Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History) (Paperback)

by Rudolf Mrazek (Author) "IT MAY help, just for a moment, to think, with Bergson, about a landscape in the beginning, as if it were "the surface of a..." (more)
Key Phrases: groote land, tempo doeloe, orgaan van, Mas Marco, Netherlands Indies, Dutch Indies (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
A striking and deeply engaging historical study. . . . In tracing this history, Rudolf Mrazek takes the reader on a journey, sometimes strange, through the jungles, laboratories, houses, trains, and latrines of late-colonial life. He also brings to life a cast of historical characters . . . who used everything from toilets to airplanes as tools for articulating and reflecting upon what it meant to be modern in the Indies. . . . Mraze develops his theoretical insights with a light hand through the telling of an original history that takes surprising and quirky turns. -- Review

A thought-provoking study. . . . Recommended reading for anyone who studies this period of Indonesian history. -- Tineke Hellwig, Pacific Affairs

Conveys the feel and flavor of modernity as it took root in the early twentieth-century Indonesia. -- James R. Rush , American Historical Review

Review
A thought-provoking study. . . . Recommended reading for anyone who studie this period of Indonesian history.
(Tineke Hellwig Pacific Affairs )

As no other book has done, this one conveys the feel and flavor of modernity as it took root in the early twentieth-century Indonesia.
(James R. Rush American Historical Review )

A striking and deeply engaging historical study. . . . In tracing this history, Rudolf Mrazek takes the reader on a journey, sometimes strange, through the jungles, laboratories, houses, trains, and latrines of late-colonial life. He also brings to life a cast of historical characters . . . who used everything from toilets to airplanes as tools for articulating and reflecting upon what it meant to be modern in the Indies. . . . Mraze develops his theoretical insights with a light hand through the telling of an original history that takes surprising and quirky turns.
(Joshua Barker Technology and Culture )

Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony is a wonderfully moody book. Moody, because it aims at capturing the aura of the Dutch East Indies in the last seventy-five years of colonial rule almost as much as it attempts to tell a critical, historical story. Wonderful, because it succeeds at this project better than any other book that I have read about this particular time and place. One feels as if time travel has been accomplished by the time that the last page is reached. . . . We do not so much analyze the world of this Dutch colony from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as we live in it for three hundred pages. . . . It really should be read by anyone who cares about Indonesia.
(Eric Tagliacozzo Journal of Asian Studies )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691091625
• ISBN-13: 978-0691091624
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #816,211 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a brilliant work with outstanding originality, March 7, 2006

By	ewa arsuka (Jakarta) - See all my reviews

Some experts call Walter Benjamin's 1000-plus page magnum opus The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard 1999) quite simply one of the greatest 20th century efforts to comprehend "History". Some even call this thick tome the greatest endeavour of all studies into one of the most fundamental perceptions in 2500 years of world development: a perception arising from awareness of the way the relationship between limited humanity and unlimited time dictates human life.

Inspired by various sources, particularly Marcel Proust and Martin Heidegger, Mrázek does something nearly similar to Benjamin. Mrázek, an expert on modern Southeast Asian history who was born in the Czech Republic and later moved to America, achieves it in this book.

The Arcades Project excavated bits of debris and `re-built' vanished 19th century Paris - then the world capital - and in so doing , offered fragments of dreams (with its interpretations) of a continent, an era. Mrázek examines Indonesia at the end of Dutch colonial rule, and from this offers an exciting alternative in studying nation, identity and culture in the 20th century. If The Arcades Project - sabotaged as it was by World War II - appeared more like a vast montage or commentary on a number of books than a whole book in itself, Engineers of Happy Land is a book that had enough time to become a fine composition, with a structure and a form of writing that appear deeply considered.

Mrázek organizes the book into six large chapters. The first, titled "Language as Asphalt" is about the technology of moving and expansion, movement and speed. The second chapter is titled "Towers", marking nicely the change of subject from constructions spread out horizontally to constructions erected vertically. The last chapter is titled `Only the Deaf Can Hear Well'. This chapter centres around Pramoedya Ananta Tour, a figure whose life story is clearly not as a statesman or an engineer, but who boomed out modernity and nationalism. He built Indonesian nationalism not with mechanical equipment, but with linguistic tools: with the novel, short stories, essays and letters.

In Pramoedya's lifestory and the events that befell him in exile, Mrázek provides an example of the life of struggle of a nation deeply wounded in gaining its independence. Pramoedya's greatness does not arise from his position as an innocent victim, with selective memory, stubborn-headed and deaf from a pistol-butt strike. The epilogue invites the reader to `leap' to the present, to Pramoedya who in his twilight years ponders the passing of time; and in so doing threads together all the previous chapters, from colonial consolidation to the emergence of independence. This time, spiritual independence.

Mrázek structures his book as an engineer builds an integrated circuit: each section supports the others and their connection sparks ideas. Or, like a sensitive poet aware of the power of space between juxtaposed images that appear momentarily without interconnection. From chapter one through to the epilogue, Mrázek presents a myriad of quotes from letters and diaries, cultural essays, political speeches, novels, poetry, song lyrics, paintings, newspaper reports and advertisement clippings, all against a background of time moving linearly from the late 19th century through to mid and late 20th century. Scattering fragments in constellar fashion, this book is a layered texture that presents simultaneously political, cultural and psychological reality in the Netherlands Indies.

Historians who have scrutinized data from Indonesia from the period Mrázek studies know just how much he has not yet touched. However, with this `limited' data, and in a tidy 300 page book, Mrázek has produced a rich and complex work, so much so that it is impossible to summarize without distorting and ruining it. Mrázek shows how `the World' and `History' are indeed incredibly important parts of Indonesia, of its birth and continuing existence.

Apart from breaking down the walls of time by loosening its intricacies and widening its flow so that the past feels manifest in the present, Engineers also smashes spacial walls and shows that the basic problems of people in Europe were not so different from those of people in Indonesia. If the nationalists in the Indies were anxious about themselves and their past, the colonists were also anxious about themselves, their nation's bankruptcy as a 17th century superpower, occupied by Napoleon and then trampled by Hitler. Culture, identity and sense of nation in the late colonial era are truly clear reflections of dynamics at a global level. The impulse for freedom and to have the right answers for history, to comprehend appropriately the seige of foreign reality that presents itself as chaos, is the same in all corners of the globe. This is why there is nothing strange in the fact that things then just starting to explode in Europe, the avante-garde movement for instance, were already echoing in Nusantara.

Nationalism is the undercurrent of this book, but beneath it flows a wider current, a current affirming that alongside all kinds of difference that strike the senses, people - West or East, white or brown - truly have many similarities. Human differences are caused by their similarities: the thorns and flowers of that difference blossom because the basic roots of similarity - the urge to live and thrive, to sense and make sense of the world - must respond to different contexts. Once these contexts are altered and made the same, then the similarities that lie in the anthropological bases of human communities become clearly visible.

(...)