Colonies of benevolence: A carceral archipelago of empire in the greater Netherlands

ABSTRACT

The Colonies of Benevolence were an early nineteenth century Dutch utopian social experiment in pauper relief, domestic settler colonialism, and segregative rehabilitation; it served as the model for Mettray, held as the epitome of the ‘carceral archipelago’ in Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. This disciplinary experiment served as a model of ‘domestic colonization’ for more than a hundred years that was widely emulated throughout Europe; and was also applied in the distant colony of Java. Many have noted Foucault’s failure to address colonialism in what more rightly should be described as a ‘carceral archipelago of empire’. Here, I address the emergence of domestic colonization as a response to Liberalism’s inner contradictions; between its protection of the individual rights of property holders, and the need to discipline, but not jail, the property-less. Only in this way can the colony’s status as a ‘prison designed not to be a prison’ be understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Discipline
• carceral archipelago
• domestic colonialism
• welfare policy
• Liberalism
• biopower

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Wendy Schutte, Geertje Bernaerts, David Jacques, the members of the Department of Anthropology, York University Research Paper Workshop and the peer reviewers of this paper for the valuable insights and comments they have made on various versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The situation was compounded by a widespread subsistence crisis in the Netherlands between 1816 and 1817 that resulted from the eruption of the volcano Tambura in 1815 in Java that spread ash world-wide, causing the ‘year without a summer’ in Europe and North America. Abnormally low temperatures were recorded from late spring to early autumn of 1815 resulted in a widespread subsistence crisis. The alteration in world climate patterns continued into 1816 and 1817 and prolonged the agricultural crisis (Boers 1995).

2 Corporations in this period were delegations of state authority to favoured subjects for public purposes, usually municipal, educational or religious. They were were a political strategy that delegated governmental (not specifically ‘economic’) tasks to subsidiary jurisdictions. This strategy allowed those favored subjects to make profits on public resources in the provision of public services. The corporate structure of the Society of Benevolence mirrored that of the Dutch East Indies Company (which had exploited the islands of Indonesia for centuries) and other poverty-alleviation businesses such as the ‘Fatherlands Society for Shipping and Trade’ (Vaderlandsche Maatschappij van Rederij en Koophandel). It was an early experiment in this kind of commercial employment creation founded by the Mennonite minister Cornelis Ris in 1777 in the North Holland port of Hoorn with the aid of the House of Orange (Mansvelt 1924 I, 16).

3 The Society’s founder, Johannes van den Bosch, based his plans on the prior work of J.C.W. Jeune (1816), which contains a single reference to the original French version of Bentham’s proposal. This is the only known reference.

4 While the ‘free’ colonists might voluntarily embrace segregation as a ‘space of freedom’ from their immiserated prior lives, the colony itself, I emphasize, was marked by detailed constraints and disciplinary penalties within which they were contractually confined in a form of debt bondage. French and English Penal colonists sent to settler colonies were segregated on their arrival in similar fashion.

5 Van den Bosch had proposed that pauper settlers should first be sent to urban workhouses manufacturing cloth to acclimatize them to work and prepare them for the harsher conditions in the colonies. The plan for these workhouses appears to be based on the ideas of a prominent Dutch philanthropist, Scherenberg (1816), who had called on the king to centralize all the existing workhouses and organize them commercially (Mansvelt 1924 I, 18). This plan was initially rejected for directly competing with the Belgian industry, but after the Belgian Separation in 1830, Van den Bosch (as Minister of Colonies) implemented a version of this plan through a second royal corporation, The Netherlands Trading Society (Schrauwers 2011).

6 For a discussion of the development of Liberal thought in the Netherlands over the course of the nineteenth century see Boschloo (1989), Stuurman (1992) and Groenveld and Wintle (1997).