Industrialisation, De-industrialisation and Women’s Work: Textile Production in the Dutch Empire

This chapter studies the relationships between the processes of industrialisation and de-industrialisation and women’s work within a colonial context. It does so by investigating textile production in the Netherlands, as well as in its overseas colony Java. The important position of women in the textile industry—the forerunner of mechanisation in the nineteenth century—has been understudied by economic historians, because their work generally remains unrecorded in the statistical sources. By including women’s work, I challenge two common claims in the historiography: first, that Java would have de-industrialised due to Dutch colonial economic policies, and, second, that new colonial markets for textiles in Java directly boosted the lagged industrialisation in the Netherlands. To this end, this chapter first highlights more general developments in industrial policies in the Dutch Empire. It then focuses on textile production in Java and the Netherlands, with a specific emphasis on women’s work and the evolution of gender-specific divisions of labour.