Short paper presented by Dulce van Vliet
The 1st Netherlands Media Studies Conference is organized by the Research School for Media Studies RMeS
23 October 2025
Abstract:
The STONEM project aims to investigate the impact of Dutch international trade on sustainable development from an historical perspective. My tasks as postdoc researcher in this project include the reconstruction of flows of specific raw materials from extraction to processing regions; and, once these entangled regions are identified, to investigate sustainability trade-offs based on historical metrics (using the well-being monitor of the Dutch Statistics Office (CBS) as a heuristic model). Central to this research are the specific flows of vegetable oils—coconut oil and palm oil—and metals—tin and aluminum—which were established between the Netherlands and Indonesia, in the colonial as well as the post-colonial era.
In this short talk I will explore how popular media forms—such as newspapers, booklets or public lantern lectures—articulated and framed the relationship between the colonies and the metropole in terms of economic development, trade and prosperity. The Dutch colonial narrative was intrinsically entangled with a narrative of industrialization, which required people to accept and learn how to use new products such as margarine (made with vegetable oils from the colonies), but also aimed to provide carefully selected points of knowledge to the wider public, from trade figures to first-hand accounts of life in the colonies. This narrative was by no means self-evident but required careful construction: as it has been recently argued, other colonial powers built very different narratives in order to frame Empire (Falcucci and Gianmarco Mancosu 2025).
This narrative of trade and economic prosperity becomes even more visible against a background of open conflict, such as during the Indonesian Independence War, in the aftermath of WWII. An interesting example to be explored is a small book of the series Boeiende Statistiek (Fascinating Statistics) published in 1947 by the commercial and public information department of CBS. Under the title The Netherlands and Indonesia: Through Cooperation to Prosperity and Development, it presented a situation which, according to them, “had very much changed since Multatuli published his Max Havelaar as a wake-up call for the Netherlands”.
Link to Conference website: https://www.rmes.nl/netherlands-media-studies-conference-organised-by-rmes/