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Governor-General Van der Capellen and the Price of Moral Vanity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2011

Extract

The death of G.A.G.P. van der Capellen, ex-Governor-General of the Netherlands East Indies is shrouded in tragedy. In March 1848 he was afflicted by mental illness, which soon developed into a serious form of insanity. Van der Capellen, however, did not suffer for long, as he died on April 10th of the same year. A fact which, out of consideration, was not revealed at the time. Later still the explanation was offered that Van der Capellen had committed suicide “because his own financial affairs were in a muddle too”. Leaving aside the question of what were actually the circumstances of his insanity and death, it should at any rate be regarded as typical that Van der Capellen was persecuted with the financial mismanagement in the Netherlands East Indies up to the very hour of his death. Apart from the outbreak of the Java War nothing so much marked his ten-year term of office as the large deficit at its conclusion.

Type
Trends in Historiography
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1983

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References

Notes

1. van der AA, A. J., Biografisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden (Haarlem, s.a.) III 167.Google Scholar

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4. See for example: Knight, G.R., “John Palmer and Plantation Development in Western Java during the Earlier Nineteenth Century”, BKI 131 (1975) 309337.Google ScholarKnight, G.R., “From Plantation to Padie-field: The Origins of the Nineteenth Century Transformation of Java's Sugar Industry”, Modern Asian Studies 14 (1980) 177204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarCarey, P.B.R., Babad Dipanagara. An Account of the Outbreak of the Java War (1825–1830) (Kuala Lumpur, 1981).Google Scholar P.B.R. Carey, “Waiting for the Ratu Adii (‘Just King’): The Javanese Village Community on the Eve of the Java War (1825–1830)”, Paper presented to the Second Anglo-Dutch Conference on Comparative Colonial History, 23–25 September 1981, Leiden, The Netherlands.

5. Louw, P.J.F., De Java-oorlog van 1825–1830 (Batavia/The Hague, 1894) I 4882Google Scholar; (Batavia/The Hague, 1897) II 1–92.

6. See for an (incomplete) survey of the publications by P.H. van der Kemp: Coolhaas, W.Ph., A Critical Survey of Studies on Dutch Colonial History (The Hague, 1980) 190191.Google Scholar

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