Wolter Robert, baron van Hoëvell

Wolter Robert, baron van Hoëvell (born July 15, 1812, Deventer, Neth.—died Feb. 10, 1879, The Hague) was a statesman and member of the Dutch Parliament who was largely responsible for ending the exploitive colonial Culture System, which extracted wealth from the Dutch East Indies from 1830 to about 1860, and who advocated replacing autocratic, arbitrary control of the Indies’ economy with legal control by Parliament.

Educated in theology, van Hoëvell went to the Indies as a pastor in 1836. In Batavia (now Jakarta), he reestablished the Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences and founded the newspaper Het Tijdschrift, which succeeded, despite heavy censorship, in criticizing the colonial government. In 1848 he returned to the Netherlands and became a member of Parliament. More a humanitarian than a doctrinaire liberal, he was able to convince people of various political persuasions that the extractive Culture System was immoral. He also showed that using legal contracts instead of arbitrary favouritism would bring more profits for the Netherlands. He pressed Parliament to legalize the granting of sugar contracts in 1860, thus marking the beginning of Liberal power in the Netherlands.