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The Coloniality of Benevolence

Bosma, A.; Valdés Olmos, T.

Publication date 2020 Document Version Final published version Published in Collateral

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Citation for published version (APA): Bosma, A., & Valdés Olmos, T. (2020). The Coloniality of Benevolence. Collateral , 23, [a]. http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=23

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Download date:28 Sep 2021 a clustered | unclustered The Coloniality of Benevolence1 Anke Bosma and Tjalling Valdés Olmos What might it mean to approach Veenhuizen as a node in the Dutch imperial project? Most of the historical and cultural framing around the Colonies of Benevolence has followed a teleological vision – moving from a failed but well-intended philanthropic project of poverty control to a well-functioning neoliberal welfare state.2 This approach has overlooked the Colonies of Benevolence as a nexus of ideas and histories legible under the ongoing logics of modernity/coloniality.3 This concept, first coined by Aníbal Quijano, refers to the manner in which modernity and coloniality are inseparable yet different aspects in shaping both historical and contemporary social orders and modes of knowledge production. In the following article we want to emphasize the foundational importance of this modernity/coloniality nexus to understanding the historical and ongoing development of the Dutch neoliberal state. Or, in Gloria Wekker’s words, we want to highlight the “centrality of imperialism”4 to Dutch culture by looking at the Colonies of Benevolence through a (de)colonial lens. In most mainstream and institutional narratives, like the ones used at the National Prison Museum in Veenhuizen (see Peeren, this cluster), the Colonies of Benevolence are predominantly explored from a historical perspective in which the “history of the metropole is structurally seen apart from the history of the colonies.”5 Veenhuizen is considered in the context of national and European Enlightenment history, while its founder Johannes van den Bosch’s enterprises in the Dutch East Indies are seen as colonial or imperial history. The constructed distinction between these histories obfuscates that populations in both locales were (and are) connected by a colonial archive. This connection is exemplified by different forms of violent oppression and exploitation experienced under a shared logic and praxis of modernity/coloniality that is always already “unevenly distributed” in degrees of “unfreedom” across the globe.6 In the first section of this contribution we highlight the Christian-cum-Enlightenment characteristics of the imperial project that constituted the Colonies of Benevolence. We do so by emphasizing Johannes van den Bosch’s role as an imperial agent who moved within and across global circuits of colonial-capitalist knowledge production.7 The Christian and Enlightenment ideals that were central to his colonial endeavors and essential to modernity/coloniality in general served as an important justification for the exploitation of people in the Netherlands and the former Indies and their construction as potentially improvable “idle paupers.” In the second section, we turn towards this modern/colonial revalorization of people (and land), and question its relation to historical and contemporary forms of urban planning and social housing in the Netherlands, taking Suzanna Jansen’s memoir Het pauperparadijs (Paradise of Paupers) (2008) as a point of departure. We pose that the logics of modernity/coloniality, in its intertwinement with Christian-cum-Enlightenment knowledges, shape both historical and contemporary technologies of social and spatial control directed towards criminalized and racialized working-class subjects.

Figure 1: These posts bearing Van den Bosch’s portrait are encountered throughout the Colonies. This post says: “Welcome to the colony.” Esther Peeren, 2019. Idle Subjects in Van den Bosch’s Colonies In both popular and institutional discourses – such as the UNESCO heritage application, the official prison museum booklet (based on the UNESCO application), and the 2018 Dutch public television documentary “Land zonder paupers” – Van den Bosch is often portrayed as a visionary: someone with good intentions, admirable ideals, and a strong will, whose efforts failed because of unfortunate circumstances.8 Special attention is given to the benevolent nature of his ideas, which are broadly based on Christian and Enlightenment notions of humanity and deemed admirable because of their charitable framing with regard to poor and working-class people. Nevertheless, we can ask how benevolent these ideas actually are. Christian-cum-Enlightenment thinking formed an important part of the ideological weave of modernity/coloniality, especially with regard to legitimizing the exploitation and oppression (racially, classed, gendered, etc.) of “othered” populations and the violent altering of ecological and natural landscapes. 9 For example, western hemispheric colonial plantations involved the capture and dehumanization of Africans and “agricultural landscape simplification” that resulted in the homogenization and radical reduction of diverse aboriginal vegetation, local agricultural practices, and wildlife.10 The extensive colonial career of Van den Bosch started in 1798 with a military position in Indonesia, a colony known as the Dutch East Indies at the time. During his first stay in the Dutch East Indies, Van den Bosch had indigenous populations, which he considered to have previously “spent their time badly,” work a plot of land he owned, and eventually sold the plot for eight times its original price.11 He cites this colonial-capitalist exploitation in his plans for the Colonies of Benevolence, which he founded some years after his return to the Netherlands. From 1827 to 1828, he was the commissary general of the West Indies, a territory that included what is now Surinam, Aruba, Curaçao, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten. He was appointed governor-general upon his return to Indonesia in 1830. In 1834, he went back to the Netherlands, where he soon became Minister of Colonies.12 Across all these locations, his ideas and practices regarding the management of indigenous populations, paupers, and unworked land traveled with him. As Ann Laura Stoler has shown, Van den Bosch was linked to an expansive network of other colonial and penal governors, reformists, thinkers, and institutions that stretched across the imperial globe.13 Van den Bosch started the Colonies of Benevolence in the Netherlands because he believed that paupers needed to be uplifted and saved from their vices and idleness for the benefit of society as a whole. With European colonial expansion and the project of Dutch capitalist nation-building after the Napoleonic wars well under way, earlier Christian and Enlightenment ideas regarding human differences were “intensified, expanded, and reworked.”14 Van den Bosch thought his project would ameliorate the perceived threat of contamination and miscegenation that these populations were seen to pose to the rapidly urbanizing centers of European civilization.15 Nineteenth-century ideas on miscegenation and contamination were heavily influenced by colonial endeavors across continents, especially with regard to non-white populations.16 Many members of the elite classes, like Van den Bosch, considered the potential spread of poverty, and its associated notions of vice and idleness, a threat to public order. Safeguarding this order, however, did not just mean preventing violence or crime. Given the reasonably recent events of the French Revolution, it quite specifically meant maintaining the social order by protecting the political and socioeconomic interests of the elites.17 The conflation of idleness with vice was due to the ideological construction of idleness. Within Christianity, particularly after the Reformation, work was seen as the fundamental divine edict. One had to work to atone for Adam’s fall. Agriculture, the main form of labor in the Colonies of Benevolence, is specifically important to Adam’s fall because, in Genesis, God condemns Adam to it: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”18 The earthly ground would be intentionally tough to grow crops on and thus would require hard work, in contrast to the effortless abundance of the garden of Eden. To work, then, in the Bible quite specifically means to till the soil. However, within Christian ideology after the reformation this was interpreted more broadly: it was sinful to live off what nature provides rather than producing food by tilling the soil; living on charity was considered similarly sinful. Within Enlightenment thinking, the Christian discourse around idleness largely remained, but replaced a man’s duty to God with a duty to himself: only through work could a person improve themselves and be uplifted.19 As a result, not working was seen as leading to one’s deterioration as a person. “Rust roest” (“rest makes you rust”), one of the mottos of the Colonies of Benevolence, exemplifies this idea. As a Christian who was also invested in the developing industrial and capitalist nation, Van den Bosch felt the Colonies of Benevolence would allow people to reach their full potential through selling their labor in a capitalist system.20 Figure 2: Plates found in De Ommerschans with the motto “rust roest” (“rest makes you rust”). Colonists were served their food on these plates. © Koloniën van Weldadigheid – Maatschappij van Weldadigheid The emerging views on the use of people as capitalist subjects – weaved together with Christian-cum-Enlightenment discourses – were tested in overseas colonial projects. As mentioned above, the interior colonies of Drenthe were partially based on Van den Bosch’s earlier endeavors in the Dutch Indies. Later on, after the collapse of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch considered making money in Indonesia by trading with the local people, but ran into a problem: the local people “had very little needs.”21 They were content with what they had and did not need anything more, or at least not anything the Dutch could offer. Since Indonesia could not be made profitable through trade, the colonizers turned to forced labor, which was viewed as the only remaining option and considered controversial even among colonial officers.22 Forced labor was implemented through Van den Bosch’s Cultivation System, which forced peasants on large parts of Java, Sumatra, and Minahasa to cultivate cash crops like sugarcane, indigo, and coffee, and hand them over to the Dutch state. Implemented in 1830, this system was legitimized by the same discourses as the Colonies of Benevolence: making both land and people productive and valuable within the logic of capitalist (re)production.23 Besides causing human and material devastation, the Cultivation System also incorporated the indigenous populations and land of Indonesia into a globalized capitalist system based on the continuing logics of European modernity/coloniality and progress. Thus, populations previously seen as unable or unwilling to contribute to the increasingly industrialized, colonially funded, capitalist, and hetero-patriarchally structured Dutch empire were subjected to certain regimes of disciplinary control that made it possible for them to be managed under a developing set of grammars regarding modern subjectivity. Even if initiatives like the Colonies of Benevolence naturalized some of these populations as potentially valuable (re)productive subjects, others remained undesirable, excluded, and marginalized. The Continued Legacy of Undesirable Populations In Het pauperparadijs (2008), Suzanna Jansen traces her family history from their arrival at the Colonies of Benevolence in the early nineteenth century. The novel highlights how thousands of paupers, including her ancestors, were put on trial for the crimes of “vagrancy” and “begging” and sent to the Colonies. Significantly, historian Wil Schackmann shows that this criminalized group of people were an elusive category. For example, more than 60 percent of the “vagrants” and “beggars” held in Veenhuizen and Ommerschans were people with physical and/or mental disabilities, elderly folk, and families without a male wage earner.24 The distant location of Drenthe, on the margins of Dutch society, served to maximize the spatial distance between these undesirable populations and idealized “proper” populations. In the Colonies themselves, moreover, internal distinctions were made between those populations that were seen as redeemable and those that were not. Het pauperparadijs sheds light on how the categorization of Jansen’s ancestors as belonging to this unredeemable criminalized population of Veenhuizen continues to haunt following generations.

Figure 3: The cover of Het pauperparadijs (Uitgeverij Balans: Amsterdam, 2008). Jansen’s grandmother Roza is one of the women for whom escaping the haunting legacy of the Colonies of Benevolence is impossible. When Roza moves to a convent, her admission to the convent is only possible by occluding her family background as it related to the Colonies of Benevolence.25 When Roza’s family history is revealed to the Mother Superior of the convent, she is dismissed and finds herself subjected to new forms of spatial displacement. Roza is, together with her husband and children, eventually housed in a new urban project: Tuindorp Oostzaan (Garden Village Oostzaan). Now, this area forms part of Amsterdam North, but at the time it was known as the Siberia of Amsterdam.26 Veenhuizen, similarly, was known as “Dutch Siberia”.27 Tuindorp Oostzaan and other neighborhoods like it, such as Floradorp and Asterdorp, were part of a new social experiment at the start of the twentieth century, reminiscent of the logic employed in the Colonies of Benevolence. In order to eradicate poverty, the criminalized poor were housed and “re-educated” there.28 In these villages, populations were under close surveillance and could move up on the social ladder through non- idle behavior, which would also allow them to move to a better (i.e. less supervised) village. Jansen poses that the municipal council was aware that those who came to be housed in this Siberia of Amsterdam would carry with them a “stigmatization” that would be hard to get rid of. Yet, the municipality also opined that this spatial “branding” would help fashion the criminalized poor into “more proper” citizens.29 Jansen’s use of the term “branding” posits the Colonies of Benevolence and the Tuindorp housing projects, both institutions of modern/colonial subjectification, as spaces that become imprinted on the flesh. This is a particularly poignant metaphor that emphasizes the interrelation between the discursive and material, and shows how sustained poverty and exclusion have lasting effects on multiple generations of human bodies.30 Jansen’s memoir offers an important intervention by showing how the colonial logics and practices of Veenhuizen do not belong to the past. The housing of less-than-human populations in zones removed from more valued national subjects connects the rural Colonies of Benevolence to the urban Garden Villages of Amsterdam North. Both operated under the Christian-cum-Enlightenment idea that labor could potentially cure the idleness and vices of such populations, and buttressed the colonial-capitalist need for an increasingly productive and manageable workforce. These days, such logics can still be partially found in contemporary urban realities. Neighborhoods such as Bos en Lommer, Nieuw-West, and Bijlmer in Amsterdam, as well as neighborhoods in other cities popularly known as Vogelaarwijken,31 continue the conflation of what are considered undesirable and threatening populations with spaces deemed uninhabitable for normative Dutch subjects. Additionally, these urban spaces are often predominantly inhabited by racialized non-white others (populations marked by the longue durée of globalization and migration), which shows the penchant for colonial logics to stick to various bodies subjected to regimes of differentiation. Global forms of capitalist-induced precarity, however, have increasingly eroded both the possibility and the idea that such communities can attain normative subjectivity through productive labor. Furthermore, those who are presently framed as the Others of the Netherlands (predominantly populations with colonial and migrant histories spanning South America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East) are seen to threaten, under the lingering logics of contamination and miscegenation, the white criminalized poor and working class people who once inhabited these selfsame national margins. At the same time, gentrification, or the “deconcentration of poverty,” is used to transform areas predominantly inhabited by non-normative subjects into livable spaces capable of attracting subjects that fit better with the image of Dutch normalcy.32 By pointing out these mechanisms in the legacies of the Colonies of Benevolence, we aim to open up further lines of inquiry regarding the contemporary relation between colonial and capitalist logics, and neoliberal technologies of social control and spatial planning. Conclusions What happens when Veenhuizen and the Colonies of Benevolence are approached within the context of modernity/coloniality? One answer may be that the concept of coloniality makes Veenhuizen legible as a node in a larger ideological and material network of colonial relations that functioned across the metropole and its overseas colonies. How does an account of modernity/coloniality within “domestic” histories of the Netherlands, for instance, shed light on how unemployed and poor white communities were treated in the past and on how these communities’ predominant political commitment to populist right-wing parties is currently perceived? Looking at the history of Veenhuizen shows that the oppression of these communities is partially rooted in the same colonial logic and practice that dominates contemporary racialized populations, which are constructed as existentially threatening the white unemployed and working class in the Netherlands. To speak with Stoler, our line of thinking in this contribution has been to show the types of perspectives that are produced when we no longer treat colonial phenomena “as realities of an Other moment” and space, but rather as phenomena that are “implicated (…) in the disquieting present.”33 Notes  1This publication emerged from the project ‘Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World’ (RURALIMAGINATIONS, 2018–2023). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 772436).  2The Colonies of Benevolence: An Exceptional Experiment, ed. Kathleen De Clercq, Marja Van den Broek, Marcel-Armand Van Nieuwpoort and Fleur Albers (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum Publishers, 2018); C.A. Kloosterhuis, De bevolking van de vrije koloniën der maatschappij van weldadigheid (Zutphen: De Walburg pers, 1981); J.J. Westendorp Boerma, Johannes van den Bosch als sociaal hervormer: de maatschappij van weldadigheid (Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1927); “Land zonder paupers,” De ijzeren eeuw, VPRO, 30 May 2018, television.  3See Anibal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” Perú Indígena 3.29 (1991): 11-20; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016); María Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742-759.  4Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.  5Wekker, White Innocence, 25.  6Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.  7Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), 6.  8The Colonies of Benevolence: An Exceptional Experiment; Kloosterhuis, De bevolking van de vrije koloniën der maatschappij van weldadigheid; Westendorp Boerma, Johannes van den Bosch als sociaal hervormer: de maatschappij van weldadigheid; Suzanna Jansen, “Land zonder paupers,” in Het pauperparadijs (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2008), 42.  9Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2015); Robert Miles, Racism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 113.  10Heather Grab, Bryan Danforth, Katja Poveda, and Greg Loeb, “Landscape simplification reduces classical control and crop yield,” in Ecological Applications 28.2 (2018): 348-355.  11Johannes van den Bosch, Verhandeling over de mogelijkheid, de beste wijze van invoering, en de belangrijke voordeelen eender algemeene armen-inrigting in het Rijk der Nederlanden, door het vestigen eener Landbouwende Kolonie in deszelfs Noordelijk gedeelte (1818), 266.  12Susan Legêne, “BOSCH, Johannes van den,” BWSA 8 (2001), 12-17.  13Ann Laura Stoler, “Colony,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).  14Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 114.  15Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 121.  16N.L. Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. D.T. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 43.  17Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 42; Kloosterhuis, De bevolking van de vrije koloniën der maatschappij van weldadigheid, 37.  18“Genesis 3:17,” The Holy Bible: King James Version.  19J.M Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 21.  20Kloosterhuis, De bevolking van de vrije koloniën der maatschappij van weldadigheid, 46; Albert Schrauwers, “The ‘Benevolent’ Colonies of Johannes van Den Bosch: Continuities in the Administration of Poverty in the Netherlands and Indonesia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43.2 (2001): 304-5, 311-2.  21J.J. Westendorp Boerma, Johannes van den Bosch als sociaal hervormer, 16.  22Ibid.  23Schrauwers, “The ‘Benevolent’ Colonies of Johannes van Den Bosch,” 316.  24Wil Schackman, De bedelaarskolonie: De Ommerschans, het eerste landelijk gesticht voor luilevende armen (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2013), 310.  25Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 164-68.  26Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 176.  27Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 175.  28Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 177.  29Jansen, Het pauperparadijs, 178.  30Jansen’s specific use of “branding” raises (theoretical) questions surrounding the onto-epistemological relation between the discursive and the material. A link to Foucault’s work on biopolitics might be expected here, but he was not the first, nor the only thinker to probe questions regarding processes of subjection, subjectification, and power structures. We are indebted to the work of decolonial and anticolonial scholars Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon, and their notion of sociogeny. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lamm Markman (New York: Grove Press, [1952] 1967); Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” Boundary II 12.3 (1984): 19-70.  31Named after minister for Living, Neighborhoods and Integration Ella Vogelaar, who, in 2007, published a list of 40 residential areas considered “problem areas.”  32Bench Ansfield, “Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick, 127.  33Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 20.