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This powerful study examines how contested notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through photography in early twentieth-century Indonesia when a reform programme known as the Ethical Policy was being implemented under the Dutch colonial regime. This is the first work to examine ethical ways of seeing through photography, a medium whose proliferation coincided with significant social and political change in colonial Indonesia

There is but a limited scholarship on photographic sources from the Dutch military actions during the Revolusi Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Revolution) (1945-1949), and what exists almost entirely neglects perhaps the largest component of the archives: Dutch soldiers' amateur photographs. Yet this category of photographs has simultaneously attracted much public and media controversy. This article contends that a narrow range of soldiers' amateur photographs have thus far borne an anomalously weighty burden of proof to substantiate the nature and limits of extreme violence during the National Revolution, one that is brittle and difficult to sustain unless historians begin to broaden the focus of investigations into photographic archives. This article also investigates what it may mean for present-day Indonesians to see their ancestors as perpetrators as well as victims of violence and, importantly, as occupants of the ambiguous categories between both ends of this spectrum. What are the ethics of looking at and reproducing these photographs, and to whom do they belong?

This article examines photographs of royal festivals in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the reign of Queen Wilhelmina (1898-1948). The association of electricity with the royal House of Orange in vernacular visual culture expressed the idealised connections made, in colonial as well as in Dutch politics, between the queen and the Ethical Policy in the Indies. Electric lights and nocturnal illuminations featured strongly in images of royal celebrations in the Indies from the early 1900s onwards—a pattern that was not followed in the Netherlands until the late 1930s. Monarchy was thus particularly linked with modernity in Dutch colonies in Asia during the twentieth century.

A common assumption in current scholarship on imperialism is that representations of colonised landscapes were gendered female and that European expansion was a male‐gendered enterprise. In the Dutch East Indies (colonial Indonesia), a Dutch possession in south‐east Asia, this association was by no means consistent in artistic and literary representations of nature and landscape. The gendering of Indies landscapes as feminine and their association with erotic conquest in colonial representations was most strongly evident in paintings. However, in photographs and literature, race figured more prominently in the designation of colonised landscapes as tropical and other. This was particularly true from the late nineteenth century onwards, when an ideological shift towards increased racial segregation occurred among colonial intellectuals and officials. In literature particularly, Indies landscapes and nature appeared as gender‐neutral, but were clearly raced native. In such instances, colonial representations were more likely to convey a fear of seduction and engulfment by Indies nature than titillation at the prospect of erotic opportunity or colonial conquest.

This article examines some of the ways in which colonial identities were constructed and maintained with reference to food and eating in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that food was an important focus for the cultural performance of Europeanness among colonists with aspirations to European status. Specific notions of class and race informed these social performances, and degrees of competence distinguished between eaters. To eat 'European' often meant publicly avoiding Indonesian dishes, even if they were enjoyed privately, and learning to appreciate foods from 'home'. Class and cultural identity intersected with race at the colonial table.