Intense debates emerged in the Dutch East Indies during the course of the third decade of the twentieth century concerning the role of missionaries in the development of the Outer Islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Ostensibly concerning “native welfare”, disagreement fundamentally reflected underlying fractures within the Dutch nation, projected through its “colonial mission” concerning the nature of modernity. While the main focus appeared to be a disagreement concerning the goals of mission and government agencies, it would be too simplistic to characterise the debate as one between adherents of a secular versus a religious world view. This paper considers the question of “missions and modernity” in the context of this debate about “native development” in the Dutch East Indies through the prism of the Poso mission in Central Sulawesi, headed by missionary Albert Kruyt, one of the foremost missionaries of his day.

The history of slavery is by no means untouched, and there are now even ambitious global histories of the phenomenon in print. On the other hand, it is clear that much of the literature on this sombre side of human society has concentrated on the Transatlantic slave trade and non-free labour in the Americas. The relative wealth of documents in Western languages has presumably contributed to give the historiography of slavery a Western centre of gravity, coupled with the fact that the early modern Americas were restructured into settlement colonies. This made slavery a motor of socio-economic change in a more pronounced way than in Asian societies. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the handling of slaves in an Asiatic context has been less thoroughly treated in the extant academic literature. It seems that aspects of Asian slavery have not fit well into the preconceptions of Asianists, or have at least been relegated to the margins of social history.

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

In 1949, after a four-year long armed struggle, Indonesia finally achieved effective control over its entire territory, with the exception of West Irian (now Papua). Nevertheless, the young nation faced serious political and economic problems. The Japanese occupation and the long fight against the Dutch had seriously impoverished the Indonesian people. The new government also faced armed insurrections and secessionist movements in various regions such as Aceh, West Java, South Sulawesi, and the Moluccas, which threatened the country's territorial integrity. In late January 1950, scarcely one month after the transfer of sovereignty, Raymond Westerling (a rogue member of the Dutch army) along with a few hundred troops under his command, carried out an audacious but quixotic plan to occupy Bandung and Jakarta. Although this plan immediately failed, it increased the sense of vulnerability of the Indonesian government.

In September 1621, Governor Nathaniel Butler of Bermuda was woken in the middle of the night to hear a report that one hundred Spaniards had landed on the west part of the islands. Bermuda had long been at risk of attack because of its close proximity to the homebound route of the Spanish treasure fleet, so Butler understandably went on the defensive. He ordered the manning of several forts and repaired to the landing area with twenty armed men, expecting to pick up additional strength along the way. Rather than find an invading enemy, Butler and his men found a group of Portuguese and Spanish men, women, and children, whose ship—the 300-tonne, Portuguese-owned San Antonio—had been separated from the treasure fleet by a bad storm and wrecked upon the rocks ten miles west of the islands. Saving what goods they could carry, most of the castaways made their way to Mangrove Bay at the north part of Somerset Island in a small cockboat.

When Indonesia finally received de jure independence in December 1949, the infant republic faced a range of serious problems, but nowhere were the problems more pressing than in the field of economic policy. In contrast with the Philippines and India, where the USA and Britain had honoured previous commitments and granted independence in 1946 and 1947 respectively, the refusal of the Netherlands to recognise the 1945 declaration of independence had led to four years of bitter and destructive fighting. Infrastructure on Java and elsewhere, already damaged during the Japanese occupation, deteriorated further after 1945, and by the end of the decade most of the important export industries were producing only a small fraction of their pre-1942 output. Smallholder agricultural output in Java was also well below pre-1942 levels. De Vries observed that many seed farms had been destroyed, irrigation systems had not been maintained and “vast areas of hill country” had been damaged by soil erosion. In the final years of the Japanese occupation, the Japanese army commandeered large amounts of rice, while the widespread issue of Japanese banknotes caused mounting inflation. Food was scarce everywhere and those with little or no land were most severely hit; most demographers concur that the population actually declined in Java after 1943, indicating a sharp increase in mortality.

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country's global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expanding demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak.

In 1901, the parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia passed a series of laws designed, in the words of the Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity”. An Act to expel the large Pacific Islander community in North Queensland was followed by a law restricting further immigration to applicants who could pass a literacy test in a European language. In 1902, under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, “all natives of Asia and Africa” as well as Aboriginal people were explicitly denied the right to vote in federal elections. The “White Australia policy”, enshrined in these laws, was almost universally supported by Australian politicians, with only two members of parliament speaking against the restriction of immigration on racial grounds.

Economic development during the Sukarno period has been touched upon in various surveys of modern Indonesian economic history. Yet, in 1971 Glassburner predicted that

the period beginning in December 1949, with the transfer of Dutch sovereignty over the East Indian Islands to the government of the United States of Indonesia and ending in December 1957, with the so-called “take-over” of Dutch-owned business property seems clearly destined to become one of those times of struggle and crisis which historians of the nation will analyze and reanalyze over the generations, interpreting and reinterpreting the known facts as the perspective of time changes.

This paper focuses on women and the early period of the modern missionary movement from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s, considering links between the anti-slavery campaigns and the development of overseas missions within a framework of early twenty-first century understandings of modernity. There are three sections. The first discusses women's writing in relation to anti-slavery, the second examines the shift from women's anti-slavery activism at home to broader activities at home and overseas, while the third focuses on the London-based Female Education Society and its role as an organising body for women in educational work overseas. Connecting the three sections is an understanding of women's lives in a changing world, caught up in Britain's expanding empire. The women described here were mostly from Christian families in a time when religious affiliation was in a state of flux. This paper argues that women's interest in anti-slavery became enmeshed with a desire to bring education to those who would attain freedom and was encompassed in broader understandings of liberty and enlightenment. The desire to educate expanded to include the “heathen” in many parts of the world, and this paralleled the burgeoning of modern missions.