Dutch Ethical Policy - Formulation of The Dutch Ethical Policy

Formulation of The Dutch Ethical Policy

In 1899, the liberal Dutch lawyer Conrad Theodor van Deventer published an essay in the Dutch journal De Gids which claimed that the Colonial Government had a moral responsibility to return the wealth that the Dutch had received from the East Indies to the indigenous population.

Pieter Brooshooft (1845-1921), a journalist wrote about the moral duty of the Dutch to provide more for the peoples of the Indies. With the support of socialists and concerned middle class Dutch, he campaigned against what he saw as the unjustness of the colonial surplus. He described the Indies indigenous peoples as "childlike" and in need of assistance not oppression. Newspapers were one of the few mediums of Indies communication to the Dutch parliament, and as editor of the De Locomotief, the largest of the Dutch-language newspapers in the Indies, he published writing by Snouck Hurgronje on understanding Indonesians. Brooshooft sent reporters across the archipelago to report on local developments who reported on the poverty, crop failure, famine and epidemics in 1900. Lawyers and politicians supportive of Brooshooft's campaigning had an audience with Queen Wilhelmina and argued that the Netherlands owed the peoples of the Indies a 'debt of honour'.

In 1901, the Queen, under advice from her prime minister of the Christian Anti-Revolutionary Party, formally declared a benevolent "Ethical Policy" which was aimed at bringing progress and prosperity to the peoples of the Indies. The Dutch conquest of the Indies brought the it together as a single colonial entity by the early twentieth century which was fundamental to the policy's implementation.

Proponents of the Ethical Policy argued that financial transfers should not be made to Holland while conditions for the indigenous peoples of the archipelago were poor.