Maarten Manse
2023

This project aims to finalize and resubmit a book manuscript on the topic of taxation and governance in colonial Indonesia, to be published with Brill in the Verhandelingen van het KITLV series. Based on the author’s PhD thesis, the book innovatively explores the implications of taxation for the local dynamics of Dutch colonial governance.

Shifting focus to peripheries, the study challenges prevailing academic understandings of colonial statecraft in Indonesia. It presents new evidence revealing how the introduction of new taxes was never the result of a linear ‘modernization’ project, but rather a sluggish process of trial and error, in which colonial and indigenous methods of taxation and social organization overlapped and coexisted. Apart from a ‘tool’ of finance, administration and governance, cunningly wielded by state officials, taxation also provided a platform to indigenous populations to challenge and contest the state, rendering the state itself into something that in the eyes of many could still be negotiated.

The manuscript is set to be resubmitted by July 2024, with an expected publication in early 2025. Additionally, the project includes two research articles on legal pluralism and the role of tropes in maintaining colonial power.

Maarten Manse is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Linnaeus University in the project ‘Imperial Expansion and Intercultural Diplomacy‘. Previously, he lectured at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and at Utrecht University, after having completed his PhD thesis at Leiden University in 2021. His research interests cover the history of colonialism and decolonization of Southeast Asia (with a special focus on Indonesia), and in particular mechanisms of colonial governance, state-formation and state-society interaction. The coming years, he will continue doing postdoctoral research on a personal grant from the Swedish Research Council, focusing on how Southeast Asian linguistic patterns and writing traditions influenced international treaty-making practices.