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The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A record from Dutch Indonesia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2011

JEAN GELMAN TAYLOR
JEAN GELMAN TAYLOR*
Affiliation:
School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Everyday technologies of the nineteenth century—mass-produced items that were small, sturdy, and affordable—transformed the daily lives of working people in Asian colonies. There is already a large literature on colonial technology transfer and a specialist literature on the sewing-machine, which draws on Singer archives, production figures, sales techniques, and advertising to establish uptake by households from North America to the Philippines, India, China, and Egypt. Still, documentation of how and why imported objects such as the sewing-machine were appropriated is difficult to find because, unlike elites, ordinary people left few records of their own. Here a visual archive is investigated to complement existing studies. Photographs and early moving pictures from the former Dutch East Indies show that ordinary Indonesians sought and appropriated imported goods such as the sewing-machine. The colonial camera's visual record of sewing-machine operators displaces attention from the more impersonal trade and productivity statistics. It brings the silent user into the history of technological uptake and allows us to consider the repercussions across a wide social band and period. Indigenous tailors and seamstresses expanded their own work options. Through the Singer they fitted out and launched their compatriots into modern jobs and lifestyles in the Dutch colony. The sewing-machine changed habits, manners, and expectations; machine operators influenced senses of propriety, fashion, and status. Appropriation of mundane technology demonstrates that modernization was not only a process trickling down to the masses from Westernizing elites; it also bubbled up from below.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1: Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia , January 2012 , pp. 71 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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3 The Images Archive of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Leiden, The Netherlands, has over 128,000 images online, which may be viewed through <http://kitlv.nl>. The Tropenmuseum (TM) photographic collection of the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, contains 155,000 images. Its online archive may be viewed through <http://tropenmuseum.nl>. Photographs discussed in this paper are referenced here by their archival source (KITLV or TM) and code number. For KITLV photographs, use Advanced Search and enter the number into Signature Code. TM photographs are found under Collections Online by entering the number into Search.

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7 The oldest image of a sewing-machine in the Dutch East Indies found by this researcher is in a sketch dated 1880 and captioned ‘Seamstress in the back veranda’, by D. Beets, KITLV#35799. Godley's figures on worldwide uptake of the sewing-machine show that there were 1,000 Singers in households in the Netherlands in 1877. By 1914, the last year in Godley's table, this number had risen to 21,500 (in ‘Global Diffusion’, Table 4, pp. 14–15.) Godley includes figures for Singers in households in India and the Philippines, but he does not address the question of ownership, that is, whether purchasers were Indians and Filipinos or colonials. However, he does note that in India ‘the majority of the population had little use for a sewing-machine; typical native clothing required little machine stitching’ (p. 29).

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12 See, for example, KITLV#40417, tailor's shop, Sabang, February 1913.

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54 By contrast, machinists who worked in the households of colonial India were male. See David Arnold, ‘Global Goods and Local Usages: The Small World of the Indian Sewing-machine, 1875–1952’, Journal of Global History, forthcoming. In similar fashion, Kupferschmidt finds that the sewing-machine was first taken up by male tailors working in shops in the Ottoman provinces, before moving into the home for female use. It became a desirable object in a bride's dowry and a regular item in the equipment of the Middle East's nomads (Kupferschmidt, ‘Social History’, p. 207). Sue Gronewold notes the cultural factors that initially hampered reception of the sewing-machine in China in ‘From Elizabeth to East Asia: The Singer Sewing-machine and Modern Women's New Worlds’, Paper presented at the 6th International Convention of Asia Scholars, Daejeon, Korea, August 2009.

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