Max Havelaar
Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company
One of the most forceful indictments of colonialism ever written and a masterpiece of Dutch literature, in an esteemed translation by an award-winning translator
Max Havelaar—a Dutch civil servant in Java—burns with an insatiable desire to end the ill treatment and oppression inflicted on the native peoples by the colonial administration. Max is an inspirational figure, but he is also a flawed idealist whose vow to protect the Javanese from cruelty ends in his own downfall. In Max Havelaar, Multatuli (pseudonym for Eduard Douwes Dekker) vividly recreated his own experiences in Java and tellingly depicts the hypocrisy of those who gained from the corrupt coffee trade. Sending shockwaves through the Dutch nation when it was published in 1860, this…
$23.00
September 1, 1995Multatuli is the pseudonym of Dutch author Eduard Douwes Dekker. Born in 1830 in Amsterdam, he is best known for Max Havelaar, a partly autobiographical novel that he penned after 18 years of civil service in the Dutch East Indies, where he witnessed the harsh mistreatment of the natives by the Dutch rulers. His writing inspired subsequent emancipatory movements across the Netherlands before he retired and moved to Germany, where he died in 1887.
