangering the cities of Amsterdam and Leiden. The scope of the project dwarfed any previous drainage project (comprising 7.5 percent of the Netherlands’ territory) (Woud 1987: 280–96). Lipkens and Simons, the academy’s first directors, were instrumental in introducing steam-powered pumps to drain the lake to replace that most iconic of Dutch symbols, the windmill. These projects are examples of what James Scott has referred to as “authoritarian high modernism,” in which the old cameralist state’s aspirational social engineering was empowered by a renewed state bureaucracy with consistent coercive power and by the detailed knowledge that made them equal to the task (1998: 88). This group of elite engineers and colonial civil servants developed a conservative political ideology that “attached great importance to the education of specialized administrators that should form an independent governmental elite under the leading of the crown,” including cabinet ministers responsible to the king, not parliament (Raak 2001: 101, 115–24: Caljé 1998: 88–89; Laarse 2000: 23). As servants of the Crown, the Royal Academy’s directors and graduates were adamantly opposed to liberal parliamentary supervision; they utilized the process of “rendering problems technical” to depoliticize governmental action (cf. Li 2007b). They rejected laissez-faire liberalism (and the liberal constitution of 1848) and proposed a return to the state interventionism of Willem I to improve public health and moral education. This group argued that the public yearned for national unity under the fusing authority of the monarchy. Instead of a reasoning parliament of notables, the country had need of an energetic king surrounded by experts and the right-minded. We could speak of a utopian royalism that would replace by authoritarian means Thorbecke’s laissez-faire constitution with an enlightening monarchy for the restoration of social harmony under the denominator of order and progress in the spirit of Auguste Comte and Napoleon III. (Laarse 2000: 24) Liberal parliamentarians so feared the appointment of engineers as government ministers that they resisted the creation of a separate Department of Public Works to manage the new state railways and telegraphs, fearing these engineers could legitimate any expense, no matter how high, on technical merits that couldn’t be questioned (Bakker 1995b: 121–26).

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This conservative movement was more broadly solidified by the “April movement” of 1853. The April movement was a reaction to Thorbecke’s attempt to broaden his political base by officially severing church and state and thereby permitting the restoration of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy, an appeasement to the largely Catholic southern provinces. This plan sparked a “Great Protestant” countermovement led by this conservative court party, which included Gerrit Simons, Gerrit-Jan Mulder, Schimmelpenninck, Baud, Agnites Vrolik, and H. A. van den Wall Bake, all technical experts in royal service (Raak 2000: 89). Searching for a strategy that would enlist broad public support for their elitist politics against the liberals, they ironically allied themselves with the conservative protestant establishment. They formed “King and Country” (Koning en Vaderland), a conservative-liberal electoral association that proved remarkably adept at mobilizing the Dutch public, and whose petition successfully led to Thorbecke’s resignation. In the subsequent elections the liberals lost their majority, and Simons and Vrolik helped form a new conservative cabinet defending the principle of ministerial responsibility to the Crown, not parliament. Simons and his former student Agnites Vrolik were the ministers of the interior and of finance in that cabinet (Hirschfeld 1949–51: 157). Willem III, however, was not of the same caliber as Napoleon III, and even his conservative supporters were forced to marginalize him from the task of governing once he accepted ministerial accountability to parliament after 1858, a full decade after the liberal “revolution.” The Conservative cabinet collapsed that year. This is the historical moment in the development of Liberal governance that led Foucault to declare that “we need a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty. . . . We need to cut off the King’s head” (Foucault 1977). What, then, replaced royal sovereignty? Here I will argue the answer is twofold. On the one hand, sovereignty was dispersed to the old regent class—monarchy replaced by oligarchy. This was a return, in other words, to the political strategies of the old republic “marked by a segmentation or parcelization of sovereign power among the ruler (or rulers) and corporate elites” (Adams 1994a: 326). And secondly, sovereignty was depoliticized and exerted by the new technocratic experts—themselves largely of the regent class—who were to dominate the management of both state and corporate bureaucracies; this marks a distinct contrast with the English “gentlemanly capitalists” who eschewed industrial production. With this permanent weakening in the influence of the House of Orange, technocratic conservatives were forced to work through parliamentary mechanisms and in concert with Amsterdam’s gentlemanly capitalist elite to create their own alternative to the liberal laissez-faire market.

Rule by Experts The improvement in the policing of colonial export production by means of “depoliticization” and “rendering technical” under the “rule of experts” was a governmental strategy that can best be assessed in the radical transformation it effected in one of the least profitable crops in the Cultivation System: sugar. The introduction of

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new technical and administrative processes eventually transformed the Javanese sugar industry from a net loss to state revenue into a lucrative source of state and private profit, making Java the second largest exporter in the world (Knight 2014). In rendering this problem technical, the crown also sought to defuse an increasingly noisy liberal colonial opposition that was politicizing the royal patronage system by which sugar contracts were dispensed. A consequence of these strategies was the creation of a technologically adept managerial bourgeoisie of conservative gentlemanly capitalist sugar manufacturers who resisted parliamentary liberal market reforms to the colonial system (Fasseur 1975: 167–68). Between 1830 and 1840, attempts were made to attract European entrepreneurs to take up sugar processing contracts through startup loans and guaranteed high prices for contractually set quotas. As the NEI government initially had difficulty attracting Europeans to this highly risky industry, it offered incentives that ultimately proved very lucrative to the manufacturers but led to large, sustained losses by the state when the sugar was auctioned off in the Netherlands. The factories were largely contracted to Chinese and Javanese refiners who used traditional Chinese refining methods that produced low yields of poor quality sugar (Elson 1994: 52–62). The global financial collapse between 1836 and 1840 that inspired the founding of the Royal Academy also made reform of the sugar industry necessary as the NEI state could no longer afford to subsidize these sugar manufacturers; however, these were not free market reforms as the Liberals demanded but government mandated technological innovations introduced by the new bureaucratic elite. Building on the early experiments by the Directorate of Cultivations in the state-operated refineries in the residency of Madiun, the Ministry of Colonies began to investigate alternate means of sugar manufacture, and to use the sugar contracts as a tool to exclude Asian refiners and Westernize the industry (Fasseur 1975: 63–76; Knight 1999b). The five government-run factories operated under the Directorate of Cultivations in Madiun were the sole early exception to the adoption of Asian methods of sugar processing in Java.3 Here, the directorate introduced technology then current in the Dutch West Indies colony of Surinam, including the use of batteries of refining cauldrons (“pans”), cane-crushing machinery, and the use of imported Otaheite cane; directorate inspector Ament’s report on them concluded that these factories were “without exception, excellently outfitted” (ARA 2.21.007.58 inv. 457; for a contrasting view, see E. Francis, resident of Madiun 1859: 3:209–32). As part of Elias’s 1836 reform of the sugar industry, these factories were sold off in the general attempt to auction all sugar contracts to Europeans (Leidelmeijer 1997: 121–22). Their function as role model was taken over by a second experiment organized by Pierre-Médard Diard, the director of the state botanical gardens at Buitenzorg, and an “honorable inspector of cultivations.” Diard obtained his sugar contract in 1838, but due to illness, his factory was not functional until 1841. His model factory proved instrumental in the introduction of steam vacuum pans for sugar refining to the colony (Leidelmeijer 1997: 128).

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The use of vacuum pan technology was later mandated by Van den Bosch’s successor, J. C. Baud, the new minister of colonies and former governor-general of the NEI, on the recommendation of Antoine Lipkens, then royal advisor on the state purchase of technology; both were key to the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1842 as noted above (Fasseur 1993: 101–30; Leidelmeijer 1997: 115–45). Lipkens recommended that the steam-driven vacuum pans first manufactured in France and Belgium in 1838 by the French firm Derosne and Cail be adapted from the European beet sugar industry. Baud first mandated the use of this equipment in four sugar contracts granted to prominent NEI civil servants after 1840. Paul van Vlissingen and A. E. Dudok van Heel, principals of the partly state-owned “Royal Factory for Steam and Other Implements,” also sought to develop their own version of the vacuum pans and were granted a sugar contract near Surabaya to test them in 1844 (Leidelmeijer 1997: 152). These appear to have been less efficient, however, so they thereafter incorporated in partnership with Derosne and Cail in 1846 to manufacture their vacuum pans in Amsterdam. The Royal Factory was granted a fifteen-year monopoly to supply all the machinery used for sugar production in Java (Fernández-de-Pinedo et al. 2014: 8: Clement and Onderwater 1990: 117). A second key figure in this technological renewal was Gerrit-Jan Mulder. Mulder, we saw, was a key figure in establishing the conservative political philosophy of the Royal Academy, which prioritized applied science. The NHM turned to Mulder, a chemist, during the 1840s to develop the standard scale and methods for measuring sugar quality, the means by which it could measure improvements in production (Leidelmeijer 1997: 173). As will be shown, the ability to make such measurements efficiently was key to the cost accounting of the Cultivation System, including the amounts paid to manufacturers by the NHM for their refined sugar, as well as the crop payment (plantloon) paid to Javanese growers. Singerman asserts that the search for purity “under the banner of ‘reason,’ [resulted in] systems of measurement [that] were progressively redefined in ways that tended to disadvantage groups like sugar factory workers, and to favor certain holders of political and economic power” (2015; 784). This “impartial” technical standard gave the NHM one-sided power in establishing the lucrativeness of a sugar factory, of its ability to fulfill its contractual obligations. “Purity” was a critical tool to the successful commodification of sugar and of establishing a stable price for variably sourced products; it is hence an excellent example of governmentality, of a tool for managing the “conduct of conduct” of sugar refiners from a distance.4 The Dutch use of this technology in Java preceded its use in the Caribbean by decades. Under Mulder’s influence, Baud was convinced to establish a government chemical laboratory in Java under the direction of Mulder’s student, P. F. H. Fromberg, to test the improvements recommended by Mulder and the Ministry of Colonies’ other advisors. In an effort to boost yields, Fromberg was to test a variety of cultivation techniques, cane varieties, fertilizers, and eventually a new sugar cane press developed by Mulder (Leidelmeijer 1997: 193–226).

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Four trial sugar contracts containing the new requirements, but offset by massive loans, were issued between 1840 and 1844; the qualified success of these operations led to the creation of a new “model contract” in 1847, which made the new requirements standard. The first two contracts were granted in 1840 to the patrician-born retiring military administrator of the NEI, Theodoor Lucassen, who received a f 555,000 startup loan, and to the retiring resident of the Priangan regency and newly minted aristocrat O. C. Holmberg de Beckfelt, who received a f 488,000 loan (Leidelmeijer 1997: 150; Knight 2014: 142). The two had investigated the Derosne and Cail works in France accompanied by Hubertus Hoevenaar, a Belgian-trained engineer, who also traveled with them to operate Lucassen’s factory in Java; Hoevenaar was a relation of Lucassen and later married Holmberg’s daughter. A third contract went to C. F. E. Praetorius, the recently retired director of cultivations (the man responsible for managing the Cultivation System), who received f 428,435 in order to upgrade the Phaiton sugar factory in the nearby Oosthoek. The last contract went to William Stavers, a holdover from the British interregnum who had earned the state’s loyalty during the Java War; he was the proxy of Dutch interests including an incumbent NEI civil servant (a Dutch aristocrat thought to be blackmailing the king), and a shady repatriated “sugar lord” (Knight 2014a: 146–47). They received a loan of f 673,368 to establish the “Koning Willem II” factory near Surabaya. For technical assistance they drew on Stavers’s recently immigrated brother, Thomas, who had established a machine works with a f 12,000 loan from the state (Knight 2014a: 83, 142). The new contracts required that 70 percent of the sugar delivered to the government be of standard 17 or higher (15 to 20 percent higher-quality sugar than the average for Java); should this standard be maintained, the contractors would be paid more. To ensure quality, all sugar was to be inspected by agents of the NHM on delivery to government warehouses. As a model factory, Lucassen also had to open his doors to other interested parties. Importantly, he was required to prepare and publish a report on the production process and the attendant costs of each subsidiary process; an early example of cost accounting (Leidelmeijer 1997: 162). Due to a series of insurmountable obstacles, including shipwreck, Lucassen and Holmberg were unable to begin production until 1843 (two years after Diard’s model factory had begun production). While their production that first year uncovered a series of necessary technological adjustments, they were soon reaching and exceeding the specified quality targets, as well as producing them in larger amounts. Their detailed production reports also revealed significantly decreased costs for fuel and labor (Lucassen 1846). With this success in hand, the Ministry of Colonies continued to drive the process of technological renewal and its resultant increases in production and cost competitiveness. These technological innovations were introduced as the old sugar contracts came up for renewal and made standard in a new model sugar contract in 1847. By 1847, when the new “model contract” was introduced, eleven of the ninety-six sugar factories in Java had already upgraded to the new technology;5 by 1851 a further

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fifteen contracts were signed (Fasseur 1975: 68); and by 1857, fifty-six had upgraded (Leidelmeijer 1997: 152). In these new model contracts, the NEI state mandated modernized production methods but significantly refused to provide the startup capital as it had in the past (among other reasons, this was to discourage the “wrong kind” of person from seeking a contract); this created a new need for investment capital that was difficult to fill since the sugar contractors did not own the fields from which they obtained their cane, and hence they had little collateral. Of equal importance, however, the new contracts also sought to incentivize higher production of better quality sugar by opening up a parallel private market. The model contract allowed manufacturers the free disposal of up to a third of their production on condition that the remaining two-thirds delivered to the government at cost was of good or very good quality (Fasseur 1975: 70–73). As we shall see, the need for capital combined with this new private market in sugar opened the door for the new crédit mobiliers, and the shift to corporate governmentality over the industry. Other methods softer than technology were also used to increase the efficiency of production. The plantloon paid for cane was now on a sliding scale so that the higher the productivity per bouw of land, the lower the price paid to farmers per additional pikul of refined sugar for the cane; this one-sidedly benefited the sugar manufacturers. And lastly, they dropped the price the government paid for these contracted deliveries below that of most current contracts (Fasseur 1975: 70). In other words, the contracts were an attempt to discipline the manufacturers to adopt modern production methods to maximize output, such that they could fulfill their contractual sugar delivery obligations at a lower price yet obtain greater profit on any amounts they produced over those obligations. Given the contractually fixed low prices paid by the state, this was by no means the application of market discipline as demanded by liberals. Indeed, this discipline can be fruitfully compared to that applied to Javanese peasants under the Cultivation System, or the “philanthropic” textile producers in the eastern Netherlands. In both cases, the state determined production techniques and administratively set prices and production goals while offering bonuses for production over these minimum targets as a means of promoting efficiency. The Cultivation System can, I argued earlier, be productively compared to a corporation as defined by the New Institutional Economics as a nexus of contracts in an internal market. The few new model contracts issued after 1847 were not put out to public tender but continued to be issued privately to existing contractors and government favorites (Fasseur 1975: 154). These favorites included Frederik s’Jacob, who had accompanied his uncle, Governor-General J. J. Rochussen, to Java in 1845 as an adjutant; Rochussen was said to have personally provided the capital for the factory. As we shall see in chapters 8 and 9, s’Jacob was to be a key player in the crédit mobilier financing the new railways, and was later to become head of the state railway system and an NEI governor-general himself. A second contract went to John Loudon (the founder of a major NEI mining company, the Billiton Maatschappij) who partnered with his brother James (later minister of colonies) and J. H. Cremer.

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As new contracts such as these became public knowledge, the expansion of the Cultivation System became a political football in parliament in 1853; the newly installed conservative government thus postponed this discussion by placing a moratorium on new contracts pending the results of a major inquiry—the Umbgrove Commission—on existing conditions in all the sugar factories that was not completed until 1858 (see below); this commission significantly ignored the factories themselves to focus on the effects of sugar production on Javanese peasants. Between 1853 and 1860, the number of factories remained fixed at 96, utilizing approximately 40,000 bouw (28,000 hectares) to refine about 875,000 pikuls (54,250 metric tons) of sugar, for which the government paid a fixed price of f 10 per pikul (62 kilograms). The NHM resold the sugar at auction in Amsterdam for an average of f 29.72 per hundred kilos between 1850 and 1854, and f 41.31 between 1855 and 1859; earning the state f 700,000 annually until 1854, rising to f 7,000,000 annually thereafter (Fasseur 1975: 159). This signifies a remarkable turnaround for the state exchequer and a promising success for the royal technocrats (see table 0.1), as well as a resounding rebuttal to the Liberal critiques of those moribund sinecures, the “sugar lords.” Liberals had long criticized the process by which contracts to establish sugar factories were granted to royal favorites, pointedly dubbed the “sugar lords” (Hudig 1886). In the grand liberal metanarratives of the period, the Cultivation System was marked by gross inefficiencies due to absentee owners, who left production to incompetent Asian managers, as well as to its dependence on forced crop deliveries by Javanese peasants. These sugar lords were characterized as sinecures living in “quasi-princely style,” whose wealth was gained through “privileged connections to the state rather than through entrepreneurial capacity or industrial expertise” (Knight 1999a: 78). This critique was distorted although substantially correct, as the NEI government had revoked its unprofitable earlier contracts with small-scale Chinese manufacturers (175 of 180 contracts in 1833) and subsequently conveyed them to former NEI state and army bureaucrats to whom it granted substantial financing for large-scale, modern refineries using steam-driven machinery designed for the European beet-sugar industry as we have seen (Leidelmeijer 1997: 115–17); this transition actually represents, in other words, the introduction of Willem II’s technocratic rule of experts (many of whom, we have seen, were already of regent stock before they became sugar lords). If the Cultivation System is considered a “private estate of the Crown,” then the use of regent bureaucrats is predictable.

Rule by Force Although the “rule of experts” produced vast improvements in the efficiency of the sugar industry, it is important to underscore that this increase in profitability was at peasant farmer expense. Just as the engineers were expected to coax improvements in productivity from their vacuum pans, the other graduates of the Royal Academy, the civil servants of the Binnenlands Bestuur, were expected to enhance the cultivation

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of sugar cane within the bounds of “traditional” Javanese village society. It is again necessary to underscore the transformation that “culture” undergoes as it becomes a key site of governmental intervention; this particularly modern social formation was draped in a “discursive traditionalism” that appeared to resonate with the past but served to introduce new production demands (Kahn 1993). The BB was to thus improve its supervision of the “traditional” countryside and increase cane production through a colonial “project of knowledge,” the Umbgrove Commission, already noted. The commission was meant to “catalogue the countryside” and impose a more legible order, allowing for greater central recording and monitoring (Knight 2005: 545–47). The ultimate profitability of the sugar industry did not lie in technical solutions alone. The industry’s relatively meager contributions to the treasury before 1854, combined with the threat by the Liberals to introduce free labor policies to the colony, led the Conservatives to launch this major review of the Cultivation System once they resumed governance from the Liberals after the April Movement of 1853; in so doing, they were able to gain time and quiet opposition until their reforms produced results (Knight 2005). The commission, known after its lead investigator, Gerhard Umbgrove, an inspector of cultivations in the Office of the Director of Cultivations, was charged with comprehensively documenting the sugar industry under the Cultivation System, especially its relations with the Javanese; the commission collected “cartloads” of material that took a further two years to summarize in one massive final parliamentary report (Fasseur 1975: 101; Umbgrove 1962–63; ARA 2.10.11). It is important to emphasize the role of the Umbgrove Commission in the larger context of Conservative party attempts to reform—and preserve—the Cultivation System from these perceived Liberal threats. The commission thus served an important role in setting the boundary between the civil service and the “economic realm,” that is, in producing a “state effect” that further reified the market metaphor at the core of the Cultivation System (Mitchell 1999). Parliamentary critique of the Crown definition of the colony as a “winstgebied” (territory for profit) played on how little profit it made and raised new concerns about “native welfare” (Fasseur 1975: 142ff.). The Umbgrove Commission was to survey the disparate conditions in the multifarious existing contracts for sugar manufacture and to make recommendations for the standardization of the industry in order to subject it to more refined control by the experts of the Office of the Director of Cultivations; importantly, when Umbgrove completed his report in 1860, he was promoted to director of cultivations (Knight 2005: 561–62). The report and its recommendations were also an integral part of Minister of Colonies Charles Pahud’s planned changes to the constitution of the Netherlands East Indies made necessary by the new 1848 Liberal constitution. The new NEI Regeringsreglement (Fundamental Law) was introduced in 1854 and shifted the colony from executive rule to rule of law, thus seeking to isolate the state from royal economic initiatives. This significant transformation, however, left many important questions to be settled by later “general regulations” (algemeene verordeningen), which could be

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passed by law or royal decree (Furnivall 1976: 158). The Umbgrove Commission was thus intended to prepare the recommendations for just such a “general regulation” on the future directions of the sugar industry. The “general regulation” that emerged from the Umbgrove Commission would ultimately serve to defend the critical role of the state in protecting the welfare of the Javanese from unfettered Liberal exploitation, hence indirectly ensuring the continuation of the Cultivation System for another decade. The commission’s remit thus focused on all aspects of the cultivation of cane, and not on the manufacture of sugar; although the commission produced a monograph on each sugar factory, its central concern was on the variety of contractual obligations of the state, manufacturers, and Javanese in relation to cane growing and their social and economic implications for Javanese livelihoods and welfare. The commission was thus concentrated on the reform of the Binnenlands Bestuur, the civil servants charged with marshaling Javanese land and labor for the sugar industry, which helps explain the consistent tension between them and Umbgrove (Knight 2005: 554ff.). Umbgrove was largely dependent on figures provided by these civil servants and their Javanese intermediaries, but the double checks performed by his assistant, who was fluent in Javanese, showed great inaccuracies; the BB insisted, however, on the necessity of turning a blind eye to such glaring omissions as part of their political accommodation with Javanese leaders. Umbgrove’s encompassing “project of knowledge” thus has serious shortcomings as a source of “hard data,” although it remains a revealing archive on relations of production when read with, and against, the grain (Stoler 2009; see Fasseur 1977 for an analysis of the monographs relating to the residencies of Jepara and Besuki). The Umbgrove Commission also elicited strong reaction from the sugar contractors themselves, as a principle recommendation of his report was a new model contract suggesting radical changes. For the first time in the colony, forty-seven (or half ) of the contractors met in a conference in November 1859 in Semarang to prepare a “Memorandum to the King” (1860) to lay out their objections. Rochussen’s nephew, Frederik s’Jacob, published his own recommendations (1859), as did the Liberal sugar contractor I. D. Fransen van de Putte (1860) (who was to become minister of colonies in 1863 to solidify the changes). The “General Principles” on the regulation of the sugar industry were finally issued as a ministerial instruction to the NEI government by Minister of Colonies J. J. Rochussen in 1860, and not as a law as demanded by the colonial opposition; as the new regulations made the sugar contracts less lucrative, public interest in new contracts died off and depoliticized the demands for public tendering, thus allowing the quiet extension of the existing contracts (Fasseur 1975: 175–76, 184). The commission had, to some extent, accomplished its goal of depoliticizing the expansion of the Cultivation System, which now grew in size by almost 20 percent. The “General Principles” ultimately served the status quo and perpetuated the Cultivation System for another decade. Where regulations touched upon the sugar

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manufacturers, they were left tentative and conditional; where they touched on Javanese land and labor, they buttressed the existing use of forced labor. As Burawoy has emphasized, exploitation is not perpetuated in the labor process alone; larger political institutions—the production regime, including civil administration, law, and policing—are required “to reproduce those relations of the labor process through the regulation of struggles” (1985: 87). The “traditional production relations of the Cultivation System had never received any official recognition in the colony’s constitutional regulations until the ‘General Principles’ laid them down in the new legal framework” (Fasseur 1975: 175–84). Nominal crop payments (plantloon) continued to be paid to farmers as a means of paying their land rent. The plantloon continued to be paid on a sliding scale, with the base price now set at a level equal to the average price from an equivalent sized field of rice (the ostensible basis charged for the land rent) paid regardless of the success or failure of the cane crop. In exchange for the guaranteed base price, Javanese planters received only marginal increases for successively higher yields of sugar, with most of the gains remaining in the hands of the manufacturer. Factory labor, as before, was ideally to be “voluntary,” but where that proved insufficient, it was to be provided at the manufacturer’s request by the BB for rates set “according to local circumstances.” In return for these accommodations, the Crown demanded a greater share resulting from increased manufacturing efficiency. The 1847 model contract had set a fixed compulsory delivery figure per bouw of cane, with the remainder at the free disposal of the manufacturer for private sale. This was ideally set at a fixed figure of about two-thirds of their initial production, so that as production became more efficient, most of the new gains in production profited the contractors. The new “General Principles” revised the compulsory delivery to two-thirds of the average of the last three years of production, and should the current years’ production fall below that average, it was the sugar manufacturer who would lose from their share for private sale. In return for this major concession, all of the existing sugar contracts would be extended by ten years and would not be put to public tender as the Liberals had demanded. This final provision ensured the grudging acceptance of the sugar lords and cemented their alliance against the liberals; eighty-eight of ninety-six contractors accepted the immediate amendments to their contracts (Fasseur 1975: 176–82; 1992: 37). By this means, the state increased its share of the total sugar produced by 22 percent between 1862 and 1864. The state further gained in that it could now issue new contracts for areas previously growing indigo, a nonprofitable crop, without general tendering; it was thus able to expand production by sixteen factories. The General Principles thus forged an alliance between all the disparate interests in this governmental assemblage, including its competing bureaucracies in the Ministry of Colonies, the Directorate of Cultivations, the Binnenlands Bestuur, and the sugar manufacturers; all of whom, it would appear, agreed to turn a “blind eye” to the stratagems used by Javanese leaders and their subjects to avoid the more onerous demands placed upon their land and labor. The General Principles cemented

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the production regime in the sugar industry for another decade, perpetuating the earlier system where “communal” villages were economically governed through the disciplinary use of monetary units of account ( plantloon and land rent). The General Principles of 1860 assuaged the golden age of the Cultivation System rather than its nadir, a presumed unprofitability that has generally been cited as the cause for the ultimate elimination of the system after 1870. It was in this period from 1851 to 1870 that the proceeds of the system rose to its highest levels of the Netherlands’ state income (see table 0.2; Fasseur 1975: 118). The “rule of experts” had successfully depoliticized the operations of the Cultivation System. They used technology both to create a more efficient and lucrative industry and to deploy the “spirit of the Crystal Palace” to ideologically differentiate the West from the “traditional” moribund East. The transformation of the sugar industry was a triumph for the Crown and the governing elite trained at the Royal Academy.

Sugar Lords: Incipient Bourgeoisie or Corporate Managers? Historian Roger Knight has persuasively argued that the later liberal parliamentary characterization of the sugar lords as absentee sinecures living in redolent luxury merely “sought to anathematize the Cultivation System and the privilege which it conferred on a discrete sector of (colonial) capital” (1999a: 78–79). He underscores, in contrast, that these enterprises were the incubator of a class of bourgeois salaried managers and of an innovative corporate managerial culture of a distinctly modern type. The “rule of experts” mandated the adoption of new techniques of production by “entrepreneurs” (predominantly former state employees), and these “entrepreneurs” (or gentlemanly capitalists) increasingly left factory administration to engineers (trained for state service but drafted into the management of these factories in the fields). The technocratic approach that resulted served to circulate governmental strategies, programs, and technologies of rule across the public/private divide—established by the 1854 Fundamental Law—between the state and these “private” businesses. While the separation of ownership from management defined a “sinecure” to the Liberals, the separation of ownership from management alternately represents a key development in the organization of the corporation and of corporate governmentality. Knight notes that Dutch Occidentalism came to increasingly emphasize “the machine as the measure of man” to exclude Chinese sugar manufacturers in this period (cf. Adas 1989). The government mandated a shift from Chinese techniques to the European steam-driven methods of production under the new regime of Royal Academy engineer-administrators; these engineers would move from their technical service bureau under the director of cultivations to directly administering “private” sugar factories for their nonresident owners. As Knight notes, “In the Indies, Western domination of production was thus both material and discursive in nature: the machinery and the processes of production were controlled by Europeans, who elab-

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orated around their dominance a view of themselves and of the Asian ‘other’ that was Manichaean in character and increasingly rigid in practice. Sugar production hence took a place in a larger discursive framework in which Western industrial progress was contrasted with a primitive, agrarian East” (2000: 25). This discursive framing was equally strong in the Netherlands itself, as expressed in the development of a royal technocratic bureaucracy and the “spirit of the Crystal Palace.” The experiences of two of the first contractors, the gentlemanly capitalists Thomas Lucassen and O. C. Holmberg de Beckfelt, are typical of this wider pattern produced by the new 1847 model contract. Lucassen had brought engineer Hubertus Hoevenaar from the Netherlands to operate his factory. Hoevenaar, however, married Holmberg’s daughter and managed his factory instead, eventually taking over the concern (Knight 2014a: 164–70). Lucassen thus sent his namesake son Theodoor for engineering training at the Royal Academy between 1846 and 1849 (Caljé 1998: 101–2), and also in 1847 married his daughter off to a government engineer, Gerhardus J. Netscher, who would manage the factory in the meantime. Netscher was one of the first engineering graduates of the Royal Academy, and the son of J. Th. Netscher, the administrator of the national Funds for National Industry used by King Willem to subsidize his favored industrial projects (Bakker 1995b: 101–7). The Royal Factory for Steam and other Implements that manufactured the new Derosne and Cail vacuum pans, for example, had received a f 300,000 investment from the funds. When Lucassen died in 1854, his sons Theodore and Donald took over the ownership and management of his two factories until 1874 when they too repatriated, leaving the factories in the charge of an employee (Knight 2014: 46–50). While Knight is right to correct Liberal aspersions of the sugar lords as mere sinecures and to emphasize their innovative managerial culture, his own conclusion that they were “bourgeois snouts in the trough” may be overstated (Knight 2014: 143). Here, I do not contest the combination of greed and ostentation to which he alludes. Rather, it is the distinctly nonentrepreneurial character of this new managerial enterprise that needs to be underscored; if not entrepreneurial innovation, from where did their management expertise derive? The sugar lords were government contractors who had no say in the location of their factory or direct control of how the sugar cane was grown; they were not plantation owners as were most other sugar producers around the world (Knight 1992: 70). They were guaranteed a fixed price for the sugar they refined regardless of market conditions. Javanese farmers were forced to grow the factory’s supply of cane on their own land, for which they received an equally fixed, nonmarket “price” ( plantloon). The state advanced the plantloon paid to farmers, simply deducting the loan from the amount they paid manufacturers for the sugar on final delivery (and then recouped the plantloon paid to farmers through the land rent). While the manufacturers had to pay the labor “costs” of their factories, these workers were also pressed by government, and only received an administratively set “wage” that bore little relationship to locally encountered wage rates. In other words, the pricing of almost all factors of production were set administratively through the

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contract and enforced by the “traditional” authority of state functionaries within which this “economy” was embedded;6 it was, as Knight declares, a form of “ersatz capitalism” (2014: 138). This, like the cotton-weaving experiments in the eastern Netherlands, was a development project, an “apparatus of security” seeking a capitalist transformation through the disciplinary use of monetary units of account and not a “free market.” This is precisely what makes the new managerial culture of the sugar lords so innovative for the period and helps explain their shift from financial to management accounting. In a capitalist company, the preparation of profit and loss statements are a critical element of financial reporting for the business; these accounts keep track of the market flows of money in and out of the enterprise and are the ultimate concern of the profit-minded entrepreneur. While the sugar lords had similar financial reporting requirements, they also introduced new forms of management accounting meant to gain greater control over the production process and the attendant costs of each subsidiary process. The use of accounting for managerial decision-making rather than financial reporting was an innovation first introduced in this period in new forms of line-and-staff corporate organizations such as railways (Hoskin and Macve 1988, 2000). A rationale for the shift from profit and loss statements produced through double-entry bookkeeping to cost accounting was provided by Van den Bosch as early as 1833 in his summary of his new financial regulations introduced for the Cultivation System: An account of receipts and expenditures as they can actually be supposed to take place, seems far preferable to a calculation of assets and liabilities, because, even if the assets and liabilities correspond to the expenses and receipts, the plan will not cause any difference in the course of business; and if, on the other hand, the liabilities appear less than expenditure, one always runs the risk of falling short, since in the long run one cannot dispose of more money than the receipts yield whether or not this asset or something else is taken. (1863: 405) Cost accounting was one means by which managers could attribute fixed organizational overhead costs to specific production processes as a means of assessing their efficiency. This was a change in business methods; while “cost as a discursive category existed . . . there was no well-established apparatus for operationalizing it.” As these new accounting measures were introduced, “a new organizational economy was forged . . . control at a distance was facilitated. The ‘real’ practices of the costing calculations became less significant than the opportunities for intervening in the name of costs. A reappraisal was made possible of the organization of the manufacturing processes . . .” (Miller and Napier 1993: 641). We can see early evidence of this kind of management accounting and its use in decision-making in Lucassen’s first published report in 1846 on the four factories owned by Holmberg and himself. The article only incidentally covered profits and

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losses; it was focused on managing production so as to meet his contractually stipulated quality targets. This entailed delivering at least 70 percent of his quota at sugar standard 17 or above; he thus concentrated on how this could be achieved with the new steam apparatus despite the highly variable and frequently substandard cane delivered to him. He broke the overall production process into its constituent parts (production lines) and the adjustments and attendant costs needed to improve efficiency, illustrated by detailed comparison of the four factories’ experience with different ratios of cane quality. He commented extensively on the reduced labor and fuel requirements of the new process. Of particular concern were the new assay methods to measure sugar quality being developed in the Netherlands by Gerrit-Jan Mulder; this was the ultimate measure of the efficiency of the production process. The “price” he received at the NHM warehouse depended on their assessment of quality, as did the plantloon paid to the cane growers. The data he derived demonstrated how, in production, the mixing of various qualities of cane could be managed most efficiently at the least “cost” to produce the required amount of high-quality sugar (Lucassen 1846). These kinds of management decisions based upon costing were to become a mandatory exercise in the Javanese sugar industry. Through the terms of its sugar contracts, the NEI state shifted manufacturers’ attention from profit per se to efficiency; sugar delivered to the state was at cost with profits to be made only on the surplus allowed for “private” sale. The state lowered the “price” paid for higher quality sugar, slightly raised the plantloon to paid growers, and incentivized manufacturers by allowing them to sell any further surplus they could produce at free market rates. This was the same contractual strategy utilized by the NHM with the philanthropic fabrikeurs of the eastern Netherlands, by which it had developed an efficient industry that could compete with English cotton. The Javanese sugar industry as a whole, like the cotton industry of the eastern Netherlands, could be made more efficient and lucrative but could never be “profitable” business enterprises in the strict sense; the entire production regime was predicated on hidden subsidies and administratively set “costs.” These “costs” were in administratively determined “monetary units of account” (i.e. not cash; they did not represent a financial report of a market transaction), which were attributed to production processes through managerial accounting practices that used them to measure efficiency. The discursive construction of a “cost” was thus the product of specific knowledge practices (accounting); and these practices selectively included—and excluded—only those chosen factors which directly impinged on the “efficiency” of production. We have already noted for example that the “wages” for Javanese factory laborers were entered as a “cost” in these accounts, but the expenses incurred by the BB and Javanese authorities to compel those workers to labor at that administratively set rate were not; those disregarded costs were “externalized” and costed as the “percentages” paid to government officials by the NHM from the final auction sales of the sugar in the Netherlands. The key discursive process here

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is the “disembedding” of managerial accounts from the uncosted social context— Burawoy’s production regime (1985)—on which production processes depended. Neoclassical economists treated such externalities as examples of “market failure” in which prices fail to reflect “true” costs and therefore lead to inefficiently regulated economic exchange; here we see that such externalities were crucial to the lucrativeness of the sugar industry, and the regulations that created them served to frame that which was arbitrarily abstracted as economic action in these accounts. Polanyi and the substantivist economic theorists cited externalities as indications of the way in which market transactions were embedded in wider social processes that could ultimately have greater impact than the market itself in regulating exchange and, importantly, in redistributing the proceeds of such exchanges. As this example indicates, a great deal of effort went into creating these acts of exclusion; the boundary between the market economy and the social had to be actively constructed through processes such as the Umbgrove Commission. Callon has referred to this entire regulatory process as the framing that defines permissible economic action; such extra-economic framing of economic action consists of “rules, procedures, understanding, constraints, enforcement, and sanction, involv[ing] potential exchanges of its own” (Mitchell 2002: 292). It is thus impossible to correct these externalities as market failures simply by internalizing that cost. All economic action requires some framing precisely because economic discourse sets itself the task of discursively disembedding the economy. The externalization of costs occurred in a number of areas that ultimately impacted the diminishing welfare of the Javanese and were thus made a concern of the Umbgrove Commission; the commission sought to establish and regulate what should permissibly count as a cost in the contracts, hence the concerns and objections of the sugar manufacturers. Question 11 of its survey, for example, investigated the use of village water supplies by sugar cane mills, inquiring whether such use negatively impacted villagers’ cultivation of rice (Umbgrove 1862–63: 11–14). The cost of the damages to rice crops was not included as a cost that sugar manufacturers needed to account for, and hence they regularly monopolized village rivers. Question 4 asked whether land used for sugar cane should be fertilized, and if so, who should pay? Question 10 asked whether the land rent charged on the land used to grow the sugar cane used by the factories should be charged to Javanese “property owners” or the manufacturers; as it stood, “ownership” obligated the Javanese to both pay tax and grow sugar cane, but they were “paid” for an equivalent crop in rice (which they then “repaid” to the state in land rent) and deprived of any other use of “their” land. It was Umbgrove’s attention to these factors—to which they sought to remain blind—that led to the bitter objections of the sugar manufacturers who could see their costs rise by administrative fiat, made worse by its impact on their efficient management of water supplies. It is important to underscore the accounts-based nature of the technology of rule used to manage production in the sugar industry; this was the technology of rule by which participants in the assemblage were held accountable in the larger state-run

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plantation that was the Cultivation System. To characterize these quasi-state functionaries as entrepreneurs misses the means by which their contracts were used to “govern the conduct of conduct.” Manufacturers “paid” Javanese peasants the “price” of their harvest of sugar cane based on an equivalently sized field of rice; but that “money” was actually “paid” by the state, who “loaned” it to the manufacturers; the state “deducted” the “loan” from the “price” it paid manufacturers for the final sugar delivered. Having “paid” the cane growers, the state then “charged” them an equivalent amount in land rent. Each of the transactions indicated by quotation marks was in “monetary units of account” arbitrarily recorded in different sets of account books where they could be charged as “costs” in the different sets of managerial reports used to regulate the various production processes. Importantly, all of these circular transactions effectively canceled each other out; they represent mere traces on paper. Despite that, they did accomplish a disciplinary function used to manage production. Here, I could quote one observer of the accounts-based disciplinary system of the Benevolent Colonies, which, he noted, created a “tidy paper shop” (Windt 1984a: 20). These transactions are typical of the internal sets of accounts used by multiunit corporations by which their “administrative coordination permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms” (Chandler 1977: 6). We must think of the Cultivation System in the same terms as the modern corporation. As a state corporation, it was a multiunit enterprise whose internal accounting replaced actual market transactions between units; all of the prices were in monetary units of account set administratively by state technocrats to allow administrative coordination and the efficient management of production by the Directorate of Cultivations. This kind of managerial accounting is a form of economic governance by which productivity is measured and encouraged, without entering the market. This form of accounts-based administrative coordination, in combination with the separation of ownership and management noted earlier, are two key features of the modern corporation. Whereas most accounts of the development of the corporation also highlight the discursive creation of a private economic sphere within which it operates (as indeed, I also do here), I also wish to underscore the circulation of these technologies of rule within this larger governmental assemblage that spanned that discursive separation.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to document the transformations in one key aspect of the developing assemblage of the Cultivation System: the privatization of economic governance. Under Willem II’s reign, the Cultivation System was transformed by the state technocrats trained in the Royal Academy to become a more efficient state-run plantation. They successfully depoliticized control of the vast wealth produced by sugar manufacturing by rendering the process technical. In this period, contractual relations with the sugar manufacturers were tightened, and greater control was ex-

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erted over all aspects of the production process from cane growing to sugar refining. This discipline was achieved through the use of newly developed forms of managerial accounting, which tracked these production processes and applied discipline to achieve greater efficiencies. These managerial accounts encompassed both the production of cane by Javanese “land owners” “contracted” to grow cane as well as the manufacture of the sugar contracted by the sugar lords. The Cultivation System in this period is an example of corporatization at work; it was an assemblage of contractors constrained by the 1860 model contract to manage through the disciplinary use of accounting to produce greater amounts of more refined sugar at lower cost. Yet I have emphasized that none of these costs were market transactions; the price of those costs was administratively set by the state. These transactions should be treated as the internal accounting measures of a large multidivisional corporation utilizing administrative control in order to achieve economies of scale. This state plantation was conceptualized within the bounds of political economy, with economizing as its aim. Under the ensuing reign of Willem III after the liberal revolution of 1848, aspects of this state-managed plantation were privatized and a conceptual divide drawn between the state and the market. I do not want to overemphasize this transformation as the Dutch liberal opposition has done; despite the new conceptual apparatus being deployed, little changed in the actual operations of the Cultivation System. This privatization strategy was in part driven by the desire to remove the industry from the state budget, and hence liberal parliamentary intervention. The state continued to organize cane production through the application of force and lay increasingly stringent contractual terms on sugar manufacturers; the state plantation was by no means dismantled. In fact, the wealth it generated with the final sale of sugar in the Netherlands made it an indispensable source of revenue for the Dutch state and its infrastructure projects at home as we shall see. However, sugar manufacturers were allowed to dispose of a decreased share of “private” sugar at higher market prices as a reward for producing state sugar at “cost.” As we shall see, this “free market” in “private sugar” led to new forms of economic governance by the crédit mobiliers like the NHM, the Netherlands Indies Trade Bank, and the Internatio (see chapter 8). This additional level of private economic governance by the crédit mobiliers should not be treated independently of the state-production of sugar; rather, it entailed the circulation of the state’s governmental strategies and technologies of rule into the nascent “private” sector. These new banks governed the private sale of sugar as effectively as the state controlled the underlying production processes by which that sugar was produced. The same group of elite regent administrators long associated with the NHM similarly circulated between these two spheres. We shall see the same pattern in the chapter on the development of the Dutch railway corporations funded by the state’s newfound sugar wealth; there, the state built the rail network, and the private sphere provided the rolling stock (chapter 9). This is a cogent metaphor of the state’s economic governance, which determines where the trains will go, with the rail corporations’ efficient administration limited to ensuring the trains arrived on time.

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Notes 1. “Second-class” students who completed the four-year program were eligible to become NEI bureaucrats and largely admitted to the lowest level of controleur. “First-class” students who had completed a degree in law at Leiden University first were admitted to the program’s third year and immediately eligible for the upper levels of the bureaucracy, such as assistant resident and resident (Fasseur 1993: 11). Students were ranked by examination at the end of each year, with the best students directed toward the programs leading to the highest paid jobs in state service (ARA 3.12.08.01, Archive of the Royal Akademie II, F, 53, 54). An 1842 regulation mandated education at Delft to qualify for the Radikaal, for appointment to the bureaucracy, leading to broad objections by the members of the Indies bureaucracy who saw their hopes for their children dashed due to the high costs and lengthy period of separation such education would mandate. Ann Stoler’s treatment of the demonstrations that resulted focuses upon the use of the Radikaal to exclude inlandse kinderen, mixed-race children of long-serving Dutch bureaucrats (2009: 73–102; Fasseur 1993: 116–24), to which this analysis of the preferred regent-class candidates stands as a complement. 2. Mulder was a childhood friend of Gerrit Simons and a staunch critic of Liberal prime minister Thorbecke’s educational policies, which sought to downgrade engineering education to a trade school. Mulder defended the academy and created his own preparatory school for it in Utrecht to stymie Thorbecke’s plans. He and Simons were integral to King and Country (Koning en Vaderland), the organization that brought an end to Thorbecke’s ministry in 1853. 3. These factories were run by the resident, L. Launy, with the help of one controleur per factory. By 1838 Launy had declared the task impossible and was subsequently transferred to Banyumas and knighted for his trouble (Van der Aa 1865: 202). 4. See Mansvelt (1924: 2:161–68, 196–99) for a description of the NHM’s auction system for colonial produce in Amsterdam by which the “value” of qualitatively disparate products was realized through their technical classification in lots and the provision of representative samples (monsters). These efforts effected a recovery in prices threatened by the sudden dumping of a large amount of coffee and sugar in the European market. Mansvelt’s description emphasizes that the “instituted” market process mandated by the NHM put the costs of sorting on the auctioneers, whose brokerage fees were based on the gross sales price. The creation of a standard scale of purity for sugar (from 1 to 21) in 1839 was initially based on color, from brown to white, and simplified the process of providing samples (1924: 2:167). The NHM contracted Mulder to develop a chemical assay scale of purity once it began to auction large amounts of steam-refined sugar and found that the auctioneers were categorizing it as inferior to the sugar produced by Chinese methods. Mulder’s assays allowed them to define the scale in terms of purity, color, and moisture content rather than its characteristic “inner power” used by auctioneers; as Singerman (2015) indicated, the new scale advantaged the NHM. 5. For a list of these early adapters, see Leidelmeijer (1997: 152). 6. I have elsewhere critiqued Dutch colonial characterizations (taken up in Geertz 1963) of Java as a “dual economy,” of separate Dutch capitalist and Javanese “social” economies. There, and here, I have attempted to demonstrate that the “disembedded” capitalist economy is intertwined with and dependent on exploiting “free” peasant resources (such as kin labor) in order to reduce its own costs and maintain its profitability (Schrauwers 1999, 2011).

CHAPTER 6

Weaving an Empire g. & h. salomonson and the “social question”

In September 1872 the former secretary to the board of the state railway company, Hendrik Quack, returned to his old home in The Hague and wandered to a dance hall in an unfamiliar neighborhood to attend the Fifth Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association. In a tumultuous session, the anarchists accused Marx and Engels of authoritarianism for their proposal to commit the International to building political parties to capture state power, leading to a permanent break between the two factions (Quack 1915: 228). A “socialist” who sat on numerous corporate boards, Quack was an innocuous participant; in his then current role as professor of political economy and statistics at the University of Utrecht, he would have been more at home in the influential public meetings of the “Committee for Discussing the Social Question” organized by the left-liberal members of the “Association for Statistics” between 1870 and 1874. This “social” or “laborer’s question” was cogently posed for them by the International’s call for the organization of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism in the committee’s own backyard. The elite Committee for Discussing the Social Question was divided, however, about whether their influential public discussions were for workers or about “the” workers (Bie 2009: 60; Boschloo 1989: 205–6). The committee was born out of the fear of labor unrest; Amsterdam had just experienced a series of strikes through which the host organization for the International’s Congress in The Hague, the General Netherlands Workingmen’s Association (Algemeen Nederlandsch Werklieden-Verbond), was created. In this chapter, I address the transformation of the Dutch cotton industry developed by the NHM in Twente as it led the Dutch industrial revolution and responded to this consequent “social question.” The committee’s discussions on the social question were a renewal of the discourse on pauperism in the Liberal era, an attempt by the nation’s elite to solve the “problem” of the working poor. Indeed, in that earlier discourse on pauperism, the “poor” and “workmen” were considered synonymous in concept and practice. The evolving conceptual differentiation between them in the discourse of political economy now declared wealth the product of “nature,” “capital,” and “labor” (arbeid), thereby mak-

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ing the laborer (arbeider) indispensable in a way the poor were not. The increasing use of the word “laborer” (arbeider) and “working class” (arbeidende klasse) signified, in particular, the new day laborers born of the Netherlands slow and late-blooming industrialization after 1855. Laissez-faire Liberals however, continued to speak of the “poor” and “workmen” (werklieden) and resisted the new language of labor as encouraging communism (Boschloo 1989: 203–7). For these doctrinaire Liberals, “there is no social question, you have no right to speak of Capital, of Labor, of the possessing and the working class, and less yet to speak of them as in conflict with each other” (Pekelharing 1895: 354; Quarles van Ufford 1886). The “social question” had its roots in the new Liberal Poor Law of 1854, which had come to replace the earlier cameralist discourse on relieving the poor represented by Van den Bosch’s Benevolent Colonies. The new Poor Law was ushered in with relatively little disagreement or debate. Orthodox liberals viewed all state welfare efforts as economically and socially misdirected, effectively worsening the situation. They pushed for business-led poverty-reduction solutions like the philanthropic workcreation schemes of the NHM, and the Salomonsons’ new textile mills discussed here. The conservative aristocrats in parliament favored traditional church-based charitable relief and equally objected to secular state intervention. The conservatives believed poverty to be the product of working-class immorality and favored a system of paternalistic moral uplift through “good example” and individual, nonmonetary patronage as exemplified by the “Christian Friends”; this group of Pietist aristocrats emerged from the religious revival led by Willem de Clercq. Both Liberals and conservatives thus objected to any legal provision of poor relief, viewing it entirely as a moral problem. The Poor Law of 1854 restricted state welfare to the last instance (Boschloo 1989: 71–72). When the law passed however, the Netherlands had barely begun to industrialize; G. & H. Salomonson had just completed the country’s first steam-powered cotton mill in 1852. In the following decades, the “moral problem” of the arbeider was increasingly taken up as an academic issue instead. Made aware of the ills of industrialization in foreign countries like England and Belgium, “professorial socialists” (kathedersocialisten) like Quack introduced concerns about the effect of long workdays, unhealthy work conditions, and most especially of child labor on the moral fabric of the nation (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 156–58)—i.e., those issues at the center of biopolitical interventions throughout Europe. It was in this context that the social question was first publicly debated at the Fifth Netherlands Industrial Congress in July 1861. Given the moral upheaval that the industrial revolution engendered elsewhere, these industrialists set the governmental agenda: “Is large factory industry desirable from a social perspective?” Whereas earlier generations had questioned whether the introduction of machinery would deprive the poor of work, this iteration focused on the social and moral situation of a working class shaped by large-scale industrialism. The congress surprisingly rejected laissez-faire disregard and found that “industry must be led in the best tested direction” because there “was still incomplete

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knowledge regarding this sort of industry in our country” (Boschloo 1989: 225). The political fear of restive paupers that had driven both Van den Bosch and De Clercq continued to frame this governmental problem, setting the direction and bounds of this discourse. While the pauper should not be the object of state welfare, industry might still require some form of regulation in order to assure that the poor laborer did not become a threat to society. In this period then, the Liberals had abdicated any form of state welfare and cast poverty as a moral failing to be dealt with by other biopower authorities, and industrialists drawing on the dismal experience of industrialization in other countries were induced to fill the lacunae of state welfare with factory-based solutions that preferably required only an enlightened owner, not legislation (Quarles van Ufford 1886: 13). This thus perpetuated the governmental role of the corporation as the manager of paupers, now transitioning into laborers. Pauper relief in the previous generation had been administered through quasi-state corporations such as the Benevolent Society and the NHM, which provided job creation as a means of disciplining the moral failings of the poor. Similarly, G. & H. Salomonson had been “governmentalized” as it adopted the philanthropic work-creation strategies of the NHM in managing the workhouses of Zeeland. We saw that both forms gravitated toward Jeremy Bentham’s model of a charity company through which the dressage of labor was accomplished and the moral failure of the poor addressed while also producing profits. When the Salomonsons switched to steam-powered production in large-scale factories in 1852 they thus introduced the moral discourse of productive virtue into its management. I would argue that their model industrial factory was exemplary of the new liberal agenda for responding to the emerging social question by moral management through charity companies. In other words, in the process of corporatization, the costs of labor dressage were economized as part of the charity company’s internal economy.1 The “philanthropic” corporation was like the other dispersed agencies of biopower that filled the governmental spaces relinquished by the liberal state, despite now being placed in the private sphere. The example of the Salomonsons is important in two ways. On the one hand, their mill provided a set of paternalistic best practices to be followed by other industrializing cotton manufacturers in the eastern Netherlands, such as C. T. Stork and H. P. Gelderman. These best practices included the provision of worker housing, sick funds, and schools for factory children; they created a “company town” set in the midst of the rural countryside not unlike the Benevolent Colonies or Robert Owen’s model cotton factory at New Lanark in England (Walsh and Stewart 1993). C. T. Stork, an entrepreneurial member of the regent class who started his first factory at age fourteen was to later become an organizer of the Committee for Discussing the Social Question. He argued that the class opposition between capital and labor could be overcome by giving both classes the same goals through profit sharing and management-worker councils, although profit sharing frequently meant little more than piecework payment (Boschloo 1989: 213–19). Their efforts point to the direct

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way in which biopower construed class conflict as a moral problem, a social question to be resolved through nongovernmental agencies (Smit 2015: 366–68). Biopower was here asserted through paternalistic strategies seeking to mold a free labor force within a custodial setting and is thus integral to the class politics of the period. As I will argue, this gave Dutch industrialization a unique path different from the Fordist model. After laying out the governmental techniques by which the Salomonsons organized their rural company town, I draw parallels with the similar strategies used to manage the Javanese peasants coerced into working in the “factories-in-the-fields” in the sugar-growing heartland of Java; with the notable exception of the work of Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (2016, 2019), little comparative attention has been focused on industrial labor regimes in the Netherlands and Java in this period. Despite radically different cultural contexts, industrialization in both regions followed this unique hybrid path that varied significantly from the British and American example. It has long been noted that the Javanese sugar factory worker retained “one foot in the fields” and continued to perpetuate a distinctly “peasant” lifestyle (Knight 1992, 2014: 135–40); this is equally true of the factory worker in the Dutch cotton industry, such that the expected effects of the industrial revolution, i.e. proletarianization in its classic sense, did not take place (Stuurman 1983; Kalb 1997). The resulting workers’ quiescence, the failure to revolutionize like the industry of which they were a part, is the product of this evolving discourse, a discourse marked by the liberal concern to develop “free labor” but in a manner constrained by the fear of the social question, of a free hence self-aware and self-organizing working class. This discourse depended upon two strategies, paternalism and flexible familism. Paternalism and flexible familism, in turn, point to why the discourse on the social question was obsessed with the issue of child labor.

Weaving an Empire The circulation of earlier strategies, programs, and techniques in the discourse for regulating the working poor into new industrial settings is clearly apparent when the Salomonsons became the first cotton manufacturer in the Netherlands to adopt power looms in 1852, more than a decade after they had adopted centralized “factory” production of handwoven cloth in the workhouses of Zeeland. Establishing a steam-driven industrial factory posed new challenges, primarily in terms of profitability; the supposed “industrial backwardness” of the Netherlands was caused less by the “spirit of Jan Salie” and more by the comparatively higher production costs of the “superior” modern mechanized process (Rensen 1982: 109; cf. Mokyr 1976: 106–14). The NHM’s highly successful preference for handweaving in Twente to compete with Manchester’s industrial production indicates the scale of the problem. Mechanized weaving was only competitive if used intensively—which entailed weavers working a thirteen-hour day to cover higher capital costs. Given new farming

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alternatives to wage employment for weavers, the Salomonsons faced a substantial labor recruitment and discipline problem. Their solution to what was construed as the moral problem of the poor was to create a modern company town, Nijverdal, a commercialized Benevolent Colony that recreated most of its organizational and disciplinary features. Pauper relief strategies were now applied to mold a truly industrial working class and not just to instill morality through the regulation of community relations. Nijverdal, no less than the Benevolent Colonies, regulated its workers’ lives through the management of labor, housing, sick pay, and education; these company institutions were adopted by other cotton manufacturers in Twente and were to form the core of the debates on the social question in later decades (Boschloo 1989: 211). The Salomonsons built the Royal Steam Weaving Mill in Nijverdal (Twente) near the NHM’s central warehouse because they wished to produce cambrics, a different, wider kind of cotton cloth than could be made on handlooms (Burgers 1954: 164). These finer pieces of cloth were the basis of the Javanese batik industry, which English mills continued to supply, leaving the Dutch with the low end of the market. Nijverdal had been the site of the NHM’s model factory built by Thomas Ainsworth, but by 1851 the buildings and the surrounding countryside were empty. The location was hardly ideal yet lay on the Regge River, allowing for the relatively inexpensive import of coal and export of cloth. A ready labor supply was not one of the draws of the area. The philanthropic Salomonsons declared to the NHM that the predominant “moral disorder” of the home weavers there was “one of the weightiest reasons why we bought a steam-factory for Nijverdal” rather than turning once more to their earlier proto-industrial strategy (Burgers 1954: 156). In the 1840s, the Salomonsons had faced their own difficulties in disciplining their extensive network of managers and home-based weavers in Twente, their problems including poor workmanship, late orders, and the reselling of yarn that they had largely resolved by centralizing production in the workhouse factories of Zeeland (Burgers 1954: 61–62). They now faced a disciplinary problem of a different sort in recreating the organizational order of the Zeeland factories in Nijverdal with a more recalcitrant labor force. Godfried Salomonson had sent his oldest two sons to Manchester in the 1840s to learn the cotton-spinning trade, and they formed a partnership for the export of thread there; it supplied the bulk of the fine cotton yarn used in Twente. These sons expedited the planning and purchase of English power looms for their father, who imported 360 machines for this new factory in Nijverdal powered by two 30-horsepower steam engines each; these were put into production in 1853. The factory expanded constantly over the next decade so that they had 1,000 power looms by 1871 (Rensen 1954: 171). The Salomonsons’ example was soon followed by others; by 1861 there were 13 factories in the area with 2,286 power looms, and six years later, 34 factories with 7,960 power looms (Stork 1888: 63–64). The number of factories remained fairly stable over the rest of the century, although they varied greatly in size; production was dominated by the five widely dispersed early adopters, including the Salomonsons (977 looms in 1867), H. P. Gelderman & Sons (630), the Scholten

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brothers (800), Van Heek & Co. (660), and C. T. Stork & Co. (120); they accounted for 40 percent of the total power looms between them. The upsurge in the number of factories was largely the result of the construction of a spur line of the state railway through the region in 1865, which radically lowered the import costs of coal and cotton thread (Coronel 1888: 259ff.). The economic challenge faced by the Salomonsons is easily calculated. The cost of weaving a calico was 80 cents, of which 50 cents represented the handweavers’ wages and 22.5 cents that of a power loom worker; but as the power loom worker was twice as productive, they ended up making the same wage at piece rates. The costs of the mechanized factory thus had to be paid out of the 27.5 cent difference between the two piece rates. These factory costs could be brought below that bar only if the power loom operator produced more than 300 calicoes per year, which entailed a 13-hour workday. Handloom weavers, in contrast, worked an average 11-hour day and were free to halt production whenever convenient. The longer workday with no interruptions required by power looms was greatly disliked by workers, resulting in labor recruitment problems and the need to pay higher wages (which necessitated yet more intensive production—and discipline—to compensate); this dilemma is common to Fordist labor regimes. Power loom operators were paid almost 50 percent more, of which one-third represented the extra hours of work (Zanden and Riel 2004: 230–33). A power loom operator of extraordinary skill could manage four machines with the help of a child, earning up to f 6 a week (out of which he had to pay the child f 1.50) compared to the f 3 that a handweaver could make part time during the winter months on their farm. Although the wages were higher than that paid the handweavers, it was not much more than a subsistence wage (Burgers 1954: 172). The heightened need for discipline was initially met by drawing on workers from the Benevolent Colonies and other workhouses as well as on the moralizing discourse on productive virtue perpetuated there (Burgers 1954: 170). Like Willem de Clercq, the Salomonsons carefully tried to avoid the tense class relations typical of the “satanic mills” of Manchester in moving to mechanized factories, and they sought to preserve the paternalistic, welfare policies of the Zeeland workhouses they had been operating for a decade. There are also clear parallels to be drawn between the work discipline and living conditions they provided in Nijverdal and that of the utopian socialist Robert Owen in his model cotton manufactory at New Lanark in Scotland (Walsh and Stewart 1993). The Salomonsons, for example, balanced their strict paternalistic discipline with rental housing, farm allotments, education, and sick pay to tie their workers to the model factory town they were building in the rural countryside. The Salomonsons created a factory-based solution to the moral problem of the working poor along the lines envisioned by the new Liberal Poor Law; the corporate revolution in pauper relief begun by the Benevolent Society now became an industrial ideal, as the governmental costs of labor dressage were internalized within company accounts. The Salomonsons were able to initially draw on the Benevolent Colonies and their Zeeland factories for workers already accustomed to the moralizing discipline of the

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workhouses. They sought families in particular as the lower-waged wives and children assisted men in tending their machines; familial paternalism was thus reproduced on the shop floor as a disciplinary strategy.2 The Salomonsons promised the director of the Benevolent Colonies that “if a family has more able-bodied persons, such as a wife, adult sons or daughters, they can earn f 3 and the younger can earn f 2” (Burgers 1954: 170–72). About 30 families of workers were sent from Frederiksoord, and many of the rest came from the Salomonsons’ workhouses in Zeeland. By 1854 they had a total of 260 workers for 360 machines. This emphasis on hiring families, as we shall see, was a critical means by which they lowered wages while maintaining tight discipline. Industrial wage work was also paired with part-time farming on small allotments, as had been done in the Benevolent Colonies and continued to be the norm in Twente. This combination of paternalism with the familial combination of farm and wage work, or “flexible familism,” was to become typical, as we shall see, of Dutch industrialization (Hendrickx 2001; Kalb 1997. The Salomonsons built 120 two-bedroom houses with gardens for workers in a planned community like Frederiksoord that they rented out for f 0.60 per week (Burgers 1954: 159). Dr. Samuel Coronel, an organizer of the Committee for Discussing the Social Question and advocate for workers’ health and housing later commented that this “oasis . . . lying so friendly on the river Regge, can be called the first attempt at a manufacturer’s healthy philanthropy towards his workers” (1888: 258). The Salomonsons were no doubt drawing on the designs for workers’ housing of a number of charitable building associations, which emerged at this time in the larger cities; their activism led to a Royal Commission by the Royal Institute of Engineers on the design of an ideal worker’s dwelling in 1853. The engineers’ report was part of a larger biopolitical “hygienic” movement of which Coronel (1861, 1875) was a lead by which the lives of workers were to be regularized and disciplined (Koningsbrugge 1990: 43, 48). Its authors included F. W. Conrad and Gerrit-Jan Mulder, both closely associated with the leadership of the Royal Academy. The report both raised a moral panic on working-class iniquity while promising that moral development could be indirectly fostered through housing: Is not the house of the workman often a place . . . where immorality finds its cradle, a locus of disease that affects all classes and spreads desolation in the houses of the more civilized? . . . We are of the opinion that all the attempts to fight the misuse of strong drink and to develop better morals in the lower classes can only bear fruit when they are paired with painstaking care for the residence, for the house of the inferior classes; because that is the seat of the family; there is the place for raising children; there a man must teach his wife to think and love; there is the terrain of his silent consideration and of his moral influence over his brood. (KIVI 1855: 3–4) This effort was itself a local manifestation of an international movement to design the ideal worker’s house as seen at the 1851 London World Exhibition. But in a Liberal

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age, state leadership was rejected and the efforts of private reformers encouraged; factory owners in particular took the early lead (Smit 2015: 138–46). Too often, the biopolitical approach to housing and healthcare fails to address the ways in which these projects were implemented directly by businesses like the Salomonsons and were an integrated part of the larger production regime by which class identity was shaped (Kalb 1997: 91–92). Biopower was thus a technique that directly bolstered workplace paternalism and the disciplinary control of factory owners (Gibbon et al. 2014: 168–69). As noted in discussing the similarly organized Colonies of Benevolence, they “followed five disciplinary models simultaneously: family, army, workshop, school, and judiciary” (Foucault 1977: 293). The pervading paternalism of the household head fostered by these new forms of housing was to be matched by that of the employer who stood as father confessor and strict disciplinarian to his employees; Godfried Salomonson was to tell a state commission on working conditions, “The people are very frank with me, as they know me not only in the factory but in all family issues. As soon as I began my career as an industrialist, I have made it the rule to keep informed on the conditions of their families and have given them both asked-for and unasked-for advice; now they always come to me” (quoted in Schelven 1985). Salomonson thus sat like the director of the Benevolent Colony tallying the various credits and demerits of his workers in a grand moral calculus. As Godfried Salomonson noted, his paternalistic discipline informed all aspects of village life from the uniform workers’ housing, hours of work, and the deductions for rent, school, and sick fund, which were little different from that of Frederiksoord (cf. Windt 1984b: 60–61); as in the Benevolent Colonies, the nominal wages earned were subject to a series of accounting charges with the surplus “saved” for the workers by the factory owner. Each Nijverdal worker had to pay f 0.15 a week per machine operated for the “sick pay fund,” which financed both sick pay and medical care. The fund was managed by the Salomonsons, and it was they who decided if and when sick pay would be dispensed or the doctor called (Burgers 1954: 267). The same fund was used to pay a part-time teacher who gave lessons on Saturday and Sunday nights to the 34 percent of the workers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. This paternalistic care for the employees was encouraged by the NHM, whose agent in Nijverdal approvingly lauded the “industrialists [that] are also interested in the greater development of the intellectual growth of the rising worker family and not just in irrational creatures produced of their own sweat, so that in all cases they think about and plan not just for the workplaces but for the creation of factory schools where youth can exert themselves in education and science” (Burgers 1954: 259). The factory town should thus be considered part of a larger “civilizational project.” A rarely noted additional part of this paternalistic regime (perhaps because it does not fit in standard narratives of the evolution of “worker uplift” (volksverheffing [Smit 2015]) was the inclusion of allotments for small-scale farming with house rental. A multivolume state inquiry in 1890 on working conditions in the cotton mills printed

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verbatim reports of interviews, with more than 80 percent of workers attesting to the continuing importance of farming to their household incomes long after the cotton mills had come to dominate the local economy. Mill worker families maintained minuscule farm holdings of about 0.1 hectare that were worked in their (or their families’) free time from factory work. This pattern, to emphasize, was heavily dependent on child labor in both field and factory for their contributions to family social reproduction. This pattern was stable over time (found equally in first- and second-generation factory workers), with the proportion of time spent farming increasing with age, as now adult children, including unmarried daughters, commenced full-time factory work and parents increasingly “retired” to farming (Heerma van Voss 2004; Hendrickx 1993, 1997, 2001, 2003). The importance of farming to mill workers was summarized best by Hendrik ter Weele Albertszoon, owner of an urban workers housing estate in Enschede that included a 0.1-hectare farm allotment with each house rental. He revealed that the vegetables, potatoes, pigs, and dairy cattle raised on these allotments produced the equivalent of a three-guilders-a-week supplement to factory wages (Hendrickx 2003: 59–65). These worker allotments allowed factory owners like the Salomonsons to cut wages well below the “subsistence” rates of urban areas. The disciplinary edifice of the factory town was completed by the “factory store” and the practice of “forced shopping” (gedwongen winkelnering).3 “Forced shopping” was a common practice in the early nineteenth century in Twente by which cotton manufacturers ( fabrikants) who owned shops forced their employed farm handweavers to spend their wages in their store, usually charging extortionate prices; it was a means of effectively lowering the wages paid (Stork 1888: 33, 36). So too, most of the new steam factories had their designated store owned by the company or a relative, and their employees were paid in “bons” rather than cash, which could only be spent there (Jansen 1995: 93; Brugmans 1929: 141–44; Hesselink 1985). The practice was greatly resented, especially where high prices were demanded for inferior goods. While most critiques (including government inquiries in 1880, 1888, and 1890) focused on the extortionate aspects of the practice, here I underscore its use within the larger disciplinary accounting system of the factory village. The paupers settled at Frederiksoord had similarly been forced to shop at the “colony store” on account, although at “fair market prices”; the comparative significance of the practice lies in the power that forced shopping granted over worker provisioning, not the “fairness” of the price. The Salomonsons opened a cooperative workers’ shop that offered goods at “fair” prices—but the shop was paternalistically controlled by them, including the setting of those prices. In this wider context, forced shopping replaced market-based cash transactions with an accounts-based system in the relatively closed company town economy. It was similar in effect to both the Benevolent Colonies and to the Cultivation System for Javanese peasants. In all of these cases, sets of account books were used to regulate and discipline workers within the all-encompassing “internal market” of the

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“charity company.” The act of forced shopping at a company store was not simply a market transaction but also a form of dressage, of holding the employee accountable and dependent. Factory workers were paid piece rates for the cloth they produced from which was deducted on account their rent for the company house, their health and education charges, and now their store provisions. Access and pricing for all of these goods and services were controlled by the paternalistic employer who with a pen stroke could tighten his economic discipline over the family. The account system also provided the Salomonsons a holistic view of the company town’s economy down to the smallest details. Undisciplined workers might find their request for a doctor declined or themselves homeless. With little cash in circulation and employer-controlled stores, alcohol sales and abuse could also be limited. Paternalistic labor discipline was thus exerted on this broader level and not just on the shop floor. This is, as we shall see in the next section, part of a broader pattern of capitalist accumulation through the control of the “structured totality” of class relationships in the community. The model provided by entrepreneurial frontrunners such as the Salomonsons led to their wide circulation and almost general adoption within the textile industry (Jansen 1995: 90). For example, H. P. Gelderman & Co., who in the 1860s were to become one of the five largest manufacturers in the region, adopted the same paternalistic disciplinary model as did C. T. Stork & Company, their one-time partner. Gelderman’s steam-driven mill in Oldenzaal was noted for its factory school, sick pay fund, and a savings bank for his employees (Fischer et al. 1991: 77–84). Gelderman was no doubt already receptive to these practices due to his family’s long history operating the Oldenzaal workhouse that produced jute sacks for the NHM and with Willem de Clercq’s technical advisor, Thomas Ainsworth. Gelderman bought the workhouse and machinery in 1845 and expanded handwoven production between 1854 and 1860 from 535 to 1,000 looms by buying out other smaller manufacturers (Fischer et al. 1991: 50). When the American Civil War created a “cotton famine,” Gelderman’s large stock of unsold cotton increased tremendously in value, at last giving him the capital to mechanize his mills in 1861 (although he also continued to employ handweavers for another decade [Fischer et al. 1991: 76]). With 660 power looms, Gelderman’s factory employed almost one-third of the town of Oldenzaal. It was in this period that C. T. Stork, another prominent Oldenzaal factory owner, was to declare that the cotton industry eliminated the long lines of beggars that had existed in the town and that “the giving of alms was no longer necessary” (Stork 1888: 24). During the 1860s, Twente became the center of the Dutch industrial revolution, although it took a form that diverged significantly from that of the British and American example (Zanden 1996; Wintle 2000). The largely rural nature of Dutch cotton production gave rise to small company towns that controlled all aspects of worker social reproduction. Given this disciplinary apparatus, the general worker acquiescence of this period is of little surprise. Dutch Liberalism had encouraged business to deal

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with the tricky operation of training paupers into laborers and thus securitizing the state from the restive poor. Their success in this regard made the subsequent concern in the 1870s for the social question somewhat surprising. As we shall see, the social question was raised less by the problem of restive workers than by academics and businessmen seeking to circulate these disciplinary strategies more broadly and to influence potential legislation that might seek to regulate it.

The “Social Question” The Salomonsons’ steam mill illustrates how the paternalistic, moralizing discourse of workhouse pauper relief was perpetuated in the early Liberal era through its application by factory owners, not government. Their assemblage of disciplinary technologies circulated widely in the region by means of the chambers of commerce and industry conferences through which the social question was posed and discussed. An example of the continuing circulation of this discourse can be found in the career of Charles T. Stork, a prototypical model of the philanthropic gentlemanly capitalist. Stork was a key figure in the development of the new steam-powered cotton industry in Twente, having been inspired by the 1851 London Exhibition to establish a machine works for the production of steam engines in the small but central village of Borne. He was also involved in a cotton mill, a spinning factory, and a rail company for which he was knighted in 1862. He was first selected as a senator representing the province in 1867 (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 185–86). Stork downplayed his regent family background and family ties with the NHM and chose to portray himself as a precocious entrepreneur, a staunch Liberal, and a “socially minded employer” who advocated management-worker councils (Hoogenboom 2003: 66). The doctrinaire Liberalism that led him to oppose legislation regulating child labor in the senate because it intruded on the rights of employers was offset by his paradoxical leadership in the Committee for Discussing the Social Question concerned with ameliorating that problem. Stork’s involvement in the development of the Liberal discourse on the social question illustrates how these two positions combine in corporate governmentality. Stork’s autobiography highlights the liberal trope of the rise of meritocratic entrepreneurial talent. Stork’s father was from a local regent family; he was a minor government official who had served as both mayor and postmaster of Oldenzaal and was partner in a small handweavery. He had eight children. When son Charles finished school at age fourteen in 1836 his father provided him with a f 2,000 loan with which to start an unmechanized factory (weeflocaal) that hand-produced cloth on contract for G. & H. Salomonson (Stork 1888: 53). The enterprise was short-lived. Stork was unable to obtain independent contracts with the NHM and thus ceased production during the famine crisis of 1847, becoming instead the postmaster of Oldenzaal. After traveling to the World Exhibition in London in 1851 with his two younger brothers and his brother-in-law, he also toured English textile factories while there. Inspired by the industrial vision portrayed in the Crystal Palace, Charles convinced

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his father to send his brother Coenraad to the Royal Academy to study engineering, and partnered with his other brother and brother-in-law to set up a new mechanized textile plant on the English model in the small village of Hengelo near Oldenzaal in 1853. By 1857 Coenraad returned and established a machine works in partnership with Charles for the manufacture of steam machinery. In 1860 Charles partnered with another manufacturer, H. P. Gelderman, and the mayor of Oldenzaal to build a steam-powered spinning factory there. The same year he joined the Salomonsons and Gelderman to form a company to build a spur line of the state railway through Hengelo where the factories and machine shop lay to link with a German railway to Salzburg. Another brother-in-law, R. A. de Monchy, son of the president of the NHM also set up a steam-powered spinnery there in 1867. By the time he became a senator in 1867, C. T. Stork & Co. was at the center of the technological innovations sweeping the textile industry (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 185–86). Stork’s doctrinaire entrepreneurial Liberalism was tempered, however, by his moralistic concern for the social question. At age twenty, the young factory owner read the internationally bestselling novel Les Mystères de Paris (1843) by the French noble and socialist writer Eugène Sue, which he was to later cite as his inspiration to create a just factory where “everyone came to their own” (Bakker and Berkers 1995: 185). The novel, one of the earliest instantiations of “bleeding-heart Liberalism,” recounted the life of a Saint-Simonian-like noble (or more likely Sue, and by extension Stork himself ). The novel’s sensationalist accounts of the travails of the working classes emphasized the importance of bourgeois noblesse oblige in resolving the social problems of the “deserving poor” to restore social harmony (Tannenbaum 1981: 494ff.). This hero founds a model farm on the same principles as the Benevolent Colonies, which he cites as a prototype (Tannenbaum 1981: 507): “We will send away lazy beggars but we will always give the charity of work to those with the heart for it; this charity does not humiliate the one who receives it and profits the one who gives it; the rich person who does not provide it is a bad rich person” (Tannenbaum 1981: 500, my emphasis). From youth, Stork was infused with this sense of noblesse oblige by which an employer’s offer of work could be equated with offering alms, a charitable act driven by moral, not economic, concerns. Hence, he later argued that the employer should want to be something other and better than the unrestrained ruler of his kingdom, the unaccountable owner of a beautiful estate; he manages but must take into account the effect his management can have on the whole society whose interests he can help or hinder through his actions; he is steward of his property, over which he can exercise only limited rights. Subordinates, for their part, must see more in the business for which they work, and off which they live, than the opportunity to earn their wage: they must view it as theirs and defend its interests as their own. Where a spirit of cooperation exists, we need not expect a dark future and can foster the hope of social transformation without great shocks. (Stork 1890: 112)

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Stork’s emphasis on his moral responsibility for leadership of the community rephrased opposed class interests in the Saint-Simonian language of the “politics of production.” There are also clear ideological intersections to be drawn here with the paternalism of the Salomonsons and the aristocratic revivalists, the Christian Friends. Stork shared these paternalistic concerns on the national stage after he joined the “Statistical Association of the Netherlands” in 1867, the same year that he became a senator. His interest in statistics was clearly governmental, although it came under the Liberal dictum of “no state intervention,” hence the voluntary nature of the association. In this period, the Liberals held a “strange contradictory position . . . in favor of administrative statistics, opposed to government social surveys, and appreciative of private statistical research” (Klep 2008: 263). The association had been formed a decade earlier by a small group of Liberal academics led by Simon Vissering who wished to bring a more mathematical approach to the study of political economy (Stamhuis 1989: 154–59). By 1867, the association’s membership of about 166 was dominated by academics and government bureaucrats leavened by significant groups of medical doctors like Coronel and industrialists like Stork and G. Salomonson (Stamhuis 2010: 13). Stork was drawn in, no doubt, by the expansion of the association’s activities in 1865, when it began to organize yearly gatherings on statistical subjects “relevant to the everyday life of the population” that would offer greater insight on “the situation of the working class” (Stamhuis 2010: 11; Boschloo 1989: 231). It was in this forum that the social question first received regular treatment; the first subjects included workers’ associations and the living conditions of factory laborers. This forum’s popularity gave birth to a loose left-liberal electoral association, the Committee for the Discussion of the Social Question, that rejected the orthodox Liberal proscription on governmental intervention in poverty relief. They were adherents of the emergent German historical school of economics and were derisively referred to as a group of “professorial socialists” (kathedersocialisten) by orthodox Liberals, although they were more sociologists than socialists. Their meetings were organized around topics that were to be debated in parliament, although they specifically precluded debate on the extension of the franchise. Between 1870 and 1874 the committee organized seven large open meetings that were widely discussed in the press on topics such as child labor and the length of the workday. Public interest in the social question was spurred by the first large-scale strikes in Amsterdam and the formation of the General Netherlands Workers Union (ANWV, Algemeen Nederlandsch Werklieden-Verbond) in 1871 which grew to 12,000 members in 123 associations by 1874. It was the ANWV that had organized the Fifth Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association at The Hague with which this chapter began. The public debates of the committee were in large part helpful in bringing the ANWV within the progressive liberal fold through shared leadership (Hoogenboom 2008: 74–75; Boschloo 1989: 206–11). The rapid bloom in the labor movement and hence interest in the social question came to an equally rapid end shortly thereafter because the Netherlands ostensibly lacked a heavy industrial economic base to feed it (Boschloo

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1989: 233–34). Large-scale factory production was largely restricted to the still new textile industry in the eastern Netherlands. It is important to underscore that although the committee made modest efforts to engage workers, the meetings were conducted by an elite to discuss the working class as it was then in formation; it was a response to the 1861 Netherlands Industrial Congress appeal that “industry must be led in the best tested direction” because there “was still incomplete knowledge regarding this sort of industry in our country” (Boschloo 1989: 225). A series of best practices, such as the provision of sick pay, savings banks, housing, work hours, and the right to strike were widely discussed; but as the debate on child labor made clear, the adoption of such best practices was left to the discretion of the individual factory owner, and all prescriptive legislation was to be avoided (Kerdijk 1878). Concerns about the effects of child labor had been the subject of parliamentary debate before, including a “State Commission to investigate the condition of children working in factories” in 1863 whose results were published in five volumes of detailed medical statistics between 1869 and 1873 just as the Committee for the Discussion of the Social Question was taking up the issue.4 The state commission’s aim was to determine whether a ban on child labor would improve the conditions of the working class. It was notable for being the only social survey undertaken by the state until 1886 and arguably undertaken only because the government felt the results would confirm its noninterventionist policy. While not declaring factory children to be either bodily or morally healthy, the commission found they were no more unhealthy than children working at domestic or farm work, and no more likely to have illegitimate children or be publicly drunk. The Liberal government of the day thus concluded that state intervention would have no effect or could potentially worsen the situation by depriving parents of their children’s wages while replacing the parents’ moral authority with that of the state (Klep 2008: 266–67). This conclusion, as we shall see, was less definitive than would at first appear, since these children were involved in both industrial and farm labor from an early age, leaving only the conclusion they were “neither bodily or morally healthy” (Hendrickx 2003: 63). Nonetheless, the study was used to confirm the Liberal laissez-faire bias against the arbitrary legal regulation of private business. That child labor should be at the center of this governmental debate is no accident.5 Child labor was highly contentious for factory owners precisely because it was so central to factory operations. Child labor allowed adult workers to tend more machines and utilized parental authority to maintain discipline. It was felt that children needed to be exposed to the demands of factory life early so that they would become acclimatized to it. Opposition was voiced by medical doctors such as Coronel (1861) who were quick to point out the pernicious effects of factory work on child health. The Catholic hierarchy objected to the provision of secular education in factory schools (Burgers 1954: 260). As a result of the report and opposition to it, the debate shifted from whether (or not) child labor to when they could be safely introduced to

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factory work and these ills avoided. Charles Stork thus felt no contradiction between his desire to improve the conditions and education of factory children and his objections in senate against the 1874 child labor law that banned children under twelve from factory work; he felt such decisions should be left to the individual discretion of the factory manager who knew the situation best. The commission’s focus on child factory labor obscured an important aspect of the larger strategy of labor management pursued by the mills; the commission failed to note that the labor of children was equally important to families in their parallel farm activities by which they sought to provide their own subsistence given the extreme low wages. This pattern of “flexible familism” was a traditional local form of social reproduction and alternately a company human resource management strategy (cf. Kalb 1997: 90–91). Low wages were made possible by the traditional forms of household economizing in the region, which had paired subsistence agriculture on small plots with the pooling of incomes from cash-generating employment like handweaving—frequently by children, including unmarried daughters (Hendrickx 2003: 64).6 The new industrialized factories could expand only because the continuing subsistence agricultural activities of its rural employees provided them with low wage workers who could survive frequent economic downturns without overly testing the paternalistic welfare practices of their patrons. While this pattern of flexible familism helped ideologically preserve paternalistic employer welfare practices from challenge, it more importantly utilized and strengthened familial paternalism (Gibbon et al. 2014). In particular, the policy of using not just “child labor” but “family” members, i.e. wives, sons, and daughters, in the factories made that labor more dependable; they could be paid less and were more quiescent due to their dependent status in both home and factory. Familial paternalism thus reinforced employer paternalism. As long as family heads remained employed in hard times, women and children could return to farm work, and the myth of employer paternalism could be maintained (Kalb 1997: 90–91). As we shall see, the pattern of labor recruitment and utilization in Dutch cotton mill towns can be productively compared with the Javanese sugar factory’s dependence on the “childlike respect” of peasants for their “customary authorities” and flexible familism (Elson 1986: 140). The discourse of productive virtue in the workhouses of the Benevolent Society and the Twente cotton industry were similarly dependent upon “respect” for local Dutch regents. The paternalism of these labor regimes needs to be more carefully situated in factory strategies of flexible familism—and thus requires a more careful examination in the distinctive form of the Dutch industrial revolution, both at home and in the colony.

“Flexible Familism” in Metropole and Colony Unlike the English or Belgian cases, the slow emergence of Dutch industrial capitalism was not “revolutionary” and hence followed an alternate hybrid trajectory that placed “factories in the fields” and resulted in a persisting peasant agricultural sphere

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whose laborers had (only) “one foot in the factory” (Zanden 1996; Wintle 2000).7 Given the social and governmental similarities between metropole and colony, we should not be surprised to find a similar situation in the Javanese sugar industry, which had introduced steam-driven refining to the countryside under state direction earlier and to a broader extent than at home (Knight 1992; Geertz 1963). Under the impetus of the new liberal constitution, both territories saw a shift from cameralist “forced labor” production regimes managed by quasi-state corporations to “free labor” corporate regimes that continued under the paternalistic guidance of regent elites. As we have explored, the emergence of “free labor” in this period sparked a new governmental concern in both territories: “the” social question on the best practices for managing those pauper/peasants who had been transformed into a potentially dangerous class of arbeiders (laborers) that industrialists could not do without. The Dutch response to that social question in these “unrevolutionary” rural industrial regions combined the paternalism of disciplinary factory regimes like those just discussed with its worker doppelgänger, flexible familism. Analysts have long noted the use of paternalist strategies like those just noted for the Twente cotton manufacturers in the Javanese sugar industry, which was itself held out as an unusual example of hybrid development in the context of the global sugar industry (Knight 1992, 2014a: 135–40). The sugar factories retained a symbiotic tie with those rural Javanese villages that provided both agricultural and factory workers such that Geertz differentiated the Javanese case from other colonial plantation economies, because the Javanese cane worker remained a peasant at the same time that he became a coolie, persisted as a community-oriented household farmer at the same time that he became an industrial wage laborer. He had one foot in the rice terrace and the other in the mill. (1963: 89) As in the Dutch case, Javanese factory workers were predominantly rural holders of marginal or no landholdings: they were sharecroppers and other village dependents for whom even the less-than-subsistence-factory wages paid to women and children became essential familial resources to supplement their farm incomes (Elson 1994: 209–18). Geertz argues that their trifling wages subsidized the perpetuation of the “traditional” peasant household, land tenure, leadership, work organization, and crop regimes in an age of diminishing prospects caused by the factory’s appropriation of a third or more of the village land for the cropping of cane.8 He dubbed this process of creative redeployment, the almost baroque reproduction of “traditional” village peasant institutions on a smaller and more refined scale, as “involutional.” Benjamin White notes that since traditional production techniques were intensified not replaced, involution should be contrasted with evolution (the emergence of new forms) and revolution (an abrupt radical change) (1983: 20); involution is thus the opposite in technique of a green revolution (meant to forestall a “red” revolution), but the same in effect. This process trapped increasingly impoverished Javanese peasants in

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the “traditional” village-based ties of patronage through which their labor was regulated so that “the problems posed by a rising population, increased monetization, greater dependence on the market, mass labor organization, more intimate contact with bureaucratic government and the like” did not result in “a dissolution of the traditional pattern into a ‘rural proletarian’ anomie, nor yet by a metamorphosis of it into a modern commercial farming community” (1963: 90). However, Geertz’s formulation of this dynamic, of a uniform peasant class with only one foot in the factory, is a subtle misrepresentation of labor relations in the sugar villages. Kahn argues that the ambiguous role of capitalism in peasant production means that we should not “rely on characterizing rural relations solely in terms of class (in the classical Marxist sense) or in terms of the survival of precapitalist traditions. Instead, rural [class] differentiation . . . has to be conceived of as a modern process, in which traditionalization and modernization are inseparably intertwined” (1993: 62). That is, all peasants, even those who continue to utilize “traditional” or involuted techniques, must adapt to changing circumstances in order to do so. He thus differentiates this “discursive traditionalism” entwined in capitalist production from its now unmarked precapitalist antecedent (Kahn 1993: 65). I would further conclude that the discursive invocation of “tradition” is itself part of the technocratic ideology by which the Dutch sought to depoliticize colonial rule and “other” an industrialized farming community little different from that developing at home. As already noted, sugar factory workers were predominantly holders of marginal or no landholdings from adjacent villages, or they were migrants and transients. This emergent landless proletariat was purposefully granted small plots of land—conditional on their labor in the factories—in order to control their labor, augment their incomes, and lower the costs of their social reproduction. Poor peasants from adjacent villages continued to find their access to land controlled by “traditional” authorities who thereby gained the ability to dispose of their labor. Migrant workers were settled in labor compounds on the factory grounds, frequently with their families, and granted small plots in neighboring villages. These compounds facilitated labor recruitment, and the subsidiary fractional wages of wives and children further lowered factory labor costs (Elson 1986: 148–51; Knight 1992). In both cases, the involutional pattern Geertz notes was less the preservation of a traditional peasant lifestyle than the emergence of a new industrial labor management strategy. Following anthropologist Don Kalb, I have referred to this pattern of familial labor diversification and the resulting self-provisioning and low wage factory regime as flexible familism (1997: 90ff.). Flexible familism had also been the typical pattern of the proto-industrial phase of cotton weaving in the Twente region under the NHM’s tutelage, with home handweaving serving to capitalize subsistence oriented farms; in a twist on Geertz’s assertion that Javanese peasants had one foot in the fields and the other in the factory, Mastboom noted, “commercial farms emerged out of industry (in Twente), just as factory-based industry emerged out of agriculture” as the markes were disbanded

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(1996: 240). As in Java, flexible familism was favored by manufacturers as it helped keep wages at a minimum; wage levels in Twente were among the lowest in the Netherlands, even after industrialization (Knippenberg and de Pater 1988: 100, 124; Blonk 1929: 217). The factory in the field model resulted in the paradox of Twente also being one of the most industrialized regions in the country, yet it lacked a classic working class of dependent wage laborers. While subsistence farming might appear to offer families a degree of independence from factory slowdowns and periods of unemployment, it nonetheless also created new patronage relations between the local landholding regent class and these mill families. The situation was thus similar to the small plots that the Javanese sugar manufacturers granted their migrant workers to ensure a stable workforce. The Salomonsons, for example, included a small allotment with each of the houses they leased to workers in Nijverdal. Similarly, Count van Rechteren in nearby Almelo rented out 200 hectares of his 2,000-hectare estate in lots of 0.1 hectare.9 The income he derived from these allotments was as much as he earned for the remaining estate leased as full farms (Hendrickx 2003: 62). These new ties of dependency contributed to the paternalism of the factory regime. Family hobby farms and factory must thus be viewed as a single Janus-faced social formation. Demographic analysis of the region over the nineteenth century showed that even after the proto-industrial home-weaving industry was definitively over, and industrial factories were providing the bulk of waged employment in Twente, the prior pattern of flexible familism was retained (Hendrickx 2001). High capital costs made industrial production unprofitable unless wages were below the level needed for its reproduction. Flexible familism in large part explains the unusual trajectory of Dutch industrialization in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Analysts have long noted the idiosyncratic pattern of Dutch rural rather than urban industrialization and the tempered nature of the attendant processes of proletarianization that resulted (Stuurman 1983). Proletarianization of the English sort driven by the enclosure movement and the urbanization of a landless proletariat did not occur in the Dutch case, just as it had not in Java. The failure to proletarianize labor sets the Netherlands on a different capitalist trajectory than that of Britain, hence this model of flexible familism leads beyond the usual narrow focus on shop-floor de-skilling, discipline, and politics derived from Braverman’s analysis of the factory labor process (1974) to an examination of how these new broader industrial relations articulated with local strategies for social reproduction. This underscores the more general point that class politics cannot be read from “mechanically related ‘class positions’” associated with land ownership or wage work but must be examined as “a variety of historically created relationships of power, of custom, of practice, of apprehension and conception” (Nugent 1994: 299). Rural industrialization and its tempered proletarianization has thus been cited as one factor explaining both weak unionization, and the frequent turn to confessional unions that incorporated clergy and employers (Stuurman 1983: 150–65; Kalb 1997: 24–34).

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The success of these disciplinary regimes thus relates to the way they link the broader pattern of capitalist accumulation with its “structured totality” of class relationships, none of which can be reductively read from factory employment. Anthropologist Don Kalb’s formulation of the same dynamic in the industrial town of Eindhoven asserts that we can only speak of such a structured totality when the logic of capital accumulation can be shown to be “operating in such diverse fields as work, coalition formation, social policy, household formation, human reproduction, everyday life, and urban form and culture” (1997: 90)—that is, when capitalist production has reshaped all aspects of social reproduction. Here, I would again repeat Scott’s assertion that colonial governmentality is “a form of power . . . which was concerned above all with disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions, and with constructing in their place new conditions so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige—new forms of life to come into being” (1995: 193).

“1872” This shared developmental path can be associated, I argue, with the shared governmental history of Java and the eastern Netherlands; it is the product of a particular form of Dutch “benevolent” colonialism. As I had concluded early on, the economic development projects in the eastern Netherlands were attempts to effect a capitalist transformation, to securitize the state and extend its authority into the hinterland while removing the costs of pauper administration from the national budget. Both factory regimes have their roots in Van den Bosch’s disciplinary experiments for the relief of those paupers (now considered laborers) in charity companies. The lives of Javanese farm families were, no less than the paupers of the Benevolent Colonies, entrapped in a multifaceted disciplinary regime, and not the unvarying “logic of capital” per se. This disciplinary regime encouraged their “virtuous” self-subsistence efforts while subjecting their factory labor to a machine-paced monotony, all under the judicious leadership of paternalistic regents with a civilizational mission. These gentlemanly capitalists had thus successfully privatized the Crown’s corporate assemblage for managing the production and trade in the major commodity chains tying metropole and colony together, without however, having given up any of the Crown’s governmental functions. The slow development of the labor movement in the Netherlands can be tied, in part, to the success of their strategies; having learned from the industrial revolutions plaguing other nations, the Dutch regent class had concentrated on searching for and circulating new techniques for managing labor. An indication of their success can be found in the events of 1872 and their reverberations in Nijverdal. The year 1872 was to prove a revolutionary one in many of the ways presaged in the Fifth Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association in The Hague with which we began. In July, the Salomonson family partnership was dissolved, and the remaining partners made the symbolic move of incorporating; this

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remained a rare occurrence, as there were still only 456 corporations in the whole Netherlands. This move became increasingly common as family firms sought corporate form for the legal protection that limited liability offered (Camfferman 2000: 79). The Salomonsons were prompted by the withdrawal of one of the partners and the need to recapitalize in order to build a bleaching factory (Burgers 1954: 237). The Salomonsons’ were very familiar with the corporate form, having become dominant shareholders in that other “International,” the Internationale Crediet- en Handelsvereeniging “Rotterdam” (International Credit and Trade Company, Internatio) a decade earlier (see next chapter); they sold the bulk of their cotton production in the Netherlands East Indies through this company (Claver 2014: 104). In August 1872, shortly after incorporating, Nijverdal weathered what was to be its first and only strike in the nineteenth century. In his first act as new manager, Godfried Salomonson had imposed new piecework rates that penalized those whose production fell below a fixed minimum and gave bonuses to those above. The strike broke out on payday; Salomonson returned the next day to find drunken workers parading through the village, prompting him to summon first the mayor and then the cavalry, who managed to “restore order.” Once he discovered he would have to pay for the cavalry himself, Salomonson tried to send them home, but not before the villagers were up in arms over their continued presence and rioted, throwing a brick through the mayor’s window. After three days, the protest ended and production resumed (Burgers 1954: 263–64). The comic opera charge of the cavalry and the business owner’s frugalness in funding the costs of government suppression point to both the fragility of this factory-based apparatus of security and to its ultimate stability, to the limits of governmentality. And yet, the disturbance proved to be the only echo in this nineteenth-century factory town of the International Workingmen’s Association’s call for revolution in The Hague that September. In the previous two chapters, I focused on the evolution of this form of biopower after the Liberal revolution, focusing in particular on the common form of apparatus of security through which the pauper was transformed into the disciplined laborer. These technologies of rule circulated between sites, from Colonies of Benevolence, to the Netherlands Trading Company, to the Salomonsons’ industrial utopia, Nijverdal. The initial focus was on the creation of the Royal Academy and its schooling of state technical bureaucrats; here, I argue, we find the roots of managerialism. Technocratic managerialism sought to improve the disciplinary apparatus through which both dressage and production were organized. State commissions and public debates on the “social question” also ensured the wide circulation of these techniques. In the following two chapters, however, the focus shifts from these individual examples of biopower in the royal assemblage, with which the book began, to the broader concern with their assemblage into other coordinated commodity chains in imitation of the Cultivation System. The emphasis shifts, in other words, to the adoption of SaintSimonian credit mobiliers as a means of assembling corporations into larger coordi-

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nated wholes through the overlapping membership of regent capitalists on corporate boards and in corporate management in imitation of the economic governance of the Crown.

Notes 1. Although I argue that the costs of labor dressage were internalized, I need also note that these factories frequently made these palliative efforts self-funding out of workers’ wages. They were part of the corporate economy, however, as they remained obligatory for workers, and under employer control. 2. The use of child labor was just as common in the handweaving industry as an 1841 state inquiry found (Blonk 1929: 244). 3. “Forced shopping” is usually referred to in English as a “truck system,” but as this phrase is less than transparent I have opted to translate the Dutch term literally. 4.. It should be noted that Umbgrove’s report on the effects of the sugar industry on Javanese villagers emerged in the same period and reflects a common governmental concern for the effects of industrialization and the “social question” across both contexts. 5. For a full recounting of the decade-long debate leading to the 1874 Child Labor Act from the left-Liberal perspective, see Kerdijk 1878. 6. See the breakdown on employees for the Oldenzaal weavers and spinners in the 1840s provided in Hommen 1964: 87. 7. Anthropologist Don Kalb named this pattern in the late nineteenth century in the company town of Eindhoven “Philipism” (after the Philips company that dominated the town) in order to distinguish it from “Fordism” as an industrial model (1997: 153–211). While I concur with his attempts to distinguish the Dutch path to industrialization from Fordism, I resist referring to it as Philipism given this evidence that the pattern existed earlier and to a broader extent than in Eindhoven. 8. This pattern was associated with a lack of proletarianization, and a relatively homogenous size of landholding, which Geertz and others have characterized as an “indifferent guide to the social pattern of exploitation” (1963: 99; cf.). Geertz argued that this produced “shared poverty” and a classless society divided only between “just enoughs” and “not quite enoughs” (1963: 97). Geertz’s arguments are based upon the Dutch colonial economist J. H. Boeke’s concept of Java as a “dual economy,” in which the Javanese peasant sector is economically and culturally distinct from the corporate Dutch sector (Kahn 1993). I have argued elsewhere that Java can be construed a “classless” society only if one ignores the widespread conscription of these peasants into the Dutch corporate sugar industry, where sub-subsistence wages were supplemented by subsistence plots farmed with kin labor (Schrauwers 1995). 9. Compare this with the three hectares rented to each colonist family in the Colonies of Benevolence, who similarly engaged in nonindustrial weaving for a secondary income.

Part III

The Credit Mobilier and Corporate Assemblage

CHAPTER 7

Political Economy, the “Self-Regulating Market,” and “Economic Governance”

When King Willem II ascended the throne in 1840, the Netherlands faced a nowfamiliar crisis; following its decade-long military standoff with a secessionist Belgium, it had the highest per capita public debt in Europe and faced bankruptcy, necessitating a period of structural readjustment. The sense of crisis was compounded by the potato blight, leading to widespread poverty, famine, and emigration with little effort by the state to ameliorate the suffering. As a wave of revolutions broke out across Europe in 1848, first in Paris then spreading to Belgium and a number of German and Italian states, Dutch liberals began to press for constitutional reform as the only remedy against an even more revolutionary change. After his cabinet resigned en masse, a panicky king transformed, as he joked, from a Conservative to a Liberal in a day and acceded to a new liberal constitution (Laarse 1999). Rejecting its republican past, the absolutist monarchy of the House of Orange was transformed instead into a constitutional monarchy on the British model, marking the transition from police state to liberal rule of law and limited direct democracy, with an aristocratic senate maintained by a high taxation census for members (Stuurman 1992: 137–70). The liberal majority that dominated the first elections under the 1848 constitution shared power with a new king, Willem III, ascending after the death of his father. Despite the new constitution, liberalism in the Netherlands was a relatively weak political force. The new constitution changed the balance of power between Crown and the States General, but it did not immediately change, for example, the functioning of the Cultivation System. Liberal reforms were legislatively introduced piecemeal, and frequently faced stiff opposition from the Crown and senate. The focus here thus remains on continuities in governmentality rather than changes in political form; in this chapter, the development of the discourse of political economy is explored as a management tool in the evolution of the colonial assemblage described in

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the first section of this book during the reigns of Willem II (1840–49) and Willem III (1849–90), with particular attention paid to the sets of development practices that it enabled in this new constitutional environment. This entails a careful examination of a particular “socialist” strain of liberalism that authorized forms of social planning under the “trusteeship” of investment bankers (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 21–28). Political economy was utilized by the Crown at the time as a pragmatic discursive tool for the economic management of the state and its colonial assemblages and was not a critical science of “natural laws” describing the limits of state regulation of the economy that it was to become under late liberalism. Here, an early variant of the developing discipline of political economy served as a practical moralizing discourse for the management (policing) of state resources: “National security and wealth were conceived as products of the sovereign’s ability to create relationships between disaggregated administrative domains which enable the nation to gain a greater share of an essentially fixed world market measured by the volume of exports” (Firth 1998: 21). Political economy was not a coherent propositional academic discourse in this context but a “development discourse” in James Ferguson’s sense; it was utilized to pragmatically constitute the various colonies as “less developed countries” that authenticated them as “a target for a particular sort of intervention: the technical, apolitical, ‘development’ intervention” (1990: 28). While the particulars of each of these projects of rule were generally known at the time, the Crown’s financial management of them was a matter of state and hence limited to a small coterie of royal administrators; the economic flows of these commodity chains and the role their profits played in the financial health of the Greater Netherlands thus remained hidden from public and parliamentarians alike. There was no sense in which the orderly flow of commodities through these administrative domains—whether bureaucratic or corporate—constituted a theoretical object, a national economy, hence its absence from the discourse of political economy in the period. Only the Crown had full knowledge of the fissiparous tensions that had to be managed in order to gather these discrete administrative domains into a coherent and functioning assemblage; yet it is this birds-eye view that dominates current economic reconstructions.1 Here then, we are concerned with the illiberal developments in the management discourse of political economy as the shift in corporate control of these commodity chains from Crown to regents took place at midcentury. This period of transformation in corporate governmentality and the resultant development of gentlemanly capitalism from it is the subject of the second half of this book. I focus, in particular, on the introduction of a technocratic “utopian socialist” variant of liberalism and political economy that provided the ideological foundation for the new regime of economic management. Liberalism had long eschewed the corporate form, placing its emphasis on enabling the actions of individual entrepreneurs acting in a free market; it is for this reason that Foucault’s own analysis of liberal governmentality remains opaque on the role of the corporation in the development of the agencies

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of biopower. Liberalism, however, had many influential variants, including that of Saint-Simonian socialism in France. Like his Dutch contemporary Johannes van den Bosch, the Comte de Saint-Simon struggled to assimilate the administrative concerns of social economy with the broad constraints of liberal political economy. His success as a liberal utopian socialist in large part explains Marx’s rejection of its compromises. The liberal revolution in the Netherlands was thus surprisingly accompanied by the introduction of Saint-Simonian techniques for the economic governance of corporations by the old republican regent elite of Amsterdam, as will be further discussed at length in succeeding chapters. The surprise should be muted, however, given that the Saint-Simonians had turned to many of Willem I’s financial innovations, including the use of investment banks, for their inspiration (Hirschfeld 1922: 17–34). These tools of financial, as opposed to political, revolution allowed the regent elite to take control of the corporately managed commodity chains assembled by Willem. In the slowly developing liberal economic tide of the nineteenth century, the existing governmental compromises and the necessary alignments they forged created new political possibilities; already used to managing, these regents found the royal hand on the tiller increasingly irrelevant. Corporate governmentality was no longer under the hand of the sovereign; its strategies, programs, and techniques of rule circulated within this rough assemblage—and those that emulated it—without the need for the Crown. The liberal revolution of 1848 thus involved little more than a shift from monarchy to oligarchy; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, a return to the old republican form after all.

Liberalism and the “Self-Regulating Market” The aim of the liberal revolution of 1848 was not to gain control of Willem’s corporate empire of managed commodity chains but to eliminate it and replace it with laissez-faire entrepreneurial reforms. However, the liberals’ ability to enact these reforms was politically limited by the internal contradictions of the inherent individualist and libertarian elements of liberal ideology. Liberals resisted forming a political party and remained suspicious of the corporate form. Although Willem’s sovereignty was to be eroded in this new constitution, the operations of the state apparatus were not radically altered; that awaited the piecemeal reforms that this weak liberal coalition was able to eke out in parliament over the succeeding decades, including the eventual end of the Cultivation System itself two decades later (Fasseur 1975). It was in this period of contestation that the “self-regulating market” was “discovered” by liberals as an important discursive tool for limiting royal sovereignty in political practice. In the grand metanarrative of liberalism, the development of the self-regulating market was of “profound epistemological significance, for the economic realm could now be appropriated from the realm of political power and police control” (Kalpagam 2000: 418). Liberalism, however, was only weakly developed in the Netherlands and poorly prepared for such an appropriation. The academic discipline of political

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economy remained within the bounds established by reason of state and police and provided little theoretical innovation in economic thought (Boschloo 1989). This late development of the concept of a self-regulating market sphere was not restricted to the Netherlands alone. The “discovery” of the market economy as a discursive object occurs much later (after Adam Smith) than is usually presumed and was poorly developed in the first decades of the nineteenth century and distinct from much older liberal laissez-faire free trade arguments (Walter 2008). Eighteenthcentury writers discussed “trade, agriculture and manufacturing as distinct entities [but] there is no sense in which these entities spontaneously combine[d] to form a self-regulating system” (Firth 1998: 21). The science of political economy (staathuishoudkunde)2 as it developed in the late eighteenth century combined mercantilism, political arithmetic, bullionism and physiocracy into a conception of government as householding, with the sovereign as steward tasked with fostering and increasing available resources (Tribe 1978; Boschloo 1989). It was not, however, until the publication of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) that the concept of “the market economy” as a self-regulating, natural law-bound sphere in the modern sense emerged to replace this mercantilist conception of householding, or economic governance (Walter 2008; Dix 2014; Poovey 1998: 307–25). It was only in this later period that German economic theory also started to distinguish between Staatswirthschaft (political economy of state administration) and Nationalökonomie (“economic” processes of a distinct civil society) (Tribe 1978: 176–77). In the Netherlands, this ideological innovation was not advanced until well after the surprising introduction of the new Liberal constitution in 1848. It was proposed by a small group of political economists who sought to establish a positivist, deductive natural law methodology into the study of political economy in the Netherlands through the French method of numerical statistics. The study of statistics in this period was dominated by the German approach, which was focused on comparative descriptive knowledge of state resources, rather than the French approach of the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, which was used to uncover social regularities from the chaos of apparently random individual cases; this latter approach emerged from earlier examples of “political arithmetic” and “social physics” (Hacking 1991: 181). This small group of lawyers, led by Leiden professor Simon Vissering, formed a “statistical movement” that sought to introduce elements of the French mathematical approach in order to develop a positivistic economic science. Vissering was to argue that “statistics is one of the most positive of sciences whose principles are numbers; whose first step consists of addition and subtraction, the second of equations: only when we have waded through these barren territories do we come to pleasant and fruitful terrain” (quoted in Stamhuis 1989: 156). For Vissering, statistics was a means of discovering those unbending rules that govern social life that needed to be taken into consideration by political economy in order to maintain public prosperity. By 1857 they had formed a Society for Statistics whose major task was the production

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of a never-finished multivolume “General Statistical Description of the Netherlands” for 1850–65 (Stamhuis 2010: 10). This statistical movement formed within the loose editorial collective that had been producing the “Political and Political Economic Yearbook” (Staatkundig en Staathuishoudkundig Jaarboekje) using the older German approach since 1849 in order to inform the newly expanded, yet still elite electorate on the basic liberal principles by which to evaluate the issues of the day. Their intent was to ensure that the “true social situation was not lost from sight” in the face of recently introduced socialist ideas made popular by socialist revolts in France and Germany in 1848 (Stamhuis 1989: 188; Boschloo 1989: 188). This collective of largely liberal academic political economists met yearly to discuss the content of the next issue, and these meetings eventually became the core of the Netherlands Economic Society (Butter 2004: 444; Mooij 1994: 33–54; Schoorl 2002). The group was largely composed of academics and government bureaucrats in the state department of census statistics. Their efforts were further popularized by member Jacob de Bruyn Kops, a young lawyer employed in the Ministry of Finance, who worked in the office of the Liberal prime minister Johan Thorbecke, author of the 1848 liberal constitution (Boschloo 1989: 190). De Bruyn Kops published the first economic textbook in the Netherlands in 1850, Principles of Political Economy, which went through five editions by 1873 (Kops 1850). Principles was never intended as a scholarly contribution to a science of political economy; it was, rather, a polemic textbook meant to popularize liberal market reforms, inveighing especially against those royal monopolies based on “robbery and suppression, slavery, serfdom, forced services” (Jong 2007: 61). Two years later, he was to found the leading monthly scholarly journal, The Economist (De Economist), which he edited for thirty-six years; it became the journal of record for both the Society for Statistics and the Netherlands Economic Society that grew out of it. This political project was further popularized in magazines such as the Practical Folk Almanac: A Yearbook for Spreading the Knowledge of Applied Science to All Classes of Society, whose editorial board included De Bruyn Kops and many other prominent liberal economists (Boschloo 1989: 185). The pages of these books and periodicals became the forum within which to locate the emergence of the self-regulating market as the “natural” realm of a new subject position, homo economicus. It is in these fora that “political economy announced the unknowability for the sovereign of the totality of the economic process and, as a consequence, the impossibility of an economic sovereignty” (Gordon 1991: 16). These political initiatives sought to shift the object of economic governance from the “state householding” (Staathuishoudkunde) ideal of those cameralist thinkers for whom police science and state action in the management of things were isomorphous, to the liberal economist concerned with gently managing the “conduct of conduct” of the self-interested citizen in a self-regulating market. This shift was clearly expressed in the epigraph to De Bruyn Kops’s Principles: “The true wealth of a people is not in gold

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and silver, but in the intellect, hearts and labor of the thousand reasonable beings that constitute the nation.—There, and there alone, is an inexhaustible goldmine” (1850). The discursive creation of the economy as a self-regulating realm outside the purview of the ruler’s sovereignty, reasons of state, and police—hence government—was thus dependent upon a whole series of ideological moves, the first being the reconfiguration of political economy from a model likened to the economic management of the state as a family, of householding, to that enframed by the vitality, fecundity, and productivity of the population (Foucault 1991). This was the aim of the new Society for Statistics, whose statistical surveys sought to present a graphic representation of the true state of the Dutch nation, and in particular of those living in poverty and hence posing a threat to order; in the liberal consensus emerging out of Smith and Mill, government’s role was limited to securitizing property by interceding with the propertyless, who therefore depended on the sale of their labor. In reapproaching the problem of securitizing the poor, these doctrinaire liberals continued to reject any form of state intervention in the management of poverty. Their only concern was that the poor not be too badly trampled in the general pursuit of wealth by misguided legislation seeking to ameliorate their condition; for them, “the new governmental problematic was to ensure that the pursuit of self-interest by individual economic actors was compatible with the reproduction and useful employment of the population” (Kalpagam 2000: 419). It is thus without irony that the Society for Statistics made its home in the offices of the “Friend of Poor and Rich,” a publishing initiative offering advice, not aid, through cheap educational pamphlets for the working class (Mooij 1994: 46–50). The second ideological move required to discursively disembed the economy as a self-regulating domain was the placement of the purely political constitutional limits on royal sovereignty after 1848. This ideological move had been prefigured by Willem I himself through his early use of corporate governmentality. In each of his colonial governmental projects, the enlightened absolutist Willem I delegated aspects of his sovereignty to corporations as a means of escaping parliamentary control or review; his economic governance was thus implemented by royal corporations outside the formal state budget apparatus, a form of governmentality not usually noted (Nadeson 2008: 55–56). As has already been noted, accounting was used to separate the commodity accounts for Javanese cash crop production managed by the NHM from the costing of the state discipline needed to drive that production. We have seen that the necessary discipline applied by Dutch colonial officers and Javanese regents to make the Cultivation System function were costed to the Netherlands East Indies state budget, while the profits of the NHM’s commodity auctions were remitted to the Netherlands Ministry of Colonies as the batig slot, the colonial “surplus” used to fund Willem’s other state-building projects. These two sets of accounts could thus be institutionally separated, with “corporate” accounts viewed independently from state budgets; this separation allowed the placement of corporate accounts in the private sphere even though these internal corporate accounts were not market based but con-

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tingent on administrative fiat. To effect such a move from public to private sphere is a form of “disembedding” of those accounts from the political context within which they were developed and operated. It is important to distinguish this form of disembedding from that proposed by Polanyi, and to underscore that this is a “discursive disembedding” of the economy, an assertion of its independence and not a demonstration. As the economy was unknowable by any economic sovereignty, its existence was established more through practical political limits placed on governmental intervention than objectively demonstrated through the fragmented statistical modeling of a national economy produced by Vissering’s cohort. The discursive disembedding of the economy quite literally involved the removal of the political from political economy in theory, if not wholly in practice. The legislation by which they sought to create the self-regulating market through free market reforms can be analyzed through Caliskan and Callon’s concept of marketization; the Liberals had less success, however, in dismantling the colonial corporate assemblage that continued to provide essential state revenue. The Cultivation System—more than at any other time—became the “cork (safety vest) on which the Netherlands floats” by providing a third or more of Dutch state revenue until the 1870s (Fasseur 1975: 37–42; see table 0.2). The test case for measuring the limited success of the liberal discursive disembedding of the economy from politics remained the royal corporations like the NHM, the working hand of the state. Since the largest and most powerful corporations remained vehicles of royal control over the economy, “why the business corporation (along with municipalities, churches and universities) was able to escape the sword of liberalizing egalitarianism is something that needs to be explained” (Roy 1997: 46). This dynamic was common to most European and American jurisdictions. The irony that requires emphasis, at this point, is that just as a disembedded free market was being created as a doctrinaire liberal political project, it was already being rendered redundant by these new organizations, corporations, which increasingly displaced market-based transactions with their vast commodity chains hierarchically managed through accounting, a fact that liberal economics failed to account for in their models. Alfred Chandler’s classic work (1977) on the corporation emphasized the degree to which the corporation organized economies of scope and scale through more efficient administrative means than could have accomplished through market mechanisms alone. The NHM managed the global commodity chains by which Javanese coffee and sugar were exchanged for Dutch cotton cloth, thereby linking Cultivation System, Consignment System, and cotton manufacturing into a single governmental assemblage—a “global economy”—where administrative accounts replaced market transactions yet generated enormous profits for the state. As we shall see, even as the Crown’s influence waned in the liberal era, the NHM’s emulators served to broaden the extent of corporate control of the economy. The argument to be developed in subsequent sections is that the liberals were unable to reform the corporation because doctrinaire liberal laissez-faire ideology

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specifically emphasized an idealized individualized entrepreneurial free competitive market, and hence a dependence on partnerships and family firms (Jonker 1996: 61–63). Liberal suspicion of the corporate form can be tied to Smithian concerns about the division of ownership and management in such businesses. Smith had argued in The Wealth of Nations that managers would never be as vigilant as entrepreneurial partners in the husbanding of the enterprise’s resources since the money was not their own, thereby rejecting the very notion of a professional managerial class (1999: 700). These concerns were repeated decades later by others, such as the prominent Amsterdam merchant and frequent contributor to De Economist P. N. Muller (1858), and largely confirmed by the bankruptcy of the most innovative new Dutch corporation of the 1860s (to be discussed in chapter 8), the General Society for Trade and Industry, which was subsequently derided as the “Society for Fraud and Industry” (Hirshfeld 1922: 85). Muller decried the French-inspired “spirit of association” (see below) that encouraged the mobilization of petty capitalists in “colossus” companies that crowded sole-agent merchants and wholesalers out of the market, and saw them lurking behind the socialist and communist revolutions of 1848 (1858: 240–41). “The individual” he concluded, “must disappear in the collective—that was and is, perhaps, still the doctrine of these modern alchemists” (1858: 241). The competitive individualist emphasis in liberal ideology—which extended to their initial refusal to organize a political party—thus precluded their taking advantage of Willem’s techniques of linking economic domains through an organized assemblage of corporations and managed global commodity chains; although a few, like the ever pragmatic Salomonsons, are a clear exception. Liberals in the Netherlands thus remained suspicious of the corporate form and, like the British, wedded to partnerships and the family firm as the preferred form of business enterprise (Sluyterman and Winkelman 1993). The 1838 revision of the Napoleonic Code du Commerce recognized three main types of business organization: the partnership; the “sleeping partnership” (CV, commanditaire vennootschap), which offered limited liability to nonmanaging shareholders; and the public limited liability company with transferable shares (NV, naamloze vennootschap) managed by elected directors. Although the Dutch had innovated in the early development of the NV, and had the world’s first stock market exchange, it was not as popular a business form as the sleeping partnership. This was partly due to regulations requiring prior state approval before an NV could begin operation, and the obligation for the yearly publication of financial reports, with the resultant fear of arbitrary state interference in its operations (Jonker 1996: 61–62). Shortly after the new liberal constitution was adopted, there were only 137 taxpaying NVs in the Netherlands; most of them were insurance companies, with the largest being royal companies like the NHM that dominated the Dutch economy through its subcontracts with family firms (table 0.1). After a decade of liberal reforms, the number had only climbed to 284, as new municipal water, utility, and land reclamation companies were formed (Jonker 1996: 256). The number did not begin to exponentially expand until after 1870, when the

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Netherlands began its industrial revolution (Camfferman 2000: 79). The economy of the Netherlands in this period was thus dominated by state corporations that exercised considerable control over the large number of small family firms that depended on corporate largesse for their survival; this was especially true in the Dutch naval transportation industry, and of those government-supported firms developing steamdriven technology (à Campo 2002). A true genealogy of the discursive development of the “self-regulating economy” in Dutch political economic thought remains to be written. This initial foray, however, has underscored the ironic role of corporate governmentality in that development. The Dutch economy was discursively disembedded from its political context in several ways that ignored the dominance of the corporation; the economy was conceptually severed from the accounts of the state administration and discursively privatized, and so included the nonmarket internal transactions of corporations. In this initial period, it is difficult to ascertain to what degree this corporate economic development was capitalist in a narrow sense. While there is evident profit seeking, little of that was accomplished through market mechanisms. Indeed, the royal corporations still primarily exercised a pastoral function, that of husbanding the wealth of the nation and the welfare of the population through the disciplinary use of accounting. Given these aims, it was remarkably successful at maintaining docile, productive populations while generating the revenue needed to preserve the Dutch state from insolvency. It is thus to the development of the illiberal disciplinary techniques for the management of that corporate economy that we now turn.

Utopian Development It is important to dwell on this irony; in an age of laissez-faire economic reform seeking to develop a free market economy through legislative limits on the Crown’s sovereignty over the private sphere, the managed economies of the royal corporations—the largest actors in that private sphere—remained intact and remained the entrepreneurial drivers of much of the economic growth of the period. As we shall see, the long-delayed industrial revolution in the Netherlands was corporately driven to meet state revenue goals and resulted from bureaucratic planning and not free market competition; hence, I have also drawn attention to the corporation as the “working hand of the state.” This managed corporate economy lying amid and displacing the free market was controlled by the old republican regent elite, a trained managerial class in royal service. As the Liberals chipped away at royal sovereignty, the separation of ownership from corporate management placed control of these commodity chains in the hands of illiberal regent board directors; these directors sat on multiple corporate boards and used their role as interlocks in order to coordinate activities across several domains just as the Crown once had. Governing economically through such a corporately organized assemblage resulted in economies of scope and scale easily able to compete with and exclude liberal family firms in a free market (Chandler

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1990). Here, then, I seek to unravel the genealogy of the new illiberal corporate management science they developed out of the cameralist strategies, programs, and disciplinary techniques by which the management of paupers was governmentalized in the royal corporations. Such a genealogy of corporate management practices has only been partially developed, even though Foucault has become a thinker of major influence on management and accounting theory despite his never having written anything within these fields (Hoskins 1998: 94). As I have already noted, Foucault’s reticence on the “sciences” of corporate economic management stems from his focus on liberal governmentality, which specifically precluded such non-Liberal practices. The genealogy of these management practices begins, however, in the same place as Foucault’s analysis of other examples of the exercise of biopower such as the asylum, the clinic, and the prison; that is, with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Analysis of current management techniques, particularly through the use of accounting, reapplies Foucault’s theory of practices approach to the prison in a wide variety of corporate settings. Here, I trace the circulation of these surveillance practices from their original proposed use in prisons (or rather, the Colonies of Benevolence), through their subsequent use in the management of paupers by corporations, to their later corporate use in the management of the labor force. As discussed in relation to the Colonies of Benevolence, Bentham’s proposed prison reforms assumed a central place in Foucault’s analysis of the nineteenth-century shift from arbitrary punishment as a display of royal sovereignty and reasons of state to the inculcation of self-discipline through continuous, unobservable surveillance by means of the panopticon (Foucault 1979: 293–94). Foucault went on to trace the extension of this new form of biopower in other total institutions such as the madhouse and clinic, and, inconsequentially, in the factory (Walsh and Stewart 1993; Jackson and Carter 1998). Less well known, and unremarked upon by Foucault, are Bentham’s subsequent works on a “poor panopticon” in Pauper Systems Compared and Pauper Management Improved, written in 1797 (1843).3 In these works, Bentham proposed a National Charity Company modeled on the East India Company to privatize pauper relief by operating a national network of over 250 poor panopticons accommodating a half million people that would, like Mettray and other forms of biopower, serve to reform rather than punish (Dean 1991: 177–92). Bentham viewed these “pauper establishments as multi-functional, combining elements of the quarantine station, prison, school, hospital, nursing home, manufactory, and research institute,” and hence as explicitly utopian, in that they would eliminate both poor rates and a dystopic population (Dean 1991: 184). The techniques of surveillance developed in the panopticon (and subsequent pauper panopticon) thus formed the foundation for a basic management science for a corporate exercise in pauper reform, much like Van den Bosch’s Benevolent Society; indeed the similarities are so strong that they cannot be coincidental. Bentham’s pauper panopticon was never built in the United Kingdom and hence has largely disappeared from scholarly view. Its influence persists, however, in the

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incorporation of its key recommendations in the British Liberal Poor Law reforms of 1834 and the introduction of a national system of workhouses; Dean (1991) underscored that the adoption of the basic distinction between the “poor” and “paupers” that was established through the application of Bentham’s “principle of less eligibility” can be credited (as Polanyi long asserted) for the creation of a free market in labor. Poor able-bodied men who would be compelled to accept wage labor by their hunger were differentiated from those paupers who chose to be housed in the institution in order to receive relief, and who therefore opened themselves up to an organized system of disciplinary reform; this is the period in the Netherlands in which the wage-earning though poverty-stricken arbeider (laborer) begins to be distinguished from the previously undifferentiated mass of working poor and those on various forms of relief (Boschloo 1989: 203–7). According to the principle of less eligibility, relief for paupers should always be at a level below that obtained through wage labor to ensure they preferably sought wage work over life within the institution (known as the “principle of less eligibility”). To further incentivize the morally bankrupt pauper to seek wage work, no matter how poorly paid, the terms of work within the institution were to be as demeaning as possible so as to highlight the difference in status of those “free” to work from those compelled to do so (Dean 1991: 156–72). Although Bentham’s pauper panopticon, no less than his other prison reforms, were never implemented by the British state in the form in which he devised them, the management principles that he developed were adapted in numerous other nonstate settings. Besides their application in the 1834 Poor Law reforms by his former secretary, Edwin Chadwick, these adaptations also included the model cotton factories of Scottish industrialist and utopian socialist, Robert Owen. Owen, a disciple of Benthamite utilitarianism, first applied the panopticon principles of labor management in his cotton-weaving factory in New Lanark, just outside of Scotland, with his now famous use of the “silent monitor” (Walsh and Stewart 1993). He subsequently applied the panopticon form in a series of planned utopian socialist communities for the resolution of pauperism, the most famous of which was New Harmony in Ohio. There is thus a clear overlap between Liberalism’s adaptation of the utilitarian reforms of Bentham and other related “Philosophic Radicals” and that of utopian socialism in the United Kingdom, an overlap to also be explored in the case of French SaintSimonian socialism in the Netherlands. Owen’s utopian plans originated in an insurrection of unemployed cotton weavers in 1820 as a grandiose but not otherwise exceptional workhouse scheme to be built for the poor of Glasgow in rural areas; it was in this period that Owen and Van den Bosch corresponded, and Scottish authors investigated the success of the Benevolent Colonies (Highland Society 1828; Schrauwers 2009: 50–56). The first of these British Owenite communities was established at Orbiston, Scotland, by Abram Combe, who laid out the form of a model commune in a pamphlet, “The Sphere for Joint Stock Companies: Or the Way to Increase the Value of Land, Capital and Labor” (1825), which harkened back to Bentham’s plan for a National Charity Company. As

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with Bentham’s prison design, the British state was put off by the high capital costs of Owen’s plan and sought to resolve the insurrection’s origins through a program of “assisted emigration” of the unemployed to the colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) instead; yet even in the colony, numerous authors proposed to deal with this influx of paupers in “emigrant depots” based on the same Owenite principles.4 In tracing the application of these techniques of panoptic surveillance to the management of labor in utopian communities, what I seek to underscore is the circulation and extension of the disciplinary techniques developed for the corporate management of paupers in communitarian workhouses into the more general principles and practices by which corporations governed production in factories (cf. Lipartito 2004; Mason 1931; Schrauwers 2011; Soliani 2009). Foucault distinguished between the productive function of labor—through which economic value is created—and its function as “dressage” to inculcate obedience. “Labor in its dressage sense, then, is non-productive, non-utilitarian and unnatural behavior for the satisfaction of the controller and as a public display of compliance, obedience to discipline” (Jackson and Carter 1998: 54). The Benthamite workhouse is generally contrasted with the factory on the basis of the nonproductive labor imposed there, and the factory thereby distinguished by its “productive” economic function; the demeaning nature of such unproductive activities as walking treadmills in workhouses was entirely disciplinary in intent, an inculcation of obedience and of the necessity for constant labor. This distinction, however, should not be used to differentiate workhouse from factory, as Owen’s use of dressage in his cotton factories suggests; much of what transpires in the factory is equally dressage, meant to inculcate obedience, and forms the core of “management science”: “Managerialism is less about production than it is about control” (Jackson and Carter 1998: 55). The strategic aim of dressage, and the specific apparatus of practices and discourses through which it is realized (the dispositif ), thus represents those aspects of work that create the identity of worker as worker, as a docile and obedient “hand” (not person) in Bentham’s terms (Bahmueller 1981: 130). This apparatus—the hierarchical corporation—imposes a set of demands that inculcate automatic obedience to a manager’s orders that resemble the demands of the prison. The dressage aspects of such corporate demands may include the wearing of a uniform, by which the worker is presented as the face of the company and their individuality denied; the specification of the time, place, and narrow range of activities in which the worker can engage, some only meant to specifically proscribe idleness or to regiment bodily functions; and may include the military-like precision by which all action is carried out in unison, like the shift change. There is then, a clear overlap between the dispositif of the panopticon and its kindred pauper panopticon, between the prison and the “charity company.” What distinguishes the pauper panopticon from the prison is that the dressage function of labor is accompanied by a productive function within the charity company. The charity corporation was to be constituted as an “alternate economy” (Bahmueller 1981: 129–63). Although Bentham distinguished between those who

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productively engaged in the labor market from those in the involuntary pauper panopticon, it was critical, he argued, that the pauper panopticon also be economically (frugally) run so as to eliminate the poor rates leveled on the producing class for the support of idlers. The means of accomplishing this economizing was through the creation of a charity company that would create its own “self-supplied” alternate economy outside the market that would serve the needs of all within its institutions while also selling its surpluses to provide the company’s profit. The National Charity Company was thus, as Chandler has argued of the corporation in general, a managerial hand organizing efficient production through the disciplinary use of accounts as a substitute for market exchanges. Within the closed confines of the company’s operations, demand was precisely known, and hence the production of supplies could be more efficiently organized by the division of labor between houses of industry engaged, like factories, in the more efficient manufacture of a single commodity; the role of the company was to coordinate this production on a national scale, thereby precluding the inefficiencies of competitive waste. The managed internal economy of the company might sell its surplus in the market but was itself organized through nonmarket means by illiberal principles. The Charity Company was both a pastoral institution for the reform of recalcitrant paupers through dressage and a productive, efficiently organized alternate economy where accounts replaced the market, a modern corporation in the Chandlerian sense. Van den Bosch’s disciplinary Benevolent Colonies could be viewed as a model implementation of Bentham’s utopian principles. This type of charity company sought to eliminate poor taxes through the formation of a self-subsistent alternate economy to provide for all the needs of its pauper inhabitants whose productive activities were organized with military efficiency—and discipline—in order to also produce cotton cloth for export to Java to generate profits. Every aspect of this corporate alternate economy, including elements of dressage (fines for bad behavior), were reduced to a common calculus using “monetary units of account” (but never cash). Similarly, the “lazy natives” in the new Javanese village were transformed into a self-subsistent unit within a coercive, administratively organized Cultivation System by which surplus cash crops for export were transformed into administratively determined, nonmarket monetary units of account used to balance administratively set land rents. Production was organized collectively, specifically so that dressage could be utilized to instill obedience to traditional authority, linking self-subsistence with new relations of power and automatic obedience. The Cultivation System, the Benevolent Society, and the NHM’s cotton manufacturing were all administratively organized as a single, nonmarket, corporate alternate economy within which the efficient application of dressage was used to ensure maximal production, profits for the Crown, and the privatization of pauper relief. This efficient managerial alternate economy sought to exercise control for control’s sake, as much as organize production. Van den Bosch’s administrative problem from the inception of his plans had been, after all, to securitize the state from a restive pauper class in the aftermath of the Napoleonic and Java wars.

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It is unsurprising to suggest that the genealogy of management science lies outside of the liberal economic discourse on the self-regulating market, and more surprising perhaps to suggest it originates in the charity company, at once disciplinary pauper panopticon and self-subsistent, managed alternate economy seeking a profit in the market. The latter suggestion, seemingly odd, points to both the dressage functions of labor found in the modern corporation and the role of management in organizing nonmarket commodity chains of scope and scale. In the preceding chapters of this book, in illustration of this process, I traced the circulation of the dispositif for pauper management developed in the Benevolent Society and analyzed the circulation of its disciplinary strategies, programs, and techniques through the Netherlands Trading Company, and subsequently through the Salomonson’s governmentalized cotton-weaving company.

Socialist Development Liberals rejected management in favor of coordination driven by the “invisible hand” of the competitive market as prescribed by the developing science of laissez-faire political economy, where statistics were increasingly used to uncover the natural law– like regularities of market forces from the chaos of individual decision-making. The utopian charity company in contrast embraced the strategies of the modern corporation, managing its alternate economy through internal accounting to reduce risk and achieve efficiencies, economies of scope and scale that avoided competitive waste, all without unduly affecting the external “free market” within which it sold its surplus. The variety of ways in which entrepreneurial factory owner Robert Owen adapted Bentham’s principles points to the paradoxical role of the pauper panopticon at the intersection of liberalism and utopian socialism; these same principles could be equally bent to the creation of a liberal free market in labor on the one hand, or utilized in the organization of productive labor within the alternate economy of a charity company on the other. Utopian socialism and its planned economies thus originate as an internal critique of liberal political economy rather than as a radical departure from it, and informs the future development of management “science.” This is, perhaps, best observed in the development of Saint-Simonian socialism in France, which was ultimately to have great impact on the continuing expansion of corporate governmentality in the Greater Netherlands. Saint-Simonian socialism had as great an impact in Europe as did Owenite socialism in the United Kingdom. In understanding the intersection of liberalism and utopian socialism in this case, it is essential to immediately qualify the meaning of socialism as the Saint-Simonians believed neither in the abolition of private property nor in the egalitarian division of its spoils. They, like the liberals, sought to limit the role of the state in the economy, and eventually saw its replacement by a “politics of production” organized by industrial associations (Eckalbar 1979). They were equally swayed by Adam Smith and Bethamite utilitarianism with their em-

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phasis on efficiency and economizing. They have been characterized as paradoxically advocating both “hierarchical socialism” (Soliani 2009) as well as the “rationalization of industry” in the form of managerial capitalism (Mason 1931). These paradoxical contradictions are difficult to politically situate yet resonate with later socialist thought. Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, the philosophic founder of the movement bearing his name, shared a social evolutionist model of progressive development with later Marxist thought. Humanity, he argued, was an inherently collective—social—entity that was evolving progressively toward a “Final State” of “universal association” according to invariable social laws; a philosophic position further developed by his secretary, Auguste Comte, father of positivist sociology. In a dialectic-like process, each society progressed through a series of morally unified “organic epochs” interrupted by periods of social chaos, or “critical epochs.” The Saint-Simonians viewed themselves as the moral midwife of humanity’s third and final organic epoch emerging out of the confusion of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. This final epoch of “universal association” was the age of industriels who would “end the exploitation of man by man” (Eckalbar 1977: 42). They repudiated all “accidents of birth” that vested property in a class of rentier idlers and envisioned a meritocracy where the “productive class” would have ready access to the capital required to build an efficient industrial order; only then would the antagonisms of the last chaotic critical epoch of laissez-faire competition and the despotic state be replaced by an industrial order of carefully planned and administered production to ensure universal peace and the progressive amelioration of humanity. Theirs was a high-modernist technocratic vision of social engineering as Utopian as Robert Owen’s planned communities (Carlisle 1974). Saint-Simonian thought, however, was predicated upon a basic class opposition between idlers and industriels that was only superficially reflected in the later Marxist critique of capitalism. Idlers consisted of those unproductive ruling elites, the rentiers (the aristocracy, clergy, and military officers) of the previous organic epoch who lived off their invested inherited wealth; and upon whom the producers (the industriels, factory owners, farmers, workers) depended for capital (Carlisle 1974: 448). The primary class conflict envisioned by Saint-Simon was thus between the emergent collective producing classes (including both capitalist factory owners and their workers) and the existing parasitic governmental elite of idlers. Hence, like the liberals, the Saint-Simonians sought to limit the role of the state and to exclude it from the regulation of the emergent economic sphere: “The real, important objective of the ‘Revolution,’ not yet attained, was not the popular government of an equalitarian State; it was rather the establishment of a ‘minimum’ State, able to ensure public order, where the administration of collective life was run by ‘industriels’ and ruled by their political value system, shared by everybody” (Soliani 2009: 24). The “end state” of the Saint-Simonians was thus a thoroughly bourgeois meritocracy of producers outside this minimal government, engaging instead in a “politics of production” under the hierarchical leadership of the most economically knowledgeable, the investment

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bankers. This politics of production rejected the notion that laissez-faire competition would lead to optimal economic activity and proposed in its stead an industrial order organized by finance capital with the explicit aim of ensuring worker livelihoods (Zouache and Bourneille 2009)—a charity company by another name. This “politics of production” thus discounted the potential for class conflict among producers and saw working-class interests as synonymous with the new industrial order that would ensure prosperity for all. The replacement of a despotic state ruled by idlers with a politics of production would be accomplished through the elimination of inherited property. The SaintSimonians were careful, however, to distance themselves from a redistributive politics predicated upon community of goods; theirs was to be a thoroughly bourgeois social order. They argued that idlers commanded great estates and derived great wealth from accidents of birth, not competency, leading to the misallocation of capital and economic inefficiency (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 26). On death, any property— capital—accumulated during a lifetime would be vested with society’s “trustees,” the bankers, who had the best capacity to determine where such funds should be invested. Personal property accumulated during a lifetime of work was to remain sacrosanct, an incentive for those with determination and skill to succeed. But by eliminating inheritance, and hence the class of idlers, a society’s accumulated capital would be constantly reinvested with the most capable industriels under the coordination of a national system of investment banks—ultimately known as credit mobiliers. Bankers, as society’s trustees, would allocate capital according to their careful assessment of where that investment could be most efficiently and productively used; these banks would be organized by economic sector, with the allocation of capital investment emerging out of the politics of production of trade associations in each industry (Mason 1931: 674ff.). The Saint-Simonian politics of production and the allocation of capital within industries by society’s trustees, the bankers, was thus meant as a critique of the social chaos and the waste of capital resulting from laissez-faire competition (Savigear 1971: 155). They pointed to the then-current critical epoch emerging from the revolution and the Napoleonic wars where laissez-faire policies produced a series of economic booms and busts due to “unchecked egoism, social conflict, duplication of effort, waste, inefficiency, and incompetence in the administration of both things and people” (Carlisle 1974: 455). Rather than celebrating the “creative destruction” of capitalism, they sought economic rationalization through the control of capital (Mason 1931: 681–82). Production within a sector was to be organized in large corporations with coordination being organized by corporate elites. These corporations would operate like a Benthamite charity company that optimized production through a hierarchical disciplinary emphasis on efficiency and the creation of economies of scope and scale. Their socialist emphasis on the poor was thus tempered by a hierarchical and technocratic approach to production (Carlisle 1974; Soliani 2009).

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The methods and goals of such a system can be gauged by a comparison of the British and French rail sectors, where liberal and utopian socialist policies were alternately first employed (see chapter 9). According to the utopian socialists, British laissez-faire rail policy had produced a “railway mania” of wasteful, short, competing lines with frequent bankruptcies, ironically higher fare prices, and no national system, leaving some regions overserved and others with no service at all. The French strove, in contrast, for a national system of carefully planned routes at a high technical standard with a minimum of competition where the efficiency of the rail corporations who operated the lines was to be ensured by state regulation of tariffs. The Saint-Simonians thus sought to replace liberal economic competition and its resultant production of winners and losers with an “age of association” in which the careful allocation of capital by investment bankers ensured the progressive amelioration of all humanity, and where each was rewarded in accord with their ability (Eckalbar 1979). This “socialist” concern for the poor thus represents a new strain in the discourse of social economy as first manifested in the experiments of military engineer Johannes van den Bosch. The development of Saint-Simonian ideas and their widespread implementation in the European rail system is closely associated with the close relationship the movement developed with the École Polytechnique, the elite state university producing engineers for state service. The students graduating from this program joined a corps of state engineers who shared a collective identity that, once infused with the Saint-Simonian philosophy of social management, viewed themselves as the natural administrators of this new industrial order, as expressed in their motto, “For science, glory and the good of the homeland” (Belhoste and Chatzis 2007: 217; Picon 2007). The École Polytechnique was to replace those earlier schools of cameralist science, with their emphasis on the pragmatic management (“husbanding”) of state resources. They were to develop their own forms of “welfare economics” of cost-benefit analysis to assess the appropriate allocation of public money in the delivery of public utility, a set of analytic tools then widely adopted in corporate management as engineers moved from the public to private sphere (Ekelund and Hébert 1978). Similar state engineering schools infused with a similar technocratic ethic developed elsewhere in Europe, and more particularly at the Dutch Royal Academy founded by Antoine Lipkens, a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Delft in 1842. These schools were to produce the Saint-Simonian-inspired engineers who would come to dominate the corporate sphere, organizing these charity companies to both increase efficiency and maintain labor dressage. Their role in reforming the Javanese sugar industry has already been noted. The first example of these concepts put into practice was the Credit Mobilier founded by the French Saint-Simonian railway developers Emile and Isaac Péreire in 1852. The Credit Mobilier was unusual in its day, as it was created to serve as an investment rather than a commercial bank. As the entire Saint-Simonian economic

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critique emphasized, industrial concerns had a great deal of difficulty in securing capital investment, which this bank sought to resolve. However, the Credit Mobilier was to do more than just secure this investment; through its control of that credit, these banks would determine the selection and scope of projects so that “everything is interlocked and all is planned . . . in the interest of all” (Eckalbar 1979: 84). That is, through its control of credit and the ownership of shares, the Credit Mobilier would ensure that wasteful competition was eliminated and that individual enterprises were efficiently run. As will be seen in the development of this argument, the Credit Mobilier was the conceptual “visible hand” to manage the economy; like the charity company, its carefully administered internal economy would progressively ameliorate the conditions of the poor through the provisionment of employment. No less than four proposals to establish Dutch Credit Mobiliers were received by the Ministry of Finance in 1856. As debates about them arose within the influential “economics section” of the Amsterdam-based scientific society “Felix Meritis,” it became clear that the Saint-Simonian investment bank strategy had itself been inspired by Willem I’s Society for the Patronage of Industry (most commonly known as the Société Générale) founded in 1822 to fund the development of the Belgian cotton industry, and after the Belgian secession it continued to be used to fund the construction of the Belgian rail network by Saint-Simonian-inspired engineers (Buijs 1857: 43–56; Block 2011). Unbeknownst to them, these investment strategies continued to be used in the NHM in the creation of the cotton industry in Twente. These Dutch proposals were, however, summarily rejected on the advice of the Netherlands Bank as “provoking speculation” (Jong 1930: 1:448–58; 2:1166–88). The debates in Felix Meritis gave clear voice to liberal opposition to the Credit Mobilier, in part reflecting Willem’s largely discredited economic policies in their eyes. The rejection of these four proposed French-controlled Credit Mobiliers, however, led to the repurposing of the Netherlands Trading Company. As will be discussed, the NHM began using its sizable capital surplus after 1854 to develop and control the industrialization of the Javanese sugar industry. This change in policy was also inspired by Willem’s Société Générale and the Credit Mobilier but retained control in the hands of the Crown without French competition.

The Governmentalization of the “Charity Company” I have highlighted three principles in the developing discourse of political economy as a management tool in this chapter, representing three separate liberal, utopian, and socialist moments. Firstly, I underscored that in the years after the new constitution of 1848, laissez-faire liberal reforms sought to discursively frame a “free market,” a disembedded private economic sphere as a means of limiting royal sovereignty. However, Liberal political economy discursively ignored the corporation; their suspicion of royal corporate tactics in combination with their individualist libertarian philosophy prevented them from seeking control of the Crown’s corporate empire, allowing

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it to continue to dominate the now “private” economy of the Greater Netherlands despite the limits now placed on the king. This corporate empire continued to be, I emphasized, both the managerial hand guiding the market, as well as the “working hand of the state”; its economic governance of this organized assemblage resulted in managed economies of scope and scale linking metropole and colony. Secondly, I underscored how the “economic” management of poverty was rooted in now-familiar Benthamite panoptic disciplinary strategies; as in the clinic, the madhouse, and the prison, these panoptic strategies created new forms of biopower for the regulation of marginalized populations who lacked the ideal characteristics of liberal citizenship. The Benevolent Society and the NHM were, we saw, corporate means of applying a productive form of dressage; the disciplinary use of accounting used “monetary units of account” in order to shape and mold pauper behavior in order to create economic subjects with productive virtue. This discipline was applied by the charity company as a closed alternate economy that sold only its surpluses in the “free market” in order to realize its profits; it is an example of formal, not real, subsumption to capitalism. It was characteristic, we saw, of the Colonies of Benevolence and the Cultivation System. And lastly, I outlined how Saint-Simonian socialists drew on Willem’s strategies of corporate financing in order to propose new forms of governing privatized corporate assemblages through investment banks, the Credit Mobiliers. Like Willem, they pursued ordered corporate management of the economy as a means of limiting the damage of laissez-faire competition and the toll it took on the poor, the losers; their “socialist” ideal remained that of a benevolent, efficiently run charity company. Yet they also specifically rejected governance by Willem, an idler, and sought to transfer power to the industriels under the leadership of technocratic bankers. This transfer of power in corporate governance presaged, I will argue, the development of “gentlemanly capitalism.” The new Credit Mobilier they proposed would lead a technocratic revolution, rebuilding the harbor of Amsterdam and creating an international rail empire, symbolizing the transfer of power to the new Palace of Industry.

Notes 1. See, for example, the multivolume series Changing Economy in Indonesia: A Selection of Statistical Source Material from the Early 19th Century up to 1940, initiated by W. M. F. Mansvelt; re-edited and continued by P. Creutzberg (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975–91), which seeks to reconstruct the early Indonesian “economy” through the contemporary preparation of historical “national [sic] accounts” long before there was a bounded nation (cf. Booth 1998). 2. Staathuishoudkunde quite literally translates as the “science of government householding.” 3. Pauper Management Improved was published in French in 1800 and in English in 1812 (Bahmueller 1981: 219). 4. See in particular the example of James Buchanan, the British consul for New York, who proposed a “Project for the Formation of a Depot in Upper Canada, with a view to receive the whole Pauper Population of England” (1834), and Thadeus Osgood’s proposed “Relief Unions,” both of which preceded the establishment of the Toronto “House of Industry” to subvert a planned workhouse by the

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colonial governor, a former Poor Law commissioner (Schrauwers 2009: 35–65). What marks these experiments is the application of the joint stock model to create a disciplined workhouse providing paupers with subsistence, but also training them in usable skills but without the moral denigration so evident in the English Dickensian House of Industry. Abram Combe’s community at Orbiston collapsed soon after the death of its founder and patron, and its members also moved to Upper Canada where they attempted to reestablish it near Sarnia (Ontario).

CHAPTER 8

The Credit Mobilier constructing an economic sovereignty

In the first chapter, I discussed recent work on the anthropology of the state that focused on its cultural construction, that is, on the ways in which the interactions of governmental agents in even the most distant and isolated communities were used to ideologically imagine the state. An example is the “monolithic” Cultivation System, which we saw had no bureaucratic uniformity or official constitutional existence yet still dominates discussion of Dutch colonialism. Although these ideological or state effects were contributed by dispersed authorities, they are marked by a shared governmental rationality that give their imaginings a coherence and unity that cannot be found on the ground. In this chapter, we examine the cultural process by which the agents of the Crown set about reimagining the state in the face of the liberal challenge of 1848 in greater detail. It is easy to overestimate the impact of the liberal “revolution” of 1848; it was less a revolution and more of a courtly introduction to decades-long change (Stuurman 1992). This period is marked by broad social and legal experimentation and the development of new forms of rule that would give this formative liberal democracy its final institutional shape. “Cutting the king’s head off” required a highly contested refiguration—a limitation—of the state’s power, especially in regard to the ultimate liberal shibboleth, free trade. Limiting state interference in trade required a series of legislative battles before the war could be won that included the question of the independence of the corporate form through which the Crown had ruled. The importance of this process is its “state effect”; by placing corporations in the “free market,” corporatization ideologically differentiated “economic” governance by corporations from the state, despite the circulation of methods, strategies, practices and personnel between them. Of concern here are the means by which the merchant king was replaced as the ideological pivot between state and economy by the “emancipated” corporation. A key challenge for liberals in setting that line was to differentiate the proper sphere of governance from the free market. We must recognize that this was a process of ideological construction in which, as Polanyi argued, “laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved” (1957a: 139). In this pro-

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cess of demarcation, the corporation is a notable transgression; as a continuing site of governmentality overflowing this tenuous boundary, it was increasingly defined as an economic rather than a public organization and its governmental role ignored. This chapter thus examines the manner in which corporations contributed to the state effect by ideologically positioning themselves as free market players by means of a discourse that framed its internal accounts and coercive contract-based transactions as “economic” and on par with market transactions while ignoring their governmental roles: as both a disciplinary apparatus to hold a nascent working class accountable, and as the visible hand of the market, organizing the complex assemblage of colonial commodity chains. Conservative prime minister F. A. van Hall’s early book Defending Free Trade, in Founding Corporations (1834) introduced the ideological groundwork for corporations as free market actors. As prime minister from 1853 to 1856, Van Hall’s book initiated a new legal orthodoxy that contributed to the process of “corporatization” in this period. He played a key role in the restructuring of the Dutch state debt in 1840, saving the Netherlands from bankruptcy, and leading to constitutional limits on the Crown. Yet he also served under numerous governments as one of the King’s trusted ministers. His liberal credentials were thus sufficiently strong to gain support for his corporate solution to the Liberal laissez-faire logjam that had brought Dutch railway development to a standstill, endangering any gains that free trade might have brought. Van Hall’s government reversed previous laissez-faire liberal rail policy and sought the “emancipation of the limited liability company” (Hirschfeld 1922: 46–47); these arguments were bolstered, no doubt, by legislation adopted in the United States and Britain in the previous decade permitting the unchartered public registration of corporations. This “emancipation” of the corporation allowed Amsterdam’s old republican gentlemanly capitalists to establish a Credit Mobilier by which they sought to command the new national rail network. These banks were to be equally successful in establishing colonial commodity chains in sugar and cotton cloth, challenging the dominance of the NHM. The Credit Mobilier thus became a tool by which the old republican regent families of Amsterdam could take control of the weakened Crown’s corporate empire and expand it. This emancipation of the corporation was legitimated by a grand technocratic vision that drew on Saint-Simonian thought in more than just its financing and administration. Van Hall’s solution to the lack of rail development in the Netherlands called for the damming of the river IJ, on which Amsterdam’s port lay, and reversing its flow by cutting through the dunes that protected Holland from the North Sea, thereby giving Amsterdam a new seaport and protected harbor (figure 8.1). These massive engineering works were to be matched by the construction of bridges of a previously unknown size to span the three major rivers dividing the country, and by the building of a national rail network that would link the international rail network to Amsterdam’s new seaport, once again making the Netherlands a world center of

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Figure 8.1. The harbor and canal project constructed at “Holland at its smallest.” Source: Fotonummer 52.00233, Collectie Gemeentearchief Zaanstad.

trade. This technocratic vision was to be celebrated in a permanent exhibition hall, the “Palace of Industry” just outside Amsterdam’s new railway station, and next to a new urban development rivaling Baron Haussman’s new grand avenues in Paris (figure 8.2). These massive engineering works were to be conceived and constructed by the state engineers of the Royal Academy; their plans drew heavily on the planning principles of the Saint-Simonian-inspired French railway engineers, a firm rejection of laissez-faire British “railway mania.” Their technocratic vision was to be implemented by a series of “emancipated” corporations on the French Credit Mobilier model, which, through their interlocked boards of directors, would ensure a rational, noncompetitive, planned economy that served the needs of all. This corporate development was to seemingly give Amsterdam’s gentlemanly capitalists control over the resources of the Crown, fulfilling the Saint-Simonian vision of a limitation on government by idlers and its transfer to a politics of production under the direction of a technocratic elite of bankers and industriels. While the impact of Saint-Simonianism would appear to be short-lived, its key contribution was in sharpening the differentiation between the state and an emerging “free market” while leaving the state’s visible hand, the corporation, in that market sphere. It conceptually shifted the governance of the economy from the state to the private sphere, to that of Van Hall’s “free trade in corporations.”

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Figure 8.2. The Palace of Industry, Amsterdam. Source: Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

The NHM as Credit Mobilier The most important example of this complex transitional process remained the Netherlands Trading Company, which dominated colonial trade and the domestic cotton industry, and which still generated almost 30 percent of state revenue. The NHM’s twenty-five-year corporate charter was set to expire in 1848—the revolutionary year—and elicited broad public debate on its very nature and whether or not it should just be disbanded. Critiques by liberals focused on its role as “the working arm of the state” and the irony of it being a “trading company that engaged in no trade” (Mansvelt 1924: 2:209–10, 353). When the NHM’s charter was renewed in 1849, these liberal demands fundamentally changed its primary functions, as it was slowly forced to give up its role as sole commission agent for the Crown. Over a decade-long period, the liberals successfully challenged the NHM’s control of the cotton industry, leaving the directors of the company with a major problem: how to invest an f 18 million cash surplus that the Crown (its major shareholder) prevented them from redistributing to shareholders as dividends (Mansvelt 1924: 2:216–22; Hugenholtz 2008: 29ff.). It was at this point that the company drew on two men, Gerrit de Clercq and Willem Poolman, who were influenced by the Saint-Simonian Credit Mobilier movement; they helped transform the NHM from financier of the state into an investment bank financing the sugar industry. This transformation had

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the ironic effect of pushing the NHM from managing the flow of colonial products on behalf of the state to displacing the colonial state in managing their production, as they had the cotton industry. The NHM, as a corporation, assumed the Crown’s economic sovereignty in managing plantation Java. To his revivalist father Willem de Clercq’s regret, Gerrit had rejected religion and embraced an “unbiased and scientific” liberalism of which he became one of the most important publicists and organizers (Aerts 1997: 134ff.). Gerrit de Clercq studied at the University of Leiden between 1839 and 1843, completing his studies with a Latin dissertation on the Netherlands Trading Company. In 1845 De Clercq was named the legal and political editor of De Gids (The Guide), which he used as a platform for a liberalism tempered by the critiques of Saint-Simonian socialism, which he praised as “the bud of the future” (Quack 1915: 101). He wrote a series of lengthy articles in De Gids on French socialism through which he introduced his liberal readers to the “social question,” the problem of worker unrest, a concern that was to become all-consuming in the revolutionary year of 1848 (Aerts 1997: 33). In 1846, he became a cofounder of the Amstelsociëteit, a liberal electoral association formed in Amsterdam and emulated widely elsewhere. And in the same year, he also began the Friday Club, a debating society that attracted a large share of Amsterdam’s liberal elite, where he defended the proposition “Socialism is in no way hostile to Political Economy.” De Clercq was known in these liberal associations for his persistent defense of socialism over laissez-faire, although he was not convinced of the practicality of its utopian plans; he was more a social democrat than a laissez-faire liberal (Aerts 1988: 33; Heemskerk 1887: 45–56; Quack 1892: 352–53). He became secretary to the board of the Netherlands Trading Company, as his father had served before him, from 1851 until his early death in 1857; under his term, the NHM was reborn as an industrial financier operating like a credit mobilier seeking to regulate and control the Javanese sugar sector. Although a radical, De Clercq repudiated the republican political form, seeking instead a reformed constitutional monarchy without wide public participation (Quack 1915: 125–27); he sought to recreate the “old image of the regent who kept both petit bourgeoisie and king apart, and in effect deprived both of their power” (Aerts 1988: 132). It is thus easy to see why Saint-Simon’s ideas appealed to him. Saint-Simonianism was the product of French revolutionary turmoil and a rejection of it. The doctrines of Henri de Saint-Simon appealed to its core French audience of young engineers and scientists produced by the Napoleonic École Polytechnique precisely because it emphasized that only the application of scientific methods to political problems could maximize the well-being of society and avoid the excesses of the revolution (Picon 2007). For Saint-Simon, politics was nothing but “the science of production—that is to say, that science whose object is the creation of an order of things most favorable to every kind of production” (cited in Olson 2008: 46). Science was to be the language of a technocracy, not a democracy, to replace royal mercantilist control of the economy with a broader “gentlemanly capitalism” (cf. Belhoste and Chatzis 2007; Ionescu 1973: 31). In De Clercq’s summation, the Saint-Simonians

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believe in the natural inequality of men. They view this inequality as the basis of all associations, as the indispensable condition for social order. They reject any system of community of goods since such a community would be openly violating the first of the moral laws, which demands of those whose calling it is to teach that they place each according to their ability, and pay them according to their work. . . . They demand that all tools, estates and capital that compose the fragmented private properties be united and worked according to the requirements of the High Authority so that everyone’s job is the expression of their ability, and their wealth the measure of their work. (Clercq 1846: 137) That such an egalitarian process should continue to require a “High Authority” points to the continuing influence of the state on economic governance in their view. Whereas in France, this “High Authority” remained the autocrat, Napoleon III, Willem III’s feebleness and final submission of ministerial responsibility to parliament meant a slow decentering of rule in the Netherlands to oligarchs such as De Clercq himself. Saint-Simonian ideas were widely discussed in the period. The development of a “spirit of the Crystal Palace” by the Association for National Industry (Vereeniging voor Volksvlijt) to oppose the “spirit of Jan Salie” was a broad popular expression of them. The association was formed in 1852 under royal patronage by Dr. Samuel Sarphati, an Amsterdam philanthropist, and Samuel Bleekrode, one of the professors at the Royal Academy. This association was to sponsor an industrial exhibition like the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London and to build a monumental Palace of Industry in Amsterdam to house it (Brugmans 1973: 60). Such exhibitions had a long history in the Netherlands going back to the Napoleonic occupation; even the 1851 London Exhibition had its roots in the French tradition. Antoine Lipkens, director of the Royal Academy, organized a successful Dutch exhibition, for example, in Delft in 1849 (Bakker 1995a: 17). The Palace of Industry sought to emulate the Great Exhibition in London that claimed to “present to its six million visitors ‘a living picture’ of the development of mankind” (Mitchell 1988: 6), which, unfortunately for the Dutch, had placed them far to the rear. They exalted industrial commodities and laid them out in an ordered, museum-like representation of progress—social Darwinism on display. There is a large anthropological literature that has reflexively examined the politics of representation of these Orientalist visions (Corbey 1993; Haraway 1984–85; Di Leonardo 1998; Bloembergen 2006; Aerts 2006: 228). The association, its journal, and the Palace of Industry were critical to the elaboration of an oppositional “spirit of the Crystal Palace” to combat the “spirit of Jan Salie” in the Netherlands. The spirit of the Crystal Palace was a new popular way of envisioning the technocratic corporation as a national trailblazer. Although inspired to action by the Crystal Palace, Sarphati’s Saint-Simonian financial model for the Dutch Palace of Industry was derived from his visit to the 1855 Paris Exhibition at which a new, permanent Palace of Industry had been un-

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veiled. The 1855 exhibition had been commissioned by Napoleon III as part of Baron Haussmann’s “renovation of Paris” in the wake of the 1848 revolutionary communes, creating the system of Paris’s renowned avenues, parks, and public works. While in Paris, Sarphati met with the former Amsterdam (and now Parisian) Saint-Simonian banker, Louis Raphaël Bischoffsheim, who was to become the major financier of his projects (Kooy and Leeuwe 2001: 120). The Palace of Industry completed in Amsterdam in 1866 was thus part of a larger plan to redevelop the lands to the south of Amsterdam into a long boulevard of luxury homes stretching between his new Amstel Hotel and the new train station. As the mayor of Amsterdam at the time noted, the development was modeled on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and it contrasted starkly with the new “model” homes for the working class being constructed in the docklands (Wagenaar 2003: 53–54). This modern redevelopment of Amsterdam led, in turn, to the construction of the massive dikes and canals that would give Amsterdam’s harbor direct access to the North Sea and make it the premier deep-water port of northern Europe. The conservative “Venice of the north” would thus be transformed into a modern hub of rail and sea transport managing the trade of the German industrial heartland, all bankrolled by a credit mobilier. As envisioned by the French Saint-Simonians, these developments would flow from a central coordinating bank that would be staffed by scientifically trained (royalist) experts who would allocate funds to industrial corporations thereby making capital available to all who could productively use it (Soliani 2016: 34ff.; Cameron 1953). These banks were the key means by which Saint-Simonian meritocratic ideas on the mobilization of credit and the marriage of banking and industry would be implemented. Prominent Amsterdam advocates of Saint-Simonian banking ideas included the Jewish Amsterdam bankers Leo Lippman, Louis Raphaël Bischoffsheim, and Julius Königswärter, each of whom was eventually to invest heavily in the new Dutch Credit Mobiliers (Jonker 1996: 250; Quack 1915: 99–102). Hendrik Quack, a later “socialist” editor of De Gids and member of the board of the Dutch SaintSimonian rail company that resulted from this process, recorded that Lippman, an Amsterdam banker, was an adept of the French Saint-Simonians, and remained on good footing with most of them. It was the time of Napoleon III. All the old Saint-Simonians, the Péreires, the d’Eichthals, the Rodrigues, Michel Chevalier, Adolphe Guéroult, Charles Duveyrier and their friends opined that a golden age was being offered to France. They prized the tendency in the emperor’s rule to meet the needs and wants of society, and firstly emphasize the organization of the productive capacities of the land. They saw in France, under the government of Napoleon III, a terrain wherein labor and industry would develop most purely. They threw themselves in the world of business always ready if it went well to give their money to spread their social ideas and bring them to reality. As a student I had

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excitedly followed all these Saint-Simonian ideas since Gerrit de Clercq, the Secretary of the NHM, praised their teachings to me as the seed of the future. Lippman frequently surprised me with news out of their circle. (1915: 101) Dutch bankers had long sought to create a capital market in Amsterdam as had existed in the eighteenth century and quickly latched onto this new tool. In 1856, no less than five proposals for Dutch Credit Mobiliers were made, yet their incorporation was ultimately obstructed by the Netherlands Bank as too speculative at that time (Jonker 1996: 255). Some, like Königswärter and Bischoffsheim, moved to Paris as a result (Berg 1992: 135). Credit Mobilier–type banks were not, in fact, new to the Netherlands; they had long been a unique mercantilist means by which Willem I governed the economy of the Greater Netherlands. One of the most important of the early royal corporations was the General Netherlands Society for the Patronage of Industry (most commonly known as the Société Générale), founded in 1822, which Willem utilized to foster the development of the cotton-manufacturing industry in Belgium before its secession. This bank was almost unique in Europe in the period precisely in that it financed industrial development, not commercial exchange. It bore a striking conceptual resemblance to the Credit Mobilier, without sharing its Saint-Simonian technocratic rhetoric (Riemans 1935: 71). The French Saint-Simonians themselves acknowledged it as their inspiration (Smith 2006: 71). Indeed, in the contemporary Dutch debates that emerged around the Credit Mobilier in the 1850s, its similarity to the Société Générale was repeatedly noted (Kooy and Leeuwe 2001: 158). Willem lost control of the Société Générale after the Belgian secession, although the institution continued to fund Belgian industrial development; it was a critical financier of the Saint-Simonianinspired Belgian railway system for example (Block 2011; Soliani 2009: 35). After Willem lost control of the Société Générale, the Netherlands Trading Company under the leadership of Gerrit de Clercq’s father had served a similar financing function in creating the Dutch cotton industry (Brugmans 1963: 50–51). The importance of this financing function was the “politics of production” that it enabled; the NHM assumed a coordinating role by which it regulated the entire commodity chain in cotton cloth production, effecting economies of scale while nonetheless maintaining its “philanthropic” objectives. In this era, as we shall see, it also turned to the regulation of the sugar industry in Java. The introduction of Credit Mobiliers was a critical step in this process of shifting political control from the Crown to the regent-controlled corporate sphere. The introduction of this kind of investment bank was a refinement in the form of “economic” governance that would replace the Crown’s direct governance of corporations, and hence depoliticize that management. Management was devolved to an “economic” institution, a bank, although as we shall see this was of more ideological than practical effect and the ties between the state, the new banks, and their daughter corporations remained strong.

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Given the initial obstruction to the creation of credit mobiliers on the French model, the test case for these banking innovations again proved to be the Netherlands Trading Company. After its charter was renewed in 1849, the NHM had been forced to retain its f 18 million capital surplus; it was utilized in the late 1850s in much the same manner as Willem’s original Société Générale. In the new age of laissez-faire, those liberal statesmen who had objected that the NHM had not engaged in any trade now objected to the use of that surplus to conduct colonial trade; the NHM would easily dominate the smaller trading houses and would monopolize the market (Mansvelt 1924: 2:389). Under the influence of Gerrit de Clercq, hired as secretary to the board in 1851, and Willem Poolman, hired as president of the Batavia Factorij (head offices) in Java in 1854, the NHM invested its capital reserve in the state-driven industrialization of the sugar industry of Java instead (Mansvelt 1924: 2:357–58). This introduced the “politics of production” that the NHM had developed in regulating the Dutch cotton industry, allowing for its management of an entirely new sector of the colonial economy; as will be seen, this came to involve the new technocrats trained at the Royal Academy, ensuring the circulation of governmental practices between state and corporation. Willem Poolman (1809–73) was of regent background, the son of the governor of the Dutch Gold Coast in West Africa (Berg and Wachlin 2005: 47). He had been a lifetime employee of the NHM, joining it aged fifteen at its founding and moving to its Javanese head office in 1832, where he was quickly promoted through the ranks. He became the secretary to the board in 1840 and a board member in 1842, but he also appears to have amassed a sizable personal fortune as well, including co-owning Djatti, a sugar factory in Kediri, which gave him personal insight in the operations of the industry (Berg and Wachin 2005: 62).1 He resigned in 1851 and returned to the Dutch head office, with some indication that he sought a position on the NHM’s board (Ramaer 1911–37: 748; Mansvelt 1924: 2:357). He was instead appointed the president of the Javanese head office from 1855 to 1859. Poolman’s reports showed a clear understanding of Saint-Simonian banking principles, and through them the NHM utilized its financing as a form of control or economic governance of its mortgagees (Mansvelt 1924: 2:357ff.). In his Annual Report of 1856, Poolman proposed to work with a portion of your capital in the same sense as the credit institutions known in Europe under the name of crédit foncier;2 and we rejoice that in the main you have united with our ideas for the time being until a partial exploration of it has been assured, since we have the firm conviction that your interests will be promoted, and the colony in general will be blessed with an unexpected boon.3 Under Poolman’s leadership, profits from the Javanese operations had more than tripled by the time he returned to the Netherlands in 1859. Poolman built up a team in the factory’s head office consisting of Th. F. Schill, Robert Browne, and N. P. van den Berg who also became skilled in these investment strategies; they were to join Pool-

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man in the later spread of the Dutch Credit Mobilier movement in the Netherlands (Berg and Wachlin 2005: 102). The circulation of personnel, strategies, and practices by this team was crucial to corporate integration of the industry in this period. The NHM was able to coordinate production, allocating capital among its business group where it would be most productive; it demanded, as Gerrit de Clercq had written of the Saint-Simonians a decade earlier, “that all tools, estates and capital that compose the fragmented private properties be united and worked according to the requirements of the High Authority so that everyone’s job is the expression of their ability, and their wealth the measure of their work” (1846: 137). The economic governance it administered was in coordination with that applied by the NEI state through its standard contracts and the actions of the Directorate of Cultivations by which they sought to introduce new steam-powered forms of sugar refining. By 1863, the terms of the loans gave the Netherlands Trading Company veto power on the appointment of factory administrators, and by 1871 they were regularly inspecting both the factories and their books (Knight 1999b: 88). This close interaction with the state in the management of the Cultivation System and the circulation of personnel points to the ways in which the governmental actions of the NHM overflowed the liberal separation of state and economy. It is important to underscore the innovative and unique regime of banking and management practices that were brought together to build this assemblage of corporations under Poolman and De Clercq’s direction in this context; the circulation of this regime of practices occurred in a similar manner to Van den Bosch’s disciplinary regime between the Benevolent Colonies, the Cultivation System, and the Twente cotton industry. The popularization of this assemblage of finance capital practices (rather than just the individuals noted here) from the NHM to other corporations created alignments and fostered new forms of management that the traditional Amsterdam merchant bankers had not previously engaged in. The Amsterdam merchant bankers extended short-term commercial loans that were meant to support trade, not industry. They were small operations, usually partnerships, unlike the large multidivisional corporations they would later be called upon to create and manage. These bankers were a “money aristocracy” whose elite culture was based on the “educational function” of the familial mercantile business. The skills learned there, in combination with their family names, gave them ready access through an “old boy’s network” to most offices in state or incorporated business as “the practiced governors of family fortunes” (Laarse 2005: 43–44). However, unlike Lippman, these were those conservative rentier bankers usually accused of perpetuating the “spirit of Jan Salie” rather than ready practitioners of radical Saint-Simonian banking methods. The new skills they picked up were by means of the dissemination of practices within the new corporations. The NHM and its technocratic financial management practices are thus a key means by which the Saint-Simonian ideology of a managed economy was overlaid on the liberal division of state and economy; complex corporate assemblages like

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the Cultivation System were economically framed as participants in the laissez-faire market. This pattern of corporatization was subsequently replicated as a model in the 1860s through the transmission of staff, programs, and strategies of rule from the NHM when liberalized banking rules finally allowed the formation of limited liability incorporated credit mobiliers. Poolman and his team were key to the formation of the Netherlands first Credit Mobilier, the General Society for Trade and Industry (Algemeene Maatschappij voor Handel en Nijverheid) in the next decade.

The General Society for Trade and Industry As the acrimonious public debate on the rechartering of the NHM indicated, liberals continued to be suspicious of the corporate form (J. Muller 1848; P. N. Muller 1858; Nierop 1865). Despite Van Hall’s call to “Defend Free Trade, in founding Corporations,” Simon Vissering, one of the most strident of the liberal political economists of the age, nevertheless found that “it is advisable for the government to reserve to itself the granting of approval for the establishment and the continuing existence of such powerful associations and to keep a watchful eye on their intentions and operations in order to act upon them as soon as they conflict with the public interest” (1860: 135–49). Unlike other jurisdictions in the period, the Netherlands did not introduce general incorporation laws, although the minister of justice declared that the country needed to “move with the times” and “emancipate” the corporation (Hirschfeld 1922: 46–47).4 As it became clear, however, that new industries like the railways required more capital than partnerships could muster, public debate on who was to build a new, national rail network was made more complex yet; which of these two distrusted institutions, the state or the corporation, should exploit this new industry (see chapter 9)? Liberals themselves were divided, allowing Van Hall’s minority conservative party to follow the French Saint-Simonian example, neither fish nor fowl, though allowing for the liberal revisioning of a public-private divide. They granted the concession to operate the new state lines to a daughter corporation of a new credit mobilier, the General Society for Trade and Industry, drawing on the now repatriated Willem Poolman. Van Hall, leaning heavily on the state engineers of the Ministry of the Interior, proposed that the state would build and own its own national rail network but would rent the infrastructure out to a corporation to operate with their own rolling stock (Veenendaal 1993: 149–51). In this way, the royalist technocrats of the state bureaucracy were married with the Saint-Simonian bankers who would create the rail corporations and credit mobiliers to fund them for both the Netherlands and Java on the French model. The solution seemed to effect a public-private divide, yet also to calm Liberal fears of the corporate form through continued state supervision. From the conservative perspective, this allowed for a continued close working relationship between the technocratic state and these corporations; this was yet another successful example of corporatization serving to depoliticize the economic management of the

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state over the market. This marriage of technocracy and investment banks, however, was to have longer-term effects as it created a class of “gentlemanly capitalists” who would usurp the power of the Crown; as will be seen in subsequent chapters, these technocrats circulated freely between the state and the corporation, extending corporate governmentality into new realms of the economy. The state engineers who led construction of the new rail network established a new preserve for their technocratic power. Willem II had deployed his technocrats to manage his domains, including the royal assemblage of Cultivation and Consignment Systems that produced the financial surplus that allowed the state to build this network between 1860 and 1863. The leader of the credit mobilier movement with whom they would work was none other than Willem Poolman. Poolman had returned to the Netherlands in 1859 with the plan of building a Javanese railway and founding a credit mobilier in order to fund it (Ramaer 1911–37). He had applied for a concession for the whole island of Java in 1858, but his application was denied after a prolonged investigation by the Ministry of Colonies in which his request was caught up in the debate on whether such a rail network should be built by the state or by private parties (Kielstra 1914: 38–52; Lion 1861; Indisch Genootschap 1864; NISM 1869a). Poolman was briefly elected to parliament in 1860 as a conservative for Amsterdam, serving just long enough to support Van Hall’s new rail legislation (Poolman 1873; Berg and Wachlin 2005: 62). Poolman then founded the Netherlands Society for Railroad Supplies (Maatschappij voor Spoorwegmaterieel) in Utrecht in 1861 in order to build the rolling stock for the new state railway; he was its largest shareholder (Leening 1866). His major partners in this company, and its co-managers, were two conservative leaders of “Crown and Country,” Agnites Vrolik and Herman A. van den Wall Bake, who had previously run the Netherlands Mint (Broeke 1985: 286–87). Vrolik was a chemistry professor who had served as a conservative finance minister from 1854 to 1858. Van den Wall Bake had purchased the Utrecht Iron Foundry in 1860, and it was to provide the new carriage company with much of its ironwork (Hooff and Boon 2018); he also provided the ironwork to complete the new Palace of Industry, of which he was a commissioner. The new company built its factory in Utrecht in 1862, where it soon employed three hundred people (SS 1865: 41). The Netherlands Society for Railroad Supplies board membership was rounded out by F. de Brouwer van Hogendorp and Frederik s’Jacob. Van Hogendorp, was a Belgian “socialist” aristocrat who had been the vice president of the permanent advisory board of the Belgian State Railways (Quack 1915: 110–11). S’Jacob was another member of the gentry, a marine engineer serving under Prince Hendrik (Willem III’s brother) and as aide-de-camp to his uncle, J. J. Rochussen, the governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies. After resigning from the military, he received a government sugar contract from his uncle and made his fortune operating a Javanese sugar factory between 1847 and 1857 (Quack 1915: 185) (see chapter 5). It was no doubt then that this “sugar lord” met Poolman, the president of the NHM in Java at the time.

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In January 1862, Poolman applied for a new concession to build a single line in Java, from Semarang to Yogyakarta, the area where the sugar industry was concentrated. While he awaited the decision on this line, Poolman worked with Alexander Mendel, an employee of the banking house of Henri Luden in Amsterdam, and whose brother-in-law was the Saint-Simonian banker Leo Lippman (Berg 1992: 41). One of Poolman’s partners in Java went bankrupt in 1862, depriving him of half his fortune and his ability to invest in a credit mobilier of his own; he was now no doubt drawn to Mendel’s well-placed proposal for a credit mobilier to fund railways in both the Netherlands and Java (Berg and Wachlin 2005: 87). Mendel had been lobbying for the creation of a credit mobilier since the first five applications had been denied in 1857. Renewed interest in credit mobiliers emerged after the Netherlands state began construction of its national rail network after 1860 (see chapter 9) and declared its willingness to lease it on its completion in 1863. Mendel was thus able to sway Frans van Heukelom, the principal of the commercial firm of Van Heukelom & Vollenhoven, the respected president of the Amsterdam chamber of commerce, and close relative of three generations of directors of the Netherlands Bank to promote his plan within the chamber. Van Heukelom was a cousin of Willem de Clercq in a tight-knit Mennonite community that included many of Amsterdam’s top merchant banker regent families. His credibility drew the major merchant banking houses of Hendrik Luden, Leo Lippmann, Van Eeghen, E. W. Cramerus, Julius Bunge, Joseph Cahan, Maurits Insinger, and Dirk Cordes to the planned credit mobilier (Quack 1915: 100–102; Hirschfeld 1949–51: 155–57). In January 1863, the General Society for Trade and Industry (Algemeene Maatschappij voor Handel en Nijverheid ) applied for corporate recognition, with a capitalization of f 20 million (about half the size of the NHM, but still the third largest corporation in the Netherlands [Jonker 1997: 256]). Its prospectus proudly drew its lineage back to Willem’s “General Society” (Algemeene Maatschappij 1863). The Amsterdam capital organized by Frans van Heukelom was supplemented by that from two competing French credit mobiliers. Isaac Péreire, president of the Société Générale de Crédit Mobilier Francais was the vice chair of the board that also contained members of his related banks and railway companies in France and Spain. Dominance by the Péreire brothers was balanced, however, by the participation of their French rivals, the Bisschoffsheim group of banks, which had allied with the Rothschilds to form the competing Société Générale pour favoriser l’Industrie et le Commerce de la France. As noted above, Louis R. Bisschoffsheim had run a banking house in Amsterdam until 1846 and was also a well-known proponent of Saint-Simonian banking theories ( Jonker 1996: 250). When he moved to Paris he began to intensify his investments in railways; his own son became a Saint-Simonian railway engineer. However, he did not abandon his interests in the Netherlands. He had received a concession in partnership with G. & H. Salomonson for an abortive Overijssel Railway Company (Overijsselsche Spoorwegmaatschappij) in 1845 meant to serve the Twente cotton industry. Bisschoffsheim was also the major investor in

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the competing Dutch credit mobilier, Samuel Sarphati’s Nederlandsche Crediet en Depositobank, which was to fund his new building developments in Amsterdam (Bussiére 1992: 23). The General Society, like its French model, was specifically formed to fund the development of railways by concentrating capital in the hands of a few directors: The new bank would improve railroad financing by diminishing the risk of the individual railroad investor by having the bank buy railroad stock and having the public in turn fund the bank. By substituting the bank’s securities—homogeneous, fixed-return securities of a single well-known enterprise of unimpeachable credit—for the multiplicity of securities of uneven and fluctuating value, the bank would insure a constant flow of capital into railways at a relatively low cost, and at the same time secure for itself over-all direction of the entire industry. (Eckalbar 1979: 88) As an investment bank, it had clear plans to create and capitalize daughter corporations for railways in the Netherlands and Java, as well as a credit mobilier specifically for the Netherlands East Indies. The General Society’s plan for a Dutch railway corporation to operate the state railways was in competition with that of the Poolman group, and their Java plans were potentially obstructed by the well-connected Poolman, who had already applied to build a Javanese railroad. It would appear, however, that Poolman had been working with the Amsterdam group from its inception, as he informed a potential employee of the new credit mobilier for the NEI of it in January, and offered him the job to run it in June, before the Netherlands-Indies Trade Bank (NIHB), with

Figure 8.3. The Corporate Assemblage of the General Society and its balanced management between the Heukelom/Clercq and Poolman groups.

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him on the board, was even created (Altes 2004: 26; Hirshfeld 1922: 54, 57). The state granted Poolman the concession for the Java railway in June, which he immediately signed over to the Netherlands-Indies Railway Company (NISM) created by the General Society in August (Veenendaal 2008b: 97). That month, Poolman’s rail carriage company also merged with a daughter corporation of the General Society to create the Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways (SS); the Den Haag group was to provide the technical expertise and the Amsterdam group the financing. The merged companies were granted the rail concession by parliament in September (Leening 1866: Broeke 1985: 111). By September 1863, the credit mobilier and its three daughter corporations were ready to commence operations and had obtained the concessions to manage railways in both the Netherlands and Java (figure 8.3). Although the General Society was soon bankrupted by the fraudulent investments of Mendel, these daughter companies went on to dominate the Dutch economy where they formed an integrated assemblage, like the NHM, coordinated through the overlapping circulation of Amsterdam’s gentlemanly capitalists on their management and boards. These interlocks in the directorates of the NIHB and NISM no doubt expedited the NIHB investment of f 500,000 in the NISM, and the appointment of the NIHB as the financial agent of the NISM (Altes 2004: 52). Although the total number of incorporated companies grew from 137 in 1850 to 3,300 by 1900, the Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways (with 18,000 employees) was the largest in the Netherlands (Sluyterman 2005: 25), and its colonial progeny were third and ninth largest in the NEI respectively (Bossenbroek 1996: 88). The daily management of this corporate assemblage was shared by members of the Heukelom and Poolman groups, ensuring rapid communication and the circulation of practices between the companies. The Amsterdam office of the Netherlands-Indies Trade Bank, for example, was managed by Frans van Heukelom himself, aided by his cousin Gideon J. de Clercq (Gerrit’s brother, a sugar wholesaler), and Robert Browne (a Poolman associate, from the directorate of the NHM Factorij in Java) (Brugmans 1963: 111–12). The bank had continued close relations with the NHM through a third brother, Daniel de Clercq, who had replaced the now deceased Gerrit as secretary of the board.5 The Netherlands Indies Railway Company was managed by three of its nine directors, led by Poolman himself, and included F. van Heukelom’s brother, Cornelis, a prominent Liberal parliamentarian closely associated with the minister of colonies, and Batavia lawyer and later Conservative parliamentarian Eduard H. s’Jacob, a brother of Frits s’Jacob from Poolman’s carriage company (NISM 1869b). The Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways was managed by Agnites Vrolik, F. de Brouwer Hogendorp, Frits s’Jacob, and H. A. van den Wall Bake from Poolman’s Society for Railway Materials, as well as by Hendrik Quack (Frans van Heukelom’s son-in-law) and Hendrik P. van Heukelom, a nephew of Frans and Cornelis (operator of de Atlas, a large tool manufactory in Amsterdam). Management of all

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three of these new corporations was thus restricted to the balanced merging of the Van Heukelom/De Clercq and Poolman groups.

The Credit Mobiliers in the Java Trade Willem II’s “rule of experts” was a phenomenal success for the state exchequer and a clear expression of state-led development, a “command economy.” The managerial culture fostered by Royal Academy engineer-administrators increased the efficiency of the sugar industry and substantially improved state profits. It had, however, partially accomplished that measure by incentivizing its European contractors with a share of the increased production for private sale. Although the Cultivation System can be treated as a single, multiunit state plantation, it was also, after 1847, a site for dependent private capital accumulation, an incipient site of corporatization in itself. The new model sugar contracts developed in 1847 and 1860 allowed contractors to retain up to a third of their production for private sale, and as Knight (2007) emphasizes, it was the vast sums generated from this that funded the bourgeois lifestyles of the sugar lords. In forging their alliance with the state, the sugar lords had, however, backed away from Liberalism in order to have their contracts renewed. Here, we trace how the “private” sale of sugar entangled the sugar lords in new forms of economic governance that circulated from the state through its economic arm, the NHM, and from there through other daughter corporations. Here then, focus shifts from the rule of experts under Willem II to corporate governmentality under the liberalized regime of Willem III. Under the old system of long-term loans for factory capitalization, the NEI state had extended some f 7 million in credit by 1844, for which it demanded total control of the factories’ output, at prices it determined; in contrast, the NHM extended almost f 4.9 million in loans to 26 sugar factories by 1861, financing their conversion to steam as prescribed under the new model contract (Claver 2014: 49; Mansvelt 1924: 2:361). Their largest customers included A. Fransen van de Putte, Hubertus Hoevenaar, D. C. Ament, and P. H. A. van den Broek, owners of what were considered among the most advanced factories in the Indies (and indeed, Asia). These sugar producers were obligated, under the new contracts, to provide the state with only two-thirds of their production (at cost), leaving one-third for private disposition (and profit). The NHM made capital loans to these producers at 7.5 percent but discounted that rate by 1 percent if they consigned their private sugar to the NHM, giving the company its own sugar to trade “privately” outside of the consignment system. The company thus acquired between f 5 and 6 million worth of sugar per year for trade on the Amsterdam market. By this means, its profits increased fourfold during the 1850s (Mansvelt 1924: 2:360–61). Transporting and wholesaling the production of twenty-six factories allowed them to introduce economies of scale that gave them the continuing ability to arbitrarily set the terms of their standard contracts with manufacturers, shipping companies,

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insurers, and retailers. Rather than seeking to maximize profits, the NHM accepted its fixed 7 percent interest return on capital and focused instead on increasing the efficiency of the industry under its direction so as to control its exposure to risk (Mansvelt 1924: 2:360). The provision of credit thus gave the Netherlands Trading Company greater control of the industry as a whole, allowing it to act as the visible hand coordinating “private” sugar production as it had in the Dutch cotton industry.6 This coordination supplemented that of the state through its standard contract. As ambitious and as wealthy as the NHM was, however, it lacked the resources required to meet the overall needs of all ninety-six sugar factories under contract to the state, as became clear in the 1863 global credit crisis arising out of the American civil war. The credit crisis was aggravated by the new sugar contracts imposed in 1861, which had increased the state’s share of sugar profits at the expense of manufacturers. The civil war’s compounding effect was a “cotton famine” that severely affected the manufacture and import of Dutch cloth by these trading companies. The crisis resulted in the bankruptcy of many of Java’s oldest trading companies who had provided short-term credit to manufacturers for whom they exported sugar on commission. The crisis thus created a void in the provision of credit for the private trade in sugar and cotton that the NHM was unable to fill, leaving the field open for competition at just the time that Dutch metropolitan capital was coalescing in the credit mobilier movement. As we shall see, two of the most important of these challengers were the NIHB and the Internatio, the progeny of those long associates of the NHM, Willem Poolman and G. & H. Salomonson. These challengers adopted the same organizational form and strategies as the NHM, although given the openness of the field, they were hardly competitors. Because all of the players were intimately connected with the NHM, an easy circulation of its strategies of economic governance was achieved. Although there is the appearance of corporate competition, all three banks operated similarly with the same technologies of rule within the constraints of the state-directed system as a whole.

Ernst Willem Cramerus, the Credit Mobiliers, and Corporatization The Netherlands East Indies Trade Bank is a crucial example of how these management practices circulated from the NHM Factorij under Poolman. The board of the bank included Poolman; his former subordinates from the NHM factory, Th. F. Schill, Norbert P. van den Berg, and, for a short time, Robert Browne; and Ernst W. Cramerus, a former director of the Java Bank (NIHB 1863: 17–18). The new bank’s operations mimicked the strategies that Poolman had introduced to the NHM’s Factorij: they provided investment capital to fund the modernization of sugar factories in Java, taking those factories’ “private” sugar production in payment for a reduced interest rate and then selling the sugar they received in payment in the Netherlands on commission in the same way as the NHM (Altes 2004). The NIHB used Cramerus’s trade company in Java—Paine, Stricker & Co.—to manage the flow of consignment

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sugar to auction in Amsterdam, until finally merging (Brugmans 1963: 107–26). By 1884 they were financing twenty-nine sugar factories in Java as compared to the thirty controlled by the NHM (Clavers 2014: 104). Two-thirds of the Javanese sugar factories were thus managed by these two corporations. Ernst W. Cramerus and his family played a similar role in linking corporate networks as did Poolman. Cramerus was married into the powerful colonial family of former resident and sugar lord Hendrik Stephanus van Son. Van Son was from an illustrious family from The Hague that had long served in the Dutch East Indies Company. He was married to a woman from an equally prominent family; his sisterin-law was married to J. C. Baud, the minister of colonies. Three of his daughters were married to the three partners of Paine & Stricker & Co., one of the NEI’s biggest trade houses (Coolhaas 1964). Paine & Stricker & Co. was owned by three brothers, Ernst W., Frederik H. C. and Alexander Cramerus, and by their brotherin-law Alfred A. Reed. Ernst and Frederik were married to sisters Ambroisine and Johanna van Son, with whom they returned to the Netherlands about 1859, where Frederik Cramerus then started a cotton-weaving factory. The powerful family ties linking this extended family of sugar lords as they repatriated were to prove important in the assemblage of a corporate commodity chain emulating and able to match the NHM. On their return, the Cramerus brothers were to play an important role in the credit mobilier movement in all its aspects. Paine & Stricker was one of the largest colonial trade houses in Java, though it operated in the shadow of the NHM, which had the monopoly on government cultivations (Bosma 2007); the company was restricted to the small but growing flows of “private” sugar and coffee. Cramerus had “distinguished” himself in his youth at one of the richest private commercial banking houses in Amsterdam, after which he moved to Java in order to found and manage the East Indies Sea and Fire Insurance Society, which insured the NHM-employed ships and their cargoes (Stads-almanak 1857: 319). E. W. Cramerus seems to have joined the firm around the time of his marriage in 1840, after its remaining original partner, Charles Stricker, returned to the Netherlands (Knight 2014: 326). His younger brothers, Frederik H. C. and eventually Alexander R. J. Cramerus, also became partners (Coolhas 1964). Under their management, the company took a commanding lead in the private coffee and sugar trade, aided no doubt by their own fleet of ships (said to be 70 percent of the “British” shipping in the colony) (Broeze 1979: 262). By 1861, they also owned Karangsemboong, a contract sugar factory in Cirebon (Regeeringsalmanak 1861: 444). Ernst W. Cramerus, with his background in banking, soon assumed a broader lead in the colonial corporate economy. By 1852, he was also a director of the Java bank and of two insurance companies (Stads-almanak 1852: 361); by 1854 a director of the Society for Mine Development in the Netherlands Indies; and by 1857 a director of the East Indies Society of Administration and Annuities as well (Stads-almanak 1857: 319). This last was one of the colony’s few sources of operating capital for sugar factories. As a director of the Java Bank and the East Indies Society of Administration

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and Annuities, Cramerus would have worked with Willem Poolman, then the president of the NHM factory at Batavia and the only other major source of investment capital for the sugar industry; he would have thus been well aware of the debates on the credit mobilier movement, and of the new investment strategies Poolman was introducing. By 1859, Ernst and Frederik Cramerus and their families had repatriated to the Netherlands (like Poolman), where they began second careers; they left Paine & Stricker under the management of their younger brother Alexander, who until then had managed their office in Padang, Sumatra. Frederik went on to found a steam cotton-weaving company near Nijverdal, “Sophia, Queen of the Netherlands.” Ernst and Alexander, however, were to become major players in the developing credit mobilier movement. Ernst’s career thereafter mirrored that of Willem Poolman; Poolman had returned to the Netherlands at about the same time with the plan of building a railway in Java, and to found a credit mobilier to fund it. On his return, Ernst similarly entered the rail business, and in 1860 he became president of the Central Netherlands Railway Society, which ran a short line along the shore of the inland sea. In 1861, he became a director of the Netherlands Mortgage Bank (Nederlandsche Hypotheekbank) with Alexander Mendel and others, who were all to become involved in the General Society for Trade and Industry; this bank invested Dutch capital in speculative Austrian mortgages to aristocrats modernizing their estates. By 1863, he, with Poolman, was central to the founding of the General Society and of its two daughter corporations, the Netherlands-Indies Trade Bank (NIHB) and the Netherlands Indies Rail Society (NISM); both Cramerus and Poolman became directors of both these latter companies. By 1864, Ernst was a member of the provincial States for North Holland, a director of the Palace of Industry, and most importantly a director of the NHM. He, like Poolman, is one of the red threads linking the multiple sites of this corporate ethnography together. The importance of figures such as the Cramerus brothers and Poolman is that they serve as interlocks whose links highlight the corporate assemblages, the visible hand managing these commodity chains. As they served on multiple boards, they established trust, coordinated company strategies, and ensured the circulation of practices and personnel across the vast commodity chains they managed; family ties stretched across a series of corporate boards gave those corporate relations a stability that great distances and poor communications made difficult. As will be noted in regard to the “dynasties” of railway barons running the Dutch railroads, this pattern occurred more broadly: “Recruiting within one’s family, such as the succession of father and son, or of nephew and uncle, offered more security than attracting an outsider, no matter his competence” (Schijf 1993: 123). As corporate interlocks, they could bolster collective family fortunes. It is no surprise then that Ernst Cramerus ensured his younger brother Alexander was appointed a director of the Netherlands East Indies Trade Bank in Java. Alexander Cramerus, as director of the NIHB, could provide the operating capital for his relatives, the Van Son’s sugar factories, in return for which the NIHB obtained the

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commission on the sale of their “private sugar.” The transport of this sugar would be done on the bank’s behalf by Paine & Stricker, of which he was also the manager (at least, until he became the CEO of the NIHB in Java, after which he closed down the partnership and integrated its functions into the bank). The sugar would be transported by the new rail link, the Netherlands Indies Rail Company, which was controlled by Ernst Cramerus and Poolman, who were also the directors of the bank’s head office, selling the sugar on its arrival in Amsterdam. In constructing this commodity chain, the NIHB emulated the NHM’s investment strategies in sugar factories. This situation is similar, we shall see, to the Salomonsons’ Internatio; both cases illustrate the circulation of the NHM’s credit mobilier strategies and practices and the corporatization of family-controlled businesses. A third such process of corporatization was developed by the Salomonson brothers, although it initially proved to be far less successful; by 1884, their business group was composed of only twelve sugar factories. The Salomonsons had long benefitted from the NHM’s largesse. When, under Liberal pressure, the NHM lost their subsidies on cotton exports in 1854, they subsequently refused to give the Salomonsons their traditional 100 percent advance on commission cloth sales, creating a significant financing problem for their new industrial cotton factory (see chapter 7). The short-term credit this delay necessitated could only be provided through “bills of exchange” drawn on Amsterdam and London banking houses using the sale as collateral. It was, however, increasingly difficult to find this kind of bank credit in the early 1860s (Claver 2014: 96–98). Having broken with the NHM, the Salomonsons initially drew on two related trade companies to manage their cotton sales: Bos, Van Maanen & Co. in Rotterdam and Van Maanen & Co. in Java. G. & H. Salomonson were themselves focused on their new steam-powered cotton factory and had turned to their younger brother Maurits to manage the Zeeland pauper factories. He too sold his production through Bos, Van Maanen & Co. As this business relationship solidified, Maurits formed a partnership with H. Bos, the senior partner, to form the Zeeuwse Weverij Combinatie (Zeeland Weaving Combination), to manage the workhouses in Zeeland in 1856 (Burgers 1954: 203). By 1863, the four associated firms cofounded the Internationale Crediet- en Handelsvereeniging “Rotterdam” (International Credit and Trade Company, or Internatio as it was generally known) with f 10 million capital in order to fund their cotton trade; it was to be unlike other trade houses (including Bos, Van Maanen & Co.) in that it was not a commission agent but would purchase the Salomonsons’ cloth outright for further export and wholesale. Both Bos, Van Maanen & Co. and Van Maanen & Co. were amalgamated into the new company. Maurits Salomonson and his partner H. Bos remained two of the three directors of the new company. With control of the products from both the Salomonsons’ steam factory and the Zeeland Weaving Combination, the new company managed the sales of the bulk of Dutch-made cloth in Java. Although largely conceived as a trade company in cotton cloth for Java, the Internatio had almost immediately, and disastrously, attempted to engage in a broad range

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of international trade ventures. Its poor success in all fields led to the acrimonious dismissal of its Javanese agent, leaving the company hobbled until 1870 (Heekeren 1870; Internatio 1938: 9, 19). After 1870, with its international trade ambitions crushed, it soon followed in the NHM’s well-established footsteps by providing loans to sugar factories and selling sugar on commission to complement the cotton commodity chain. Like the NHM, the Internatio ended up burdened with poorly run factories that, once bankrupt, it was forced to operate on its own. The Internatio, like the NHM, soon shifted its focus from financing its commission sugar trade to mitigating the risk of defaults through more refined economic governance of the efficiency of its clients (Internatio 1938: 24–25; Claver 2014: 50–59). The NHM’s set of management practices thus successfully circulated through the three major credit providers to the Javanese sugar industry. Corporatization, I have argued, is a means of fixing these loose assemblages in place. These corporations replaced market exchanges with hierarchical administration; this nonmarket administration may or may not have been more “efficient,” but it reduced the costs of negotiating market exchanges and imposed hierarchical power relations that lent stability to the assemblage. The first of these corporate assemblages had been pulled together by Willem I, the “merchant-king,” the hyphen emphasizing the role of the Crown as the visible hand in governing the economy. In the liberal period, ideological and legislative effort went into redefining state power (“that government is best that governs least”), thereby limiting the role of the state in the market. I have noted the irony that this new freedom was quickly superseded by the corporation, which retained its managerial hand, supplanting that market as rule devolved to regents such as Cramerus, Poolman, and the Salomonsons. This decentering of rule was typical of the era of “old republicanism” and the VOC, “the company state.” In this process of assemblage, the credit mobiliers were crucial. Cramerus became involved with Alexander Mendel’s Saint-Simonian associates in the founding of the Netherlands Mortgage Bank in 1861 and was equally influential in the General Society for Trade and Industry in 1863, where he represented the third major group of Dutch capital, after Poolman and Van Heukelom. This ensured that he was appointed to the board of both the Netherlands-Indies Trade Bank and the Netherlands Indies Rail Society. His influence there ensured that his younger brother Alexander was appointed to the board of the Javanese branch office, and that Paine & Stricker would be used as the bank’s commission agent in sugar and coffee. The bank’s investments in modernizing the sugar industry ensured that they obtained a monopoly on those factories’ “private sugar.” But the NIHB also served to ensure that capital was allocated most productively within its business group of twenty-nine factories. Their control of capital flows gave them the power to assess and correct factory administrators, who were now in charge of recruiting conscripted labor under conditions where government-set nonmarket “prices” still determined profitability. The relations within the assemblage were solidified in contracts that eventually allowed these el-

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ements to be internalized, with hierarchical administration replacing any hint of a market, from the “sale” of peasant cane on. The credit mobiliers ultimately served their Saint-Simonian purpose: “In the Final State, industry is organized by the banks; ‘everything is interlocked and all is planned’ in the ‘interest of all’” (Eckalbar 1979: 84). The corporate network they assembled served to tie motherland and colony in tight embrace.

The Emergence of Gentlemanly Capitalism The political context behind the founding of these new Credit Mobiliers illustrates the “hard work” of assemblage, the ways in which “heterogeneous elements” are drawn together and connections forged in a loose-fitting functional whole in the face of multiple cross-cutting tensions (Li 2007b: 264). All of the implicit processes required to pull together a governmental program are found here: the “forging of alignments” between distinct entities with varying interests, also resulting in “failures and contradictions that required management.” This political process resulted in a short-lived solution, the “General Society,” that did not long survive the tensions evident at its founding. In recounting these developments, I have underscored how corporations made the ideological transition from state agent to “private” economic firm. The process of corporatization described here ultimately had a “state effect” that satisfied liberal demands for the separation of state and market, without, however, creating a “free” market. As we have seen, the circulation of strategies, practices, and personnel across that divide ensured the continued practice of corporate governmentality. Corporations, as “scientific managers” of the global commodity chains that perpetuated colonial rule, produced a new managerial class, a group of “gentlemanly capitalists” like the Poolman, Cramerus, and Salomonson families. Although we will explore each of their networks in greater detail, it is important to underscore at this point the core features of the sociology of rule that has been sketched out so far. This approach was meant to indicate the manner in which specific regimes of practices—of strategies, programs, and technologies of rule—circulated within an apparatus of security through the forging of political and economic alignments and interests. As a sociology of rule, its intent was to underscore the context for the subordination of the Crown to the old republican regent governing elite. The cultural context for this transformation was a Saint-Simonian-inspired banking movement with deep roots in Willem I’s own strategies of economic governance. Saint-Simonian technocracy was adopted as a political strategy in order to combat Liberal attacks on a state they characterized as the “spirit of Jan Salie.” The Crown’s adoption of the spirit of the Crystal Palace infused the engineers and colonial civil servants of the Royal Academy with a royalist vision of an “enlightening monarchy for the restoration of social harmony under the denominator of order and progress in the spirit of Auguste Comte and Napoleon III” (Laarse 2000: 24). Yet, as the Crown’s sovereignty was limited by the Liberal revolution of 1848, this project of rule was

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perpetuated by the House of Orange’s traditional opposition, the conservative regents who now contested a Liberal government that impinged on its own traditional rights and privileges. These regents were rentier capitalists whose wealth and family position guaranteed them key economic and political positions in the royalist state. Family businesses based on trade and merchant banking were both a source of wealth and also served an educational function that schooled their children for their future roles in government. The educational function of the family firm was supplemented in this period by the Royal Academy, which produced a “rule by experts” schooled in the “practical knowledge” required for governing. The engineers that it produced sought to “govern economically” through the technocratic rule of corporations that replaced markets as coordinating mechanisms. By the end of the 1860s, the technocratic elite from the Royal Academy surrounding the king had assumed a dominant position among conservative politicians in parliament, in the bureaucracies of both the Netherlands and Netherlands East Indies, and in the largest heavy industrial corporations, including sugar manufacturing in Java and the railways in the Netherlands. These regent engineers were granted control of the royal concessions in these industries insuring the transfer of governmental strategies, programs and technologies of rule within the state-corporate assemblage. A bourgeois culture of corporate management was the product. It is here, then, that we find the roots of the “regenten [gentlemanly] capitalism” that was to drive Dutch imperialism in South Africa and the Netherlands East Indies archipelago in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Kuitenbrouwer 1994, 1998; Bossenbroek 1996).

Notes 1. Poolman co-owned this factory with J. J. Blanckenhagen, a repatriated agent of Fraser, Eaton & Co. in Surabaya. The factory was administered by A. A. van Vloten, a former high court judge granted a nearby sugar contract (Umbgrove 1862–63). 2. Crédit foncier was an alternate name for credit mobilier; the name crédit mobilier had been closely linked specifically to the bank established by the Péreire brothers. 3. ARA 2.20.01 Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij +A.1.6.2.1.4 De Factorij: Jaarverslag 1856, pp. 12–13. 4. This wording is unfortunate, as the Nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which recognizes the personhood of slaves, was subsequently applied to corporations, granting them “separate personality” and “equal rights.” In the Dutch case, incorporation simply required the approval of the Ministry of Finance; no special legislation, as required in the United Kingdom and United States, was necessary, hence the need for a general incorporation law was less keenly felt. 5. Their brother-in-law, Adriaan Gildemeester, a graduate of the Royal Academy, was also a managing director of the short-lived General Society (Hirschfeld 1949–51). 6. Claver (2014: 35–42) gives a detailed description of the report prepared by Th. F. Schill in 1855 in assessing a Chinese entrepreneur with two steam sugar factories on a private estate just outside of Batavia for a loan under these terms.

CHAPTER 9

The Crédit mobilier and the Railways

In 1848, De Gids editor Simon Vissering published a utopian tale of a “Jaunt to the Mouth of the IJ” to celebrate—and illustrate—the promise of the new liberal constitution. Mirroring proposals for the Suez Canal, this prescient “science-fiction” story relates a simple summer journey by the author and a German visitor to the beach on a (yet-unbuilt) railroad, along a (yet-unbuilt) canal linking Amsterdam with the North Sea, to the new (yet-unbuilt) seaport upon which the city’s international trade would depend. Building this canal would entail draining the surrounding lakes and reclaiming thousands of hectares of inundated land before cutting through the dunes at “Holland at its smallest” to gain access to the sea (figure 9.1). This utopian prophecy imagined funneling the industrial production of the German hinterland along a (yet-unbuilt) international rail network to this new international port for further export by some seven thousand ships. He conjectured that the enormous cost of the massive engineering works that he envisioned would be paid for with the NHM’s surplus capital, since their shareholders “would certainly have a healthy appreciation of their interests other than as members of a limited liability company; an interest as citizens of the state, as residents of the capital, and a thousand fold interest in the bloom of Amsterdam’s trade” (1848: 678). Vissering’s prophecy was not to be completed for several decades and not as a testament to the laissez-faire liberal values of the constitution as he envisioned, even though the Crown, as we shall see, had neither the resources nor the desire to commandeer the building of railways from private capital, and it had just sold off the sole state line to a private company. As one analyst of Dutch rail policy noted, “Government policy in relation to railroad building was based on an extremely rigid economic-liberalism as propagated by [Prime Minister] Thorbecke in these years. State policy professed its blessings for private initiative but in fact fully frustrated the construction of railroads by private interests” (Fritschy 1980: 521). Although numerous rail concessions were granted, nothing was actually built, and the Netherlands lagged far behind other European countries in railroad construction; samesized Belgium, for example, had 1,729 kilometers to the Netherlands’ 335 in 1860 (Veenendaal 2001: 29). The NHM’s capital surplus was being deployed in the Javanese sugar industry instead. The “spirit of Jan Salie” seemed to dominate the land,

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and Vissering’s laissez-faire vision of the rebirth of Amsterdam as an international trade entrepôt remained unfulfilled (for the time being). The inability of the Dutch to finance a rail network stands as a frequently cited indictment of their industrial backwardness (Griffiths 1979). This stands in stark contrast to the histories of Britain, France, and America where railways have served as a key trope of modernity in business history. As the first modern multidivisional corporations, they were taken by Alfred Chandler (1977) and others as exemplary of the managerial revolution in business. The new rail companies “economically” governed a vast national transportation network through careful administration by engineers. However, Chandler’s emphasis on the corporation as a virtual replacement for the market did not address the governmental means by which corporate managers were themselves managed and became the “working hand of the state” through governmental strategies meant to shape “the conduct of conduct.” Even Chandler’s critics fail to address the relationship between government and rail corporations and the circulation of governmental practices, strategies, and personnel between them; the creation of management science was viewed as an endogenous process, the product of the technological demands of a complex new industry (Hoskin and Macve 1988; Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin 2002). However, a second strand of business history has long argued that the “cultural models” of a country’s political forms “overdetermined” the shape of their emerging industrial orders in the development of railroad corporations in Britain, France, and the United States (Dobbin 1994; Dunlavy 1994). In these cases, Dobbin noted a clear parallel structure between the institutions for organizing politics and those of economic life, much as the example of the Dutch republic and the “company state” of the United East Indies Company illustrated earlier. He concludes that “in each country, liberal thinkers sketched a form of democracy in the image of their respective colonial and aristocratic regimes,” such that “Liberalism,” “Statism,” and “laissez-faire” characterized the co-emergence of both political and industrial orders in each of these three cases (Dobbin 1994: 129). Dobbin argues that the British located sovereignty in the elite Liberal individual who required protection from the state, the Crown and their neighbors resulting in an industrial policy focused on protecting individual rights. The French located sovereignty in a central state as the only institution that could orchestrate order, thus producing a centrally directed industrialization policy. And Americans located sovereignty in a weak federative state leading to an industrial policy in which that national state served as a market referee. In the Dutch case I reframe this “cultural overdetermination” argument in terms of governmentality and the circulation of practices, strategies, and personnel between state and corporation. I argue that sovereignty in the Netherlands came to rest with an oligarchic regent class in a decentralized state who exercised their rule through corporations that had long exercised governmental functions: the end product was a form of “gentlemanly capitalism.” In this chapter then, I trace the development of the crédit mobilier in fostering, on the one hand, this iconic “modern” industry in the Netherlands, solidifying the

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technocratic managerial culture already described in the sugar and cotton-weaving industries; and on the other, I follow the process by which “concessions” were granted to this corporation in order to ideologically maintain the division of state and economy while also maintaining the flow of practices, strategies, and personnel between the two. I outline how Vissering’s prescient vision of Amsterdam’s renewal as the central node of an international rail network was framed as a governmental program, as an issue of managing trade through regent-controlled corporations similar to the NHM. The Dutch state was ultimately successful in building a national network of state-built rail lines in 1860 with a ten-year budget of f 100 million funded by the increased state profits from the Javanese sugar industry. In 1863, as the first lines neared completion, it offered the concession of operating that network to a private company, the Society for the Exploitation of State Railways (Maatschappij tot de Exploitatie van Staatsspoorwegen, SS) funded by the General Society. As we shall see, the form of this concession—a private monopoly for the exploitation of a state economic resource—bears more than a passing resemblance to the grants of state sugar-refining contracts to private sugar lords with the same governmental effects (Fasseur 1975: 64). By means of these concessions, the state was able to manage the corporate managers just as its ability to determine rail routes shaped the overall direction of the industry.

The Political Context of Railway Construction, 1831–1863 By the 1850s, the state of the nation’s railroads were viewed by Liberals as iconic of the backwardness of Dutch industrial development and an indictment of the interventionist economic policies of the House of Orange (Griffiths 1979). This failure, however, had far more complex roots, as the continued failure of a corrective laissezfaire liberal policy was to demonstrate. There were unique geographic challenges to be overcome, such as the three massive rivers bisecting the country that demanded bridges of a previously undreamed scale. As Fritschy (1980) has shown, liberal policy with its emphasis on the protection of private property perpetuated obstacles to construction, such as a weak expropriation law that prioritized landowners over rail concessions that exponentially increased land acquisition costs. Although many argued that the railways were common carriers and hence should be built by the state (as they were in Belgium), the Liberals persistently favored the British model of building infrastructure through concessions to private entrepreneurs; less than entrepreneurial concessionaires in the Netherlands, however, demanded untenable profit guarantees before they would start. The eventual model adopted for granting the concessions in 1863 followed the French rather than British example and hence recapitulated their use of Saint-Simonian crédit mobiliers. These crédit mobiliers, as we have seen, had a unique Dutch history. The prior history of the fitful development of railways in the Netherlands clearly demonstrates the many obstacles to be overcome. The first proposal to construct

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a railway came in 1831 from artillery engineer Lt. Col. William A. Bake not long after the 1830 opening of the first rail line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (Lintsen 1980: 125). Bake was the first to propose a rail link between Amsterdam and Cologne to solidify Amsterdam’s control of the trade with the German industrial hinterland. Bake formed a limited company to fund the line, but his share issue failed when it became clear that the port of Rotterdam had successfully blocked the granting of the concession in parliament. The Netherlands Steamboat Company based in Rotterdam argued that it would cost less to improve the navigability of the Keulse Vaart canal from Amsterdam to the river Rhijn, and hence from Rotterdam to Cologne. This would take better advantage of the Netherlands’ existing superior barge canal network. Indeed, Fritschy (1980) argued that international rail connections with Germany would have sat idle until the 1860s anyway awaiting an international network to connect to. This international connection would, however, ultimately allow the cheap importation of coal, lowering the transport costs of rail below that of river and canal traffic. The Dutch were not as far behind as the liberal narrative of Jan Salie would imply and merely awaited this more timely moment to decisively resolve the “railway question.” Subsequent competition for Bake’s failed “Iron Rhijn” came from three sources. First, in the wake of their secession from the Netherlands, the Belgian parliament had authorized a meandering railway, the “Iron Rhine [sic],” from Antwerp to Cologne around Dutch territory between 1835 and 1843. Antwerp, Belgium’s only seaport and Amsterdam’s major competitor for control of the German trade, could only access the sea through Dutch-controlled waters (Witlox 2006: 56ff.). Willem had refused to recognize Belgian independence and kept the border militarized until 1839. The Iron Rhine was an attempt to circumvent this stranglehold on their economy. It was a state-constructed network called the “iron cross” planned according to SaintSimonian principles and funded by the Société Générale, the investment bank created by Willem I that later inspired the French Saint-Simonian crédit mobiliers (Block 2011). Subsequent to Bake’s failed experiment, the first Dutch railway was an eightykilometer test line between Amsterdam and Rotterdam by which railroad enthusiasts hoped to overcome Rotterdam’s objections to rail. It was built in 1837 by the Iron Railway Society of Holland (Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg Maatschappij, HSM), which was funded by the major Amsterdam trading houses (Broeke 1985: 38ff.). This rail concession was granted on the same terms as those in Britain and was an entirely private concern. Its construction revealed all the obstacles that were to continue to bedevil future development. Most telling was a rather violent jog in the track that resulted from having to route around the property of A. H. van Wickevoort Crommelin; he refused to sell unless a train stop was located near his house. This jog became known as the “crooked line” (kromme line), a pun on Crommelin’s last name and an aspersion on his motives. This expensive rerouting of the line pointed to the weakness of the expropriation laws, which favored private property rights over

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private rights of way. Since a private line was not a public road, there was little that could justify abrogating those property rights. As a result, the HSM was forced to purchase far more property at much higher prices than originally estimated: they had projected they would have to buy 80 hectares of land to acquire the 76 hectares they needed at the already elevated price of f 3,500 per hectare and ended up having to purchase 126 hectares at an average of f 12,000 (Veenendaal 1993: 136). Although the line was profitable, the enormous capital costs prevented any further expansion into a true network. The third line, the Dutch Rhenish Railway (Nederlandsche RhijnspoorwegMaatschappij, NRS), was built on the initiative of Willem I out of frustration with the failure of Bake’s plan, the HSM, and further parliamentary intransigence (Broeke and Meerkerk 2001: 6; Veenendaal 1995). It was instigated by Willem in 1836 by way of the first state inquiry to pose the “railway question” and progressed in a remarkably similar way to the ultimate decision of 1863. The inquiry proposed that a line from Amsterdam to Arnhem, the closest city on the German border, should be a state priority given the large decrease in German trade through Amsterdam (Veenendaal 1993: 132). A royal bill proposing to build the line funded by colonial profits was rejected by parliament in 1838 as too risky given precarious state finances. Not to be frustrated, Willem simply sidestepped parliament and issued a royal proclamation authorizing the state to build the line funded with a f 9 million bond issue (later rising to f 18 million), with a personal royal guarantee on interest payments. The railway, however, faced severe financial constraints after Willem siphoned off a portion of the bond issue to subsidize the continuing military conflict with Belgium. Willem I abdicated in 1840, leaving his son Willem II to personally deal with the resulting financial burden; Willem II thus sought to privatize the railway in 1845 when it was finally completed. When news of the huge debts this private company would be forced to bear was made public, none of the major Dutch financiers invested, and the line fell into English hands. The failure of the Netherlands’ first state railway thus added fuel to Liberal opposition to additional state intervention, and the Liberal constitution of 1848 foreclosed any further royal attempt to circumvent parliament. By the time Vissering’s utopian dream was published in 1848, Liberal hopes were invested in the British example. The Liberals under Thorbecke pursued a free market policy and turned to foreign capital—unfortunately, just after British “railway mania” had conclusively ended. Neither German nor English capitalists seemed willing to invest further in Dutch railways given the low rates of return on the existing lines. A mustering of national capital under the leadership of the House of Orange on the pattern of the Netherlands Trading Company seemed unlikely in the wake of the failure of the Dutch Rhenish Railway. The only other option, a state-funded system, was untenable to the Liberals. This “railway question” preoccupied public and parliamentary debate for five years in the late 1850s with the Liberals favoring the laissez-faire extension of rail concessions on the British and German models with state subsidies or profit guarantees. The

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Conservatives recoiled at the waste induced by British “railway mania” and favored a state-built planned network as proposed by their own engineers (who, we should remember, were the loyal elite of the Royal Academy), like those that had been constructed as Saint-Simonian programs in Belgium and France. Here the emphasis lay on establishing a rail network that met strategic state goals and not simply private profit motives; state engineers raised other concerns, for example, such as the need for speed in defending borders under attack (J.d.L. 1858). In problematizing the entrepreneurial “failure” of the Jan Salie–like Amsterdam capitalists (who preferred to invest in American railways instead), the conservatives posed a governmental question that seemed innocuous enough: “What is the aim or need of railways in the Netherlands” other than a generally felt if vague sense of their utility? In what way were they the same or different from roads and canals (Spoorweg-quaestie 1859: 8ff.)? In the conservative’s problematizing of the railways as a governmental program, the comparative failure of Dutch capital to build a rail network was recontextualized as an opportunity for the state to utilize a new technology of rule for managing trade. In this way, obvious comparisons to the NHM’s corporate means of efficiently managing the trade in sugar, coffee, and cotton cloth with the Netherlands East Indies were evident. The emphasis on international trade is all the more remarkable given that one of the two existing lines, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, carried only passengers and had experienced a climb in ridership from seventy-eight thousand in 1839 to nine hundred thousand in 1850 (Woud 1987: 193). By phrasing the “railway question” as a tool for managing trade, the Conservatives were reframing the debate from issues of “economy” to a comparison with public infrastructure like roads and canals. Influential French state engineer Henri Navier had rejected the premise that only roads and canals whose costs were self-liquidating through tolls should be built and in 1832 was the first to propose a method of costbenefit analysis (or “welfare economics”) to replace this market test for the viability of public works. His argument was that tolls should be kept minimal and geared to maintenance, not construction costs, so as to maximize the savings of transporting goods for the public (Ekelund and Hébert 1978: 640ff.; Smith 1990), a model ultimately adopted by the Dutch government that absorbed the capital costs of the network’s construction but left its operation to private corporations. The transport cost savings of railways over roads and canals would serve as the incentive to profitably divert the flow of international trade through new domestic channels, for example, by arrogating for Amsterdam the existing flow of German trade along Belgium’s “Iron Rhijn” railroad between Cologne and Antwerp and thereby striking a blow at their secessionist rivals. This separation of the rail network from the railway operators allowed for the introduction of a corporate solution to the political conundrum. It is in this discursive framing of the “railway question” that the creation of the “state effect” and its associated process of “economization” was ultimately resolved by “corporatization.” What I am referring to here is the discursive means by which the corporate replacement of market mechanisms was “economized” such that corporate

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governmentality was obscured and the image of a bounded, liberal state created. We must be cognizant, however, that as the owner of the rails, the state was literally able to direct the route of the railway to meet strategic national goals. As the grantor of the government concession to operate the lines, the state was able to indirectly govern the conduct of the new rail corporation through the contractual terms and conditions that set, among other things, carriage rates and service levels. Although a “private company,” this new, modern, multidivisional corporation, seedbed for a new managerial culture, was a “quasi-state” entity not so different from the NHM after all.

From Monarchy to Oligarchy: The Introduction of the Saint-Simonian Crédit mobilier The ideological groundwork for this process of corporatization was laid by the conservative-liberal ministry of Floris A. van Hall after a decade of failure by a series of Liberal railway concessions. Van Hall had been the lawyer for Bake’s first rail proposal and, as we saw, had sought to protect the company’s interests under the civil code against Rotterdam’s objections with a presciently titled book, Verdediging Van De Onafhankelijkheid Des Handels, Bij Het Oprigten Van Naamlooze Maatschappijen (Defending free trade in founding corporations), published in 1834. His Liberal economic credentials were balanced by his extensive experience in cabinet serving the Crown. He represented the old republican regent elite that had always opposed the centralizing impulses of the Crown but were equally suspicious of the laissez-faire policies of the Liberals. Following a plan laid out by the state’s chief engineer, L. J. A. van der Kun, Van Hall proposed that the state should initiate the building of the rail network in stages by first assuming the large capital costs of land acquisition and bridge-building until they handed the lines over to the private sector, as in fact had eventually happened with the Dutch Rhenish Railway (Lintsen 1980: 177). Van Hall’s proposal called for a state-owned railway system to meet national goals, which would be exploited by private railway companies who would own and operate their own rolling stock, a model that had been successfully pursued in France (Broeke 1985: 110ff.; Smith 1990: 675–77). In the French case, the Legrand Star, a vast network of lines named after its chief architect Victor Legrand, was built by the state engineers of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées to link Paris with other chief centers of population beginning in 1842. The French Railroad law of 1842 preserved the corps’ ultimate authority in the planning, location, and engineering of all rail, whether state or private capital was used. Between 1845 and 1846 they had further established a regulatory regime that subjected all aspects of construction and operation of private rail companies to state inspection (Smith 1990: 675). French governmental strategies thus differed from the British in that the state planned all routes, favored national socioeconomic needs over immediate returns, and valued efficiency of use over cost of construction (Campagnac and Winch 1997: 94). The enthusiasm of private rail developers like the Saint-Simonian

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Péreire brothers for the “socialist” administration of the railways by the rule of engineering experts was thus shared by the French state, which maintained its strict governing hand over their operations. The Péreires founded their crédit mobilier in 1852 to fund the expansion of their private network of secondary lines when the French state consolidated the twenty-eight existing rail companies into six regional monopolies so as to reduce competitive waste. The Péreires quickly expanded their rail and banking empire from their base in southwestern France into an international network of largely owned subsidiaries in Spain (1855), Austria (1854), and Russia (1856). A secondary wave of less successful overextension into Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Netherlands in 1863 eventually resulted in the insolvency of the French Crédit mobilier (but not the rail networks or subsidiary national crédit mobiliers) in 1867 (Bouneau 2008: 17, 21), a route to insolvency also to be followed by its Dutch imitator. The Péreires’ international expansion strategy took the same form in each case; they created a local crédit mobilier controlled by a French committee that funded and managed a series of corporate subsidiaries through overlapping board memberships. In Austria, for example, they established the Crédit Foncier of Austria and the Imperial Royal and Privileged Austrian State Railway, as well as a consortium of metallurgy, mining, and locomotive-manufacturing companies; “While the president and at least half of the administrators had to be Austrian, the actual direction of the company was ensured by a committee located in Paris and headed by Isaac [Péreire] who saw to it that all of the executives were French” (Bouneau 2008: 17). The Spanish Crédit mobilier created subsidiaries that included Madrid’s gas company, the Asturian Mining Company, insurance and canal companies, iron and steel factories, sugar refineries, docks, and warehouses. The end result was a network of corporate networks that was at once decentralized yet coordinated, guided by a French Saint-Simonian central committee through which the international flow of governmental strategies and technologies of rule circulated at an increasing tempo. The Dutch sought to connect their state-constructed rail network to this emerging coordinated international network in 1863. Strengthened by the success of the April Movement and a series of conservative ministries, the “old republican elite” of regent merchant capitalists increasingly charted a path independent of the Crown. The success of the crédit mobilier movement offered an opportunity for the old republican regent elite of Amsterdam and Holland to take advantage of the weakening of both the House of Orange and the Liberals to reassert their traditional decentralized control over state and economy. In 1856–57, the Dutch Ministry of Justice had received five petitions (primarily from French investors) to establish crédit mobiliers, all of which were rejected on the advice of the Nederlandsche Bank for fear their size and function would fan speculation (Jonker 1996: 255).1 It was only in 1863 that two more modest schemes were approved in a clear governmental shift in economic policy clearly related to funding the new state railways. As discussed previously, the two groups were unequal in terms of resources and political connections. The group

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we are concerned with here, centered on the president of the Amsterdam chamber of commerce, Frans van Heukelom, had broad connections within Amsterdam’s financial and political elite and international links with the Péreire brothers and the French Crédit mobilier; they were to take control of the state rail network. The second group, centered around Dr. Samuel Sarphati, had less local support and depended almost entirely on the French rivals of the Péreire brothers, the banking houses of Bischoffsheim-Goldschmidt and the Rothchilds, who combined to form a crédit mobilier called the Société Générale pour favoriser l’Industrie et le Commerce de la France. This group was to redevelop Amsterdam’s new modern core, building the “Palace of Industry” and the multistoried Amstel Hotel next to the Dutch Rhenish Railway’s train station (Broeke 1985: 286–88). The relatively swift collapse of both these banks had little effect on their subsidiaries, a string of tightly connected corporations that they created that solidified the regime of gentlemanly capitalism then taking form (figure 8.3). In each case, we see a tight cabal of gentlemanly capitalists on the boards of new investment banks operating like the Péreires by utilizing the capital of others (including the state) to create a network of subsidiaries under their control and managed by a coterie of royal engineers. These corporations established a new managerial culture that served as the visible hand of the market replacing market transactions with administrative control by engineers; their directors, however, were from the old regent elite that also controlled the Dutch parliament and staffed the state apparatus. It is in this way that alignments were forged that allowed the circulation of governmental strategies, programs, and technologies of rule across the developing public-private divide. By midcentury, Amsterdam’s old regent elite were thus successfully emulating Willem’s corporate strategies (as we just saw, in managing the colonial commodity chains), a shift from monarchy to oligarchy. In his analysis of Dutch corporate boards at the end of the nineteenth century, Huibert Schijf found that a select group of powerful individuals serving on four or more boards were dominated by the aristocracy and patriciate of Amsterdam (Schijf 1993: 39). It is these individuals with multiple directorships that coordinated quasi-state corporate activities in a managed economy while simultaneously directing the process of state and nation formation through governmental programs such as the railways. In 1863, as small portions of the new state rail network were nearing completion, the Dutch parliament granted the concession for operating the northern and southern arms (still separated by the three great east-west rivers and the Iron Rhijn railway) to a new company, the Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways (SS). The SS was one of the daughter corporations of a newly formed crédit mobilier, the General Society for Trade and Industry; we saw that the boards of management of this crédit mobilier and its daughter corporations were tied into a coordinated whole by the overlapping membership of two distinct personal networks. These shared networks illustrate that this new industry, the railways, remained under the same corporate directorship as that over the sugar industry in the NHM, the NIHB, and the Inter-

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natio. The network of Frans van Heukelom was composed of the banking families of Amsterdam’s regent elite, and the network of Willem Poolman was composed of managers from within the NHM. Together, this board of “gentlemanly capitalists” was to coordinate the financing of new railways in both the Netherlands and Java while leaving the management of the enterprises to the new type of businessman, the corporate engineer. However, we will see that this separation of ownership from management was clouded by the dynasties of owner-engineers that continued to dominate the company.

Governing the Conduct of Conduct: Terms of the Concession As previously indicated, the ideological groundwork for establishing corporations as free market actors had been laid in 1834 by Prime Minister F. A. van Hall’s book Defending Free Trade by Founding Corporations. Van Hall’s book initiated a new legal orthodoxy that contributed to the process of “corporatization.” This process differentiated “economic” governance by corporations from governance by the civil bureaucracy, despite the circulation of methods, strategies, practices, and personnel between them; this process of ideological differentiation cast the internal administrative coordination of transactions within the corporation as market processes. Of concern here are the means by which the merchant king was replaced as the ideological pivot between state and economy by the corporation. After beginning with the legal context for granting railway concessions to corporations initiated by Van Hall, analysis in this section will shift to the means by which corporations replaced the state to become the visible hand of the market. Specific attention is placed on those two key tools, contracts and accounting, by which these internal corporate markets were ideologically created. Attention to the rail concession, the overarching contract with the state, demonstrates how—despite the “state effect” created by this new form of “free market”—the state continued to exercise governance on the conduct of corporate conduct. The use of concessions had a relatively short and uneven history of success in the Netherlands, combining elements of both French and British legal precedents. The concession was the lending of a royal privilege to private entrepreneurs to provide public works such as roads; to provide services such as water, gas, and electricity; or to collect taxes, such as the “tax farms” on opium granted in the Netherlands East Indies. One difficulty with the Liberal strategy for encouraging railway construction was favoring this British model of infrastructural funding through charters to private entrepreneurs by which they gained the right to collect tolls. The concession thus ceded a public monopoly to a private entrepreneur—a paradoxical preference for Liberalism! The granting of the privilege of a concession was a means by which the state could impose contractual obligations on the service provider, including setting service levels; although in Britain, these regulations were limited to ensuring public safety.

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Although the concessionaire was a private business, the concession of a public monopoly did not fall under the civil code in the Netherlands and hence did not fall entirely in the “market” sphere then being ideologically constructed. The granting of a concession fell under a separate administrative legal code that extended the competence of the state to intimately regulate the enterprise. This administrative code relating to public contracts and concessions had its roots in the French legal system and varied considerably from the English common law system and the granting of charters (Compagnac and Winch 1997: 91). Its position became murkier when the Liberal constitution stripped the king of the right to grant concessions through royal decree, yet the Liberals failed to pass a general law on concessions, thus requiring specific terms and conditions to be included in detail in each concession bill (Damsté 2001: 84–95). The lack of consistency and legal clarity proved a barrier for many investors. In the Netherlands, concessions had been utilized only five times since 1822 (in order to finance canals), with very uneven results; three of the five concessions were failures that had to be taken over by the state, one failed due to the secession of Belgium, and one had to be bought out at a steep premium (Damsté 2001: 67). The Netherlands East Indies state, we saw, had considerably more success in regulating its sugar refining concessions once they introduced stricter regulation by the graduates of the Royal Academy in the 1850s, a pattern of success that fostered the Crown’s continuing penchant for detailed state oversight. The Conservatives were cynical that private capital was either available in sufficient quantities or technically qualified to accomplish such large public works, the more so when concessionaires requested state subsidies or profit guarantees like those that had been granted to the Dutch Rhenish Railway. The Conservatives argued that profit guarantees would lessen a contractor’s need to maintain the strict financial management such projects required, encouraging waste at the state’s expense. The Dutch railway concession to the SS was extended under the French era administrative code, and thus offered the state the means for ongoing, detailed supervision of company operations through both the terms of the concession contract and the government supervisory council, the Raad van Toezicht op de Spoorwegdiensten. This council had extensive power (including the investigation of customer complaints of cold coffee served at an isolated train station) that was exercised most intensively through its demands for statistical summaries of all railroad activities to be published in the company’s annual report (Veenendaal 2008a: 372). These printed annual reports thus provide detailed information on the operations of the railway, broken down by rail line, locomotive, and station stop, allowing for ready calculation and comparison of cost and efficiency of the entire network; they thus provided the tools for a panoptic accounting discipline of the entire operation that allowed for both a global as well as a highly localized view. From 1869, these statistics were collated by a central Office of Statistics (Statistiek Bureau) that provided SS management with comparative data on the company’s internal operations where the measure of effi-

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ciency could be expressed in either monetary or other units of account. For example, these management statistics could equally provide information on the cheapest form of lubrication used on locomotives on different lines as well as which lubricants resulted in the fewest breakdowns (Veenendaal 2008a: 364–72). These statistics reflect a concern for efficiency that exceeded a mere concern for profits. This concern for efficiency of operations was further enforced through the terms of the concession by which net company profits were calculated. Rather than simply charging a fixed amount for the maintenance of the rails they “rented,” the state utilized a complex equation that determined what percentage of total operating revenues the company could retain; this equation imposed a demand for greater operational efficiency the busier the network became. Calculating that net revenue began with the initial low base deduction for the operating costs of the company; however, this deduction for operations increased on a sliding scale with that base growing as a decreasing percentage of the total revenue generated by the system as it grew busier. This meant that the company received proportionately less operating funds for increases in traffic and hence had to be more efficient. If it achieved those efficiencies, the net revenue was higher, and they received a fifth of that as profit with the other four-fifths going to the state for rail maintenance; if they failed to achieve those efficiencies, they were penalized even as business improved, with proportionately lower profits. It was thus not market pressure but the terms of the state concession that drove efficiency. Having set both the transport rates that determined gross revenue as well as allowable operating costs, the SS could profit only through the efficient application of a line and staff model under the disciplining hand of engineers. This kind of regulatory regime managing the managers was like that exerted on the sugar manufacturers, whose profits were determined according to the efficiency with which they met mandated production targets for reduced-price, high-quality government sugar. They did so through new forms of management accounting, the disciplinary apparatus we first saw in Van den Bosch’s experiments, and circulated with increasing refinement through the NHM and the Directorate of Cultivations in Java. This concern for efficiency of operations was not the result of entrepreneurial profit seeking but of the government’s management methods. The engineers to whom the task of seeking efficiencies were delegated were, as Chandler first emphasized, “a new kind of businessman.” This “new kind” of businessman was a critical innovation for several reasons. First, it signaled a key defining characteristic of the corporation: the separation of ownership from management. Daily management of the corporation’s complex line and staff organization was left to salaried employees with no skin in the game. As Hoskin and Macve emphasize, “The reason why businessmen of a ‘new type’ made the managerial breakthrough . . . was because they were not really businessmen at all” (Hoskin and Macve 1994b: 5). They point to the role of military engineers from West Point Academy in the creation of innovative management techniques, the line and staff

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model in American railways, and highlight that although engineers, they were not moved to introduce these measures either through the technological demands of the industry or for personal profit motives (British railways, for example, did not initially adopt the hierarchical line and staff management model [Channon 2001]). Hoskin and Macve point out that when these engineers were introduced into a complex developing industry, they drew on familiar organizational and disciplinary models from their experience at West Point, which, like the Dutch Royal Academy, had borrowed them from the French École Polytechnique. If, as Chandler insists, managerialism was born and developed in the first and largest of nineteenth-century corporations, the railways, it can be tied to these engineering schools and their common pedagogy. We have seen in the Dutch case that these roots go even further back to the Benthamite “charity company” that seeks to efficiently regulate its own internal economy of pauper laborers so that they will not be a drain on the state. Benthamite efficiency, not entrepreneurship, defines this new kind of businessman and their management techniques. Breeding this concern for efficiency in this new kind of “economic man” was, however, the result of a consistent disciplinary pedagogy. It is instructive to compare the continuing role of the state in managing the “conduct of conduct” of the railway and sugar manufacturers in this period. The Dutch state’s economic governance of trade was increasingly conducted in both cases through its quasi-state corporate proxies like the NHM or the SS. In sugar manufacturing, the Crown stipulated the kinds of technologies to be utilized, the amounts to be produced, and the prices to be paid to its concession holders, the sugar lords of Java. The state controlled almost all aspects of pricing so that risk was minimalized and the emphasis placed on the efficient manufacture of higher grades of sugar instead. The new steam technologies mandated the introduction of a new managerial class, the engineers, many of whom were trained at the Royal Academy for state service. These new technologies had high capital costs that required financing by the new crédit mobiliers, including the NHM, the NIHB, and the Salomonsons’ Internatio, all of whom exercised further economic governance. These three crédit mobiliers managed the managers of the sugar factories “by the numbers” in an increasingly intrusive manner until they finally owned or controlled the production and sales of most of the Javanese sugar factories. The boundaries between the state and its “private” concessionaires was thus highly permeable, reinforcing the quasi-state status of these managerial enterprises operating in the private sphere. The corporation was thus serving equally as the “visible hand of the market,” orchestrating pricing, as the “working hand of the state” was camaralistically governing the efficient production of a state resource.

A Managerial Class: Dynasties of Railroad Barons Who, then, comprised this new class of businessmen? We saw in chapter 5 that the engineers trained at the Royal Academy were largely drawn from the old regent class

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long accustomed to ruling. This class was largely composed of rentier capitalists, with some also involved in colonial trade and merchant banking. They were a financial capital elite that shifted effortlessly into the Crédit mobilier movement, and a governmental elite that dominated both parliament and the state bureaucracies. In this transition the Royal Academy came to replace the educational function of the family firm. Trained in the new arts of engineering, these graduates were uniquely qualified to run the new, now non-royal corporations through their class privilege as regents, through their training as masters of the new steam technologies, and through their familial wealth (which obscured the supposed divide between owners and managers). This “new class of businessmen,” at least in the Netherlands, bore a striking resemblance to the old. And as we shall see here through an examination of the dynasties of railway barons that they established, they were as equally concerned as their ancestors to ensure that this tradition of privilege continued. Sociologist Huibert Schijf has approached the same pattern from a network perspective. He analyzed membership of a sample of 142 of 931 corporate boards of directors in 1886 and 1902, with a special focus on the individuals like Hendrik Quack who served as interlocks on two or more boards. Schijf ’s study is focused on individuals who served on multiple boards and thereby coordinated corporate activities, yet his analysis of the core elite in the national network demonstrates the importance of family ties (Schijf 1993: 122–24). Schijf described, in other words, a series of corporate assemblages like that of the NHM and the sugar producers described in the last chapter. In tracking the families of the core elite of thirty-five men in 1902 over a seventy-five-year period, he found that seventeen families continued to have members in the core corporate elite in two or more of his four sample years (Schijf 1993: 167). Schijf notes that “recruiting within one’s family, such as the succession of father and son, or of nephew and uncle, offered more security than attracting an outsider, no matter his competence” (Schijf 1993: 123). This pattern had been noted as early as 1903 by the Dutch sociologist F. M. Wibaut (1903; Davids 2006; Dankers and Bouwens 2004). It is consistent with other studies that have shown the predominance of family firms in the Netherlands even as they assumed corporate form (Sluyterman and Winkelman 1993). We need to be cognizant, therefore, of the networks of networks that intersected in board rooms. Family networks ramified those national networks between corporations created by interlocking directorships (Mizruchi 1996). This pattern is immediately visible in the board and management of the SS. The board was initially linked to that of the General Society, hence Frans van Heukelom chaired both. Through Heukelom’s influence, his son-in-law Hendrik Quack was appointed secretary to the board of the SS. Frederik s’Jacob was appointed to represent the Poolman group from the Netherlands Society for Railroad Supplies (Maatschappij van Spoorwegmaterieel). The board subsequently hired their associates (and family) as managing directors. Frans van Heukelom’s nephew H. P. van Heukelom was joined by Agnites Vrolik and H. van der Wall Bake; the last two had a long history

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Figure 9.1. State railways corporate management (year graduated in brackets).

together as masters of the mint and fellow directors of the Society for Railroad Supplies. Vrolik was the former Conservative minister of finance and served as the railway’s first president; after the bankruptcy of the General Society, he was replaced by Frits s’Jacob. Under s’Jacob, a line and staff administration was immediately imposed just as the network was nearing completion (Lintsen 1980: 198; Quack 1977: 198). The management immediately hired their own engineering-trained children, who were all conveniently graduating from the Royal Academy at that time (see figure 9.1). On Frederik s’Jacob’s appointment as governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies in 1881, Willem, the son of Agnites Vrolik (the railway’s first president), was appointed the new director general.2 Willem Vrolik graduated in 1862 from the Royal Academy. After working as an engineer for the SS until 1870, he was appointed the Secretary to the board after Quack retired to briefly become a professor of political economy. He remained director general of the SS until 1889, when he was elected to parliament for Amsterdam between 1891 and 1894 (Veenendaal 2001: 54). Frits s’Jacob’s son F. B. s’Jacob graduated from the Royal Academy in 1873. He also worked as an engineer for the SS until 1881, when he became secretary to his father in the governor-general’s office. On his return he was elected mayor of Rotterdam and later appointed to the senate. He became a member of the board of the SS in 1915. Rudolf, the son of Herman van den Wall Bake, also trained as an engineer and worked for the SS from 1863 to 1867. He, however, replaced his uncle, Jan Willem Bake, who had been president-director of the rival railway, the Holland Iron Railway Company, from 1857 to 1881 (Veenendaal 2001: 559). Rudolf remained with that company only until 1883, when he left to found the Netherlands–South Africa Railway Company. By 1902, he was also on the boards of the National Mortgage Bank, the Netherlands Trading Company, and the Zeeland Steamship Company (Schijf 1993: 164–65). Hendrik Pieter van Heukelom’s son Jean Charles graduated from the Royal Academy in 1861 and served as an engineer for the Netherlands Central Railway. He eventually left the railway to manage a family textile mill. Jean Charles’s children George Willem and Hendrik, however, were taken under the wing of their childless uncle, Hendrik Quack (Eeghen 1952). Quack became a board member of the SS in the late 1870s and the chair of the board in 1885 (as well as board member to the

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Netherlands Trading Society, the Netherlands Bank, and the Royal Dutch Steamship Company). George Willem van Heukelom went on to become the chief engineer of Ways and Works of the SS, responsible for all major construction work for the railway. George Willem’s brother Hendrik P. received a PhD in economics with his foster father Quack (now also a professor at the University of Amsterdam) as his supervisor; he became a banker, serving on the board of directors of the National Mortgage Bank and six other bank and insurance companies (Roding 2002). In tracing these dynasties of “railway barons,” it is important to note how they circulated through a variety of roles in the state and other corporations. Although beginning as managing directors in the Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways (SS), they soon acquired roles on the boards of cognate companies as well as governmental roles in parliament. From their positions of power in the SS, they moved to control almost every other railway in the Netherlands. This ensured the circulation of governmental technologies of power in the corporate sphere that made a coherent and coordinated assemblage possible. It also ensured that these same strategies were shared by the state, becoming a hegemonic cultural understanding on how the “conduct of conduct” in the “free market” was to be governed, despite the state effect of Liberal ideology.

Gentlemanly Capitalism and Corporate Networks The Dutch railway corporations were a means by which the mercantilist regents of the city of Amsterdam were transformed into regenten capitalists much like King Willem I himself. This chapter therefore examined the delegation of royal sovereignty to corporations headed by this elite. Chandler views the limits that the new industrial technologies place on the organization of labor (the technical relations of production) as critical to the development of scientific management and the modern corporation (Roy 1997: 7–10). This analysis, in contrast, has emphasized the social relations of production: the ways in which those innovative technologies to manage people first developed in the royal corporations were later redeployed by other gentlemanly capitalists in private corporations. The railways borrowed these management technologies from the royal firms such as the Société Générale and the Netherlands Trading Society. As a delegation, first of royal sovereignty and then of the regent class, the adoption of particular social technologies for managing people through corporations was driven by political considerations. This transition to corporate governmentality embodies a central irony, as the corporation itself was transformed from a public economic body into a private one as the state itself became increasingly open to democratic influence. On the one hand, the liberal emphasis on the separation of state and economy, that “that government which governs least, governs best,” ensured that this critical tool of state formation, the railways, would remain in private hands rather than under state control. This liberal strategy limited the ability of the Crown to continue to dominate the economy in

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the corporate sphere. On the other hand, the liberal state granted control of its highly capitalized rail network to a corporate monopoly on the grounds that a corporately managed economy was more capable than that “free market” of generating economies of scope and scale; that “scientific management” by engineers was more efficient than the “invisible hand of the market.” In other words, in the political struggles to establish the railways, the free market ideology that had been used to limit royal power was rejected by the liberal state in the actual operations of the railway. Passing the railways to corporations served only to vest the monarch’s economic sovereignty in a broader oligarchy of gentlemanly capitalists. While Chandler has rightly dubbed the modern corporation the “visible hand of the market,” the power of his metaphor obscures the governmental impact of the corporation; this “visible hand” was the same that steered the ship of state. The regent class of the Amsterdam chamber of commerce united with the conservative, technocratic engineering elite at the Royal Academy and Royal Mint to take over the role of the monarchy in privately managing the new state-funded rail system. It was not the Thorbeckian laissez-faire Liberals but the old republican elite that ironically adopted the technocratic corporate emphasis of the French utopian socialists. The General Society is but one example of how Amsterdam’s old republican political and commercial elite were transformed into gentlemanly capitalists usurping the role of the merchant king himself in fostering the industrial development of the Netherlands and in ultimately ruling the Dutch state itself. This account of the politics of the expansion of the Dutch railway system has focused on those national factors that favored the introduction of a technocratic form of corporate governmentality. Technocracy, supported either by Saint-Simonians or by the utopian conservative advisors to the king, served a specific role in the new industrial regime; technocracy under the guidance of gentlemanly capitalists served as the ideological replacement for royalism in the government of corporate economies of scope and scale.

Notes 1. The advice of the Netherlands Bank to the minister of finance was reprinted in De Jong 1930: pt. 1, 2:1166–88. 2. S’Jacob was following another family tradition here, as his career had begun as adjutant to his uncle, J. J. Rochussen, governor-general of the NEI from 1845 to 1851.

Conclusion assemblage, corporatization, and the government of the economy

In the introduction, I noted that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan served as a key ideological means of producing the “state effect”—that is, of imagining the unity of the Western state personified in a Crown sitting above and separate from the civil society it encompasses and rules. It is an origin tale rooted in a mythic state of nature that thus shifted the question of royal legitimacy from history and from conquest to a purely philosophical plane. Hobbes’s Leviathan personified and unified the state whose “body politic” was composed of the unnamed multitude otherwise engaged in a competitive war of “all against all”: “a Multitude of men are made One Person, when they are by one man, or One Person, Represented” (cited in Neocleous 2003: 150). The multitude and their representative are bound together in this personified unity through a “social contract,” an ambiguous voluntary surrender of individual sovereignty to the Crown, which thereby guarantees the rights of sovereigns, the liberties of subjects, and the power of law. Through this contract, the state was personified in the Crown, and thereby came to deny “the multitude of its own subjectivity—to deny it a unity independent of the state” (Neocleous 2003: 152). No competing source of sovereignty, apparently, could be sanctioned. However, the corporation disrupted this ideal proscription on the pluralization of sovereignties. We have traced the corporate means by which Willem I, the merchant king of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, extended his sovereignty by establishing a series of “franchise states” that themselves depended upon this same Hobbesian ideological maneuver. Like the leviathan of state, the personified corporation came to stand above and separate from the multitude of shareholders who surrendered their economic sovereignty through a similar social contract. The “separate personality” of the corporation made it a personification of shareholder capital that it (not they) now owned; “the person of the corporation thus replicates state power through its unity as the basis for domination. This explains why both state and corporation were historically understood through the same category of ‘body politic’” (Neocleous 2003: 158). State sovereignty, the right to govern, was now partitioned among these multiple leviathans.

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In the original Hobbesian sense, the corporation fractured the unitary sovereignty of the state. However, that original delegation of sovereignty to the corporation by the Crown has, under Liberalism, been transformed, and this act of delegated sovereignty has been ideologically eliminated. Incorporation has been redefined without the Crown as a mere legally recognized act of association, hence preserving the unitary sovereignty of the state from corporate competition. Under Liberalism, what was an initial royal grant of “separate personality” to the corporation has instead been reified as the legal recognition of its inherent personhood (Ireland 1996). The liberal rights-bearing citizen was never defined in terms of real bodies; it was an intellectual construction lent conditionally to particular agents on the basis of property, gender, and class, thereby denying women, the propertyless, and “irrational” natives basic civil rights. Liberal personhood was granted to property holders only, to those who by that fact possessed “independence” and hence would not sway the state from its primary function, the protection of property. For Liberals, it ultimately proved easy to recognize the personhood of a corporate property-holding legal fiction while denying it to other real bodies. It was by this means, as a private rights-bearing individual, that the franchise state’s governmental functions were obscured and removed from political discourse, its public nature denied. It is through this subterfuge that the corporation’s scalar growth in numbers and size, and of the administration of the lives of its dependents, was “economized” and depoliticized (Barkan 2010); politics was eliminated from “political economy,” and corporate “rights” were preserved from the intrusions of majority rule. However, behind the legal fiction of separate personality lies a powerful economic administration that must operate within the bounds of Liberal economic theory; corporate management remains bound by the same Liberal governmental rationality as does the state’s administration. This book has traced the circulation of governmental techniques, strategies, and personnel between the two in the assemblage of commodity chains that bound the Dutch empire together. Under the guidance of the Crown, this assemblage included the Cultivation System, managed by Janus-faced civil servants serving as the Crown’s purchasing agents; a royal trading corporation that fixed the arrangements for the transport and sale of the “purchased” export crops; and that organized the return flow of manufactured cotton cloth by the NHM. The goal of this assemblage was not the simple pursuit of profit (although it produced vast surpluses) but of securitizing the poor, fostering their prosperity, and instilling “productive virtue” in them; it is a form of biopower rarely discussed. The sets of disciplinary practices and the ideological tools developed by Johannes van den Bosch in his Colonies of Benevolence circulated widely within this larger assemblage to the same ends; the state and its franchise exercised a shared governmental rationality that served as the visible hand of the market. The shared governmental rationality of this messy assemblage of state and corporate administrations was used to manage the disposition of things so that their subjects voluntarily “did as they ought.”

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My analysis of the process of assemblage by which these multiple projects of rule were aligned emphasized the process of corporatization, by which the components of these friction-ridden commodity chains were fixed in place and coordinated through corporate contracts and accounts. The corporation, as a franchise state, was granted a concession on state resources—whether to house vagrants, manufacture sugar or cloth, or operate the nation’s railways—a grant that, under Liberalism, could also be viewed as a direct personal appropriation of those state resources. The concession contract created a simulacra of a market. The internal corporate “economy” is a form of ersatz capitalism, given that its hierarchical administration and economies of scope and scale replace the market. “Costs,” we saw, were set by administrative fiat and specifically included the “cost” of dressage, of disciplining labor. These costs were contractually constructed such that they encouraged “efficiency,” not profit per se, and here we find the origin of corporate economies of scope and scale. These contracts allowed the state to continue to exercise its guidance, leaving us with paradoxical images of the corporation as the “working arm of the state” or as the “visible hand of the market.” Under Liberalism, the Crown’s overall guidance of the assemblage was attenuated, replaced by networks of regent capitalists without changing the nature of its governmental functions, a political shift from enlightened absolutism to the renewed oligarchy of the old republic. This shift was presaged by businesses like the Salomonsons’, which were governmentalized and adopted “philanthropic” ends in imitation of the Netherlands Trading Company. But the shift was truly expedited by the technocratic ideology developed at the Royal Academy for the training of engineers and East Indies civil servants. This royalist technocratic government, once married with the Saint Simonian crédit mobilier, multiplied the number of these messy corporate assemblages. This state-trained technocratic elite replaced the Crown’s coordination and circulated between state and corporate administrations, and as these corporations multiplied, they further solidified the character of this assemblage through shared personnel, strategies, and techniques of governance. After the Liberal revolution “emancipated” the royal corporations, control, power, and personnel shifted from the Crown to Amsterdam’s regent capitalists.

Corporatization and State Formation Foucault’s emphasis on government and the apparatuses of security through which it is achieved has successfully decentered the state in our analyses and encourages us to instead trace the circulation of governmental rationality and of practices into the civil sphere, thereby drawing attention to the dispersed and friction-ridden assemblage as a whole. The counterimage of a messy assemblage unevenly spread over the globe portrayed in this book raises doubts about the ability of these leviathans to construct the ordered whole they ideologically project; what Tania Li calls the

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“limits of governmentality.” Corporatization, I argued, was their attempt at fixing those contested commodity chains in place—frequently through coercion and by imposing hierarchies; an alternate process of state formation. Because of the focus on governmental rationality and the realization of its messy limits, this book picks up on the uncomfortable realization that there are institutional players that Foucault does not explicitly consider (Neocleous 1996: 57–79): as Mitchell notes, “The state is an object of analysis that appears to exist simultaneously as material force and as ideological construct. It seems both real and illusory” (Mitchell 1999: 76). So too, the leviathan of the corporation. The unity of the personified state or corporation is not entirely an ideological process, and their administrations have real effects. In examining the growth of liberal governmentality over the nineteenth century, we still need to attend to state formation, and to its unmarked attendant process, corporatization. Even though that state ruled best by ruling least, the Liberal state was marked by a massive growth in scale and reach. I have repeatedly indicated the uneven, dispersed nature of the state apparatus of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands; in 1850, a rudimentary royal bureaucracy of 806 civil servants, with a further 300 in the Netherlands East Indies, sought to rule an empire of over 10 million people. Centralized state rule was abetted by the Crown’s absolute sovereignty and right to appoint all mayors, ministers, and senators, but countered by decentralized parliamentary centers of national, provincial, and municipal power. To counter that resistance, King Willem I delegated his sovereignty to a series of royal corporations in order to carry out his policies; the corporate revolution was an integrated element of royal state formation, although it ultimately multiplied the number of delegated sovereignties, of franchise states that required new modes of coordination and integration. Others have noted that the development of the modern corporation and its techniques of governance at midcentury underscores an irony; the modern corporation, which replaces market exchange with hierarchical economic administration, emerges at precisely the point of liberal ascendance and its efforts to construct a laissez-faire market, largely making it redundant. Chandler explains the timing of the corporate revolution in terms of “efficiency theory,” that the corporate form of economic administration was made necessary “when the volume of economic activities reached a level that made administrative coordination more efficient and more profitable than market coordination” (1977: 8). This was clearly not the case in the Netherlands, an economic backwater with little or no industry. Sociologist William G. Roy has demonstrated the inadequacy of efficiency theory in a number of other national contexts, and points rather to the importance of the corporation as a resource of hierarchy, monopoly, and power (1997: 21–40); as do the critical accounting theorists (Clegg 1998; Hopkins 1998; McKinlay 2006; Miller 1990; Miller and Power 2013; Miller and Rose 1992). Corporatization, as noted in chapters 3 and 4, was a means of managing the global commodity chains that “internalized” anonymous market transactions through contracts, and replaced those market exchanges with hierarchical administration utilizing

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accounting as a disciplinary tool; this nonmarket administration may or may not have been more “efficient,” but it reduced the costs of negotiating market exchanges and imposed hierarchical power relations that lent stability to the assemblage. The first of these corporate assemblages had been pulled together by the “merchant-king,” the hyphen emphasizing the role of the Crown as the pivot in governing the economy. In the liberal period, ideological and legislative effort went into redefining state power (“that government is best that governs least”), thereby limiting the role of the state in the market. I have noted the irony that this new freedom was quickly superseded by the corporation, which supplanted that market, as rule devolved to regents. This decentering of rule was also typical of the era of “old republicanism” and the VOC, “the company state.” It now reflected the evolution of the patrimonial corporation under liberal governmentality. I have emphasized the circulation of strategies, practices, and personnel between the state and the corporations in addressing a series of state security concerns, whether pauper management, the “lazy native,” the “railway question,” or the “social question.” At times, I shifted the focus of analysis from the “corporation as governmental assemblage” of this type to the process of “corporatization”; the focus of the concept is not institutional but on sets of practices, and is thus more useful in the analysis of inchoate assemblages like the Cultivation System. This is, then, an attempt to provide an alternate perspective on the “origins of the firm,” on why corporations came to replace market transactions with managerial control. The corporation has emerged not only because it “lowers transaction costs” through contracts (Coasce 1993; Williamson 1980) or that its hierarchical administration is more “efficient” than the market (Chandler 1977). These effects of corporatization may occur once it is instituted as an alternative to the market, but the driving force of corporatization is governmental: establishing and perpetuating the continuity of a specific kind of liberal rule. This was a political process of assemblage, of aligning interests and piecing together sets of practices, organized within a specific sociology of rule. As an apparatus of security, the corporation as assemblage sought to organize social and economic goals within this sociology of rule so as to meet alternate governmental aims. Thus, the series of contracts cobbled together in the Cultivation System organized an “internal market” in export products yet was ultimately organized so as to strengthen colonial rule in the aftermath of the Java War. It is this governmental drive that helps explain, I would argue, the consistent parallel structure of the governmental and corporate orders in Western states. The shared governmental rationality of state and corporations has been extensively examined in numerous contexts. I had earlier noted those sociological studies that argued that the “cultural models” of a country’s political forms “overdetermined” the shape of their emerging industrial orders in the development of railroad corporations in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Dobbin 1994; Dunlavy 1994; Dunlavy and Welskopp 2007). Dobbin notes a clear parallel structure between the institutions for organizing politics and those of economic life, and concludes that corporations

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took on the character of political institutions not only because nations reinterpreted existing state characteristics as strategies for growth but also because they employed the broad means-ends designations of political culture to design economic institutions. Political cultures shaped new industrial and economic strategies principally by determining the kinds of economic and industrial problems nations would perceive and by delimiting the solutions that nations would conceive to those problems. (Dobbin 1994: 20) Dobbin’s work thus documents the nationally specific “varieties of capitalism” that emerged in the nineteenth century and ties them to their governmental strategies of rule. In this work, I have reframed Dobbin’s “cultural overdetermination” argument in terms of governmentality and the circulation of practices, strategies, and personnel between state and corporation. Dobbin’s focus on the rationality of national political cultures has obvious productive parallels with the concept of governmentality, without, however, incorporating Foucault’s treatment of liberalism, biopower, and his deconstruction of the state, as pursued here. In the Dutch case, the dual processes of state formation and corporatization reproduced the decentered corporatist political system of the old republic, which celebrated the “true freedom” (ware vrijheid ) of the stadhouder-less period (Laarse 1999). Liberalism successfully decapitated the king, leaving only a nominal sovereign to represent “the multitude,” to project an image of the unified body politic; but political power was decentralized and devolved such that state formation took place in numerous local corporate sites. These corporate franchise states were given concessions on state resources. These concessions, like the traditional “heritable privileges, including patrimonial offices and rentes, functioned as both lineage property and a kind of ‘property in politics’ in many Old Regime societies, including the United Provinces. Corporate elites acquired pieces of the nascent state, in some cases selling them or passing them on to descendants. These properties came to resemble land, as relatively immobile family assets” (Adams 1994b: 508). The apt political metaphor for this body politic was thus less the leviathan and more the hydra. Under Liberalism, the multiple heads of the hydra must nonetheless rule by the same governmental rationality. This was ensured, I have argued, through the overlapping membership of board members and the circulation of administrative personnel and technologies of rule. Hence, like the liberal state itself, the corporation that rules best does so by ruling least; it could not depend on direct coercion and instead sought to manage. Like the state, the corporation works best by arranging the disposition of things so that its workers “did as they ought.” In Foucault’s phraseology, the managers of managers explicitly sought to organize the “conduct of conduct.” Workers who had been instilled with productive virtue through the disciplinary tactics of this apparatus of security learned to regulate themselves.

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Gentlemanly Capitalism In tracing the sociology of rule in the case of Dutch industrialization, I have focused upon a specific class of regents, both at home and in the colony, who were the traditional bearers of the empire’s political culture. Sovereignty in the greater Netherlands came to rest with an oligarchic regent class in a decentralized state, who exercised their rule through corporations that had long exercised governmental functions as company states or franchise governments; the organizing force of industrialization was gentlemanly capitalists. The end product of this generative process over the long nineteenth century was a form of gentlemanly capitalism that exercised corporate governmentality as the “visible hand” of the Dutch economy. These corporations remained preoccupied with governmental concerns, “the social question,” and thus continued to exercise a form of economic biopower in their efforts to shape an “economic man” infused with productive virtue. The underlying sociology of rule nurturing the development of corporate governmentality traced throughout this book incorporates Dutch historians’ and sociologists’ comparative analysis of British gentlemanly capitalism. The theories of gentlemanly capitalism have their origins in the analysis of historians P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins (1993) and have been used primarily to explain the emergence and character of British imperialism; by extension, they have also been used to explain Dutch expansion within the Netherlands East Indies in the late nineteenth century. They argue that the landed interests of the British aristocracy in London and the Home Counties were transformed in the eighteenth century as they embraced the financial services sector, including the large London banks. These improving gentry maintained their aristocratic privilege in church and state and leveraged their landed wealth through investment in the city banks, thus becoming the driving force of British politics; as in the Dutch case, English nobles retained a disproportionate share of seats in cabinet, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. Dutch scholars have applied this model to Dutch imperialism where a similar pattern of aristocratic domination of the financial service industry, corporate boards, and parliament has been called Regenten Capitalisme (Kuitenbrouwer 1994; Bossenbroek 1996; Moes 2012). In chapter 1, I outlined how the patrimonial rule of regents was an ancient Dutch institution that tempered royal absolutism in the “greater Netherlands.” As state officials, these regents had two concerns: securing the state that provided their frequently inherited office, and maintaining the status and wealth of their extended families (Adams 2005; 1994b: 505–6; cf. Sutherland 1975: 66 for Java). This wealth was acquired through their state-sanctioned access to the corporate form, with each corporation (whether civic or trade) granted a degree of segmented sovereignty that these regents jealously defended: a form of governance referred to as “old republicanism.” In founding the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, an enlightened absolutist

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centralized state bureaucracy was imposed on this older pattern of decentralized rule, the state per se. Willem, however, continued to rule through corporations specifically because they lay outside of parliamentary review, and provided him with financial and governmental resources that freed him from formal state constraints. It was these early royal corporations, such as the Benevolent Society and the Netherlands Trading Company, that developed the new disciplinary techniques that securitized the fragile state from rebellious paupers at home and in the colonies. These techniques later circulated in other corporate contexts as the focus shifted from pauper reform to political economy’s newly developed concern with disciplining labor. I emphasized the corporation’s continued use of older disciplinary strategies derived from the cameralist police sciences that were further developed at the Royal Academy. I argued that hierarchical corporate techniques of discipline were developed to manage commodity chains in sugar, coffee, and cotton cloth, linking metropole and colony into a global governmental assemblage. This assemblage was a means by which the regent class could continue to draw on the delegated sovereignty of the historical corporate form to extract wealth and maintain their patrimonial familial status while securitizing that state from the propertyless. The emergence of this class of gentlemanly capitalists can be linked to Willem’s policy of aristocratic restoration across the greater Netherlands. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the economic dislocations they caused, he sought to draw regents and former aristocrats into the royal corporations he created to exploit state resources, as well as his new centralized state bureaucracy, as a counter to their traditional sources of power, the city councils and provincial states. This was, however, no simple refeudalization of the Netherlands; while their status was officially renewed through their preferential access to these new governmental positions, few feudal economic rights and obligations were retained. It is important to underscore that this policy of aristocratic restoration also extended to Java. The old pangreh praja (rulers of the realm) of Java were now also granted their traditional forms of aristocratic status display and given preferential access to the bureaucratic role of regent. And while the literature has concentrated on the autocratic despotism this seemed to encourage, it is important to underscore that this status largely depended upon the new “markets” in cash crops created by the Cultivation System, and not upon feudal exactions. The wealth of the new regent class of Java, like that in the Netherlands, depended on the rent (commissions) they drew on the operations of the vast corporate trade assemblage that Willem was building. The “refeudalization” of Java as described by historians (Doel 1994) is thus a reinscription of a mark of colonial otherness that ignores the similar renewed noble status of the Dutch ruling elite. Both metropole and colony were marked by the resurgence of their “regent classes” and of their governmental role. The patrimonial cast of the aristocratic restoration in Java is thus unsurprising given that most of the residents serving as “elder brother” to the Javanese regents continued to be drawn from the

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Dutch regent and aristocratic estates, and the Crown retained control of colonial policy. Ninety-three men served as residents on Java between 1830 and 1860, of whom a quarter had aristocratic status and a further 28 percent were of the urban patrician regent class (Quarles van Ufford 1860). During the 1830s, the percentage of nobles was 65 percent, dropping to 54 percent in the 1840s and 37 percent in the 1850s. Forty children of these ninety-three residents had been sent to the Royal Academy and had begun their ascent in the Indies civil service, of which twenty-three (58 percent) were of noble background (Keurenaer 1870). Bosma and Mandemakers have demonstrated the same from a wider sample (2012: 174). This seemingly slow decline was highly regional, however, and specific residencies (Batavia, Cirebon, Jepara, Kedu, Rembang, Semarang, Surabaya, Yogyakarta) were staffed by noble residents over 75 percent of the time throughout the period. This aristocratic renewal is a key element of gentlemanly capitalism, which highlights both the governmental and economic impact of this class. I have already noted that 270 regent families had the dominant role in the state throughout the nineteenth century: “Of all members of the Dutch Second Chamber of Parliament in 1901, 34 percent belonged to a patrician [regent] family, while 19 percent was still from noble birth. Of all government ministers between 1888 and 1918, 40 percent belonged to patrician and 24 percent to noble families” (Kuitenbrouwer and Schijf 1998: 72). This same class dominated the upper echelons of the state administration and, as we have just seen, the colonial bureaucracy. This does not entail, however, that this specifically governmental elite should have embraced corporate industrialization. This book has traced how this governmental elite also became a corporate industrial elite. It has been repeatedly noted by historians that by the end of the nineteenth century the Netherlands was dominated by a tight network of corporations whose overlapping leadership solidified colonial and domestic economies into a coordinated whole (Schijf 1993: 39; Kuitenbrouwer and Schijf 1998). The regent-controlled corporate assemblage created by Willem I over a forty-year period differs significantly from the gentlemanly capitalism that developed in the British Empire (Cain and Hopkins 1993; Kuitenbrouwer 1994, 1998). British gentlemanly capitalism was marked by an alliance of estate-holding Tory aristocrats and financial service bankers from “the City” whose political interests marginalized the emerging northern industrialist class in the aristocrat-controlled parliament; in regent capitalism, in contrast, regents lacked landed estates and had a strong background in commercial banking. In this book, the reluctant embrace of industrialization by this class of banking regents under state leadership was traced. Regent capitalism thus differs from the British variant in its embrace of corporate industrial capitalism. I have argued that the transition to corporate governmentality under these gentlemanly capitalists was eased by the introduction of the Saint Simonian crédit mobilier, with its philosophy of hierarchical administration of entire industries through a politics of production. The French Saint-Simonians had borrowed many of Willem I’s industrial finance policies and rephrased them in technocratic terms through their

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influence on the French school of engineering, the École Polytechnique. These strategies, we saw, were reflexively adopted by the Crown in its new Royal Academy, which produced the state engineers who were to manage this evolving global corporate assemblage. The conservative royalist technocracy they created was embroiled in sugar and cotton production as well as the railway industry. As each of these industries was privatized through the issuing of state concessions, conservative regent technocrats circulated between state and corporate service, ensuring continuity of rule over the economy. This book has covered the major corporate industries of the Dutch economy in midcentury, demonstrating the development of gentlemanly capitalism and its doppelgänger, corporate governmentality. These gentlemanly capitalists were hardly entrepreneurs, although their families had generations of investment experience. I have noted that the regent class in the Netherlands had but two concerns, securing the state, and hence their place in it, and maintaining the wealth of their families. They accepted the principles of liberal political economy, if not its laissez-faire dogmas; as conservative followers of the Crown’s technocratic vision, they extended its range into the corporate sphere. The corporation achieved greater economic efficiency through administrative hierarchies than was possible in the market, and tracing the circulation of governmental practices and personnel into the corporation pointed to the means by which vast colonial commodity chains in sugar, coffee, and indigo were assembled and managed. These observations apply equally to the cotton-weaving industry in the Netherlands, from the Benevolent Colonies, to the NHM, to the steam-powered factories of the Salomonsons.

Benevolent Colonization: Corporate Governmentality and Biopower At several points throughout this book I have pointed to several distinctive features of this apparatus of security and its use in Dutch colonialism, economic development, and state formation that deserve further emphasis. Together, they form a uniquely Dutch national tradition. Chief among these was the form of “benevolent colonization” (irony intended) developed by Johannes van den Bosch in his rural Colonies of Benevolence, which was later redeployed in Java as the Cultivation System. This form of benevolent colonization was a rehabilitative experiment in pauper relief that replaced market transactions with hierarchical corporate management—a charity company—in order to instill productive virtue in colonists. Both the Colonies of Benevolence and the Cultivation System were complex assemblages of state and corporate administrations tied by a shared governmental rationality that placed as much emphasis on creating a specific social order as it did on making profits. Benevolent colonialism was ultimately successful because of the way it integrated governing elites—the regents in both the Netherlands and Java—in its apparatus of security in ways that granted them both power and profit. They are examples of “systematic colonization,” which developed internationally in the early nineteenth century.

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As he made clear in a flow of policy documents, Van den Bosch’s experiments were conceived as a “system of colonization” (koloniale stelsel, systema van kolonizatie). At the time, this was a relatively new way of conceiving the process of colonialism and finds its equivalent, in the British case, in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theories of “systematic colonization” that guided British rule in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Wakefield’s theories, rooted in the Benthamite political economy of the Philosophical Radicals, were to dominate colonial policy in Britain in an otherwise laissez-faire state that was hostile to the expense of ruling colonies. Wakefield’s theory could be boiled down to a simple principle: to recreate the class-stratified social order of Britain in its settler colonies (and hence to prevent their rebellion), the poor must be prevented from easily acquiring land by never granting (the previous practice) but only selling Crown “wastelands” at a “sufficient[ly high] price.” The sufficient price would eliminate the egalitarian subsistence farming order of the colonies and ensure the poor became a proper dependent working class on the farms of those with capital, thus fostering further capital formation and class differentiation. Wakefield’s system was the colonial equivalent of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), by which the British poor were deprived of charitable relief and forced to take any work, no matter how poorly paid. Wakefield referred to the open labor market that systemic colonization would create as “natural slavery,” leading Marx to crow that he had given the capitalist game away (Semmel 1970: 111–12). Wakefield called for the systematic colonization of the empire, which he and his Whig backers sought to implement through a series of land corporations. That systematic colonization was to be implemented by corporations should come as no surprise when much of the colonial world was still ruled by “company states” such as the British East Indies Company or the Hudson’s Bay Company. In this new era, however, it is important to underscore the sociology of rule of these new governmental assemblages. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the new “private” land companies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that implemented Wakefield’s policies were all founded by the Whig prime minister, Earl Grey, and his cabinet ministers, including his son and brother-in-law who were in a position to implement this new land sale policy; in the resulting assemblage, the control of British emigration passed from the British state to these land companies (Schrauwers n.d.). Systematic colonization in both Dutch and English empires thus involved complex assemblages of colonial states and corporations that privatized the profits of rule. While the “system” was an attempt to create a specific kind of social order, it also provided the state and its officers with the resources for state formation. Benevolent Colonization was a similar guiding principle that differed from the British case, as these were royal corporations, and the considerable primary profits were accrued by the Crown. I have pointed out that the Colonies of Benevolence and the Cultivation System should be conceived as development projects meant to better integrate marginal territories in the empire, securitize the state from restive paupers, and to instill productive virtue in them, so as to produce a wider prosperity

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in the population. Liberalism in the colonial context did not seek to recreate the citizen-individual (i.e. the individual as bearer of rights) but “an individual who by being forced into a new sphere of commercial exchange would become the Homo economicus of the market economy” (Kalpagam 2000: 420). As indicated above, this governmental task was left to corporations. Analysis of this form of “systematic colonization” points to the need and benefits of keeping metropole and colony in a single analytic frame. Little attention has been paid to the unique tradition of “domestic colonization” that the Dutch Colonies of Benevolence inspired throughout Europe (Arneil 2017), nor have historians compared it to the colonization of Java (Schrauwers 2001, 2020). The panoptic disciplinary model developed in the Colonies of Benevolence was widely adapted for alternate uses by Robert Owen for his communitarian experiments in Britain and America, and by Alexis de Tocqueville in France, in the development of the agricultural colony for juvenile delinquents at Mettray (Stoler 2016: 89–96). Mettray (and by extension, the Colonies of Benevolence) was described by Foucault as “the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behavior” (1977: 293). These examples were, he said, part of a cluster of disciplinary apparatuses suffusing civil society—“factories, schools, barracks, hospitals”—that formed a “carceral archipelago” that disciplined the wider social body rather than punishing it (Foucault 1977: 298–99). The concept of the carceral archipelago helps identify a “carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques to the most innocent of disciplines, transmitting disciplinary norms to the very heart of the penal system . . . and to the depths of the social body” (Foucault 1977: 297). I emphasize that the carceral archipelago that Foucault made famous was both corporate and based on forms of specifically domestic colonialism. Foucault studiously avoided addressing the issue of the colonial nature of the carceral archipelago (Arneil 2017). He also ignored the corporate nature of the Benthamite charity companies created to organize these colonies. These are two themes I have addressed here. Ann Stoler has argued that the evidently straightforward noun “colony” is actually a complex and highly variable political concept encompassing widely divergent planned settlements for different groups and functions. She names settler colonies, domestic agricultural colonies, military colonies, and penal colonies at home and abroad, among others; yet all of the French colonies she cites were applications of the disciplinary model developed at Mettray, leading her to argue that despite Foucault’s studied indifference to the issue, the carceral archipelago is central to colonialism, and we must address its role in the expansion of empire (2016: 68–121). The “carceral archipelago of empire” was an experiment “beyond the frontiers of criminal law” (Stoler 2009: 131; 2016: 68–121); they were parapenal institutions “created not to be prisons” (Foucault 1977: 294). As political concept, the colony presents us with a methodological demand to attend to its dependent status and its “relationship to a broader biopolitical norm and legal status that those in the colony are imagined

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to aspire to and desire but, by design, cannot attain” (Foucault 1977: 78). Colonial governmentality is not liberal governmentality. Although Van den Bosch’s model of “benevolent colonization” was specifically conceived as rehabilitative, it did not offer charitable relief but rather lessons in how to labor. “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. I am referring to a form of governmentality that in marking out a ‘subject nation’ appropriates, directs and dominates its various spheres of activity” (Bhabba 1990: 75). Domestic colonists, like those “lazy natives” overseas, were denied full liberal citizenship and marginalized. The colony, specifically as a colony, assigned a separate and disparaged social status to its inmates (little different from the madman assigned to the asylum), from whom disciplinary demands in the form of coerced rehabilitative labor could be made (Foucault 1977: 239–44). The Colonies of Benevolence could “rehabilitate” colonists only if their initial state was presumed deficient enough to have deprived them of their full freedom. This refocuses attention away from the discourse on the “powers of freedom” that the progress of liberalism was said to have unleashed and redirects it to the dark side of those judicial liberties: panopticism, “the technique, universally widespread, of coercion” being used to shape “economic man” (Foucault 1977: 222). The colony in this broad sense should thus be viewed as a pastoral field of biopower; as a specific apparatus of security seeking to maximize national vitality no less than the evolving disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, and public health. The colonies developed specific programs of government for their problematic subject population, paupers, who were held responsible for their own miserable fate and were considered a danger to the body politic and the state and hence a source of moral panic. This problem population was subjected to technologies of government, in particular, a panoptic accounting discipline that held them accountable. These technologies produced “stable, mobile, comparable, combinable” knowledge for centers of calculation, which allowed government at a distance (MacKinnon 2000: 296). While the colony depends upon the exercise of discipline, its effects were intended to be moral, to foster an individual able to discipline themselves without external pressure. Although I have questioned the ability of the colony to effect the changes it seeks, disciplinary failure frequently did little but redouble efforts at reform and the refinement of techniques. Like other examples of biopower, this discipline was systematized as an academic “discipline” to further develop its techniques, such as at the school for colony supervisors at the Agricultural Institute at Wagenen or for the “Indologists” trained at the Royal Academy. Having identified a moral failing of social consequence, pauperism, these disciplines shaped the economic practices and value orientations of the population to ensure its elimination and the spread of productive virtue in its stead. In the liberal era, as the laissez-faire state sought to govern less, and better, these biopower programs of improvement were promulgated and developed within the model villages like Nijverdal, which were created by industrializing corporations like

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that of the philanthropic Salomonson brothers. In order to implement the complex disciplinary order that could accomplish this task, Van den Bosch framed the colony as a Benthamite “charity company.” All companies in this period were expected to serve public ends with benevolent purpose. What distinguishes this new form of colony is its corporate economic frame in which internal accounting is used as a form of hierarchical panoptic surveillance; such corporations internalize the expense of worker dressage. Van den Bosch’s Colonies of Benevolence utilized the language of the market, of wages, prices, rent, and savings; but each of these “market” transactions was nothing but a paper trail used to command obedience, measure productivity, impose fines, and grant gradated freedoms on the road to “a broader biopolitical norm and legal status that those in the colony [we]re imagined to aspire to and desire but, by design, cannot attain” (Stoler 2016: 78). The same was true under the Cultivation System, where village discipline was deployed to grow cash crops but which ultimately strengthened the colonial state. The Colonies of Benevolence had offered universal public education, savings, and health benefits as part of its program of moral reform. The Salomonsons adopted the same disciplinary framework, becoming an industrialized benevolent colony predicated on “free” but still disciplined labor; hence, under liberalism, the company town became part of the carceral archipelago of “factories, schools, barracks, hospitals.” As the liberal state abandoned social programs and social legislation, it was companies like the Salomonsons’ that developed these biopower programs and promulgated their spread through public debates on the “social question.” The role of corporations in implementing biopower strategies has been little noted. The cost of labor “dressage,” the disciplining of paupers into the working class, was transferred to corporations and their government of the economy. The model of benevolent colonization I am highlighting here thus combined collective coerced production with individual accounting discipline within an internal corporate economy—it is the birth of the management sciences as they were later developed by the technocrats of the Royal Academy. In the “free” Colonies of Benevolence, families lived on an individual farm but worked their farms collectively in supervised platoons; what crops they grew, when they grew them, and how they grew crops on the society’s land lay out of their hands. But at harvest, they were forced to sell their crops to the society at prices it set, and rent, fees, and fines for their farm were deducted. What money they received was in colony scrip to be spent only at the colony store; the internal economy of the colony was little but a series of accounting measures used to discipline production and evaluate the individual colonists’ “worth.” So too in the Javanese case. Production on 40 percent of villagers’ land was set aside for the payment of taxes; that land was farmed collectively under the disciplinary gaze of the village chief. The crops grown and the manner of their production was determined by the state and sold to the state at the prices it determined. In the final accounting, the village chief balanced a villager’s share of the “sales” against their participation in dispensing final rewards. In both cases, coerced collective labor re-

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moved individual choice in what “cash crops” were produced and when and how they produced them, but accounting measures were used to individualize that discipline and allocate responsibility and accountability. I traced the extension of this system to the production of cotton cloth in the Netherlands and of sugar in Java, and then how the Dutch industrial revolution that followed retained the model of benevolent colonization, creating rural industrial villages organized like the “free” Colonies of Benevolence. Sugar refining in Java, under state lead, introduced steam technology in the 1840s; a decade later, cotton weaving in the Netherlands made a similar transition in the Salomonsons’ model village of Nijverdal. Benevolent colonialism as an evolving state-corporate assemblage thus set the Netherlands on an alternate rural path to industrialization, of “factories in the fields” whose laborers had (only) “one foot in the factory” (Zanden 1996; Wintle 2000; Knight 1992; Geertz 1963). As these governmental techniques were adopted by corporations like the Netherlands Trading Company and others, it produced a distinctive form of rural industrialization shared by both metropole and colony predicated on flexible familism and paternalism. Related industries were soon drawn into the larger governmental assemblage that managed the global commodity chains that tied the empire together and provided the resources for the Dutch industrial revolution. This larger assemblage was initially managed by the Netherlands Trading Company, the “working arm of the state,” but we traced how its strategies for managing people and products circulated within a number of the daughter corporations created by the new crédit mobiliers. Corporate competition proved to be little but replication and imitation. It is only when compared to the English or Belgian cases that the hybrid trajectory fostered by benevolent colonization becomes apparent. Slow rural industrialization with attenuated proletarianization differentiates the Dutch case from the British and American models. The slow emergence of Dutch industrial capitalism was not “revolutionary,” and was frequently commented on; as the concerns expressed in the debates on the social question reveal, it was the product of a particular kind of social engineering that specifically sought to avoid the ills of Manchester and the emergence of a restive working class. It is for these reasons that I have argued that an analysis of class cannot focus on the narrow relations of production in the labor process alone but must take into account the broader governmental circumstances through which they are structured. Insofar as corporate governmentality was used to discipline and shape the moral identity of workers, it plays an important role in developing class consciousness through the way it defines the economic sphere. The Dutch pattern of rural industrialization and a “farming proletariat” was the product of these circulating practices, producing a distinctive class identity throughout the greater Netherlands (Kalb 1997). However, this analysis of class formation also addresses the unique class of “gentlemanly capitalists” who served in both state and corporation as the organizers of this new social order.

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Index

Accounting, 8–10, 15, 17, 24, 63, 69–71, 73, 75, 81, 87–91, 96–7, 101, 103–04, 110, 119, 138–39, 141–42, 160, 172, 180, 185, 215 220; critical theory of, 9, 704, 230; disciplinary use of, 9, 11, 69, 81, 220, 221, 231, 239–41; management, 11, 138, 183, 221 Ainsworth, Thomas, 107, 148, 153 Amsterdam, 18, 31, 32, 63, 110, 125, 126, 132, 156, 185, 191, 192, 193, 199, 200, 210, 211, 213; export houses of, 14, 109, 113, 213; regent families of, 105, 188, 196, 199, 215, 217, 218, 225, 226 anthropology (volkenkunde), 123, 124, 125 apparatus of security, 3, 4–5, 8, 12, 20, 22, 24, 29, 74, 76, 89, 95–96, 138, 163, 208, 231–32, 236, 239 April movement, 127, 133, 217 aristocracy (see also, regent, gentlemanly capitalism), 233, 116, 118, 233–35; Dutch, 18, 29, 32, 33, 40, 43, 44, 47, 117, 145, 234–35; Javanese, 30, 34, 37, 42–45, 81, 87, 116, 218, 234; restoration, 30, 38–42, 234; religious revival, 106–07, 145, 156 assemblage (dispositif ), 4–6, 15, 18, 22–25, 73, 89–90, 92–3, 97, 100–103, 116, 118–19, 122–23, 125, 140–42, 163, 167–69, 173–75, 188, 196, 198, 200–01, 205–09, 223, 225, 228–41 passim Association for National Industry (Vereeniging voor Volksvlijt), 192 auctions (NHM), 100, 122, 172 Bake, H. A., van den Wall, 127, 198, 201, 223–24 Bake, Rudolf van den Wall, 224

Bake, William A., 213, 214, 216 Barracks, 23, 66, 73, 238, 240 Batig Slot (budget surplus), 92, 172 Baud, J. C., 80, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 204 Belgian secession, 10–11, 46, 96, 105–06, 116, 184, 194; independence, 122, 213 Benevolent Society (Maatschappij van Weldadigheid), 52, 54, 56, 57–58, 60, 65, 67, 72, 74, 79, 105, 106, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 146, 149, 158, 179, 180, 185, 234 Bentham, Jeremy, 11, 24–25, 54, 56, 66, 89, 107, 146, 176–79, 180, 182, 185, 237, 238, 240 Berg, N. P. van den, 195, 203 biopower, 4, 20, 23, 29, 41, 51, 72, 118, 125, 146–47, 150–51, 163, 169, 176, 185, 228, 232–3, 236–41 Bischoffsheim, Louis Raphaël, 193, 194, 218 Bos, Van Maanen & Co., 206 Bosch, Johannes van den (see also benevolent colonization, Colonies of Benevolence, Cultivation System), 22–23, 24, 43, 48 n. 1, 52–54, 56, 99–100, 113, 138, 177; and Colonies of Benevolence, 63–70; and Cultivation System, 74–80, 81–87, 92, 93–94; and on forced labour/discipline, 60–62, 72–73, 96–97, 146, 162, 169, 179, 183, 228, 236; on pauperism, 56–60, 107–08 British business (see also gentlemanly capitalism, railways), 174, 212, 241; cotton industry, 110 British empire, 19, 74, 80, 235, 237–38 British government, 1, 40, 42, 167, 177, 178, 211

262 | index

British interregnum, 37, 82, 96, 130 Browne, Robert, 195, 201, 203 bureaucracy (see also patrimonial), centralized, 13, 30, 44, 47 126, 137, 230, 234; Java (Binnelands Bestuur), 42–43, 45, 132, 134, 135, 230, 235 cameralism (mercantilism), 14, 15, 16, 18, 41–42, 46, 51, 55, 105–06, 118, 119, 126, 171, 176, 183, 234 capitalism (see also gentlemanly capitalism), 2–3, 79, 138; regenten, 209, 225, 233; rentier, 18, 32, 40, 47, 120, 125, 181, 196, 209, 223 carceral archipelago of empire, 61, 65, 69, 76, 238 Central Netherlands Railway, 205 Chandler, Alfred, 3, 8, 15, 90, 97, 109, 173, 179, 211, 221–22, 225, 226, 230 charity company, 11, 24, 54, 56, 74, 76, 80, 89, 146, 153, 176–80, 182, 184–85, 222, 240 Christian Friends (see also pietism), 106, 145, 156 citizenship, 10, 36, 71, 185, 239 class (see also regent), analysis, 6, 9–12, 19, 23, 58, 106, 151, 153, 160–62, 181–82, 188, 237, 241; Dutch working, 4, 9, 15, 58, 144–47, 157, 159, 179, 193; Javanese working, 9, 73, 160–62 Clercq Daniel de, 201 Clercq, Gerrit de, 125, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 201 Clercq, Gideon J. de, 201 Clercq, Willem de, 100, 105, 106, 125, 145, 149, 153, 191, 199, coffee cultivation (see also cultivation system), 8, 74, 81, 87, 89, 97, 100, 101, 116, 173, 204, 207, 215, 234, 236; contracts, 92, 93, 95; payments for, 83–84; plantations ,94–95 colonialism (see also, governmentality, see also generality lands), 19–24, 47–48, 74, 187; benevolent, 65, 69, 162, 236–241; domestic, 21–24, 59, 65, 69, 71, 238, 239; systemic, 237

Colonies of Benevolence (see also colonialism, benevolent), 11, 12, 14, 22, 24, 25, 63–73 passim, 74–77, 81–82, 84, 87–89, 95–96, 151, 163, 176, 236–41; free colonies, 52, 63–65, 68, 69, 79, 87; unfree colonies, 52, 65–69 Committee for Discussing the Social Question, 144, 146, 154, 157 commodity chains, 6, 8–9, 11, 15, 17, 23–5, 75, 83, 87–91, 96, 97, 99–105, 108, 115–16, 118–19, 162–63, 168–9, 173, 188, 204–06, 208, 229–30 Conrad, F. W., 124, 150, concession (state, see also contract), 13, 65, 197, 209, 210, 212–13, 216, 219–22, 229, 232, 236 conservatives, 126, 127, 132, 133, 145, 167, 209, 215, 220, 226 Consignment System, 92, 93, 95, 116, 118, 121, 122, 173, 202 constitution, ‘1815,’ 40, 122; ‘1848 Liberal’ 15, 24, 126, 133, 159, 167–68, 169, 170, 171, 174, 184, 214, 220; Java, 42, 44, 80, 95, 133, 135, 136, 159 contract, 6, 8–9, 11, 17, 24, 61, 73, 84–97 passim, 100–105, 109–111, 188, 207, 219–20, 229, 231; model, 93, 94, 138, 131, 134, 135, 137, 142, 202; nexus of, 8, 102–03, 131; social, 58, 227; standard, 75, 84, 90, 93, 95, 97, 101–2, 100–105, 110–11, 119, 126, 196, 202–03; sugar, 128–32, 134–35, 140–42, 198, 202 controleurs, 88, 91–93, 143 n.1 Coronel, Dr. Samuel, 150, 156, 157 corporate boards, 6, 13, 18, 144, 164, 175, 189, 201, 205, 218, 223, 224, 225, 233 corporate governmentality, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 14, 17, 22, 25, 29, 42, 46, 131, 136, 154, 172, 175, 180, 202, 225–6, 236–41; and corporatization, 103, 119; and gentlemanly capitalism, 41, 168–9, 233, 235–6 corporation (see also visible hand), 1–2, 7, 174; multiunit, 84, 90, 97 n. 6, 141, 196, 210, 211; national models, 211

| 263 corporatization, 6–12, 15, 24, 90, 97, 99, 103–5, 115–16, 119, 142, 146, 188, 197, 202, 203–8, 215, 216, 219, 227–32 cost, 3, 8, 15, 56, 59, 62, 81, 88, 89, 90, 92, 103, 109, 115, 129, 130, 137, 138–42, 146, 149, 172, 183, 215, 221, 231, 240 cotton cloth, export, 110, 113; production, 100, 105–112, 147–54 Cramerus, Alexander, 204, 205 Cramerus, Ernst W., 199, 203–08 Cramerus, Frederik H. C., 204, 205 Crédit Mobilier (see also General Society), 25, 122, 131, 142, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 190–97, 199, 209 n. 2, 210–26 passim, 229, 235, 241 Crommelin, A. H. van Wickevoort, 213 crop payment (plantloon), 83, 87, 88, 95, 98 n.7, 8, 122, 129, 131, 135, 136, 137, 139 culture (‘national character’), 76, 77, 79, 123, 133, 162; Dutch political, 31, 34, 125, 232–33; Javanese (adat), 37, 45; managerial, 136–38, 196, 202, 209, 212, 216, 218 Cultivation Report, 91–93 Cultivation System, 8, 11, 17, 19–20, 22, 24, 45, 57, 61, 74–97 passim, 99–103, 109, 116–18, 122–23, 129, 131, 132–36, 141–42, 152, 167, 169, 173, 179, 187, 196, 202, 228, 231, 236; as state plantation, 75, 80–84, 142, 202 Daendels, Herman Willem, 37, 43, 57 De Gids (The guide), 125, 191, 193, 218 Depoliticization, 18, 106, 121, 124, 126, 127, 134, 136, 141, 160, 194, 197, 228 Derosne and Cail, 129, 130, 137 development, 22, 80, 100, 168, 202, 236; project, 54, 60, 73, 75, 96, 106, 119, 138, 162, 237; socialist, 180–84; utopian, 175–80 Diard, Pierre-Médard, 128, 130 Director of Cultivations, 94, 130, 133, 136 Directorate of Cultivations, 83, 89–97, 103, 110, 119, 128, 135, 141, 196, 221

discipline, 10, 11, 30, 51, 54, 56, 60, 61–63, 66–73, 77, 79, 88, 95, 96, 105, 108–09, 114–15, 118, 131, 142, 149, 153, 178, 185, 234, 238; accounting, 9, 63, 69, 70, 73, 87, 96, 107, 152, 220, 239, 240; force, 24, 54, 61, 62; military, 66–67, 74; penal, 80 Drenthe, 22, 32, 34, 52, 57, 59, 63, 65, 73, 74, 79, 81, 108 dressage, 146, 149, 153, 163, 164 n. 1, 178, 179, 180, 183, 185, 229, 240 Dutch Rhenish Railway (Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg-Maatschappij, NRS), 7, 126, 214, 216, 218, 220 East Indies Company, Dutch (VOC), 13, 20, 34, 52, 204, 211 East Indies Company, English, 2, 20, 176, 245 École Polytechnique, 121, 124, 183, 191, 222, 244 economic man (homo econimus), 10, 11, 22, 24, 119, 222, 239 economization, 17, 102, 215 economy (sphere, see also market, selfregulating), 6, 11, 15–17, 25, 88, 102, 140, 142, 168, 172–75, 184–85, 189, 191, 207, 227–41 education (see also Royal Academy), 18, 55, 60–61, 70–71, 106, 107, 121, 123, 239, 126, 153, 157–58 efficiency, 65, 97 n. 6, 131, 132, 135, 138–39, 181–83, 202, 216, 220–21, 222, 229, 230, 236 Elias, B. J., 93, 94, 128 empire (see also carceral archipelago), 3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 19–24, 31, 32, 33, 228, 230, 233, 237, 241; corporate, 118–20, 169, 184–85, 188 engineers (see also Royal Academy), as managers, 136, 209, 202, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221–22, 224, 226; military, 52, 56, 57, 90, 123; Saint-Simonian, 121, 184, 191, 197, 198, 199; state, 125, 126, 136, 183, 197, 208–09, 215, 216, 236 engineering, school (see Royal Academy) enlightened absolutism, 12, 42, 47, 229

264 | index

entrepreneurs, 109, 110, 111, 113, 120, 128, 136–41, 168, 212, 219, 236 Estates General (Staten-Generaal, legislature), 13, 18, 32, 36, 40, 122; provincial, 32, 34, 40, 41, 44, 47, 205, 234 fabrikants (cotton manufactuers, see also philanthropists), 109, 111–13, 152 family (see also flexible familism), as disciplinary model, 61, 65, 68–69, 71, 87, 151, 153, 158; firm, 111, 163, 174, 182, 183, 209, 223; moral, 67, 71, 151; patriarchal, 68, 86 farmers, Javanese, 8, 9, 22, 46, 62, 82–83, 91, 95, 96, 100, 108, 129, 131–32, 134, 137, 140, 142, 147, 159–60, 162 Fasseur, Cornelis, 80, 83 Fatherlands Society for Shipping and Trade (Vaderlandsche Maatschappij van Rederij en Koophandel), 53, 55, 56, 111 Fellenberg, Philipp Emanuel von, 70 feudal dues, Dutch, 18, 36, 40, 44, 62, 234; Javanese, 37, 43, 44, 81, 82, 234 flexible familism, 147, 150, 158–61, 241 flying shuttle, 107, 108, 111 Force (see discipline) forced shopping (gedwongen winkelnering), 152, 153, 164 n. 3 Foucault, Michel, 1–5, 8–12, 15, 17, 20, 23, 41–2, 51, 56, 60, 65, 70, 72, 90, 125, 127, 168, 176, 178, 229–30, 232, 238 Frederik, Crown Prince, 52, 67 Frederiksoord, 63–65, 75, 79, 83, 87, 109, 115, 150, 151, 152 Geertz, Clifford, 80, 143 n. 6, 159, 160, 164 n. 8 Gelderman & Sons, H. P., 120 n. 2, 148, 153, 155 General Netherlands Workingmen’s Association (Algemeen Nederlandsch Werklieden-Verbond), 144 General Society for Trade and Industry, 174, 197–201, 218 generality lands, 32, 34, 51, 63

gentlemanly capitalism (see also capitalism), 6, 12, 18, 19, 21, 24, 41, 48 n.4, 115– 18, 120, 127, 136–37, 162, 168–9, 188, 191, 198, 201, 208–09, 211, 218–19, 225–6, 233–6 Great Confinement, 51, 56, 72 Greater Netherlands, 6, 14, 19, 29–31, 38, 46–47, 101, 115–17, 168, 180, 185, 194, 233–34, 241 governmentality, 1–6, 8, 10, 12, 14–17, 29, 51, 88, 90, 100, 107, 121, 125, 129, 168, 172, 188, 211, 232; colonial, 19, 21–23, 162, 239; corporate (see corporate governmentality); liberal, 2, 14–15, 168, 176, 230–1, 239; limits of, 6, 30, 58, 83, 116, 163, 173, 229–30 Hall, Floris A. van, 188, 189, 197, 216, 219 Hasselman, J. J., 80, 97 n.3 Heukelom, Cornelis van, 201 Heukelom, Frans van, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 218, 219, 223–25 Heukelom, George Willem van, 225 Heukelom, Hendrik Pieter van, 224 Hobbes, Thomas, 227, 228 Hoevenaar, Hubertus, 130, 137, 202 Hofwyl, 70 Hogendorp, F. de Brouwer van, 198, 201 Holmberg de Beckfelt, O. C., 130, 137 House of Orange, 32, 34, 38, 39, 40, 47, 52, 53, 56, 58, 127, 168, 209, 212, 214, 217 idlers, 179, 181, 182, 189 imperialism, 19, 209, 233 incorporation, 13, 174, 197, 228 indigo, 8, 74, 81, 83, 84, 92, 93, 94, 236 industrial revolution, 3, 11, 14, 15, 19, 80, 91, 109, 125, 144–47, 153, 158, 162, 175, 241 industriels, 181, 182, 185, 189 interlocks, corporate, 18, 175, 201, 205, 223–24, 225–26 Internatio (Internationale Crediet-en Handelsvereeniging “Rotterdam”), 142, 163, 203, 206, 207

| 265 International Workingmen’s Association, 144, 156, 162 Iron Railway Society of Holland, (Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg Maatschappij, HSM), 213, 214 Iron Rhijn, 213, 215, 218 s’Jacob, F. B., 224 s’Jacob, Frederik, 131, 134, 198, 201, 223–24 Java (see also Cultivation System); adat (culture), 37, 45, 79; colonial rule (see also regent), 34–35, 36–38; residencies, 37, 44, 78, 93–94, 134, 235; war, 10, 43, 46, 76, 78, 96, 116, 118, 130, 180, 231 Java Bank, 7, 48 n. 4, 203, 204 Judiciary, 65, 71, 151 King and Country, 127, 143 Kingdom of Holland, 30, 36 KITLV (see anthropology) KIVI (see Royal Institute for Engineers) Königswärter, Julius, 193, 194 Kun, L. J. A. van der, 124, 216 labor (see also colonies of benevolence, cultivation system), child, 145, 147, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 164; collective, 65, 68–69, 87, 179, 240; forced, 22–23, 53, 62, 65, 68–69, 76, 79, 108, 118–19, 135, 159; free, 61, 78–80, 85, 133, 147, 159 laborer (arbeider), 61, 62, 78, 145, 146, 177 land ownership, 46, 81, 85, 87, 95, 96, 140, 142, 161 land rent, Javanese (see also land tax system), 37–38, 47, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 94, 95, 97, 116, 118, 140, 240 land tax, Dutch, 36, 38, 46, 117, 118 land tax system (Landelijke stelsel), 85, 91, 92, 96 ‘lazy native’ 21, 23, 75, 76, 77, 87, 96, 99, 179, 231, 239 Li, Tania, 5, 116, 230 liberal illusion, 8, 61, 62, 79

Liberal revolution of 1848, 12, 142, 169, 208, 229 liberalism, bleeding-heart, 155; laissez-faire, 3, 13, 16, 25, 54, 107, 126, 145, 170, 173, 180, 187–88, 191, 210, 216 Lipkens, Antoine, 123, 126, 129, 183, 192 Lippman, Leo, 193, 194, 196, 199 looms, power, 107, 108, 147, 148, 149, 153 Lucassen, Theodoor, 130, 137, 138, 139 Magazine for Poor-Relief in the Netherlands, 55 Malthus, Thomas, 56, 59 managerialism, 18, 90–91, 103 163, 168, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 222 managers salaried, 91, 92, 93, 98 n. 9, 113, 130, 132, 136–41, 148, 174, 211, 212, 219, 221, 222, 232; owner, 25 n. 2, 198, 208, 211, 222–5 marke, 54, 63, 79, 85 market (see also economy), 2, 3, 15, 46, 51, 56, 59, 74, 78–119 passim, 128, 131, 137–42, 152–53, 169–75, 179–80, 182, 184, 188, 197, 207, 211, 215, 218, 219, 230–31; exchange, 8–9, 24, 82, 89–90, 103, 119, 179, 207, 230–31; internal (corporate), 8, 9, 89, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 119, 131, 152, 231; invisible hand of, 72, 80, 101, 226; policing of, 13, 14–15, 20, 122; self-regulating, 17, 169–75, 180 Mendel, Alexander, 199, 201, 205, 207 mercantilism (see cameralism), merchant king (see also William I), 3, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, 38, 118, 187, 207, 219, 226, 231 Mettray, 23, 51, 52, 60–61, 65, 176, 238 middle price, 103, 104, 109, 111, 115 Ministry of Colonies, 92, 111, 128, 129, 130, 172, 198 monetary units of account, 11, 89, 96, 101, 108, 119, 136, 138, 141, 179 moral reform, 10, 54, 60, 62–63, 70, 72, 73, 96, 106–07, 109, 126, 145–51, 168, 239–40

266 | index

Mulder, Gerrit-Jan, 124, 127, 129, 139, 143, 150 Mulder, Kornelis, 70 National Charity Company (see charity company) Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM) (see Netherlands Trading Company) Netherlands East Indies, 14, 20, 74, 95, 111, 113, 115, 133, 163, 198, 200, 209, 215, 219, 220, 224, 230, 233 Netherlands Economic Society, 171 Netherlands-Indies Railway Company (NISM), 201 Netherlands-Indies Trade Bank (NIHB), 142, 200, 203, 205, 207 Netherlands Society for Railroad Supplies (Maatschappij voor Spoorwegmaterieel), 198, 223 Netherlands Steamboat Company, 213 Netherlands Trading Company (NHM), 7, 11–12, 14, 15, 20–21, 25, 55, 76, 117, 120, 145–48, 154, 160, 163, 173, 180, 184, 188, 214, 216, 219, 224, 234, 241; as cotton manufacturer, 99–120 passim, 179; as credit mobilier, 184, 190–97, 203–07; auctions of,92, 100, 122, 132, 139, 143 n. 4, 172, 204 Netscher, Gerhardus J., 137 New Institutional Economics, 8, 101–03, 131 New Lanark, 107, 146, 149, 177 Nijverdal, 107, 114, 148, 149, 151, 161, 162, 163, 205, 239, 241 Ommerschans, 65 Owen, Robert, 52, 70, 107, 146, 149, 177–78, 181, 238 Paine, Stricker & Co., 203, 204, 205, 206 Palace of Industry, 185, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 205, 218 panopticism, 4, 11, 25, 51, 65–67, 107, 176–80, 185, 238, 239, 240; and accounting, 9, 69, 81, 221; pauper, 176, 177, 178, 179 Paris, 155, 167, 189, 192, 194, 199, 216, 225

paternalism (see also flexible familism), 45, 145, 146, 147, 149–51, 153, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 241 patrimonial, bureaucracy, 20, 29–30, 40–41, 121, 232; corporation, 42, 231; rulers, 29–30, 33, 36, 42, 233; state, 6, 29, 31, 33, 34, 42–48 pauper relief (see also workhouse), 54, 75, 115–16, 146, 148, 149, 154, 176, 23 paupers, rebellious, 114, 146, 154, 179, 237 pauperism, 11, 14, 18, 52–61, 65, 72, 75, 76, 81, 100, 144, 177, 239 percentages (kultuurprocenten), 91, 92, 98 n.9, 115, 139 Péreire brothers, Emile and Isaac, 183, 193, 199, 217, 218, philanthropists (cotton manufacturers, see also fabrikants), 55, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 131, 139, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154, 194, 229, 240 pietism, 106, 107, 114, 119, 145 plantation (see also coffee), 54, 76, 81, 159; labor organization, 68; management of, 57–58, 69, 90, 191, 202; private, 78, 79, 85, 137; state, 75, 80–84, 85, 86, 87, 97, 141, 142 police law, 15, 17 police science (see cameralism) political economy, 4, 20, 15, 52, 56, 58– 62, 76–77, 80, 86, 99, 142, 144, 156, 167–75, 228, 236–7; Christian, 107 politics of production (see also SaintSimonism), 156, 180, 181–82, 189, 194, 195 Poolman, Willem, 190, 195–202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 219, 223 poor law, 58; British, 56, 177, 237; 1854 Liberal, 145, 149 poorhouse (see workhouse) Praetorius, C. F. E., 130 principalities, 43, 78, 79, 81, 85 Putte, I. D. Fransen van de, 134, 202 Quack, Hendrik, 144, 145, 146, 193, 201, 223, 224, 225 race, 21, 23, 77, 143 n. 1, 239

| 267 Raffles, Sir Stamford, 37, 43, 96 railway; barons, 205, 222–25; Belgian, 184, 194, 198, 212, 213; British, 183, 189, 213, 214, 216, 219, 222, 231; concession, 13, 201, 210, 214, 216–17, 219–22; Dutch, 121, 122, 124, 142, 149, 188, 197–202, 205, 210–26 passim; French, 121, 183, 200, 216, 217, 231; German, 155; Java, 198, 199, 201, 205, 231; mania, 183, 189, 214, 215; organization, 138, 222, 224; question, 214, 215 regent (see also aristocracy), class, Dutch, 6, 18, 24, 29–36, 40–42, 44–5, 46–7, 52, 115–18, 124, 127, 162, 164, 168–9, 175, 188, 194, 208–9, 211–12, 217–19, 223, 225–26, 229, 231, 233–36; Javanese (bupati), 37–38, 42–47, 91–92, 96, 123, 161, 172; philanthropic, 113–17 regenten capitalisme see gentlemanly capitalism. Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, 13, 14, 18, 24, 30, 31–33, 38, 211 republicanism, 33, 36 revolution(s), 1848 12, 15, 127, 142, 163, 168, 170, 174, 187, 191, 193, 208, 229 ridderschappen (se also aristocracy), 36, 40 Rochussen, J.J., 80, 131, 134, 198, 226 n. 2 Rotterdam, 34, 163, 206, 213, 215, 216, Royal Academy, 18, 121, 123–26, 128, 129, 132, 136–37, 141, 150, 155, 163, 183, 189, 192, 195, 202, 208–09, 215, 220, 222–24, 229, 234–36, 239–40 royal decrees (Koninklijk Besluiten), 13, 134 Royal Factory for Steam and Other Implements, 129, 137 Royal Institute for Engineers (Konijklijk Instituut van Ingenieurs, KIVI), 124, 125, 150 Royal Steam Weaving Mill, 114, 148 rule of experts (see also, Royal Academy), 18, 121–23, 127–32, 202 rule of law, 15, 21, 36, 133, 168 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, 169, 181, 191

Saint-Simonianism, banking (see credit mobilier); engineers, 121, 183, 189, 215; socialism, 25, 180–84, 185, 189, 191; technocratic ideology, 125, 156, 169, 188, 192, 226, 235 Salomonson, G. & H. (firm), 7, 111–115, 119, 120, 144–64 passim, 174, 180, 199, 203, 206–08, 222, 236, 240–41 Salomonson, Godfried, 112, 148, 151, 163 Sarphati, Samuel, 192, 193, 200, 218 Scherenberg, R., 55, 115 Schill, Th. F., 195, 203, 209 n. 6 school(ing), see education scope and scale, economies of, 3, 8, 9 56, 89–90, 96, 97, 100, 114, 119, 173, 175, 180, 182, 185, 202, 226, 229 self-rule, 20, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43–44, 45, 96 separate personality, 7, 13, 120, 209 n. 4, 227–28 sharecropper, 73, 85–86, 96, 159 Simons, Gerrit, 123, 124, 126, 127, 143, n. 2 slavery, 61, 62 Smith, Adam, 2, 3, 45, 56, 98, 170, 180 social economy, 56, 169, 183, social question, 144–47, 148, 150, 154–59 passim, 163, 191, 231, 233, 240, 241 socialism (see also Saint-Simonianism), Owenite (utopian), 52, 107, 149, 168, 169, 177, 177, 180, 181; professorial (kathedersocialisten), 153, 156 Société Générale (General Netherlands Society for the Patronage of Industry), 7, 184, 194, 195, 199, 213, 218, 225 Society of Benevolence, 7, 51–73 passim sociology of rule, 5–6, 10, 12, 18, 208, 231, 233, 237 Society for the Exploitation of the State Railways (SS), 201, 212, 218, 220, 221, 224, 225 Society for Railway Materials (Maatschappij voor Spoorwegmaterieel), 198, 201, 223, 224 Son, Hendrik Stephanus van, 204, 205 sovereignty, state, 2, 4, 7, 13, 15, 17, 33, 211, 227–8, 233–4; economic, 16, 171,

268 | index

173, 187–209 passim, 226–7; royal, 6, 13–15, 42, 118, 122, 127, 169, 172, 175–76, 184, 225, 230 spirit of the Crystal Palace, 136, 137, 154, 192, 216 spirit of Jan Salie, 125, 147, 192, 198, 208, 210, 213, 215 stadhouder, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 232 state, effect, 16, 17, 82, 133, , 187–88, 208, 215, 219, 225, 227; formation, 2, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36–38, 47–8, 115–18, 225, 230–32, 236–7; franchise, 2, 13, 227–30, 232; patrimonial, 6, 20, 29–34, 40–48 passim, 121, 232, 233–34, workers, 147, 158, 160 Statistical Association of the Netherlands, 156, 170–71, 172 Stavers, William, 130 Stoler, Ann, 21, 22, 23, 238 Stork, Charles T., 113, 146, 149, 153, 154–58 subjectivity, class, 10, 54, 69, 228 sugar, 8, 24, 75, 81, 83, 86, 87, 97, 101, 116, 122, 173, 183, 184, 188, 212, 223, 229, 234, 236, 241; Chinese produced, 94, 128, 132, 136; contracts, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 128–41, 198, 220; factories, 25, 94, 128–41, 159, 195, 196, 217; financing, 191, 192, 195, 202–07, 210; manufacturers (‘sugar lords’), 103, 122, 128–42, 161, 198, 202–03, 209, 218, 221, 222; payments, 84, 132, 135; quality, 129–30, 131 technocracy, (see also rule of experts, SaintSimonianism), 25, 121, 125, 132, 137, 198, 209, 212, 217, 226, 229 technologies of rule, 4, 6, 10, 14, 24, 75, 77, 99, 116, 136, 141, 142, 163, 203, 208–09, 218, 232 Thorbecke, Johan, 126–27, 171, 210, 214 Twente, 22, 107, 110, 111, 112, 115, 119, 144, 147, 148, 152, 153, 158, 159, 160, 161, 196, 199 Umbgrove, Commission, 98 n. 8, 132, 133–34, 140, 164 n. 4

United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 19–20, 30, 38–42, 47, 116–17, 227, 230, 233 vacuum pan, 128, 129, 132, 137 Van Maanen & Co., 206 Veenhuizen, 65–67, 72, 73 village; corporate, 75, 80, 84, 87; Dutch (gemeente), 38, 107, 109, 115, 117, 118; head (Javanese), 37, 85, 86, 87, 96, 118; Javanese (desa), 37, 45, 75, 82, 84–88, 90–92, 95, 96, 118, 120, 133, 148, 159, 179, 240; mayor (Dutch, burgemeester), 38, 117 virtue, productive, 4, 10, 11, 12, 15, 23–25, 57, 60, 72, 81, 87, 91, 96, 99, 109, 114, 119, 146, 149, 158, 185, 232–33, 236, 237, 239 visible hand (see also, corporation), 3, 8, 12–18, 90, 101, 184, 188–89, 203, 205, 207, 218, 219, 222, 226, 228–29, 233 Vissering, Simon, 10, 156, 170, 173, 197, 210–11, 212, 214 Vrolik, Agnites, 127, 198, 201, 223–24 Vrolik, Willem, 224 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 237 Willem I, 3, 12, 13–16, 30, 38–43, 44–46, 52, 56, 57, 105, 106, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122–23, 126, 137, 169, 172, 184, 194, 207, 208, 213–14, 225, 228, 230, 234, 235, Willem II, 52, 123, 132, 141, 167–68, 198, 202, 214; factory, 138 Willem III, 123, 127, 142, 167–68, 192, 202 workhouse, 14, 49, 53, 55, 56, 72, 105, 109, 112, 113–14, 115, 117, 154, 158; Benthamite, 177, 178; Oldenzaal, 111, 114, 118, 119, 153; Zeeland, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 206 World Exhibition, 1851 London, 150, 154, 192; 1855 Paris, 193 Zeeland, 36, 112, 113, 114, 116, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 206 Zeeuwse Weverij Combinatie (Zeeland Weaving Combination), 206