German-speakers were the largest group of non-Dutch European physicians in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) in the 19th century. More than 300 German, Swiss and Austro-Hungarian medical practitioners worked for the Dutch colonial health service in the 19th century, the majority of them joining the medical corps of the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL). While some travelled ‘Far East’ out of unemployment or a desire for adventure, many were driven by scientific curiosity and contributed to a growing corpus of scientific literature on the colonized Malay Archipelago during or after their stay in the colony.
This PhD project investigates these historical entanglements between German-speaking Europe, the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies in the late 19th and the early 20th century that so far have been overlooked by nation-centred narratives in historiography. Zooming in and out between micro-historical case studies and larger developments in the age of ‘high imperialism’, it will open up three fields of investigation: First, it will analyse the self-perception and identity formation of German-speaking physicians as male, non-Dutch, middle-class co-producers of medical, botanical, zoological, and anthropological knowledge with a special focus on the relation between imperialism, knowledge, and masculinity. Second, it will ask about the interaction between European and non-European actors, environments and knowledge cultures in processes of knowledge-making between germanophone Europe, the Netherlands, and the Dutch East Indies. Third, it will take a closer look at the transimperial networks that connected these spaces in order to further illuminate the ‘webbed’ character of colonial knowledge production and imperial culture that often transcended (trans-)national or intra-imperial boundaries.
Through the analysis of printed publications and archival sources from Swiss, German, Austrian, Dutch and Indonesian archives, the research project seeks to stress the hybrid and entangled nature of Dutch imperialism in the Malay Archipelago and the repercussions of these entanglements on a broader European ‘imperial world’. Thereby, it contributes to the up-and-coming strand of research in global history that understands colonialism not as a project of individual nation states, but rather as a product of both formal and informal networks, connecting the histories of colonial metropoles like the Netherlands, of nation states without formal colonies like Switzerland and of colonized Southeast Asia.