Colonial Tourism, Politics, Religion, and Ethnicity: Development of Denpasar City, Bali, The Netherlands Indies, 1906 – 1924

Abstract

The socio-economic excesses of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 have shown that so many Balinese and Denpasar [South Bali] people, in particular, have lost their source of life from the tourism sector. While waiting for tourism to recover, those who still have vacant land try to survive from the agricultural sector, but only on a small scale. Whereas as part of an agricultural area, Denpasar [Badung] in the kingdom era had the potential in the port-trade sector. Why did that potential just disappear? The study will move backward, downwards to see if there are duplications or similar incidents in Dutch times. Although it has such potential, previous researchers agreed to say that in the first decade of the Dutch colonial period [1914], the embryo of a tourist city had grown in Denpasar, developed in 1924, and bloomed in 1928 when the Bali Hotel was founded. So there was a space-time that was empty for eight years because Badung was controlled by the Dutch East Indies in 1906. What happened during that time span? This study will answer this question in terms of colonialism, politics, religion, ethnicity, tourism. By using the theory of imperialism-colonialism as a basis for thinking, this study can produce a conclusion that tourism is an unexpected child born several years later after the failure of the development of the port-trade sector in Denpasar.