Colonial civil servant
How this Indonesian civil servant looks reflects his ambivalent position in the Dutch colonial administration. He is carrying a briefcase and wearing a watch chain and European clothes combined with a sarong, slippers and an iket (traditional headwear). Indonesians who participated in the executive administrative apparatus in the Dutch East Indies received a Western education. They had a salary and prestige in the colonial class system. The divide-and-rule principle was successful. Without the involvement of local tax officials, it would have never been possible to govern such a vast area so efficiently.
An enormous amount
The total of all registered tax revenues in the Dutch East Indies from 1848 to 1940 amounted to 25,836,314,430 guilders. Everything the Dutch government collected before 1848 comes on top of this, but those revenues are not well documented. The colonial government also had expenditures, but these are not taken into account because they benefited the Dutch administration rather than the Indonesian people. For example, the Dutch built a railway – not to make travel in Java (more than three times the size of the Netherlands) easier – but to transport timber from the jungles to the port.