6

Rethinking histories of military atrocity, ethnic violence and photography, from the Aceh War to the Indonesian national revolution

Susie Protschky

Introduction

The subjugation campaigns of the colonial army in the Netherlands East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century produced one of the most substantial photographic records of military atrocities committed by a European colonial regime anywhere in Southeast Asia before World War II.¹ We do not see its like again in Indonesia until the surfeit of photographs by Dutch soldiers during the Indonesian national revolution (1945–49). While a few studies have examined the visual culture of specific wars in colonial Indonesia,² scholars have neglected the longer history of war photography, military atrocity and ethnic violence across the period bracketed by the Aceh War (1873–1942) and the revolution. This chapter attempts to begin such a history.

Only a few studies link the Dutch colonial army’s wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to form a coherent overview of colonial military conflict across the period, and most are in Dutch.³ Drawing continuities is complicated by the fact that the colonial Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger, KNIL) was joined on Indonesian soil by the Netherlands’ national forces (the Royal Netherlands Army or Koninklijke Landmacht, and the Royal Netherlands Navy or Koninklijke Marine) for the first and last time between 1946 and 1950. New research argues that the colonial army strongly influenced the leadership, training and tactics of the Dutch armed forces throughout the revolution.⁴ As the introduction in Chapter 1 of this volume explains, recent work on ‘extreme violence’ perpetrated by Dutch soldiers against Indonesian combatants and civilians during the revolution prompted fresh questions in the Netherlands and Indonesia about whether this focus occludes a broader discussion of colonial violence and its longer history.⁵ Put differently for my purposes here, we know that ‘colonial history is military history’,⁶ but what, if anything, made Dutch military violence in Indonesia colonial over the longer period? And how can a historical analysis of war photography help answer this question?

This chapter considers the photographers who accompanied KNIL campaigns in Aceh and Bali at the turn of the twentieth century as the first practitioners in Indonesia of ‘embedded’ photography—a genre that scholars more typically date to the 1940s. For example, Hugo Wilmar (1923–57), one of the best-known accredited Dutch military photographers deployed to Indonesia during the revolution, is usually compared with the American cameramen among whom he trained during World War II and the Dutch soldiers with whom he served in 1946–47, rather than with the photographers who accompanied the bloody wars of the KNIL before 1942.⁷ Wilmar and his ilk were preceded by C.B. Nieuwenhuis, who photographed the Sigli and Samalanga (Aceh) ‘expeditions’ in 1897 and 1901, respectively; H.M. Neeb, who photographed the Gayo and Alas (Aceh) campaigns of 1904; and H.M. van Weede, who photographed the KNIL’s role in a Badung puputan (dynastic ‘ending’) in 1906 (Bali).

I will examine two aspects of these embedded photographers’ works that place war photography, and its relationship to military and colonial violence, in historical context. The first aspect is the prominence of ethnic violence in photographs of Dutch colonial military atrocities. Comprehension of the KNIL’s hierarchical organisation along ethnic lines remains largely confined to the subfield of (Dutch) military history.⁸ The KNIL’s renowned ‘martial race’—the so-called Ambonese soldiers, who were in fact men recruited from throughout present-day Maluku and the Minahasa Peninsula—have attracted special attention.⁹ Colonial photographs reveal the importance of the Aceh War for valorising the reputed ferocity of ‘Ambonese’ soldiers. Such images arguably formed a historical foundation for an enduring colonial stereotype—one that informed white Dutch accounts of ‘extreme’ violence during the Indonesian national revolution. However, in a novel extension of Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig’s notion of ‘martial Orientalism’,¹⁰ I argue here that the entire spectrum of the KNIL hierarchy—from the European officers to the lowest convict auxiliaries from Java—must be brought into a critical historical analysis of how ethnic differences were theorised and mobilised for warfare within the Dutch colonial army.

My second purpose is to move beyond the massacre images that made certain indigenous soldiers’ reputations for ferocity iconic. I explain how a broader body of work by photographers embedded within the KNIL captured modes of ‘approved violence’.¹¹ Paul Bijl, in his brilliant work on H.M. Neeb’s Aceh photographs, first used this term to signify the realpolitik of the ‘Ethical Policy’—a period of liberal imperial reforms coinciding with intensive Dutch military expansion across the Indonesian archipelago.¹² I develop his concept here to explain how forms of colonial violence that were widespread across civilian society in the Netherlands East Indies also supported military structures. In so doing, I aim to nuance a contemporary Dutch scholarship on wartime atrocities in Indonesia that remains fixated on the breach of judicial and military upper limits to violence. I attend equally to how a baseline of what was considered acceptable violence in fact derived from peacetime civilian practices under colonial rule.¹³ Recognising the colonial genealogy of embedded war photography thus places revolution-era dynamics in historical context and reveals what I will call the ‘double-embeddedness’ of war photographers: the productive synergy between their certified interloper status in the army, whose interests they ostensibly served, and their positions as men of colonial societies who valorised forms of violence that permeated both civilian and military institutions.

The first embedded war photographers in colonial Indonesia

During the Indonesian national revolution, officially embedded photographers consistently self-censored or were censored by Dutch authorities.¹⁴ It was the amateur frontline Dutch soldier-photographers ostensibly making ‘private’ images who produced a much larger, more explicit record of atrocities during the mid to late 1940s. Their prints circulated widely among comrades and military institutions during the war and among veterans and their supporters for decades afterwards but remained out of the media until recently.¹⁵ During the revolution, embedded photographers were technically trained and equipped for their roles. Large numbers of self-taught amateurs were also able to operate because small handheld cameras and roll film had become standard by the 1940s. By contrast, the embedded photographers who had accompanied KNIL expeditions in the early twentieth century monopolised skills that were relatively rare before the advent of mass photography, and contended with very different technology—slower shutter speeds, fragile or volatile materials and cumbersome equipment—such that an element of staging was still necessary to their practice.¹⁶ For these reasons, embedded photographers, and not combatants themselves, provided the most comprehensive record of KNIL atrocities at the turn of the twentieth century.

Christiaan Benjamin Nieuwenhuis (1863–1922) was a successful commercial photographer active on Sumatra and best known for his landscapes and ethnographic portraits¹⁷ but, given the militarisation of large parts of the island at the turn of the twentieth century, it is impossible to separate his practice from war photography. He took his camera on at least two KNIL campaigns in Aceh, to Sigli in 1897 and Samalanga in 1901. Nieuwenhuis probably met Lieutenant Colonel Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz, the highest military authority in the Netherlands East Indies, during the Sigli ‘expedition’ he commanded. It was van Heutsz who later sanctioned Nieuwenhuis’s official attendance at Samalanga. Nieuwenhuis was self-conscious of his authorised position as an ‘eyewitness’ (ooggetuige) to events. ‘Although I am known by many,’ he proclaimed in his Samalanga account, ‘here in the Indies it has never been known for a professional photographer [vakfotograaf] to be granted such an excursion.’¹⁸

Hendricus Marinus Neeb (1870–1933) was a non-combatant in the colonial army, who was primarily employed as a medic. Born in the Indies and trained in Leiden, Neeb joined the KNIL in 1893 and first went to Aceh as an army doctor 10 years later.¹⁹ Neeb’s interest in photography was welcomed by an institution that routinely combined topographic, anthropological and scientific work with military campaigns. He produced 173 photographs, including landscapes and ethnographic portraits, from the KNIL ‘expedition’ to the Gayo, Alas and Batak lands between 8 February and 23 July 1904 under Lieutenant Colonel Gotfried Coenraad Ernst van Daalen. Copies were given to the Royal Military Academy in Breda, two Dutch ethnographic museums and the Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences, which exhibited them in 1905.²⁰ That same year, van Daalen’s aide, J.C.J. Kempees, reproduced 29 of Neeb’s photographs as plates in his book-length account of the expedition.²¹

Hendrik Maurits van Weede (1879–1912) was a jonkheer (‘young lord’, lower nobility) and only son of a former diplomat, chamberlain to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and, briefly, foreign minister in the Dutch Parliament. Van Weede’s career and hobbies were typical of aristocratic Dutchmen. He was a reserve officer in a cavalry brigade of the Netherlands Royal Army. After completing his studies at Utrecht University, he took a 14-month grand tour of British India and the Netherlands East Indies.²² His published account of this journey indulged his two passions: hunting (which killed him, by way of an accident, in 1912) and photography (which has arguably given him a longer ‘afterlife’). Van Weede’s published travelogue included more than 200 of his own photographs, including those taken after the Badung puputan. He saw this as the guest of Major General Marinus Bernardus Rost van Tonningen, commander of the Seventh Bali Expedition, with whom he became acquainted via a letter of introduction from his father. Like Nieuwenhuis, van Weede invoked his status not as a soldier or an aristocrat, but as an eyewitness—‘I was present at the spot’—to two massacres on 20 September 1906, the first at the puri (‘royal court’) of Denpasar and the second, a few hours later, at Pemecutan.²³

Across four separate campaigns in Aceh and Bali, Nieuwenhuis, Neeb and van Weede produced 14 explicit photographs between them showing the grisly aftermath of KNIL massacres, most taken by Neeb.²⁴ Nieuwenhuis’s 1897 photograph of the massacre at Kuta Sukun (Figure 6.1) was not reproduced in a published expedition account, but was consumed as a commercial print that could be purchased from his studio.²⁵ His 1901 photograph of the massacre at Batu Iliq (Figure 6.2) was published in his own account of the Samalanga campaign and circulated in other contemporary Dutch media.²⁶ Some (not all) of Neeb’s 1904 photographs from massacres in the Gayo and Alas lands were published in Kempees’ account and, as Bijl has shown, became the subject of parliamentary debate and public controversy (Figures 6.3 and 6.4).²⁷ Van Weede’s 1906 photograph showing mounds of dead men, women and children in a Badung palace forecourt circulated privately in albums, but was omitted from his book (Figure 6.5).²⁸ The image was not published until after Indonesian independence and has rarely been acknowledged let alone critically examined in scholarship on KNIL atrocities.²⁹

Thus, between 1897 and 1906, photographs celebrating KNIL atrocities circulated openly, through various channels, in Dutch colonial society. The captions for published versions of these photographs were originally more euphemistic than those I reformulate here. They adopted military perspectives and referred to locations where the battle turned in favour of the Dutch, for example, rather than to ‘massacres’. The language of the time framed these outcomes as victories rather than atrocities. Until at least 1906, the KNIL leadership readily approved embedded photographers to ‘witness’ these military campaigns and relay the nature of colonial warfare to the Dutch public.

Figure 6.1 Aftermath of the KNIL massacre at Kuta Sukun, Sigli (Aceh), 6 August 1897

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures) Collection, RV-A78-189.

Figure 6.2 Aftermath of the KNIL massacre at Batu Iliq, Samalanga (Aceh), 3 February 1901

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV 27179.

Figure 6.3 Aftermath of the KNIL massacre at Kuta Rih (1), Alas (Aceh), 14 June 1904

Photo: H.M. Neeb, Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV 503098.

Figure 6.4 Aftermath of the KNIL massacre at Kuta Rih (2), Alas (Aceh), 14 June 1904

Photo: H.M. Neeb, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures) Collection, TM-60001244.

Figure 6.5 Aftermath of the KNIL massacre at the puri Pemecutan, Badung (south Bali), 20 September 1906

Photo: H.W. van Weede, Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV A3, 10084.

Martial orientalism and KNIL atrocities in colonial sources

The photographs of Nieuwenhuis, Neeb and van Weede show the immediate aftermath of KNIL massacres of civilians killed in the attempt to resist Dutch conquest (Figures 6.1–6.5). These can be described as ‘massacres’ because the casualties were markedly asymmetric: the KNIL had guns and artillery capable of causing mass deaths and soldiers took no prisoners, killing the fleeing, wounded and unarmed.³⁰ At Kuta Sukun and its nearby fortification, 110 people were killed, while the KNIL lost a single soldier.³¹ At the mountain stronghold of Batu Iliq (Baté Ilië) in 1901, Nieuwenhuis counted five KNIL deaths against 71 enemy casualties, not including the scores of people felled in skirmishes during the army’s advance on the benteng (‘fortification’) or, indeed, in the preceding naval bombardment of coastal villages.³² The people killed at Kuta Rih (Koetö Réh) in 1904 outnumbered KNIL casualties across van Daalen’s entire campaign—313 men, 189 women and 59 children, not counting fatalities along the march to the fortification—versus 35 men killed in the colonial army. KNIL soldiers fired 4,400 rounds of ammunition into the enclosed space of this benteng against a group armed with 75 guns, bladed weapons, stones and lances. ‘Among these dense ranks,’ Kempees wrote, ‘each bullet made several targets, and in a very short time the bloody drama was played out.’³³ Van Weede gave no casualty figures from south Bali in 1906, but it is estimated that at least 1,000 people died in the Badung puputan.³⁴

Neeb’s photographs (Figures 6.3 and 6.4) and several others he took at Kuta Rih have received the most sustained attention, both during his own lifetime and in the postcolonial period.³⁵ However, it is Nieuwenhuis’s earlier image of the slaughter at the fortified village of Kuta Sukun on 6 August 1897 (Figure 6.1) that has arguably come to represent KNIL military atrocities in recent museum and scholarly representations, perhaps because it expresses the ‘horrifying, necrotic’ theatricality viewers register when a photographer inserts themselves into a violent scene and asks killers to pose with their victims.³⁶ J.B. van Heutsz’s report of the attack during the Sigli expedition under his command remains unpublished³⁷ and historians have sometimes omitted or incorrectly identified Nieuwenhuis’s photograph from Kuta Sukun in favour of having it speak more generally for KNIL atrocities.³⁸ The latter recently featured as the banner to an editorial titled ‘The Evil of Colonialism is Unforgivable’ in the Dutch daily newspaper of record NRC Handelsblad. Award-winning journalist Goenawan Mohamad, co-founder and editor of the Indonesian politics journal TEMPO, begins this piece with a childhood memory from shortly after the conclusion of the Renville Agreement, in February 1948.³⁹ He recounts a day in his neighbourhood that began with jubilation at the ceasefire but ended with Dutch soldiers shooting four local men in a rice field. Mohamad also refers to the atrocities committed under Raymond Westerling’s command in South Sulawesi (1946–47) and the execution of his own father in 1947.⁴⁰ Nowhere, however, does the article attempt any connection between the pictured KNIL massacre half a century earlier and the ‘extreme violence’ committed by Dutch soldiers against Indonesians during the late 1940s. The photograph is burdened with working solo to demonstrate a longer history of Dutch military violence. The contrast between Mohamad’s description of revolution-era atrocities committed by white Dutch soldiers and the visual dominance of indigenous men as both perpetrators and victims in the 1897 image is a complication that goes unaddressed.

At the Wereldmuseum (World Museum) Amsterdam, a copy of the 1897 photograph at original print size features in the new ‘Onze Koloniale Erfenis’ (‘Our Colonial Inheritance’) exhibition with text that acknowledges the ethnic diversity of the KNIL. Before 2022, an enlarged version covered a whole wall of the long-standing ‘Oostwaarts!’ (‘Eastwards!’) exhibition (Figure 6.6). The caption acknowledged ‘Indonesian soldiers with their European officers’ in a display about ‘colonial wars’, but a cropped, reoriented version of the photograph centred the European figures and cut out half the indigenous soldiers. At Bronbeek, the official museum of the KNIL in the Netherlands, an even narrower focus prevailed for more than a decade in the reproduction of a tightly cropped image behind a display of historical weapons. In the new permanent exhibition, opened in June 2024,⁴¹ the photograph remains cropped behind a display of weapons, but now enlarged to fill an entire wall.

Figure 6.6 C.B. Nieuwenhuis’s photograph of the massacre at Kuta Sukun from the ‘Oostwaarts!’ (‘Eastwards!’) exhibition

Source: Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics), now Wereldmuseum (World Museum), part of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures), 2018.

Vague contextualisations and, in the case of some museum displays, cropping and reorientations of the 1897 Nieuwenhuis photograph are ironically at odds with the aim of addressing colonial violence, since such manipulations elide or minimise important aspects of KNIL warfare under Dutch rule. From the Aceh War onwards, Javanese, Moluccan and Minahasan troops were not just prominent but also numerically dominant among the soldiers the Dutch deployed to conquer not just territory, but also other ethnic, language and (sometimes) religious groups in Aceh, Bali and elsewhere in the so-called Outer Provinces (Buitengewesten) of the Indonesian archipelago.⁴² That is why indigenous soldiers crowd the frame and swarm the borders of the massacre sites photographed by Nieuwenhuis, Neeb and van Weede.

Although excluded from the commanding ranks of the KNIL, which were reserved for European and Eurasian men, indigenous soldiers and a small number of men from West Africa—known colloquially as Belanda Hitam (‘Black Dutchmen’)—made up the majority of the infantry and, significantly, the marechaussees (‘military police’).⁴³ The Korps Marechaussee of Aceh, founded in 1890 and considered one of van Heutsz’s great military innovations, was a multi-ethnic brigade specialised in counter-guerilla warfare. It was frequently deployed for punitive expeditions and to exact exemplary violence as a deterrent against further rebellion.⁴⁴

Despite the clear presence of indigenous soldiers in the photographs examined here, a persistent blindness to the ethnic violence involved in colonial expansion characterises present-day historical presentations of KNIL warfare. This is true of not just recent Dutch museum displays, but also a historiography that recognises the ethnically mixed nature of the colonial army while often failing to critically explore the historical dynamics and implications of indigenous soldiers as perpetrators of military violence.⁴⁵ The lacuna perhaps originates in conflicting narratives within key colonial sources. Nieuwenhuis’s Samalanga account, for example, is transparent on the marechaussees’ role as a special force deployed to ‘finish off’ resistance worn down by KNIL artillery fire and infantry regiments.⁴⁶ But the photographs in his book tell a different story. One image showing an artillery installation foregrounds a throng of European soldiers, relegating Ambonese infantry to a mass of staffage in the rear (Figure 6.7). Indeed, most of Nieuwenhuis’s camp portraits and battle scenes visually centred European officers, whom he diligently named in his captions and text.⁴⁷ Van Weede’s photographs from the Seventh Bali Expedition similarly focus on the European military leadership. However, like Neeb in Aceh, van Weede captured the significant role of indigenous troops in Badung’s subjugation.⁴⁸

Figure 6.7 ‘Mountain gun in position on the Glé Risa Poenggoeng’, Samalanga (Aceh), 1901

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures) Collection, RV-A78-20.

Where van Weede, Nieuwenhuis and Kempees differ markedly is in their textual acknowledgement of the indigenous soldiers who carried out the massacres they photographed. Ever the Dutch aristocrat, van Weede vigorously name-dropped the European officers among whom he was accommodated, but was almost silent on the indigenous troops who did the killing at Denpasar and Pemecutan. By contrast, Kempees, a KNIL insider (he was van Daalen’s aide), explicitly lauded the ‘martial character’ of the Ambonese, whose landaard (‘ethnicity’), in his opinion, made their impact at Alas disproportionate to their relatively small numbers.⁴⁹ At Samalanga, the night before the main attack on Batu Iliq, Nieuwenhuis found the piety and docility of the Ambonese troops while they were led in prayer by their Christian pastor difficult to reconcile with what he had already seen of their ‘turbulent’ (woelig) and ‘passionate’ (hartstochtelijk) nature in battle.⁵⁰ In Dutch military discourse, both these characteristics, their Christianity and their ferocity, made ‘the Ambonese’ an effective martial race—a typology common to many European colonial armies that valued particular ethnic groups for local warfare.

Hack and Rettig’s notion of ‘martial Orientalism’ acknowledges the wider practice of ethnic profiling within colonial armies,⁵¹ and thus has the capacity to illuminate the competitive racial hierarchies forming an entire organisational spectrum, from the European command to subaltern auxiliaries. Kempees’ soldierly account of the 1904 van Daalen campaign reflected at length on how ethnic divisions in the KNIL were best instrumentalised. His description of Neeb’s marechaussees lining the broken parapets of Kuta Rih (Figure 6.4) signified a military ideal of the best fighting unit to wage guerilla wars of subjugation within the Indies, and he recommended their widespread replication across the KNIL. Van Daalen’s marechaussees in Gayo and Alas comprised two European sergeants (first class), two Ambonese sergeants (second class) and a mixed company of about 20 Ambonese and Javanese soldiers, each directed by their own ‘representatives’ but working together ‘as a family’.⁵² The shortcomings and benefits of such mixed units—particularly pertaining to the large-scale recruitment of Muslim Javanese soldiers—were hotly debated among military authorities until the end of World War I.⁵³ For Kempees, however, their virtues were clear. Significantly, he considered Javanese soldiers unjustly maligned relative to their Ambonese counterparts. In his view, mixing promoted a competition useful to the army. He wrote:

The mutual jealousy, not towards the whites, whom the Javanese have learned to see as their betters, but rather, with respect to their colleagues of the same skin colour, inspires the inferior one [the Javanese] to strive to set his best foot forward.

Kempees valued all ‘Native’ troops for their fitness, endurance and strength in tough mountain terrain, where they proved themselves capable of long marches on meagre rations of ‘rice and dried fish’ (or less) while bearing heavy loads.⁵⁴

In fact, Kempees’ account, read against the grain, suggests a culture of deprivation, struggle and suffering among indigenous troops in the KNIL.⁵⁵ This context is directly pertinent to understanding the army’s moral and material economy, which fostered internal competition between soldiers and ruthlessness towards their common external enemies. Kees van Dijk has shown that, by 1914, tensions between Ambonese and Javanese soldiers over differential pay, conditions and privileges frequently erupted in complaint, strike action and defection. It was not until 1918 that cruel punishments within the KNIL were abolished, under protest from the high command. These included rattan (bamboo) canings and the dreaded kromsluiten (‘close’) restraint, which involved shackling a person tightly in a contorted position for hours.⁵⁶ Martial Orientalism and competitive ethnic hierarchies within the KNIL made for brutal conditions among indigenous soldiers whose material and moral rewards, controlled by their European commanding officers, derived from not only how much pain they could endure, but also, significantly, how viciously they were able to mete it out. ‘Savage warfare’ in this schema was not exclusively the consequence of white soldiers dehumanising indigenous Others,⁵⁷ but also the outcome of carefully graded ethnic typologies integrated within a military ranking system that produced indigenous perpetrators and allies, as well as victims and enemies.

The ferocity valorised in Nieuwenhuis’s Sigli photograph (Figure 6.1), which foregrounds an ‘Ambonese’ corps, was perhaps the most explicit articulation of the martial identity that van Heutsz and his successors actively cultivated for this group in Aceh. In more innocuous photographs of KNIL activities from the period, such as group portraits of soldiers (Figure 6.8), we see marechaussees use the same distinctive gestures and props—klewangs (‘swords’) brandished, carbines cocked (at comrades!)—in visual rehearsal of the association between ‘Ambonese’ and the bloodlust on which their reputations and privileges depended. Of course, we cannot know whether KNIL photographers demanded or simply captured such poses and, therefore, whether they recorded or created the stereotype of ‘the’ battle-hungry Ambonese. The contemporary written sources demand that historians make no assumptions about the innateness of such traits but acknowledge the role of the military leadership in fostering them. We should arguably follow the archival grain more closely to examine how theories and practices of martial Orientalism were (co-)constructed within the KNIL and by its close observers.

Figure 6.8 ‘Marechaussee brigade from Samagani at Pasar Sibreuë’, Aceh, c. 1897–1901

Photo: Photographer unknown, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures) Collection, TM-ALB-1991.

Approved violence and the double-embeddedness of colonial war photographers

Scholarship on embedded photography emphasises the integration of soldiers into the military and their managed adoption of military ways of seeing.⁵⁸ Equally important, but frequently overlooked, is the embedded photographer’s entanglement in civilian society, on which their effectiveness as interlocutor relies. What authorised Nieuwenhuis’s and van Weede’s accounts was their status not just as embeds with the KNIL, but also as respected members of a colonial society to whom they reported and returned ‘from’ war. Van Weede and Nieuwenhuis can thus be productively reconceived as doubly embedded: as interlopers among combatant forces and as deeply imbricated in communities in which approved colonial violence was widespread.

These men’s war accounts obscured the fluid boundaries between militarised and civilian spaces in motifs of travel from ‘somewhere else’ that artificially differentiate the terrains of war and peace. Van Weede’s book was in the hallowed tradition of a Dutch reisverhaal (‘travelogue’) about the Indies. Nieuwenhuis similarly took a journey by boat from civilian territory to a battlefront.⁵⁹ The notion of travelling in and out of a war ‘front’ was a uniquely European perspective on late-colonial conflict in Indonesia—one viewed differently by mobile Sumatran communities moving to negotiate survival under violent, sustained and expanding occupation.⁶⁰ However, even the European framing of colonial wars of conquest as ‘over there’ and always already over—as the Aceh War was many times prematurely declared, including by Nieuwenhuis himself in his 1901 Samalanga account—was a fragile fiction. Through Nieuwenhuis’s eyes, for example, we glimpse how the civil context ‘apart from’ war in Sumatra was in fact profoundly militarised. His Samalanga account contained a portrait of two KNIL soldiers from his Padang circle of acquaintances whom he unexpectedly met on the campaign.⁶¹ In fact, among the 80,000 or so Europeans who resided in the Netherlands East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, a staggering 30 per cent were employed in the KNIL.⁶² Although the proportion of soldiers per population was much smaller for Indonesians, from a civilian perspective, military conflicts were ubiquitous. As Henk Schulte Nordholt has shown, within the space of a generation, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Aceh War, the KNIL additionally subjugated Lombok, central and south Sumatra, Borneo, central and south Sulawesi (Celebes), Seram, Flores, Timor and Bali. He counted a total of 32 ‘wars’ between 1874 and 1910.⁶³ Piet Hagen’s more recent book examines, in addition to ‘wars’, ‘expeditions’, ‘actions’ and responses to ‘resistance’ and ‘rebellion’ from the colonial army, navy and local police across the Netherlands East Indies. He tallies at least 160 armed encounters across the century from 1840 to 1940, with barely a year passing unmarked by conflict.⁶⁴ Thus, in the last 100 years of Dutch rule in Indonesia, there was always a military campaign or armed skirmish between colonial authorities and local civilians or militias taking place somewhere.

Furthermore, throughout the entire period of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia, repressive, unfree labour regimes upheld colonial authority, particularly on plantations and in the burgeoning mining sector, as well as in public works. Exploitative corvée labour regimes were sources of local unrest and brutal military reprisal across the archipelago.⁶⁵ Roel Frakking has explained how the plantation system, ‘from its inception to its violent demise in 1949, functioned as the space in which indigenous populations were classified, deconstructed and rearranged according to the needs of an extractive economy backed by the threat of violence’.⁶⁶ During the Indonesian national revolution, plantations became deeply contested sites of conflict between the Dutch military, local police, the TNI (Indonesian National Armed Forces) and laskar (‘paramilitary’) forces precisely because of their centrality to Dutch legitimacy, the colonial economy and strategic control of both land and labour. On estates, rebellious workers enacting arson or isolated attacks on planters rarely achieved organised or enduring effects. Colonial retribution, however, was swift and exemplary, including police fire on demonstrators, corporal punishment and death sentences.⁶⁷ As the Edwards Collection of luxury albums at the Leiden University Library reveals, European planters visually fetishised the regimes of punishment that instilled fear and discipline on estates (Figure 6.9).⁶⁸

Figure 6.9 Stafhell & Kleingrothe, ‘Execution on a Deli plantation’, Sumatra, c. 1880–1901

Source: Leiden University Library, Geoffrey Allan Edwards Collection, Or. 27.389, 44.

Nieuwenhuis, Neeb and van Weede could not have taken their war photographs without the systems of unfree labour that permeated civilian society. Coolies ported their photographic equipment on the march from camp to battlefront, sometimes under fire.⁶⁹ Nieuwenhuis recounted how, before the main attack on Batu Iliq:

I, alas, was able to take no photos. My servants and coolies who carried my equipment were nowhere to be found; frightened by the rattling gunfire, they sought shelter behind a protected spot, and not without great effort was I finally able to bring my device into position, although only shortly after the storming [of the target].⁷⁰

Van Weede’s and Nieuwenhuis’s war photography additionally reveals the army’s widespread use of non-uniformed auxiliaries from throughout the Indonesian archipelago, including convict labourers (dwangarbeiders). Colonial courts reserved the criminal sentence of forced labour for ‘natives’, who were allocated to public works like road construction and repair, in mines and as expedition porters.⁷¹ The Aceh War generated such demand for convict labour that legislators in the 1870s and 1880s endlessly debated and delayed planned reforms to the statutes governing dwangarbeid in deference to the KNIL’s insatiable needs.⁷² To allay government concerns that convicts might join local rebellions rather than support the colonial army, from the early 1870s, those assigned to military expeditions had to serve their sentences away from the region where they had committed their crimes.⁷³ Such provisions built ethnic differences between army staff and ‘enemies’ into the very lowest levels of the KNIL.

Nieuwenhuis noted how, on the Samalanga campaign, the KNIL employed 955 ‘indispensable forced labourers’—a number almost equal to the combat personnel.⁷⁴ He photographed some of these men, working with the draught animals among whom he listed them, carrying water to the KNIL encampment ‘under the guidance of several armed jantjes’ (‘little Jans’: ordinary soldiers) (Figure 6.10).⁷⁵ ‘I found this convoy such a typical sight that I could not resist taking a snapshot,’ he wrote.⁷⁶ Although he made light of it, manning supply columns was among the most dangerous military work in the Aceh War.⁷⁷ Convicts died in such numbers—tens of thousands—building the rail, road and fort infrastructure on which the KNIL relied to subjugate Aceh that the Director of Justice, in the mid-1880s, held that transport there constituted a ‘type of suspended death sentence’.⁷⁸

Figure 6.10 ‘Water transport to the Glé Nang Roë’, Samalanga (Aceh), 29 January 1901

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (National Museum of World Cultures) Collection, RV-A78-12.

Van Weede’s and Nieuwenhuis’s many photographs of auxiliaries demonstrate their fascination with the masses of labour required to support KNIL logistics, from the porting of war matériel to the formation of human chains at river crossings (Figures 6.11–6.13). Their photographs show an unfree, largely immigrant workforce produced by penal judiciaries and indentured labour systems that underpinned every major sector of the colonial economy. Military accounts may have alluded to these mobile workers primarily as resources, but they were as pertinent to the conquest of ethnically ‘Other’ populations as the soldiering rank and file. Photographs of these militarised personnel, many of them brought to Aceh from far away, must equally be integrated into understandings of how martial Orientalism in the KNIL conceived and instrumentalised a hierarchy—differentiated by ethnicity as well as class—of indigenous men who were both subject to and agents of colonial violence, in peacetime and in war.

Figure 6.11 ‘Coolies and military police assemble before the attack on Kuta Sukun’, Sigli (Aceh), August 1897

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Nationaal Archief (National Archives), The Hague, 2.20.46 Album 850, p. 14.

Figure 6.12 ‘Convict labourers assist soldiers with a river crossing’, Samalanga (Aceh), February 1901

Photo: C.B. Nieuwenhuis, Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV 43051.

Figure 6.13 ‘The draught horse convoy on the plain before the puri Denpasar’, Badung (south Bali), September 1906

Photo: H.M. van Weede, Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV A3 10078.

Conclusions

In a recent article on what Dutch soldiers of the KNIL and Royal Army thought of their ‘Ambonese’ comrades’ reputation for ferocity during the Indonesian national revolution, Gert Oostindie and Fridus Steijlen canvassed veterans’ ego-documents for testimonies. Some might have served as captions to the photographs by Nieuwenhuis, Neeb and van Weede from almost half a century earlier. ‘The Ambonese were wild and blood-thirsty after this massacre. They kicked and beat the prisoners until there was nothing but blood,’ wrote one. ‘[T]hey attacked with the klewang [sword] and then licked the enemy’s blood from the blade,’ wrote another.⁷⁹ Other Dutch soldiers expressed gratitude for the unfailing courage and loyalty of their Ambonese brothers-in-arms. The authors describe a ‘bias’ in the Dutch sources—one they rightly suspect abrogated responsibility for ‘extreme’ violence to ethnic Others within the Dutch forces. Peculiarly, they conclude that, ‘[a]lthough Moluccans themselves contributed to the longevity of the “martial race” myth, explaining Moluccan attitudes and behaviour through Orientalist frames of ethnicity remains a dead end’.⁸⁰

Contra Oostindie and Steijlen, and following this volume’s attention to coloniality, I have argued that historians must take seriously the colonial genealogy of such frames and trace their mobilisation during earlier wars in Indonesia. I have shown how Dutch war photographers embedded within the KNIL in Aceh and Bali at the turn of the twentieth century captured modes of approved colonial violence, like unfree labour and rule by racialised difference, which not only underpinned the colonial army, but also permeated and were produced by civilian institutions in peacetime. These photographers’ visual works and the narrations containing them reveal racialised practices of divide and rule within military ranks, with consequences for recognising how ethnic violence figured in military atrocities against enemies defined in advance as ‘internal’ to the borders of the colonial state and as recalcitrant Others.⁸¹ Such findings should caution historians against dismissing ‘quotidian’ forms of colonial violence in the pursuit of understanding European motives in perpetrating atrocities.⁸² From Indonesian perspectives, approved forms of violence conditioned civilian and military experiences of war. The KNIL replicated and concentrated the racial and class hierarchies on which Dutch colonialism in the East Indies was built.

For certain groups of soldiers and militarised Indonesian personnel deemed loyal or useful to the colonial army, opportunities for survival or even advancement were predicated on participating in atrocities against ethnic Others. Rethinking histories of colonialism in Indonesia therefore demands critical examination of genealogies of military violence within as well as by the KNIL and requires further research on the origins of ethnic violence perpetrated by members of the colonial army long before the Indonesian national revolution.

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1. 1 Research for this essay was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT200100597). I am grateful to the editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions. Thanks to Melle van Maanen for remote research assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic, and John Klein Nagelvoort for advice at Bronbeek.

2. 2 James T. Siegel, ‘The Curse of the Photograph: Atjeh 1901’, in Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 57–78, doi.org/10.1215/9780822391821-003; Louis Zweers, ‘Atjeh-Oorlog’, in Sumatra: Kolonialen, Koelies en Krijgers [Sumatra: Colonials, Coolies and Combatants] (Houten: Fibula, 1988), 38–58; Louis Zweers, De Gecensureerde Oorlog: Militairen versus Media in Nederlands-Indië [The Censored War: Military Personnel Versus Media in the Netherlands Indies] (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2013); Liesbeth Ouwehand, ‘Militaire Albums [Military Albums]’, in Herinneringen in Beeld: Fotoalbums uit Nederlands-Indië [Recollections in Pictures: Photo Albums from the Netherlands Indies] (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009), 87–110; Paul Bijl, Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), doi.org/10.1515/9789048522019; René Kok, Erik Somers, and Louis Zweers, Koloniale Oorlog 1945–1949: Van Indië naar Indonesië [Colonial War 1945–1949: From the Indies to Indonesia] (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Carrera, 2015).

3. 3 Piet Hagen, Koloniale Oorlogen in Indonesië: Vijf Eeuwen Verzet Tegen Vreemde Overheersing [Colonial Wars in Indonesia: Five Centuries of Resistance Against Foreign Domination] (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, 2018); Petra Groen, Anita van Dissel, Mark Loderichs, Rémy Limpach, and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, Krijsgeweld en Kolonie: Opkomst and Ondergang van Nederland als Koloniale Mogendheid, 1816–2010 [Military Violence and the Colony: The Netherlands’ Rise and Fall as a Colonial Power, 1816–2010] (Amsterdam: Boom, 2021); Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘A Genealogy of Violence’, in Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective, eds Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), 33–62, doi.org/10.1163/9789004489561_004.

4. 4 Gert Oostindie and Rémy Limpach, ‘The War in Indonesia 1945–1949: The Military-Historical Context’, in Beyond the Pale: Dutch Extreme Violence in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–1949, eds Gert Oostindie, Ben Schoenmaker, and Frank van Vree (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 69–106, at 83.

5. 5 See also Setiawan’s Chapter 14 in this volume.

6. 6 Backcover blurb to Groen et al., Military Violence and the Colony.

7. 7 Louis Zweers, Front Indië: Hugo Wilmar, Ooggetuig van een Koloniale Oorlog [The Indies Front: Hugo Wilmar, Eyewitness to a Colonial War] (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), 11; Kok et al., Colonial War, 52; see the Stichting Hugo Wilmar [Hugo Hilmar Foundation], online at: hugowilmar.nl/en/biografie/nederlands-indie/, hugowilmar.nl/en/biografie/.

8. 8 See Groen et al., Military Violence and the Colony.

9. 9 See Richard Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists: The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), doi.org/10.1163/9789004253957.

10. 10 Karl Hack, with Tobias Rettig, ‘Imperial Systems of Power, Colonial Forces and the Making of Modern Southeast Asia’, in Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, eds Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (London: Routledge, 2006), 3–38, doi.org/10.4324/9780203414668_chapter_1, at 14.

11. 11 On nomenclature: I use ‘indigenous’ from here on to signify diverse ethnic groups local to Indonesia, as distinct from ‘Indonesians’, since the history of the KNIL reveals how contested that category was for some of its soldiers before and across independence.

12. 12 Paul Bijl, ‘Saving the Children? The Ethical Policy and Photographs of Colonial Atrocity during the Aceh War’, in Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia, ed. Susie Protschky (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 103–32, doi.org/10.1515/9789048523382-005, at 111.

13. 13 I use a similar approach, focused on the topic of violence against women and children who worked inside Dutch military barracks, in Susie Protschky, ‘Home at the Front: Violence Against Indonesian Women and Children in Dutch Military Barracks during the Indonesian National Revolution’, in Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia: Across Time and Space, eds Katharine McGregor, Ana Dragojlovic, and Hannah Loney (London: Routledge, 2020), 59–83.

14. 14 Zweers, The Censored War.

15. 15 Susie Protschky, ‘Burdens of Proof: Photography and Evidence of Atrocity during the Dutch Military Actions in Indonesia (1945–50)’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia] 176, nos 2–3 (2020): 240–78, doi.org/10.1163/22134379-bja10015.

16. 16 Bijl, Emerging Memory, 50–51; H.M. van Weede, Indische Reisherinneringen [Indies Travel Memories] (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1908), 501.

17. 17 Anneke Groeneveld, ‘C.B. Nieuwenhuis’ View of Sumatra’, in Toward Independence: A Century of Indonesia Photographed, ed. Jane Levy Reed (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1991), 65–71.

18. 18 C.B. Nieuwenhuis, De Expeditie naar Samalanga (Januari 1901): Dagverhaal van een Fotograaf te Velde [The Expedition to Samalanga (January 1901): Tales of a Photographer in the Field] (Amsterdam: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1901), vii, 1.

19. 19 Anneke Groeneveld, ‘H.M. Neeb: A Witness of the Aceh War’, in Toward Independence: A Century of Indonesia Photographed, ed. Jane Levy Reed (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1991), 72–77, at 73.

20. 20 Bilj, Emerging Memory, 43–44.

21. 21 J.C.J. Kempees, De Tocht van Overste Van Daalen door de Gajo, Alas- en Bataklanden 8 Februari tot 23 Juli 1904 [The March of Commander van Daalen through the Gayo, Alas and Batak Lands, 8 February to 23 July 1904] (Amsterdam: J.C. Dalmeijer, 1905). Van Daalen and Neeb also produced reports on the campaign in the Indisch Militair Tijdschrift [Indies Military Journal] in 1905, but these were not illustrated.

22. 22 ‘Genealogie van Weede [Genealogy van Weede]’, in Nederland’s Adelsboek [Netherlands’ Book of Nobility], 97 (The Hague: Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie [Central Bureau for Genealogy], 2012), 204–31, at 222–23; Inventaris van de Dienststaten en Stamboeken van Officieren van de Koninklijke Landmacht en van de Koloniale Troepen in Nederland [Inventory of the Service Records and Registers of Officers of the Royal Netherlands Army and Colonial Troops in the Netherlands] (1715) 1814–1940 (1945), 2.13.04, no. 763 (The Hague: Nationaal Archief [National Archives]), 64–65.

23. 23 van Weede, Indies Travel Memories, 1, 5, 371, 407, 448, quote at 477.

24. 24 Nieuwenhuis: two from Kuta Sukun (1897), one from Batu Iliq (1901); Neeb: three from Kuta Rih, four from Likat, one from Rékét Göïp (all 1904); van Weede: three from Badung (all 1906).

25. 25 See the copies held at: the Wereldmuseum [World Museum], Leiden (RV-A78), ‘Sold by A. Kaulfuss, Penang’; the Wereldmuseum [World Museum] Amsterdam, in the album of Serge Sergeivitch Grigorieff (TM-ALB-1991); the album in the archive of the NV Deli Maatschappij [Deli Company], Nationaal Archief [National Archives], The Hague, 2.20.46, Inventaris van het archief van de NV Deli Maatschappij, Dochtermaatschappijen en Gefuseerde Bedrijven [Inventory of the Archives of NV Deli Maatschappij, Subsidiaries and Merged Companies] (ca. 1700) 1869–1989 (1994), 850; and at Museum Bronbeek, 2005/00-654 (unknown owner), 2011/06/03-1-4/18 (Collection of J.C. Lamster [1872–1954], filmmaker and former major in the Topographical Service of the KNIL, 2021/04/20-3 (descendant of an officer in the Korps Marechausee).

26. 26 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, Plate 19; Bijl, Emerging Memory, 68.

27. 27 Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen; Bijl, Emerging Memory, 91–92.

28. 28 Leiden University Library Special Collections, KITLV Album 3; Wereldmuseum [World Museum] Amsterdam, TM-60050657–TM-60050669; Bronbeek Museum, 1973/04/09-2-2/32.

29. 29 Works that published the image without acknowledging the photographer are: Pierre Heijboer, Klamboes, Klewangs, Klapperbomen: Indië Gewonnen en Verloren [Mosquito Nets, Swords, Coconut Trees: The Indies Won and Lost] (Haarlem: De Haan, 1977), 85; Helen Creese, Darma Putra, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, Seabad Puputan Bali: Perspektif Belanda dan Bali [Centenary of the Bali Puputan: Dutch and Balinese Perspectives] (Jakarta: KITLV Press, 2006). He is named in Petra Groen, ‘Koortsachtig imperialisme 1894–1914 [Feverish Imperialism 1894–1914]’, in Krijgsgeweld en Kolonie: Opkomst and Ondergang van Nederland als Koloniale Mogendheid, 1816–2010 [Military Violence and the Colony: The Netherlands’ Rise and Fall as a Colonial Power, 1816–2010], eds Petra Groen, Anita van Dissel, Mark Loderichs, Rémy Limpach, and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg (Amsterdam: Boom, 2021), 135–60, at 156; and discussed in Anne-Lot Hoek, De strijd om Bali: Imperialisme, verzet en onafhankelijkheid, 1846–1950 [The Battle for Bali: Imperialism, Resistance and Independence, 1846–1950] (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2021), 57–65.

30. 30 J.B. van Heutsz, ‘Expeditie naar Segli [Expedition to Segli]’, 3 Oktober 1897, NIMH Collectie 511, f. 19r (The Hague: Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie [Netherlands Institute of Military History]); Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 17, 20; Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 158, 160, 161; van Weede, Indies Travel Memories, 463–64, 467–68.

31. 31 van Heutsz, ‘Expedition to Segli’.

32. 32 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, vii, 11, 13, 17, 18, 20, 25.

33. 33 Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 156–57, 163, 243, quote at 159–60.

34. 34 Henk Schulte Nordholt, The Spell of Power: A History of Balinese Politics, 1650–1940 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996), 213–14; Hoek, The Battle for Bali, 60.

35. 35 See Paul van ‘t Veer, De Atjeh-Oorlog [The Aceh War] (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, 1969); Siegel, ‘The Curse of the Photograph’; Groeneveld, ‘H.M. Neeb’; Bijl, Emerging Memory; Bijl, ‘Saving the Children?’.

36. 36 Sean Willcock, ‘Aesthetic Bodies: Posing on Sites of Violence in India, 1857–1900’, History of Photography 39, 2 (2015): 142–59, doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1038108, at 153, 157–58.

37. 37 van Heutsz, ‘Expedition to Segli’.

38. 38 See Gerke Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company: Fighting Power and Ethnic Relations in the Dutch Colonial Army, 1890–1920’, in Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia, eds Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (London: Routledge, 2006), 154–68, doi.org/10.4324/9780203414668_chapter_6, at 162; Bijl (Emerging Memory, 16) says the photograph was taken during the 1898 Pidie expedition.

39. 39 The January 1948 Renville Agreement was a ceasefire agreement that confirmed Dutch territorial gains in return for a plebiscite in Dutch-occupied parts of Java, Madura and Sumatra as to whether they would join the Republic of Indonesia or become separate states.

40. 40 Goenawan Mohamad, ‘Het Kwaad van het Kolonialisme is Onvergeeflijk [The Evil of Colonialism is Unforgivable]’, NRC Handelsblad, [Amsterdam], 25 March 2022, www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/25/het-kwaad-van-het-kolonialisme-is-onvergeeflijk-a4104979 [first published as Goenawan Mohamad, ‘Maaf (Sorry)’, Majalah Tempo, (Jakarta), 19 February 2022].

41. 41 Door de ogen van … Over kolonisatie, oorlog en onafhankelijkheid van Indonesië [Through the Eyes of … About Colonisation, War and Independence of Indonesia], Museum Bronbeek, Netherlands.

42. 42 Recruitment of soldiers from Ambon to Dutch forces in the Indies had already begun in the period of the Dutch East India Company. See Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists, 40.

43. 43 Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company’, 155. Indonesians outnumbered Europeans in the infantry and marechaussees for the period 1861–1918, while Europeans slightly outnumbered Indonesians in the cavalry, artillery and engineering regiments.

44. 44 Gedenkboek van het Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden: 1890–2 April 1940 [Commemorative Book of the Military Police Corps of Aceh and Dependencies: 1890 – 2 April 1940] (Korps Marechaussee [Military Police Corps], 1940); Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 157; Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company’, 161, 164.

45. 45 See Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company’, 160; Siegel, ‘The Curse of the Photograph’; Kees van Dijk, ‘The Fears of a Small Country with a Big Colony: The Netherlands Indies in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century’, in Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia, eds Volker Grabowsky and Frederik Rettig (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2019), 87–122. Notable exceptions are Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Aceh Histories in the KITLV Images Archive’, in Mapping the Acehnese Past, eds R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly, and Anthony Reid (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 199–239, doi.org/10.1163/9789004253599_011, at 202–3, 218; Mark Loderichs and Anita van Dissel, ‘Militaire Instrumenten van de Koloniale Macht 1816–1941 [Military Instruments of Colonial Power 1816–1941]’, in Krijgsgeweld en Kolonie; Opkomst en Ondergang van Nederland als Koloniale Mogendhied 1816–2010 [Military Violence and the Colony: The Netherlands’ Rise and Fall as a Colonial Power, 1816–2010], eds Petra Groen, Anita van Dissel, Mark Loderichs, Rémy Limpach, and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg (Amsterdam: Boom, 2021), 171–206, at 180–84.

46. 46 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 25.

47. 47 ibid., Plates 4, 5, 8, 10, 20.

48. 48 van Weede, Indies Travel Memories, 431–33, 435–36, 438–40, 442–44, 451, 455, 457–59, 474, 479.

49. 49 Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 233.

50. 50 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 19.

51. 51 Hack and Rettig, ‘Imperial Systems of Power’, 14.

52. 52 Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 234–35.

53. 53 Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company’; van Dijk, ‘The Fears of a Small Country with a Big Colony’.

54. 54 Kempees, The March of Commander van Daalen, 233–34.

55. 55 See also Veer, The Aceh War, 235, 268–69.

56. 56 van Dijk, ‘The Fears of a Small Country with a Big Colony’, 110, 112.

57. 57 Kim A. Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 85 (Spring 2018): 217–37, doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbx053.

58. 58 See Fay Anderson, ‘Australians, Allies and Enemies’, in Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia, by Fay Anderson and Sally Young (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2016), 88–116, at 89. The concept arises from Anglophone theorists who foreground the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or, at the very earliest, World War II: Judith Butler, ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120, no. 3 (2005): 822–27, doi.org/10.1632/003081205X63886; Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War, 2nd edn (London: Red Globe Press, 2011); Christopher Paul and James J. Kim, Reporters on the Battlefield: The Embedded Press System in Historical Context (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004); Liam Kennedy, ‘Photojournalism and Warfare in the Postphotographic Age’, Photography and Culture 8, no. 2 (2015): 159–71, doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2015.1076242.

59. 59 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 1–5.

60. 60 David Kloos, ‘Dis/connection: Violence, Religion, and Geographic Imaginings in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia, 1890s–1920s’, Itinerario 45, no. 3 (2021): 389–412, doi.org/10.1017/S0165115321000255.

61. 61 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 16, Plate 13.

62. 62 Teitler, ‘The Mixed Company’, 155–56.

63. 63 Schulte Nordholt, ‘A Genealogy of Violence’, 36–37.

64. 64 Hagen, Colonial Wars in Indonesia, 889–905.

65. 65 Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 59–69; Jan Breman, Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits from an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), doi.org/10.1515/9789048527144; Hagen, Colonial Wars in Indonesia, 439–80.

66. 66 Roel Frakking, ‘The Plantation as Counter-Insurgency Tool: Indonesia 1900–50’, in Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies, eds Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 57–78, at 70. See also Leksana’s Chapter 5 in this volume; Marieke Bloembergen, De Geschiedenis van de Politie in Nederlands-Indië: Uit Zorg en Angst [The History of the Police in the Netherlands Indies: Out of Concern and Fear] (Amsterdam & Leiden: Boom & KITLV Press, 2009), 109–36.

67. 67 Frakking, ‘The Plantation as Counter-Insurgency Tool’, 58, 62, 64, 68–69.

68. 68 First published in Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

69. 69 Bijl, Emerging Memory, 51. Van Weede had several coolies and a manservant named Karemin: van Weede, Indies Travel Memories, 407–8.

70. 70 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 27.

71. 71 Robert Cribb, ‘Convict Exile and Penal Settlement in Colonial Indonesia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 18, no. 3 (2017), doi.org/10.1353/cch.2017.0043, 7.

72. 72 Historische Nota Betreffende de Regeling der Wijze van Toepassing van de Straf van Dwangarbeid [Historical Note Concerning the Regulations on the Method of Application of the Penalty of Forced Labour] (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1897), 29–32.

73. 73 ibid., 11.

74. 74 Nieuwenhuis, The Expedition to Samalanga, 6.

75. 75 ibid., 10, 21.

76. 76 ibid., 11.

77. 77 Emmanuel Kreike, ‘Genocide in the Kampongs? Dutch Nineteenth Century Colonial Warfare in Aceh, Sumatra’, in Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia, eds Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses (London: Routledge, 2014), 45–63, doi.org/10.4324/9781315767345-3, at 49.

78. 78 Historical Note Concerning the Regulations, 42. See also Veer, The Aceh War, 168–69.

79. 79 Gert Oostindie and Fridus Steijlen, ‘Ethnic “Ferociousness” in Colonial Wars: Moluccans in the Dutch Army in Indonesia, 1945–1949’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia] 177, no. 4 (2021): 491–523, doi.org/10.1163/22134379-bja10032, at 504.

80. 80 ibid., 519. The authors use ‘Moluccan’ instead of ‘Ambonese’ following the conventions of the contemporary diaspora community in the Netherlands.

81. 81 An emerging historiography of racialised warfare in colonial Southeast Asia is captured in Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey, ‘Why Race Mattered: Racial Difference, Racialised Colonial Capitalism and the Racialised Wars of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia, eds Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 9–30, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1dc9kb3.3.

82. 82 Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present 233, no. 1 (2016): 185–225, doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw037, at 190.