Conducts research and collects data on the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations

PhD Defense Klaas Stutje: Indonesian nationalism in Europe

On Wednesday 15 June, IISH employee Klaas Stutje defended his thesis on Indonesian nationalism, in the Auditorium of the University of Amsterdam.
In his thesis, he shows that during the twenties and thirties, Indonesian nationalists were in close contact with anti-colonial groups and activists from other parts of the colonized world,
and that they consistently framed their fight for an independent Indonesia in an international context.

Stutje focuses mainly on the small but important Indonesian student union in the Netherlands, the Perhimpoenan Indonesia (PI), and its contacts in Europe. By focussing in each chapter on one particular Indonesian student in one European city, he identifies the movements and networks that the students joined, the central themes, and the ways in which the students mapped out Indonesia abroad.

From , amongst others, archive material from the IISH collection - especially the archive of the Chung Hwa Hui, the League against Imperialism and the Komintern – it turns out that it was not easy to manifest as a small student organization on the international stage. After several failed attempts to establish contacts with communist organizations in Paris and anti-colonial mass organizations from India and China, the PI later got crushed between the major blocs on the international stage. From this thesis, it becomes clear however, that the PI cannot be reduced to a plaything of the Komintern, as contemporary commentators would have us believe.

By giving a prominent role to the international arena in the analysis of the Indonesian nationalist movement, Stutje aims to free the existing literature on the Indonesian political history of traditional national and imperial interpretation frames, and to make a connection with the Global History of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements.

Since May 2016 Klaas Stutje has been working as a post doc researcher on the IISH – NIOD project “Four Centuries of Labour Camps’

Thesis: Behind the Banner of Unity: Nationalism and Anticolonialism among Indonesian Students in Europe, 1917-1931

Supervisor:

Prof. dr. Joep Leerssen

Co-Supervisor:

Dr. Harry Poeze

Posted: 
1 June 2016