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The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A record from Dutch Indonesia
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The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A record from Dutch Indonesia
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Journal Article
The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A record from Dutch Indonesia
2012
Overview
Everyday technologies of the nineteenth century—mass-produced items that were small, sturdy, and affordable—transformed the daily lives of working people in Asian colonies. There is already a large literature on colonial technology transfer and a specialist literature on the sewing-machine, which draws on Singer archives, production figures, sales techniques, and advertising to establish uptake by households from North America to the Philippines, India, China, and Egypt. Still, documentation of how and why imported objects such as the sewing-machine were appropriated is difficult to find because, unlike elites, ordinary people left few records of their own. Here a visual archive is investigated to complement existing studies. Photographs and early moving pictures from the former Dutch East Indies show that ordinary Indonesians sought and appropriated imported goods such as the sewing-machine. The colonial camera's visual record of sewing-machine operators displaces attention from the more impersonal trade and productivity statistics. It brings the silent user into the history of technological uptake and allows us to consider the repercussions across a wide social band and period. Indigenous tailors and seamstresses expanded their own work options. Through the Singer they fitted out and launched their compatriots into modern jobs and lifestyles in the Dutch colony. The sewing-machine changed habits, manners, and expectations; machine operators influenced senses of propriety, fashion, and status. Appropriation of mundane technology demonstrates that modernization was not only a process trickling down to the masses from Westernizing elites; it also bubbled up from below.
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