ABSTRACT
The Dutch colonial empire lay in Asia; as an economically valuable and relatively well-developed region while the proximity of China, Japan, and India gave rise quite early on to a modern nationalist movement, thus causing problems for the Dutch. Belgium and Portugal, on the other hand, whose colonies were predominantly in Africa, had no serious protests of an anti-colonial nature to face before 1939. The profits nevertheless did predominantly find their way to the Netherlands. A total investment of 5,000 million guilders was planned for Indonesia in 1929, four-fifths of this Dutch capital; every hour, the historian Jan Romein asserted, some 50,000 guilders in profits flowed from Indonesia back to Holland. The Congo colony rested securely on the three pillars of authoritarian administration, mission schools, and big capitalism. The administration was guided by the British doctrine of Indirect Rule, desiring to leave the Africans as undisturbed as possible in their traditional chiefdoms.
