Max Havelaar is published

In May 1860 the Amsterdam publisher J. de Ruyter brought out a two-volume book called Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. Its author signed himself Multatuli, Latin for 'I have suffered much'. Behind the name was Eduard Douwes Dekker, born in Amsterdam in 1820, who had served the colonial government in the Dutch East Indies for seventeen years. The book tells how Max Havelaar, a newly arrived Dutch official in Java, tries to protect the villagers of his district from their own chiefs and is abandoned by his superiors. It was, with little disguise, Dekker's own story.

In January 1856 Dekker was made assistant-resident of Lebak, a poor district of the Bantam residency in western Java, with its seat at Rangkasbitung. Within weeks he became convinced that the regent, the highest Javanese official of the district, was making people work for him without pay and taking their produce without paying a fair price. On 24 February he accused the regent in writing and asked the Resident at Serang to remove him so that witnesses could speak freely. The Resident refused, and the Governor-General, Duymaer van Twist, did not back his young official: he moved Dekker to another post instead. Dekker asked to leave the service and was discharged in April 1856. He went back to Europe poor and in debt, and in September and October 1859, in an attic room above the Brussels tavern Au Prince Belge, he wrote the book in a few weeks.

Max Havelaar is a strange and modern novel. It opens with Batavus Droogstoppel, a smug Amsterdam coffee broker who wants a book about coffee, and turns into the story told from a bundle of papers left by a shabby former official, 'Sjaalman' (Scarfman). Woven into it is the tale of Saidjah and Adinda, two Javanese villagers whose lives are destroyed by extortion and war. At the end Multatuli dismisses his narrators and appeals directly to King William III. The novelist Jacob van Lennep, who arranged its printing, removed the names of people and places and the dates, and Dekker had unwittingly signed away the rights to his own book. The Lebak documents appeared in full only in later editions and in the first English translation of 1868.

The book caused a sensation. Readers in the Netherlands learned that the profits of the Cultivation System, under which Javanese villages had to grow coffee, sugar and other crops for the government, came with hunger and abuse. Max Havelaar was often compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Historians are more careful: Dekker idealised the Javanese, his story is not free of errors of fact, and the book was one of several forces behind reform. But it came at the right moment. Colonial policy became the leading question in the Dutch parliament through the 1860s, and by 1870 the liberals had won and the forced cultivation began to give way to private enterprise.

Max Havelaar is often called the greatest Dutch novel, and it has been translated into dozens of languages; D. H. Lawrence introduced the English version of 1927. In 1999 the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer called it 'the book that killed colonialism': in his view it shamed the Dutch into the Ethical Policy of 1901, whose schools produced the generation that led Indonesia to independence. Others point out that Dekker attacked abuses, not Dutch rule itself. The name lives on in the first Fairtrade label, launched as Max Havelaar coffee in 1988, and in the Multatuli Museum that Lebak opened at Rangkasbitung in 2018.