Max Havelaar shifted Dutch colonial policy debate as no prior work did

Evidence

As an assault on Dutch colonial policy, there was no equal. According to Van Hoëvell, Max Havelaar’s publication had sent “a tremor through the country.” In part based on his own quarrel as a newly stationed, midranking civil servant with his superiors over abuses of power by Javanese authorities in the Lebak district, no one mistook the novel for fiction. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1105