Segregating the Seas: Maritime Tourism and Imperial Authority in Southeast Asia, 1920s–30s

During the 1920s and 30s, Dutch passenger liners carried thousands of touristsacross colonial Indonesia, the Straits Settlements, China, and Japan. However, the colorful images promoted in tourist brochures overlooked the varied experiences of instability and confusion often present onboard passenger ships during the interwar period, where the intersection of race, class, religion, and nationality amongst globally mobile passengers and workers created a mix of contradictory messages. Images of the “Indies” filled with docile and grateful Indonesians—working together with Dutch colonists to create an orderly and successful empire—clashed with the realities of empire faced by tourists. Maritime travel exposed tourists to complicated struggles over power and identity at sea, in foreign port cities, and within colonial Indonesia. Ships served as colonial classrooms, where both colonizer and colonized were taught to interact and behave in ways reflective of terrestrial structures of imperial control. Dutch ideology presumed that if tourists learned to maintain imperial order through hierarchical segregation while at sea, they would reinforce the same colonial hierarchies upon arrival in the colony or metropole. On the decks of Dutch passenger liners, segregation was essential in establishing and maintaining imperial norms around race, class, religion, and nationality and shipping companies tightly regulated both maritime spaces and tourist networks linking ships to shores.