Soerabaja’s shipyards and arsenal made it the Indies’ first industrial center

Evidence

Of all the reformist visions that captured the imagination of Dutch colonial authorities in the nineteenth-century Indies, none generated more intense debate and exchange of paper than that which centered on the creation of an artisan and craft-based training school—an ambachtschool in east Java’s large port city of Soerabaja. It was not an unexpected choice of location. Soerabaja had long housed a shipbuilding complex, a military installation, civil service employees and civilian Europeans. In the eighteenth century it was home to what has been considered “the first vaguely ‘modern’ manufacturing establishments” in the Netherlands Indies. Along with shipyards and defense installations first established by the Dutch East India Company, in 1851 there was a military arsenal outfitted with metalworking and machine shops manned with European labor. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 670