David Henley
Biographic Data
| ID | 630071 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Henley |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Henley |
| SIGNATURE | HENLEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7618-4956 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Minahasa
The eighteenth century remains a mysterious period in the history of Minahasa. It has often been treated as a rather uneventful interlude between the foundation of Dutch power in the seventeenth century, and the dramatic and well-known colonial transformations of the nineteenth, beginning with the Tondano War of 1808-1809 and the imposition of compulsory coffee cultivation in 1822. This article brings together material from existing research, bot…
Amplified Waves
This chapter explores the nexus of religious sound and social conflict in multiethnic Indonesia.It analyzes recent controversy over mosque loudspeakers, including the case of a non-Muslim woman who was imprisoned in 2018 for "religious defamation" after complaining about noise from her local mosque.This event was bound up with a broader contest between groups favoring a greater role for Islam in the public domain, and groups upholding the princip…
Amplified Waves
Amplified Waves
This chapter explores the nexus of religious sound and social conflict in multiethnic Indonesia. It analyzes recent controversy over mosque loudspeakers, including the case of a non-Muslim woman who was imprisoned in 2018 for “religious defamation” after complaining about noise from her local mosque. This event was bound up with a broader contest between groups favoring a greater role for Islam in the public domain, and groups upholding the princ…
Monsoon Asia
Body Modification in East Asia
This short article introduces the special issue “Chasing Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery and Skin Lightening in East Asia”. It highlights the scale of and interest in the current boom in these procedures across Northeast and Southeast Asia, and outlines some questions of causality and interpretation arising from that boom. It then summarises the contents of the other five contributions to the collection, and identifies a number of common themes and conc…
Body Modification in East Asia
This article outlines the long-term historical development of body modification in East (Northeast and Southeast) Asia, from the intentionally transformative practices of prehistory, such as tattooing and tooth blackening, to the “naturalistic” practices of the 20th century, such as cosmetic surgery, which aim to leave no visible evidence of change. Attention is also paid to the recent postmodern revival of transformative body fashions. Asian dev…
Precolonial citizenship in South Sulawesi
Citizenship is a difficult concept to apply to non-Western societies. The idea of citizenship has its origins in Ancient Athens and Republican Rome, its modern form having been shaped by the French Revolution and the nationalisms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Yet the idea of a social contract between members of a society and their leaders is also found in non-Western societies. The notion of integrated rights and duties of free ind…
The Role of China and Southeast Asia in Africa’s Agricultural Transformation I
Is the Asian experience more relevant for African renaissance than it is generally assumed? I am alluding to the lessons that could be drawn from a close examination of the transformation that had occurred in the twentieth century in Japan and China, and particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. The answer, I argue, must be definitely yes. In each of these countries, positive economic change was preceded by a sustained and successful effor…
In memoriam Peter Boomgaard
Debate
outcomes described by Li with similar and contrasting cases elsewhere would help reveal to what extent the fate of the Lauje represents a universal story, and to what extent it reflects locally specific factors, such as the markedly individualistic tendencies which Li describes as characteristic of Lauje economic behaviour even before the cacao era
I ndonesia
With one‐tenth of all living languages, and numerous adherents of every major religion, Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries. Accordingly its national identity, born in an anticolonial revolution rather than a precolonial culture or kingdom, is resolutely multicultural, emphasizing pluralism and tolerance, yet rooted in centralized political and educational institutions that the revolution created. Except in one area, Aceh, s…
Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia
The Origins Of Southeast Asian Nations
This chapter explores the historical origins of today's Southeast Asian nations. Some of the region's precolonial societies—including Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma on the mainland, but also Java in maritime Southeast Asia—had characteristics which predisposed them to serve as vehicles for modern nationalist movements: ethnic distinctiveness and homogeneity, and a tradition of political unity and independence. Whether or not this potentia…
Forced Labour and Rising Fertility in Colonial Indonesia
This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in nineteenth-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonia…
Swidden Farming as an Agent of Environmental Change
Swidden farming, once condemned as a major cause of deforestation, has increasingly come to be seen as a form of forest management and even conservation. Under traditional conditions, it is now assumed, swiddening was a sustainable practice and cultivation cycles were long enough to allow forest to regenerate during the fallow interval. This article tests these assumptions against historical evidence from Sulawesi (Indonesia) in the period 1820-1…
Credit and Debt in Indonesia, 860-1930
Credit and debt are practical concerns of all times and places. They are also increasingly important topics in economic history and the social sciences, from Marcel Mauss and the anthropology of the gift to the urgent quest for understanding of today's global credit crunch. This volume brings together eight essays on credit and debt in the history of Indonesia, where for centuries debt and debt bondage played central roles in the organization of …
Kings and Covenants
This paper explores the relationship between stranger-kingship and contractual authority in the history of the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia). In most parts of Sulawesi, social and political stratification were always pronounced. At the same time the power of kings and chiefs was restricted by more or less explicit social contracts defining their rights and duties with respect to the political community as a whole, typically consisting of an olig…
Introduction
To Java came the nations of the world New masters ever sailing to her shores Prevailing one by one like serried clouds Only her native sons were never her lords – H.A. Meijer, ‘A farewell to Java’
Natural Resource Management
In the Name ofAdat
This article examines the revival ofadat(custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise ofadatrevivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratizatio…
The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics
Introduction: radical conservatism - the protean politics of adat David Henley and Jamie S. Davidson 2. Colonial dilemma: Van Vollenhoven and the struggle between adat law and Western law in Indonesia C. Fasseur 3. Custom, that is before all law Peter Burns 4. Custom and koperasi: the cooperative ideal in Indonesia David Henley 5. The romance of adat in the Indonesian political imagination and the current revival David Bourchier 6. Land, custom a…
The Fate of Federalism
Cet article, par une approche biographique, explore les facteurs politiques liés à la région et à l’identité à Sulawesi Nord, plus spécialement au Minahasa, durant les décennies du milieu du xxe siècle. Examinant le parcours de trois hommes politiques clés de cette période, G.S.S.J. Ratulangie, A.E. Kawilarang et A.Z.R. Wenas, il met en lumière des continuités caractéristiques dans la vie politique minahasa depuis la fin de l’époque coloniale, à …
From low to high fertility in Sulawesi (Indonesia) during the colonial period
This paper examines the past transition from low to high fertility which, in Indonesia as elsewhere, preceded the return to lower birth rates. Data from two parts of the island of Sulawesi where fertility rose during the colonial period are used to explain both why it rose, and why it was originally low. Economic conditions, it is argued, were the most important factors, affecting fertility via the supply of income and the demand for labour. Two …
Fertility, Food and Fever
Combining historical geography with historical demography, and conceived as a study in environmental history, this book examines the long-term relationship between population, economy and environment in the northern half of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Using a rich variety of Dutch historical sources, including VOC and missionary archives, it attempts to reconstruct and analyse patterns of demographic, economic and landscape change througho…
In the Name ofAdat
This article examines the revival ofadat(custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise ofadatrevivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratizatio…
Conflict, Justice, and the Stranger-King Indigenous Roots of Colonial Rule in Indonesia and Elsewhere
Historians of Indonesia often think of states, and especially colonial states, as predatory institutions encroaching aggressively on the territory and autonomy of freedom-loving stateless peoples. For Barbara and Leonard Andaya, early European expansion in Sumatra and the Moluccas was synonymous with the distortion or destruction of decentralized indigenous political systems based on cooperation, alliance, economic complementarity, and myths of c…
Natural Resource Management
Nationalism and Regionalism in a Colonial Context
The "regional nationalisms" of early twentieth century Indonesia are often portrayed either as mere components of the Indonesian nationalist movement or as expressions of "primordial" ethnic sentiments. Minahasa, however, displayed a local nationalism which was neither.Minahasan nationalism was an autonomous development conditioned by many of the same modernising processes which generated its Indonesian counterpart, but operating on a smaller sca…
Body Modification in East Asia
This article outlines the long-term historical development of body modification in East (Northeast and Southeast) Asia, from the intentionally transformative practices of prehistory, such as tattooing and tooth blackening, to the “naturalistic” practices of the 20th century, such as cosmetic surgery, which aim to leave no visible evidence of change. Attention is also paid to the recent postmodern revival of transformative body fashions. Asian dev…
Nationalism and Regionalism in Colonial Indonesia
a David HenleyThe "regional nationalisms" of the early twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies are usually portrayed as mere subcomponents of the emerging Indonesian nationalist move ment.Akira Nagazumi's authoritative work on the first ten years of Budi Utomo, for in stance, is entitled The Dawn o f Indonesian Nationalism-* 1 Yet this Javanese nationalist organi zation consistently refused to embrace the outer islands-tanah sabrang, the lands …
Swidden Farming as an Agent of Environmental Change
Swidden farming, once condemned as a major cause of deforestation, has increasingly come to be seen as a form of forest management and even conservation. Under traditional conditions, it is now assumed, swiddening was a sustainable practice and cultivation cycles were long enough to allow forest to regenerate during the fallow interval. This article tests these assumptions against historical evidence from Sulawesi (Indonesia) in the period 1820-1…
Population and the Means of Subsistence
the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typical…
From low to high fertility in Sulawesi (Indonesia) during the colonial period
This paper examines the past transition from low to high fertility which, in Indonesia as elsewhere, preceded the return to lower birth rates. Data from two parts of the island of Sulawesi where fertility rose during the colonial period are used to explain both why it rose, and why it was originally low. Economic conditions, it is argued, were the most important factors, affecting fertility via the supply of income and the demand for labour. Two …
Agrarian change and diversity in the light of Brookfield, Boserup and Malthus
This paper uses historical sources to examine the relationship between demography, economy and ecology in three parts of the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia) over a long time period. Broadly speaking, these case studies suggest both the density of population and the intensity of agricultural activity at any given time and place were controlled by two factors. The first was the agricultural potential of the natural environment in terms of soil, clim…
Body Modification in East Asia
This short article introduces the special issue “Chasing Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery and Skin Lightening in East Asia”. It highlights the scale of and interest in the current boom in these procedures across Northeast and Southeast Asia, and outlines some questions of causality and interpretation arising from that boom. It then summarises the contents of the other five contributions to the collection, and identifies a number of common themes and conc…
Forced Labour and Rising Fertility in Colonial Indonesia
This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in nineteenth-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonia…
Regional nationalism in a colonial state
Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism
In one chapter ofImagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indo…
Nationalism and Regionalism in Colonial Indonesia
a David HenleyThe "regional nationalisms" of the early twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies are usually portrayed as mere subcomponents of the emerging Indonesian nationalist move ment.Akira Nagazumi's authoritative work on the first ten years of Budi Utomo, for in stance, is entitled The Dawn o f Indonesian Nationalism-* 1 Yet this Javanese nationalist organi zation consistently refused to embrace the outer islands-tanah sabrang, the lands …
Regional nationalism in a colonial state
Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism
In one chapter ofImagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indo…
Nationalism and Regionalism in a Colonial Context
This book describes and analyses Minahasan regional nationalism in the period up to 1942. Attention is given to precolonial antecedents, to the transformations brought about by compulsory coffee cultivation, Christian mission activity and Western education, to the role of local representative councils, to the privileged position which Minahasans came to occupy relative to other Indonesians within the colonial state, and to the ambiguous relations…
Nationalism and Regionalism in a Colonial Context
The "regional nationalisms" of early twentieth century Indonesia are often portrayed either as mere components of the Indonesian nationalist movement or as expressions of "primordial" ethnic sentiments. Minahasa, however, displayed a local nationalism which was neither.Minahasan nationalism was an autonomous development conditioned by many of the same modernising processes which generated its Indonesian counterpart, but operating on a smaller sca…
Paper Landscapes
Peter Boomgaard, Introducing environmental histories of Harold Brookfield, Land degradation in the Indonesian region, interpreted as landscape history Anthony Reid, Inside-out: colonial displacement of Sumatra's David Henley, Carrying capacity, climatic variation and the problem of low population growth among Indonesian swidden farmers: Evidence from North Sulawesi Han Knapen, Epidemics, drought and other uncertainties in Southeast Borneo during …
Population, Economy and Environment in Island Southeast Asia
This article attempts to provide a long historical perspective on the relationship between population, environment, and the use of economic resources (particularly agricultural land) in island Southeast Asia. Historically speaking, it is argued, both the size and the distribution of Southeast Asia’s human population have been determined mainly by economic factors: population geography has reflected economic geography, and population growth has fo…
Conflict, Justice, and the Stranger-King Indigenous Roots of Colonial Rule in Indonesia and Elsewhere
Historians of Indonesia often think of states, and especially colonial states, as predatory institutions encroaching aggressively on the territory and autonomy of freedom-loving stateless peoples. For Barbara and Leonard Andaya, early European expansion in Sumatra and the Moluccas was synonymous with the distortion or destruction of decentralized indigenous political systems based on cooperation, alliance, economic complementarity, and myths of c…
Fertility, Food and Fever
Combining historical geography with historical demography, and conceived as a study in environmental history, this book examines the long-term relationship between population, economy and environment in the northern half of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Using a rich variety of Dutch historical sources, including VOC and missionary archives, it attempts to reconstruct and analyse patterns of demographic, economic and landscape change througho…
Agrarian change and diversity in the light of Brookfield, Boserup and Malthus
This paper uses historical sources to examine the relationship between demography, economy and ecology in three parts of the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia) over a long time period. Broadly speaking, these case studies suggest both the density of population and the intensity of agricultural activity at any given time and place were controlled by two factors. The first was the agricultural potential of the natural environment in terms of soil, clim…
Population and the Means of Subsistence
the phenomenon of low population growth in pre-colonial southeast asia is often interpreted in terms of epidemic disease, internecine warfare or cultural idiosyncracies affecting the birth rate. the modern population boom, in these analyses, results from medical and public health improvements, military pacification or foreign cultural influences. this article, by contrast, argues that in indonesia and the philippines population growth has typical…
From low to high fertility in Sulawesi (Indonesia) during the colonial period
This paper examines the past transition from low to high fertility which, in Indonesia as elsewhere, preceded the return to lower birth rates. Data from two parts of the island of Sulawesi where fertility rose during the colonial period are used to explain both why it rose, and why it was originally low. Economic conditions, it is argued, were the most important factors, affecting fertility via the supply of income and the demand for labour. Two …
The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics
Introduction: radical conservatism - the protean politics of adat David Henley and Jamie S. Davidson 2. Colonial dilemma: Van Vollenhoven and the struggle between adat law and Western law in Indonesia C. Fasseur 3. Custom, that is before all law Peter Burns 4. Custom and koperasi: the cooperative ideal in Indonesia David Henley 5. The romance of adat in the Indonesian political imagination and the current revival David Bourchier 6. Land, custom a…
The Fate of Federalism
Cet article, par une approche biographique, explore les facteurs politiques liés à la région et à l’identité à Sulawesi Nord, plus spécialement au Minahasa, durant les décennies du milieu du xxe siècle. Examinant le parcours de trois hommes politiques clés de cette période, G.S.S.J. Ratulangie, A.E. Kawilarang et A.Z.R. Wenas, il met en lumière des continuités caractéristiques dans la vie politique minahasa depuis la fin de l’époque coloniale, à …
Kings and Covenants
This paper explores the relationship between stranger-kingship and contractual authority in the history of the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia). In most parts of Sulawesi, social and political stratification were always pronounced. At the same time the power of kings and chiefs was restricted by more or less explicit social contracts defining their rights and duties with respect to the political community as a whole, typically consisting of an olig…
Introduction
To Java came the nations of the world New masters ever sailing to her shores Prevailing one by one like serried clouds Only her native sons were never her lords – H.A. Meijer, ‘A farewell to Java’
Natural Resource Management
In the Name ofAdat
This article examines the revival ofadat(custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise ofadatrevivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratizatio…
Credit and Debt in Indonesia, 860-1930
Credit and debt are practical concerns of all times and places. They are also increasingly important topics in economic history and the social sciences, from Marcel Mauss and the anthropology of the gift to the urgent quest for understanding of today's global credit crunch. This volume brings together eight essays on credit and debt in the history of Indonesia, where for centuries debt and debt bondage played central roles in the organization of …
Forced Labour and Rising Fertility in Colonial Indonesia
This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in nineteenth-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonia…
Swidden Farming as an Agent of Environmental Change
Swidden farming, once condemned as a major cause of deforestation, has increasingly come to be seen as a form of forest management and even conservation. Under traditional conditions, it is now assumed, swiddening was a sustainable practice and cultivation cycles were long enough to allow forest to regenerate during the fallow interval. This article tests these assumptions against historical evidence from Sulawesi (Indonesia) in the period 1820-1…
The Origins Of Southeast Asian Nations
This chapter explores the historical origins of today's Southeast Asian nations. Some of the region's precolonial societies—including Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma on the mainland, but also Java in maritime Southeast Asia—had characteristics which predisposed them to serve as vehicles for modern nationalist movements: ethnic distinctiveness and homogeneity, and a tradition of political unity and independence. Whether or not this potentia…
I ndonesia
With one‐tenth of all living languages, and numerous adherents of every major religion, Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries. Accordingly its national identity, born in an anticolonial revolution rather than a precolonial culture or kingdom, is resolutely multicultural, emphasizing pluralism and tolerance, yet rooted in centralized political and educational institutions that the revolution created. Except in one area, Aceh, s…
Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia
Debate
outcomes described by Li with similar and contrasting cases elsewhere would help reveal to what extent the fate of the Lauje represents a universal story, and to what extent it reflects locally specific factors, such as the markedly individualistic tendencies which Li describes as characteristic of Lauje economic behaviour even before the cacao era
Asian Studies and History (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Geography (17 works) · Law (16 works) · History (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Population (11 works) · Development economics (10 works)