Racialised Colonial-Capitalism as the New Language- Game of the Nineteenth Century

Today's reader may recoil at the language used by some of the writers of the colonial era. In the course of my work as a lecturer who teaches the history, society and politics of Southeast Asia, there have been occasions when I have had to remind my students that the books on their reading list contain language that may seem somewhat alien to them – though that is not an excuse not to read such works. That some may balk at the idea of reading such writers is understandable, considering the sensibilities we share today – though I, for one, do not share the sentiments of those who argue for ‘trigger warnings’ to be pasted on book covers. Yet one is seldom prepared to read of how the Malays, Javanese and Filipinos were summarily written off as lazy natives, of how the Chinese in Java were referred to as bloedzuigers (‘bloodsuckers’) by Dutch colonial administrators, and of how some of these colonial writers were convinced of the biological inferiority of Asians, whom they thought were on the verge of degeneration and extinction thanks to their own inherited genetic deficiencies. By today's standards of political correctness, any social scientist with the temerity to pen such ideas would probably be hounded out of academia.

But the point is that such books were not written today, and that they were works that emerged in the age of empire; and we should not forget that what constituted academic and scientific writing in the nineteenth century was very different from our own understanding of it now.