Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907 Available to Purchase

Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907 is a happy throwback. Meticulously researched, unabridged, with thorough footnotes, it tracks the incorporation into the Netherlands East Indies of the “small, obscure, and insignificant” (p. 63) East Sumatran sultanate of Jambi. In the 1810s, after the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch returned to the archipelago not as an East India Company but as representatives of the Crown. Much attention has been paid to this transition from trading company to high imperial state and its political impact on the regions of Aceh and Minangkabau in Sumatra. As for those “lesser” territories, the conventional narrative has the political will of Batavia spreading like a rash—annoying perhaps, but not particularly alarming, and maybe even a natural course of events. Elsbeth Locher-Schouten's monograph analyzes this process at the local level, detailing the interactions of officials in The Hague, in Batavia, and...