A sugar factory and its swimming pool: incorporation and differentiation in Dutch colonial society in Java

Abstract

The construction of a swimming pool for the European personnel of one of the fifty or so colonial sugar factories still operating in Java in the mid-1930s was a symptom of the growing 'enclavement' of the Dutch colonial communities on the island during the final decades of the Netherlands India. An earlier phase of Dutch colonialism in the Indies had been characterized by hybrid, inclusivist social practices and cultural assumptions generally labelled indisch or Indo-European. By the inter-war decades of the twentieth century, totok – meaning expatriate – norms and values began to assert their hegemony at virtually all levels of colonial society. Yet ambiguity continues to surround this progress from incorporation to differentiation, as instanced by the inter-war history of the Europeans who lived in the residential compound which the pool was designed to service.