Throughout colonial Indonesia, a common method to determine a boy’s taxable age was to loop a rope around the chest. If the boy’s head fitted through, his chest was still too small and he was too young; if not, he owed the government tax. 

Analysing unique archival sources from across Indonesia, this book shows how such pragmatic, locally embedded methods often overshadowed formal tax procedures, which colonial officials advanced as civilizing instruments of modernisation and state-power. It exposes taxation as a process in which improvisation, indigenous customs and everyday negotiations tied together formal regulations and ordinary local realities. A must-read for historians of empire in and beyond Southeast Asia, the book reshapes our understanding of colonial governance, challenging grand theories of colonial state formation by revealing the practicalities of everyday colonial rule and the agency of local actors manipulating the system from within. 

More information about the book

Empire of improvisation: Taxation and governance in colonial Indonesia. Publisher: BRILL. Open acces.

Author

Maarten Manse (PhD 2021, Leiden University) is an historian specialised in colonialism in Southeast Asia. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden. 

Discussant

Adriaan Bedner is professor of Law and Society in Indonesia, Head of Department of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, and honorary fellow at KITLV. Adriaan’s research focusses on access to justice, legal reasoning, family law and land law – in particular in Indonesia.

Moderator

David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia and Malaysia), working as a senior researcher at KITLV. His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

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 Thursday 2 April from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET), with drinks afterwards.

Image

Measuring skulls and chests to verify the age of boys in Palembang in order to determine whether they should participate in performing labour services and paying taxes. Photo: Collectie Wereldmuseum, Coll.nr. TM-10001540.

Flyer

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