Taming the Coolie Beast (trans. from Dutch)

When Van den Brand wrote his pamphlet Millions from Delhi, in the beginning of the twentieth century, it shocked public opinion in The Netherlands. The pamphlet documented tales of horror, which were everyday experiences of the coolies on the tobacco plantations in the Dutch colony of Sumatral. The rumblings which the pamphlet caused shook the government and it ordered an investigation known as the Rhemrev Report.The Report was eventually suppressed by the Dutch Government because it revealed a state of affairs even more horrifying than what the Millions from Delhi had disclosed.Professor Breman came upon the Rhemrev Report accidentally in the archives while working on migrant labour in South and Southeast Asia. The result is the present book.The Coolie Beast unfolds the social organization on the plantations in Sumatra. Class structure was organized along racist lines into white planters and Asian coolies, and the later were further devided into head foremen, workers and contract workers. The historian and the economist will find the comparison with plantations in the Americas and elsewhere interesting. This book is revealing for yet another reason. Breman gives a graphic description of the manner in which scandals were supressed by the policy-makers both in the colony and in the home-country.