Genre, métissage et transactions coloniales aux Indes néerlandaises (1900-1942)

Since the mid-seventeenth century, the colonial history of the Dutch East Indies reveals a distinctive pattern of interracial intimacy and reproduction as a naturalized practice embedded in daily life. As a result, in the year 1900, as much as seventy five percent of the "European" population may have been of biracial descent. Around the year 1900 concerted efforts were made to initiate a "modern" regime of racial segregation in the wake of the introduction of laissez-faire capitalism, the growth of foreign investments and newly implemented legal stipulations regarding citizenship. Despite political and social attempts to fortify the internal racial frontiers of Dutch colonial society in the Indonesian archipelago, however, the interracial sexuality and creolized character of Dutch colonial culture persisted until 1942, revealing that the putative superiority of the European community was grounded in a mythical construction of whiteness.