The first half of the twentieth century stands out as a crucial phase in Dutch state-building, in various parts of the world. During this period the Netherlands became a strong national community with the different provinces bound together by a tight infrastructural grid and a range of invented traditions.At the same time the Dutch authorities also tightened their grip on the overseas dependencies. The colony in the Indonesian archipelago in particular underwent some major transformations following territorial expansion, the creation of new political institutes and the development of (intercontinental) communication lines. These processes of state-building, in the metropole and the periphery, to a large extent depended on the development of modern technology. The interaction between these two variables, state-building and technology, is central to this contribution, which specially focuses on the development of radio as a medium connecting the Netherlands and the Indies.

One important argument in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is that print-capitalism, in the form of the newspaper press, played a crucial role in state-building as it ‘represents the kind of imagined community that is the nation’. By emphasizing the power of the media on human society, Anderson to an extent followed the work of Marshall McLuhan, who coined the famous phrase that ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan argued that in order to understand media one should not study the content, but rather the form. Technology, he asserted, ‘shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’.