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Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. By RUDOLF MRAZEK. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xvii, 311 pp. $70.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Rudolf Mrazek's Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony is a wonderfully moody book. Moody, because it aims at capturing the aura of the Dutch East Indies in the last seventy-five years of colonial rule almost as much as it attempts to tell a critical, historical story. Wonderful, because it succeeds at this project better than any other book that I have read about this particular time and place. One feels as if time travel has been accomplished by the time that the last page is reached. This is no mean feat-Mrazek writes about pharmacies and fingerprints in this book and often uses very dry, technical journals as his sources. The fact that we can smell the odor of chemicals being mixed by the apothecary and feel the sensations of the Javanese laborers as their fingers are pressed to the acid blotter is a tribute to Mrazek's powers over language. It is appropriately enough through the use of language-language reproduced from a broad variety of actors and their surviving documents-that Mrazek accomplishes his goal. We do not so much analyze the world of this Dutch colony from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as we live in it for three hundred pages. Not many books...