About Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië

Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië

The Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, whose name meant the General Trade Newspaper for the Dutch East Indies, was a Dutch-language newspaper published in Semarang, in Central Java, in the Dutch East Indies, in what is now Indonesia. It was published from 1924 to 1942, a short life by the standards of the colonial press, but a well-documented one. It was founded as a competitor to De Locomotief, one of the most successful Dutch-language newspapers in the Indies, and its eighteen years passed through the hands of a succession of editors whose careers illustrated the workings of the Indies press: a founding editor dismissed within two years, a successor prosecuted for a press offence, a third editor who led it through the Depression, and a takeover in 1936 by the very rival it had been created to challenge. It ceased publication in early 1942 during the Japanese occupation and never resumed after the war.

Founding in Semarang in 1924 under Hoogenstraaten

The Algemeen Handelsblad was established in Semarang in 1924 as a competitor to De Locomotief. That ambition said much about its backing: De Locomotief was Semarang's first newspaper and a leading title of the colony, and challenging it required money. The new paper was printed in the presses of N.V. Drukkerij Benjamins, and it already promised to offer a full wire service, which contemporaries recognised as the mark of a well-funded newspaper, since wire news, distributed in the Indies by the ANETA agency, was the expensive foundation of a modern daily's foreign and inter-island coverage. The first editor of the paper was L. M. C. Hoogenstraaten. In preparing to launch the paper he announced that it would not have any particular political position, but that it would be supportive of the development of the land and people. That declared stance, commercially open and development-minded rather than party-political, was the founding editor's public promise to Semarang's Dutch-speaking readers in a city already served by an entrenched rival.

The dismissal of the founding editor in 1926

Hoogenstraaten's tenure was brief. In June 1926 the paper announced on its front page that Hoogenstraaten was no longer associated with them. According to a wire sent out by ANETA, he had been fired due to a difference of opinion with the management. The episode was reported in the Indies press, including the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad of 14 June 1926, and the manner of it was instructive: a front-page announcement in the paper itself, followed by a wire-service explanation, showed how publicly, and how abruptly, editorial leadership could change at an Indies daily, and how much of a newspaper's internal life was conducted before its competitors and readers. The founding editor who had promised a paper without a particular political position was gone within about two years of the launch, and the Algemeen Handelsblad began the pattern that marked its whole existence, of reinvention under a new editor.

Challenging authority under Evert Jansen, 1926 to 1929

In June 1926 the paper announced that Evert Jansen, who signed his name E. Jansen, would take over editorial duties. He had until recently been a correspondent working for the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad in Yogyakarta, but he had worked on various newspapers in the Indies since 1915, including major papers such as De Locomotief and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, so the new editor of the anti-Locomotief challenger was himself a former Locomotief man. His appointment was made more permanent and full-time in January of the following year. Jansen was a figure in Semarang's Indo-European community life: the record of his career indicated that he was a member of the mixed-race Indo community, he became involved in the Indo Europeesch Verbond organisation and was appointed to its board, and in early 1929, when the previous representative died, he stepped forward as the organisation's new representative on the Semarang city council, although, since he left Semarang before the end of that year, he was himself replaced in that position before long. His editorship collided with authority in the classic Indies manner. In July 1929 he was charged with a persdelict, a press offence: he was held responsible, as editor, for printing an article that insulted the good name of Mr. Minderman, the fired head of a local school, who was accused of forgery and misappropriation of school funds. Jansen was found guilty and given a punishment of 150 guilders or fourteen days' imprisonment. The case was a precise example of the legal exposure of an Indies editor, personally answerable for what his paper printed about a local official.

Jansen's departure and the move to East Java

In late 1929 Jansen stepped down as editor of the Handelsblad and left Semarang to become editor of at least two Dutch-language newspapers in East Java, De Malanger in Malang and De Indische Courant in Surabaya. His career after Semarang underlined how small and interconnected the world of the Dutch-language Indies press was: the editor of a Semarang challenger paper moved within months to edit titles in Malang and Surabaya, just as he had earlier moved between the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, De Locomotief and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad. In September 1940 the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad marked Jansen's twenty-five years in the profession, a jubilee notice that traced a quarter-century spent entirely in that interconnected Indies newspaper world. For the Algemeen Handelsblad, his departure closed its most combative period, the years in which it had acquired both a seat on the Semarang city council, through its editor, and a press-offence conviction.

Financial problems under Leertouwer in the Depression

W. Leertouwer, who had until recently been editor of the magazine Sumatra in Medan and of De Malanger in Malang, took over Jansen's duties in the summer of 1930. It was a difficult time to work at the newspaper, because it was hit very hard by the start of the Great Depression, which caused deep financial problems for the company that owned the paper, N.V. Benjamins. The Depression struck the Indies export economy severely, and advertising and circulation revenues of papers across the colony contracted with it; for a challenger paper that had been launched on the promise of an expensive full wire service, the downturn attacked exactly the advantage on which it had been founded. The paper also met the colonial state in its censorship capacity during these years. During the 1930s the paper's licence to publish was temporarily suspended, along with a number of other Dutch-language papers, over coverage of the Zeven Provinciën uprising, a mutiny on a Dutch warship in February 1933 in which Indonesian and Dutch sailors seized the ship before it was bombed into surrender with heavy loss of life. The colonial government was worried about the widespread labour unrest that might be incited by continuing coverage of the event. A temporary suspension of that kind, imposed on several Dutch-language papers at once, showed that even the colony's European press, normally far freer than the Indonesian-language press, published under a licence the government could withdraw when its reporting touched military discipline and labour unrest.

Takeover by De Locomotief in 1936

The Depression-era logic of consolidation reached its conclusion in 1936. In that year the paper was taken over by its more popular competitor, De Locomotief, the very newspaper the Algemeen Handelsblad had been founded in 1924 to compete against. Leertouwer and P. Scheepers were kept on as editors, and the paper continued to be run as a separate newspaper. The arrangement preserved the title, its newsroom and its separate identity while ending its independence: Semarang's two Dutch-language dailies were now under one ownership, and the challenger survived as a companion title to the established paper it had failed to displace. The takeover was reported in the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad on 4 January 1936, another instance of the Indies press reporting on itself as a matter of public interest to its trade and its readers.

The final years under Scheepers and the end in 1942

The editor of the paper in its final years was P. Scheepers, who, like his predecessor Jansen, was active in the Indo Europeesch Verbond, as well as in local sports organisations in Semarang, including football and cycling. He was editor of De Stadion-Revue, a football magazine, and he had also worked as an editor at the Handelsblad during Leertouwer's tenure, although the exact year he began was not clear. His profile, a newspaper editor embedded in his city's Indo-European associational and sporting life, matched the community the Semarang Dutch-language press served. The Algemeen Handelsblad ceased publication at some point in early 1942 during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, and it never resumed after the war. Unlike De Locomotief, which was revived in 1947, and unlike the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, which returned under successor names, the Algemeen Handelsblad ended with the colony whose name it carried: a paper for Nederlandsch-Indië had no second life in the Republic of Indonesia.

Survival in the Delpher archive

The paper's issues survived through the Dutch national digitisation of the colonial press. Digitised issues of the Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië were made available on Delpher, the newspaper platform of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, and its front page of 16 April 1924, from its founding season, was reproduced as the paper's representative image in reference works. Much of what is known of its internal history, the front-page announcement of Hoogenstraaten's departure, Jansen's appointment notices and his press-offence case, was reconstructed by historians from notices in the paper itself and in its fellow Indies titles, a reminder that the colonial press was often its own best archive.

Assessment

The Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië was a case study in the economics and politics of the late colonial press. It was founded with serious money, on a full wire service and a declared non-partisan stance, to challenge one of the strongest Dutch-language papers in the Indies, in a single city. Within twelve years it had lost its founding editor to dismissal, seen his successor convicted of a press offence and drawn into municipal and Indo-European politics, been battered by the Depression, been suspended over its coverage of a naval mutiny, and been absorbed by its rival. That it continued for six further years under that rival's ownership, under an editor rooted in Semarang's sporting and associational life, before disappearing in the Japanese occupation of 1942, made its short life a compact history of the world that produced it, the Dutch-language newspaper world of the late Dutch East Indies.