Oil Leaks and Forced Labour: The Coastal Infrastructure of the Oil Industry in Dutch New Guinea, 1936-1962.

The Dutch empire was one of the major oil producers of the twentieth century. When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the Dutch empire in Asia was reduced to one last, yet vast, outpost: Dutch New Guinea. There US oil companies extracted and exported oil from the 1930s until the decolonization of the territory in 1962. To connect the colony to oil markets in Japan, the US, and Australia, the industry needed to construct oil harbours. This paper asks how the oil industry’s export infrastructure projects affected indigenous communities and coastal landscapes. To answer that question the paper investigates the construction of the Sorong oil harbour by forced labourers.   

The literature on New Guinea paints a relatively benign picture of Dutch colonial rule. It focuses mainly on civil servants and missionaries seeking to “modernise” and “civilise” Papuans. The oil industry in the colony has been neglected in scholarship because it never made significant profits. As a consequence, the environmental and social consequences of the three-decade-long attempt to generate profits remain out of sight.

This paper presents the first archivally-based history of oil in New Guinea. By drawing documents from Dutch and Indonesian archives, the paper will show how the industry produced social and ecological harm. Through its examination of the oil industry, the paper argues that the colonial project in Dutch New Guinea was defined by capitalist resource extraction as much as paternalistic desires to “civilise” the indigenous population.