Engineering the Dutch Empire

Since time immemorial, wet rice farming has been practised in Java, the main island of the Indonesian archipelago. For those people there was something divine about running water. Such water was attributed to the gods. The Solo, the biggest river of Java, was for them the Bengawan: the auspicious Lord of the Waters. In the nineteenth century, Dutch irrigation engineers arrived from overseas to subject these water gods to their own technical regimes. In terms of their own religious beliefs, they went about perfecting creation in the Netherlands East Indies. In so doing, the engineers were following in the footsteps of the sovereigns of the old Indo-Javanese domains and their ambitious projects. This book shows what their efforts resulted in. It captures the experiences, the achievements as well as the disappointments of these tropical engineers. Nowadays, their works still predominate in the Javanese landscapes though, ironically, it was precisely the Solo that was to prove too powerful for them! This monograph concludes a series of volumes on irrigation and public works in Indonesia between 1800 and 2015.