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Death in Slawi: The “Sugar Factory Murders,” Ethnicity, Conflicted Loyalties and the Context of Violence in the Early Revolution in Indonesia, October 1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2017

G. Roger Knight
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Abstract

In mid-October 1945, Edward and Frederika van der Sluys were murdered in gruesome circumstances, along with a number of other Dutch Eurasians, most probably in the yard of a Dutch-owned sugar factory in the Slawi district of the north coast of Central Java at which the husband had been employed since his youth. Their fate forms part of a larger narrative of the Bersiap! (“Get Ready!”) period of the Indonesian national revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from historians. Indeed, there are already two well-trod narratives of the violence accompanying the revolution and of ethnic cleansing during the Bersiap. The present paper argues, however, that there is room for a third: that of the sugar industry—and factory communities that lay at its heart—as a much older arena of social difference and conflicted loyalties. The account proceeds on the assumption that, without being embedded in a broader and deeper narrative, the story of what happened to the Van der Sluys couple remains incomplete.

Keywords

violenceethnicitysugar factoriesJavarevolution
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 606 - 626
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

G. Roger Knight taught Indonesian history for many years at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of several books and many book chapters and journal articles on the Java sugar industry and related matters, but his most recent production, Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth Century Southeast Asia. Gillian Maclaine and his Business Network, 1816–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015) had almost nothing to do with that particular commodity. He cannot, however, promise the same for his current research and writing, which includes (in conjunction with Colin Brown of Griffith University, Queensland) a study of the evolution of the postcolonial Indonesian sugar industry from the 1930s onward. For this article, he remains grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this journal, whose helpful critique has, he hopes, done much to improve and clarify a once more tentative argument. The author is profoundly grateful to the late Peter Christiaans, formerly of the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague, for invaluable assistance in locating biographical data on many of the individuals discussed in this article, and Mariske Heijmans of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in Amsterdam for kindly drawing his attention to materials relating to the massa moord in Tegal in the NIOD archives. Earlier versions of this paper benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions by Peter Post (NIOD); Remco Raben (University of Utrecht) and Tom van den Berge (KITLV).

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