Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism

Front matter

A Postcolonial Chronicle of Dutch and Belgian Practice

Jan Breman

Amsterdam University Press

Foreword

Prologue: The Formative Impact of Childhood: Life Experiences in a Comparative Setting of Time and Space

Settling down from footloose livelihood

At school

Looking back and ahead

In denial of the social question in its global incarnation References

Part! Imperialism, Its Ideology and

Practice of Racial Inequality

The study of the colonial past

Labour as a sustained theme of my research Castigating voices of dissent

The pretence of a multinational state

The eclipse of universalized betterment Emancipation in default

Impact of the colonial legacy

Democracy as self-reliance

Second thoughts on the social question

The imperative necessity of colonialism

The 1848 revolution

Exclusion from equality

From propertyless to property-owning?

Rejected as undeserving on grounds of class and race

19 20 23 25 28 30

In hindsight 68 References 69

Part Il The Coolie Scandal on Sumatra’s East Coast

3 Dutch Colonialism and Its Racist Impact 73 The coolie scandal on Sumatra’s East Coast 73 A blot on a clean slate? 75 A facade of reforms 77 The fabrication of a contract 79 Insistence on the penal sanction in the work contract 81 Voicing dissent 84 Racism as featured in colonial psychology 86 Contempt, envy and fear of the ‘native’ 89 The public staging of violence and torture 91 Demarcating the racial divide 93 References 97 4 Coolie Labour and Colonial Capitalism in Asia 101 Introduction 101 The trafficking of a footloose workforce held captive 102 Cooliehood from China dispatched to the Nanyang 106 Loneliness signalling individuation and alienation 108 Ethnic diversity and the racialized preference of employers 109

The demise of the peasant economy and the rising rupture between the Global North and the Global South 111 The impact of the capitalist contrast between the metropoles and their colonies 114 The end of cooliehood? 115 The museumized past 118 Conclusion 119 References 120 5 ‘A Crafty Lawyer of Shady Deals’ 123 From ally to traitor 123 A whistle-blower whose call fell on deaf ears 127 Resurrection as a trade union leader 131 Agitation and backlash 135

Part Ill Civilization and Racism

6 Primitive Racism in a Colonial Setting 143 A state of terror: Congo at the start of the twentieth century 143 The royal committee of inquiry: Its creation, mission and results 153 The need for revision 159 Hands for rubber 166 Terror: from means to end 173 References 180

7 Colonial Development 183 Rehabilitation of colonial rule, a comparative view 183 Reforms 189 Ethical policies combined with racism 195 Colonial dualism 202 Development policy: colonial and postcolonial 207 References 214

8 Early Whistle-blowers on Belgian Colonialism 217 Driven to dissidence 217 The old colonial lobby 220 The colonial sequel to the Free State 221 Way out of the impasse 226 A disputed memory 228 Tervuren, meeting place and battleground 230 Behind the façade of a model colony 232 Back to Jules Marchal 233 References 235

PartIV_ Political Advocacy of the Multinational State g The Colour Bar as the Crux of Colonial Rule 241 Racism in the service of economic profit 241 Colonial society as a multi-ethnic hierarchy 244 Resistance, repression and adaptation 247 Care for the poor and its coloured bias 251 Impact of the economic crisis in the early 1930s 253 The national movement in search of support 258

The rise of liberal imperialism

The Christian gospel

Colonial practice

The onset of multinational capitalism and its insistence on colonial domination

The outgoing tide of colonialism

Conclusion

The colonial surplus drained off

Failure to industrialize

A frontal reappraisal of colonial custody

The crusade for imperial enterprise

Another faculty of indology

The colonial state between colony and independence

The East Indies treasured as the jewel in the Dutch crown References

Merdeka

Crushing the call for independence Maintaining the imperial unity of the kingdom The capitalist lobby

Operation Product and failed pacification

The end in sight

Repatriation

An unpalatable aftermath

PartV Development Aid as the Postcolonial Codex of

Globalized Capitalism

Spreading Dutch Welfarism in the Global South The falling tide of development politics

A global public sector

The downfall of the Third World

265 265

276 280

349 349 350 351

Discord in worldwide interdependence A political parti pris

The demise of developmentalism References

Development Aid Abandoned, Mission Achieved Western aid policies under scrutiny

The enigma of development and how to measure it Only when growth goes up poverty comes down Informalization of the economy

Path-dependent trajectories in bringing about development Dynamics of divergence

Halting the NGO-ization of the aid packet

To whom to entrust the mandate of implementation? The geopolitical shift in the world order

The globalization of development

En route to a colonial career

Change of discipline

Breaking away from Orientalist exceptionalism

On sabbatical leave in postcolonial Asia

A wider field of study

A dissenting view on development

Fiercely opposing Indonesia’s dictatorship and its donors in the

West

Evolution or revolution?

Focus on China’s achievements Wertheim’s legacy

The high tide of territorialized imperialism Developmentalism

Coming to terms with the colonial past?

Racism dressed up in a gestalt of otherness Imperial governmentality

Colonialism as a double-sided relationship

352 355

359 360

393 396 398 400 403

Decolonization staved off

The driving force of capitalism in imperialism old and new The footlooseness of capital and labour in a world of disorder References

Name Index

420 422 423 426

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

Fig.11. Two Chinese coolies accused of leading a coolie revolt in the Banka tin mines. The photo was taken in 1899 and has the caption: ‘Captured Chinese gang leader Li Hong and one of his supporters surrounded by KNIL soldiers during the containment of a Chinese rebellion on Bangka, 1899.

Fig. 3.1. The coolie scandal in Deli. A well-heeled and self-righteous Delian carrying De Planter (The planter) in his pocket.

Fig. 3.2. Execution at the company Kisaran in Asahan on 4 January 1893 of the Javanese Tasmin and Kromo di Rono for their participation in the murder of Roeckl, assistant at Tandjong Alam in April 1891.

Fig. 4.1. Bounty hunters from among the Batak peasantry in the region roamed around in search of runaway coolies to bring them back to the enterprise to which they were indentured.

Fig. 6.1. The Monument to the Belgian Pioneers in Congo in Jubelpark/Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. The Congo monument in Jubelpark in Brussels that the king commissioned bears the following inscription: ‘I have undertaken the work in the Congo in the interest of civilization and for the good of Belgium. Leopold II,

3 June 1906’. And in the cornice: ‘Erected in honour of the first Belgian pioneers.’

Fig. 6.2. The punishment with the chicotte (hippopotamus whip).

Photo by Alice Seeley Harris.

Fig. 6.3. Display of the severed right hands of Bolenge and Lingomo, killed by Abir overseers in May 1904. Original caption: ‘Natives of the Nsongo district (ABIR concession). With hands of two of their countrymen, Lingomo and Bolengo, murdered by rubber sentries in May 1904. The white men are Mr. Stannard and Mr. Harris, of the Congo Balolo Mission at Baringa.’ Photograph by Alice Seeley Harris.

Tables Table 9.1.

Table 11.1.

A prisoner who has been made to walk with a severed leg around his neck.

The ‘bachelor life’ that the arrival of white women on the East Coast of Sumatra brought to an end.

The need for continued submission. Planter with Deli cigar, by Eberhard Freiherr von Wechmar.

Front cover of the 1914 pamphlet Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren (The Indies lost, disaster born) by C.G.S. Sandberg.

A jovial colonial having rijsttafel with bottles of beer under his chair, by Eberhard Freiherr von Wechmar. Dutch war propaganda, distorting the truth. Source: NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust- en Genocidestudies (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies). Recruitment for the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, KNIL).

The Dutch GI Joe — Jan Soldaat — was accused of having committed war crimes. Tenaciously denied by veterans, a spate of investigations has produced solid evidence of ‘excessive violence’ as such practices were scaled down in official jargon. Jan Soldaat, on the cover of Elsevier

25 January 1969.

The changing size of the workforce in agro-industry, mining and government service, 1929-1934 (in thousands).

Selected companies by economic sector.

254 289

Acknowledgements

This book was published earlier in a Dutch edition under a slightly different title. Its altered and updated contents will clarify why I have added ‘capitalism’ to the new title. Some of the chapters included in the earlier Dutch edition have not been translated into English. Several others appear here in a somewhat changed format while new ones (Chapters 2, 10,14 and 15) have been added. The prologue and epilogue have been written to strengthen the coherence of the main text and to highlight the focal points binding them together. Six of the chapters were published earlier in the following journals:

— Chapter 3: ‘Colonialism and Its Racial Imprint’, Sojourn 35(3), 2020: 463-92.

— Chapter 4: ‘Coolie Labour and Colonial Capitalism in Asia’, Journal of Agrarian Change 23(2), 2022: 233-46.

— Chapter 8: ‘Over Jules Marchal en klokkenluiders die geen gehoor vonden. Kanttekeningen bij de Belgische postkoloniale debatten’, Brood & Rozen, 2020(3): 32-49 [in Dutch].

— Chapter 10: A shortened version of ‘Ethische politiek verbeeld als de christelijke beschavingsmissie: Alexander Willem Frederik Idenburg, een Nederlandse koloniaal met goede bedoelingen?’, BMGN — Low Countries Historical Review 138(3), 2023: 63-92.

— Chapter 14: ‘A Change for the Better? Dutch Development Aid in Good Times and Bad Times’, Development and Change 42(3), 2011: 833-48.

— Chapter 15: ‘W.F. Wertheim: een tegendraadse kroniekschrijver van maatschappelijke omwenteling’, Tijdschrift Sociologie 12(3), 2016: 321-50 [in Dutch]; ‘W.F. Wertheim: A Sociological Chronicler of Revolutionary Change’, Development and Change 48(5), 2017: 1130-53.

Finally, I found the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam willing to equally share the cost of this open access edition. Their expressed generosity demonstrates my long-standing association with both institutes.

ı Kolonialisme en racisme. Een postkoloniale kroniek. Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Foreword

The trajectory of my social science research started at the beginning of the 1960s with anthropological fieldwork in India and writing on the colonial history of Indonesia. Local-level fieldwork on labour relations which I observed in the contemporary setting of these postcolonial societies and economies was combined by tracking and tracing my findings in their historical context as well as in a micro-macro perspective. The major argument running through the chapter scheme is intended to highlight how the colonial question and its racist tenets have prevented the social question from being posed and solved. My investigations focused on the plight of labour in the voluminous bottom ranks of the working classes of South and Southeast Asia in both past and present. It is a problematic which has urged me to focus on the intrusion of capitalism in the fierce exploitation and suppression of labour rights. The use of force in tying down workers to toil for their survival was, after the abolition of slavery,sustained in a more contractual bind than had been instituted in the precolonial form of servitude.’ The tendency of capitalism in its naked form to prevent the labour it requires from living and working in freedom was further effectuated and complemented by resorting to the colonial power of the multinational state. The coercive regimentation which resulted has remained intact in the aftermath of decolonization mainly but not only in the Global South. On my retirement from the chair in comparative sociology at the University of Amsterdam in 2001, I continued doing grassroots research in the rural and urban sites of my earlier rounds of fieldwork in both India and Indonesia. A decade and a half later, advancing age meant I was no longer able to continue with this method of participant observation for collecting data. I switched to the full-time study of history. In 2013, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam offered me its hospitality as an honorary fellow, an invitation which I gratefully accepted. It allowed me to make use of office space and services, participate in the programme of activities and easy access to the excellent collection of publications and archives in the institute’s library. My much appreciated association with the IISH has encouraged me to continue my scholarly life. About half of the essays included in the book were written during the tenure of my fellowship over the past decade. Many of the chapters which were also included in the

1 Jan Breman, Fighting Free to Become Unfree Again: The Social History of Bondage and Neo- Bondage of Labour in India. New Delhi, 2023.

Dutch edition have been elaborated upon in an updated version, translated or edited by Andy Brown. Acknowledgement of my indebtedness to the platform of academic work that I was allowed to join and benefit from would be incomplete without an endnote on the home front. I am indebted to Ilse for the love, care and companionship with which she has enriched my life.

Amsterdam, September 2023

Prologue: The Formative Impact of Childhood: Life Experiences in a Comparative Setting of Time and Space

The introduction argues that the identity of the social scientist is of crucial relevance in considering his or her options to engage in research. To decide where to go, what to do and how to accomplish it. Targeting my investigations on the dispossessed classes of labour in India was not a decision taken on the spur of the moment, a random choice picked out of many. but inspired by my own background and childhood history from the mid-1930s to the mid-1g50s. Did it make me a biased observer? What I find important as a guideline in doing research is to remain alert to one’s own subjectivity and on the basis of that awareness persevere in the attempt to falsify one’s preconceived ideas, to argue against the grain, to question one’s own set of norms and values and in that painstaking endeavour, to aim for a higher degree of objectivity. To achieve this with a modicum of success makes it imperative not only to talk and listen to informants but to remain critically engaged in constant dialogue with one’s own biased choices and in doing that, bring the hidden script to the fore.

When back in 1962 I started to conduct anthropological research in rural India, most of my time in the field was spent asking questions, both pertinent and impertinent ones. On many occasions I had, in similar fashion, to deal with counter-queries from my interlocutors. Who I was, why I had come, and what I was up to. It was a tit for tat which did not allow me to go into hiding behind a facade of privacy and innocence. In this ongoing cross-examination, the underlying assumption often was that I belonged to the privileged part of humanity brought up in wealth and splendor. After all, according to the stereotyped notion people hailing from vilayat (which was my kind of country) all shared in the comfort and prosperity that were the fruits of an industrial-urban way of life. Actually, I happened to grow up in a milieu bothered by material deprivation. As a young boy, I came to know what it meant to belong to a social class having to cope with poverty. It seemed a stroke of irony that, when I came to India to investigate the dire plight of a landless class of agricultural labour and their dependency on main landowners, it brought back memories of my own past. For sure, these reminiscences were not coloured by the heartrending immiseration that I encountered in the slums of rural Gujarat. At night, scribbling down what

I had seen and heard, the stark difference between my life experiences at a tender age and the destitution of the people in the countryside of Gujarat who had become my focal point of study, brought home to me the formative impact of my childhood.

Settling down from footloose livelihood

From the beginning of the twentieth century, by leaps and bounds, life had started to become better for most people in the Netherlands although the spread of social progress was very uneven. My father and mother belonged to families of bargees who plied the rivers, canals, lakes and inland seas of our country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, carrying freight such as potatoes and apples, peat (fuel for household heating) or bricks, sand and gravel used for construction. The restructuring of the economy away from rural locales to urban growth poles started to accelerate towards the end of the nineteenth century. The turning tide went together with a shift from a predominant mode of petty commodity production to large-scale industry and big business. Infrastructural development altered the existing fabric of communication and facilitated motorized transport along railroads and highways. Breaking through rurality and parochiality, it led to dispossession and downward social mobility for vulnerable parts of the workforce, such as small or landless peasants, craftsmen making products which were no longer required and other rural folk with occupational identities — among them boatmen — who had become redundant in the reshaped economy. The proletarianization process that followed and which turned the majority of them into an urban class of regular wage earners, paradoxically improved rather than worsened their economic condition. It was an outcome induced by political assertion from below which in a gradual process of democratization allowed for raising and settling the social question. The progress made climaxed in the welfare state around the middle of the twentieth century. This emancipatory trend, to no less extent paid for by squeezing the labouring poor in the colonies to bare survival, remained firmly restricted to the imperial homeland. People’s livelihoods only slowly and haltingly improved for the lower segments of the workforce.

Together with most of their siblings both my father and mother had gone ashore early in the twentieth century to join the urban labour market as young adolescents. Lolkje arrived in Amsterdam when she was barely eleven years old, and started her working life as a day-and-night domestic. Speaking only her own dialect, she exchanged her Frisian identity (from the northernmost region in the country) to Lena, a pure and proper working-class name in the big city. Willem first roamed around in several casual jobs, applied for training in a craft but was then for four years drafted into compulsory military service during the World War I. On his return to civil life he became and remained a postman until his retirement age. Preceded by two sisters I joined this nuclear family in a working-class neighbourhood as the last child and the only son.

We lived on the first floor of a multi-storey house block in a rented apartment which contained three cramped rooms plus a kitchen. It was already a much better dwelling than the two rooms with a privy but no flush toilet in which my parents began their married life in the early 1920s. Then, each morning they had to carry a bucket downstairs to the street for what was called the Boldoot cart (named after a well-known brand of eau de cologne) sent around by the municipality to collect the night soil. On Friday evening, all of us would go to the public bathhouse to take a shower, and on that day mother would give us a fresh set of clothes and underwear to last for the next half week. Boys, in particular, spent many hours of the day roaming around outside simply because of the lack of space indoors. For girls, there always was some household chore to keep them busy and indoors. The apartment blocks on both sides of the street where I was born in 1936 had four floors. Our neighbours worked as waiters, mill hands, lorry drivers, tram conductors, linesmen, construction workers, rent collectors, coal heavers, travelling salesmen, seamstresses, etc. Social life was embedded in this neighbourhood and children as well as adults rarely ventured during their hours of leisure into districts of the city inhabited by the better-off classes. The state-run elementary school I went to was around the corner. It was also attended by boys and girls from the other end of our long street, which towards the end degraded into a slum. In addition to lacking maintenance, the shabby habitat in these back quarters, had other unsavoury traits such as garbage in the streets, dwellings lacking maintenance. broken families, in-house fights as well as brawls outdoors, boozing during off-hours and petty crime. Basic education was not only opening new horizons but was also meant to instil discipline. Every now and then, the teacher would check our hair for lice, inspect our hands for cleanliness, berate us for showing ‘lowly behaviour’, such as the use of slang, swear words and foul language. We had a rich repertoire for which we were made to rinse our mouth with soap. When I turned nine, I was treated for scabies, a poverty-related affliction.

What stood out in the urbanized landscape of the working class during the early decades of the twentieth century was the gradual fading away of jobs which carried the load of subservience separating the lower echelons from the better-off ones. It implied a deference made manifest in a wide variety of menial tasks performed in the residences of the well-to-do as coachman, maid, groundsman, skivvy, cook, scullion, footman; or at work sites as porter, bag and file carrier, messenger, concierge, janitor, usher, lift boy, cloakroom helper, and other peon-like figures. More generally it went together with a growing formalization of employment. To explain this phase in the struggle for social emancipation only in terms of the rising price of labour would not do justice to the growing respectability of the working class pointing to a change in the economic, social, political and cultural balance between high and low. No doubt, the work maid did not disappear, as I noticed in the case of my mother. Her relationship with the households where she found employment became less personal and more contractual and detached. No longer did she bring food items, hand-me-down clothes or other leftovers when she came home at the end of the day. She was now upgraded, solicited first as domestic help, and later on as caretaker. A major segment of the labour force found jobs in the much expanded public sector of economy and society. Even in the lower ranks of the government apparatus, employees such as my father found protection and security in the terms of their service gained by becoming members of a trade union. Our way of life was still precarious rather than comfortable, more so because of the severe crisis in the 1930s in the midst of which I was born. The state budget, out of which my father got paid, spiralled down but although he suffered multiple wage cuts, at least his regular job was not taken away. ‘For me, steady work meant steady poverty’, was how he summed up to me his assessment of those grim years.

A very meaningful change which came about around the middle of the twentieth century was that poverty did not any longer seem to carry the stigma of denigration. Essentially it meant the end of the ideology of inequality. Living in dire circumstances tended to be no longer belittled for what was now considered as adverse and unfair life chances, missed opportunities or simple bad luck. The urge to resort to what in sociological jargon is known as ‘passing for’, hiding one’s background in order to claim and benefit from a loftier social identity, has never been part of my selfpresentation. People lagging behind in modal income and consumption were no longer blamed for not being up to the mark. Trying to make ends meet, the course which my parents dutifully steered throughout their working lives, was not something for which one ought either to feel ashamed or brag about. Indigence, or at least not being able to enjoy all kinds of extras and comforts, was a mere fact of life taken for granted in day-to-day behaviour as well as in interactions with the outside world.

The insistence on the basic equality of all citizens did not mean, of course, that class boundaries had become obsolete. The sharp edge may have got blunted both in the public and private spheres but social and cultural distinctions, which found expression in a diversity of lifestyles, were very much kept intact. However, not family descent but education and occupation were henceforth the main markers of class hierarchy. A textbook that I had to read as an undergraduate student in the social sciences ranked the social pecking order which split up Dutch society around the middle of the twentieth century. The divide between the well-bred and ill-bred was not abrogated but reaffirmed, now justified under the debatable banner of the merit an individual might possess or gain.

At school

Schooling had become the main determinant of upward mobility but that insight, if at all comprehended by children, did not really help them in finding their way around once they had learnt how to read and write. The problem of what to do next and where to go was not theirs to solve. Also, parents equipped with hardly any schooling stood by helplessly when the moment came to decide for their offspring that enough was enough or whether to reach up and take the next step on a long, very complicated and nebulous route ahead. In addition to the primary school-leaving certificate, the advice the teacher gave usually decided whether or not to proceed. Half of my classmates, boys as well girls, were all for throwing in the towel, having completed their basic learning after six years, and dropping out was indeed what they did. The other half went for advanced training in various directions. One segment plodded on for one more year or so until they reached the minimum age limit set at 14, for being officially permitted to engage in waged work. Many boys opted for vocational school in order to be trained for three years as craftsmen. Girls, unwilling to abort learning immediately — among them my two sisters — went to attend a school which provided a two-year course, instructing them in domestic skills such as cleaning, sewing, cooking, washing, etc., to prepare for their future role as housewives. A handful of children were permitted to register themselves in secondary school. In consultation with the teacher, this was also my training for the next four years because my parents suspected, quite rightly so, that I was not savvy enough to get skilled in one of the crafts. At this juncture, there was already a crucial split into two streams. The choice between them had far-reaching consequences for later entry into the labour market. The curriculum of the lower secondary school, referred to in Dutch as ‘extended lower education’, took three or four years. Its pupils were trained for a wide variety of low-grade jobs in the service sector or in the bottom ranks of administration. My neighbourhood school was still in the early 1960s listed in Amsterdam as the largest primary school, exclusively attended by working-class children. Out of the bunch of more than one hundred children who had finished together with me this elementary training in 1948, only two were enrolled for five or six years in the higher secondary school which after five or six years qualified them for higher grade white-collar jobs. But after a year, they were back in our midst, having failed miserably to move on to the next standard. We were not surprised since, in our class-based view, they had crossed a bridge too far, setting out for a station in life that was beyond their reach.

When I had successfully completed the lower secondary school, strong pressure was put on my parents to get me enrolled in a higher one. As it happened in those instances, teachers were the promoters of upward mobility. They often projected on their pupils aspirations which they had failed to realize themselves. With their support I managed to pass an entrance test but lost two years, because I got admission only at junior level to make up for what I had missed out in the earlier curriculum. The rigid ceilings which were fixed in educational trajectories were clearly meant to demarcate boundaries between the higher and lower social orders. Crossing those barriers was tolerated but at a high price which, in my case. was borne by my parents. Burdened as they were with a wayward son, still not wanting to start working and become a wage earner like his street friends and school mates. I had the temerity to aim for even greener pastures when, after passing the final examination of the higher secondary school with commendable distinction, I easily gave in to the persuasion coming again from the teaching staff to register as a student of the up-and-coming social sciences at the University of Amsterdam.

Apart from adding to the household income, now the cost of advanced education also had to be faced. I applied for a scholarship for which children of employees in the state postal service were eligible. My request was turned down because funding so far had been spent on sons or daughters of Class II and III officials employed by this public agency. It was unheard that the son of a mere postman, a Class IV servant, could qualify for the facility. The panel of high-ranking officials before which I was asked to appear for a formal hearing decided after questioning me in detail to reject my application. Even if I would he fortunate enough to complete my studies with graduation, the gap extracting me from my parental background would become too big, and result in alienation on both sides of the familial fence. Not wanting to dishearten me, I was given the offer of joining a course for training as a clerk in the lower ranks of the postal service, which I declined. The verdict was that in my own best interest, limits had to be set on my aspirations. So I began my university education by combining work and study, each half time. It was an uneasy compromise which ended when the Ministry of Education came forward with a scheme of study loans for deserving cases as part of a range of social benefits provided by the welfare state. The interest-free loan I received was a turning point which enabled me to pay my parents at least for food and lodging. The kind of secondary school certificates I had on my enrolment in university excluded the choice for registration in many faculties, such as law, medicine or the humanities. History would actually have been my first option but that was out of the question because I had not been taught the classical languages, Greek and Latin, deemed to be mandatory for study of the past. However, the social sciences did not have that restrictive clause. As a new discipline, it happened to be an open field, a faculty not already occupied by the right of heritage from which sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie stood to benefit. I have no reason to regret the academic path that I have followed, but would it be possible to do it all over again if I had to make a fresh start? Iam not so sure.