Note sull'episodio
Eduard Douwes Dekker was a career Dutch colonial administrator in the Dutch East Indies, where the state had taken over from the bankrupt Dutch East India Company and ran the cultivation system, forcing farmers to grow coffee, sugar, and indigo instead of rice, alongside a state opium monopoly marked with a chemical tracer. Posted as assistant resident to Lebak after his predecessor Slotering likely died of poison, Dekker found the local regent seizing villagers' water buffalo and forcing men into unpaid labor. He even lent the regent his own savings, hoping debt was the problem.
His superior, the resident of Bantam, blocked his report, and when Dekker went to the governor general, the aide who locked him in a room was his own brother-in-law. Dekker resigned, sat freezing in Amsterdam, and wrote Max Havelaar under the pen name Multatuli, I have suffered much. Published in May 1860, it used the pompous coffee broker Batavus Droogstoppel as a narrator to mock Dutch complacency, then ended with a direct plea to King William III. The outrage pushed the colony toward the Ethical Policy, whose schools helped train Indonesia's nationalist leaders.
- The book cost four guilders and sold out so quickly a second printing was ordered.
- Publisher J. de Ruyter secretly reset the entire text to print an off-the-books edition and pocket the royalties.
- The counterfeit copies were exposed by a printer's error that ran the words lieve lezer together on page one.
- Dekker did not get to restore his own unedited text until the fourth edition of 1875.
- Pramoedya Ananta Toer called it the book that killed colonialism, yet an Indonesian translation only came in 1972.