As a history of streets from the saddle, this talk examines how bicycles shaped everyday rule and colonial mobility in Indonesia. Drawing on Reza's article-in-progress, it traces how the bicycle, a modest technology, became central to decisions about who could move, at what speed, and in which part of the road. Following David Arnold’s notion of “modest modernity”, the bicycle is treated as an everyday machine that carried heavy political weight. Newspapers, police ordinances, popular traffic manuals, and military cycling regulations reveal a fine-grained “street sovereignty” that worked through lamps, bells, lanes, and drills.

Reza begins with late nineteenth-century reports of European cycling experiments between Batavia and Buitenzorg, then follow the rapid spread of bicycles into Chinese and indigenous middle-class worlds through advertisements and repair workshops. The talk then turns to regulations that define the “proper” cyclist and accident reports in Malay and Chinese newspapers that show how blame was allocated when children, pedestrians, or servants were struck. These sources highlight unequal distributions of risk, in which colonised bodies absorbed much of the danger while state actors often escaped sanction. 

Reza argues that bicycles were not a minor prelude to motorisation but a central arena in which colonial authorities tested and extended their power at street level, while clerks, students, and workers used the same machines to widen their horizons of work, sociability, and politics. The conclusion sketches how this colonial grammar of fast and slow, respectable and obstructive movement anticipated postcolonial traffic politics and later campaigns against becak and other muscle-powered transport.

Speaker

Teuku Reza Fadeli is a historian and lecturer at the Department of History, Universitas Indonesia. He holds a PhD in History from the University of York. As a visiting fellow at KITLV, he is conducting research for his project 'Wheels of empire: Bicycles, race, and social mobility in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia'. His study examines how cycling shaped everyday life, social mobility, and racial hierarchy from the late nineteenth century to the post-independence period, tracing how a global technology was redefined through local structures of power and aspiration. 

Moderator

Tom Hoogervorst is a senior researcher at KITLV. He is interested in the languages, everyday life in late-colonial Indonesia and histories of Indonesia, including culinary history. In his recent research he studies Indonesian cuisines in relation to the wider world and how Indonesian cuisines have developed and adapted to local circumstances in the “diaspora”, specifically Suriname, Sri Lanka, and South Africa.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Tuesday 16 December from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).

Image

Field police officers on bicycles near Sawahlunto, Sumatra, c. 1932. Bicycles served as everyday tools of patrol and control in colonial Indonesia. Collection KITLV, Leiden University Libraries. Photographer unknown.

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