Dutch East Indies
During the 19th century, Dutch possessions and hegemony were expanded, reaching their greatest territorial extent in the early 20th century. This colony which later formed modern-day Indonesia was one of the most valuable European colonies under the Dutch Empire's rule, and contributed to Dutch global prominence in spice and cash crop trade in the 19th to early 20th century. The colonial social order was based on rigid racial and social structures with a Dutch elite living separate but linked to their native subjects. The term "Indonesia" came into use for the geographical location after 1880. In the early 20th century, local intellectuals began developing the concept of Indonesia as a nation state, and set the stage for an independence movement.
The word Indies comes from Latin: Indus. The original name Dutch Indies was translated by the English as the Dutch East Indies, to keep it distinct from the Dutch West Indies. The name Dutch Indies is recorded in the Dutch East India Company's documents of the early 1620s.
Scholars writing in English use the terms "Indix," "the Dutch East Indies," "the Netherlands Indies," and "colonial Indonesia" interchangeably.
Centuries before Europeans arrived, the Indonesian archipelago supported various states including commercially oriented coastal trading states and inland agrarian states. The 1st Europeans to arrive were the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century and following disruption of Dutch access to spices in Europe, the 1st Dutch expedition set sail for the East Indies in 1595 to access spices directly from Asia. When it made a 400% profit on its return, other Dutch expeditions soon followed. Recognizing the potential of the East Indies trade, the Dutch government amalgamated the competing companies into the United East India Company.
The VOC was granted a charter to wage war, build fortresses, and make treaties across Asia. A capital was established at Batavia, which became the centre of the VOC's Asian trading network. To their original monopolies on nutmeg, mace spice, cloves and cinnamon, the company and later colonial administrations introduced non-indigenous cash crops like coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, rubber, sugar and opium, and safeguarded their commercial interests by taking over surrounding territory. Smuggling, the ongoing expense of war, corruption and mismanagement lead to bankruptcy by the end of the 18th century. The company was formally dissolved in 1800 and its colonial possessions in the Indonesian archipelago (including much of Java, parts of Sumatra, much of Maluku, and the hinterlands of ports such as Makasar, Manado, and Kupang) were nationalized under the Dutch Republic as the Dutch East Indies.
From the arrival of the 1st Dutch ships in the late sixteenth century, to the declaration of independence in 1945, Dutch control over the Indonesian archipelago was always tenuous. Although Java was dominated by the Dutch, many areas remained independent throughout much of this time including Aceh, Bali, Lombok and Borneo. There were numerous wars and disturbances across the archipelago as various indigenous groups resisted efforts to establish a Dutch hegemony, which weakened Dutch control and tied up its military forces. Piracy remained a problem until the mid-19th century. Finally in the early 20th century, imperial dominance was extended across what was to become the territory of modern-day Indonesia.
In 1806, with the Netherlands under French domination, Napoleon appointed his brother Louis Bonaparte to the Dutch throne which led to the 1808 appointment of Marshall Herman Willem Daendels to Governor General of the Dutch East Indies. In 1811, British forces occupied several Dutch East Indies ports including Java and Thomas Stamford Raffles became Lieutenant Governor. Dutch control was restored in 1816. Under the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, the Dutch secured British settlements such as Bengkulu in Sumatra, in exchange for ceding control of their possessions in the Malay Peninsula and Dutch India. The resulting borders between British and Dutch possessions remain between Malaysia and Indonesia.
Since the establishment of the VOC in the seventeenth century, the expansion of Dutch territory had been a business matter. Graaf van den Bosch's Governor-generalship confirmed profitability as the foundation of official policy was to restrict its attention to Java, Sumatra and Bangka. However, from about 1840, Dutch national expansionism saw them wage a series of wars to enlarge and consolidate their possessions in the outer islands. Motivations included: the protection of areas already held; the intervention of Dutch officials ambitious for glory or promotion; and to establish Dutch claims throughout the archipelago to prevent intervention from other Western powers during the European push for colonial possessions. As exploitation of Indonesian resources expanded off Java, most of the outer islands came under direct Dutch government control or influence.
The Dutch subjugated the Minangkabau of Sumatra in the Padri War and the Java War (1825â€"30) ended significant Javanese resistance. The Banjarmasin War (1859â€"1863) in southeast Kalimantan resulted in the defeat of the Sultan. After failed expeditions to conquer Bali in 1846 and 1848, an 1849 intervention brought northern Bali under Dutch control. The most prolonged military expedition was the Aceh War in which a Dutch invasion in 1873 was met with indigenous guerrilla resistance and ended with an Acehnese surrender in 1912. Disturbances continued to break out on both Java and Sumatra during the remainder of the 19th century, however, the island of Lombok came under Dutch control in 1894, and Batak resistance in northern Sumatra was quashed in 1895. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the balance of military power shifted towards the industrialising Dutch and against pre-industrial independent Indonesian states as the technology gap widened. Military leaders and Dutch politicians said they had a moral duty to free the Indonesian peoples from indigenous rulers who were oppressive, backward, or didn't respect international law.
Although Indonesian rebellions broke out, direct colonial rule was extended throughout the rest of the archipelago from 1901 to 1910 and control taken from the remaining independent local rulers. Southwestern Sulawesi was occupied in 1905â€"06, the island of Bali was subjugated with military conquests in 1906 and 1908, as were the remaining independent kingdoms in Maluku, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Nusa Tenggara. Other rulers including the Sultans of Tidore in Maluku, Pontianak, and Palembang in Sumatra, requested Dutch protection from independent neighbours thereby avoiding Dutch military conquest and were able to negotiate better conditions under colonial rule. The Bird's Head Peninsula (Western New Guinea), was brought under Dutch administration in 1920. This final territorial range would form the territory of the Republic of Indonesia.
On 10 January 1942, during the Dutch East Indies Campaign, Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies as part of the Pacific War. The rubber plantations and oil fields of the Dutch East Indies were considered crucial for the Japanese war effort. Allied forces were quickly overwhelmed by the Japanese and on 8 March 1942 the Royal Dutch East Indies Army surrendered in Java.
Fuelled by the Japanese Light of Asia war propaganda and the Indonesian National Awakening, a vast majority of the indigenous Dutch East Indies population 1st welcomed the Japanese as liberators from the colonial Dutch empire, but this sentiment quickly changed as the occupation turned out to be the most oppressive and ruinous colonial regime in Indonesian history. The Japanese occupation during World War II brought about the fall of the colonial state in Indonesia, as the Japanese removed as much of the Dutch government structure as they could, replacing it with their own regime. Although the top positions were held by the Japanese, the internment of all Dutch citizens meant that Indonesians filled many leadership and administrative positions. In contrast to Dutch repression of Indonesian nationalism, the Japanese allowed indigenous leaders to forge links amongst the masses, and they trained and armed the younger generations.
According to a UN report, four million people died in Indonesia as a result of the Japanese occupation. Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence. A four and a half-year struggle followed as the Dutch tried to re-establish their colony; although Dutch forces re-occupied most of Indonesia's territory a guerilla struggle ensued, and the majority of Indonesians, and ultimately international opinion, favoured Indonesian independence. In December 1949, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty with the exception of the Netherlands New Guinea. Sukarno's government campaigned for Indonesian control of the territory, and with pressure from the United States, the Netherlands agreed to the New York Agreement which ceded the territory to Indonesian administration in May 1963.
The economic history of the colony was closely related to the economic health of the mother country.
Despite increasing returns from the Dutch system of land tax, Dutch finances had been severely affected by the cost of the Java War and the Padri War, and the Dutch loss of Belgium in 1830 brought the Netherlands to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1830, a new Governor-General, Johannes van den Bosch, was appointed to make the Indies pay their way through Dutch exploitation of its resources. With the Dutch achieving political domination throughout Java for the 1st time in 1830, it was possible to introduce an agricultural policy of government-controlled forced cultivation. Termed cultuurstelsel in Dutch and tanam paksa (forced plantation) in Indonesian, farmers were required to deliver, as a form of tax, fixed amounts of specified crops, such as sugar or coffee. Much of Java became a Dutch plantation and revenue rose continually through the nineteenth century which were reinvested into the Netherlands to save it from bankruptcy. Between 1830 and 1870, 1 billion guilders were taken from Indonesia, on average making 25 per cent of the annual Dutch Government budget. The Cultivation System, however, brought much economic hardship to Javanese peasants, who suffered famine and epidemics in the 1840s.
Critical public opinion in the Netherlands led to much of the Cultivation System's excesses being eliminated under the agrarian reforms of the "Liberal Period". Dutch private capital flowed in after 1850, especially in tin mining and plantation estate agriculture. The Billiton Company's tin mines off the eastern Sumatra coast was financed by a syndicate of Dutch entrepreneurs, including the younger brother of King William III. Mining began in 1860. In 1863 Jacob Nienhuys obtained a concession from the sultan of Deli for a large tobacco estate. From 1870, producers were no longer compelled to provide crops for exports, but the Indies were opened up to private enterprise. Dutch businessmen set up large, profitable plantations. Sugar production doubled between 1870 and 1885; new crops such as tea and cinchona flourished, and rubber was introduced, leading to dramatic increases in Dutch profits. Changes were not limited to Java, or agriculture; oil from Sumatra and Kalimantan became a valuable resource for industrialising Europe. Dutch commercial interests expanded off Java to the outer islands with increasingly more territory coming under direct Dutch control or dominance in the latter half of the 19th century. However, the resulting scarcity of land for rice production, combined with dramatically increasing populations, especially in Java, led to further hardships.
The colonial exploitation of Indonesia's wealth contributed to the industrialisation of the Netherlands, while simultaneously laying the foundation for the industrialisation of Indonesia. The Dutch introduced coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco and rubber and large expanses of Java became plantations cultivated by Javanese peasants, collected by Chinese intermediaries, and sold on overseas markets by European merchants. In the late 19th century economic growth was based on heavy world demand for tea, coffee, and cinchona. The government invested heavily in a railroad network, as well as telegraph lines, and entrepreneurs opened banks, shops and newspapers. The Dutch East Indies produced most of the world's supply of quinine and pepper, over a 3rd of its rubber, a quarter of its coconut products, and a 5th of its tea, sugar, coffee, and oil. The profit from the Dutch East Indies made the Netherlands one of the world's most significant colonial powers. The Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij shipping line supported the unification of the colonial economy and brought inter-island shipping through to Batavia, rather than through Singapore, thus focussing more economic activity on Java.
The worldwide recession of the late 1880s and early 1890s saw the commodity prices on which the colony depended collapse. Journalists and civil servants observed that the majority of the Indies population were no better off than under the previous regulated Cultivation System economy and tens of thousands starved. Commodity prices recovered from the recession, leading to increased investment in the colony. The sugar, tin, copra and coffee trade on which the colony had been built thrived, and rubber, tobacco, tea and oil also became principal exports. Political reform increased the autonomy of the local colonial administration, moving away from central control from the Netherlands, whilst power was also diverged from the central Batavia government to more localised governing units.
The world economy recovered in the late 1890s and prosperity returned. Foreign investment, especially by the British, were encouraged. By 1900, foreign-held assets in the Netherlands Indies totalled about 750 million guilders, mostly in Java.
In 1898, the population of Java numbered 28 million with another 7 million on Indonesia's outer islands. The 1st half of 20th century saw large-scale immigration of Dutch and other Europeans to the colony, where they worked in either the government or private sectors. By 1930, there were more than 240,000 people with European legal status in the colony, making up less than 0.5% of the total population. Almost 75% of these Europeans were in fact native Eurasians known as Indo-Europeans.
As the Dutch secured the islands they eliminated slavery, widow burning, head-hunting, cannibalism, piracy, and internecine wars. Railways, steamships, postal and telegraph services, and various government agencies all served to introduce a degree of new uniformity across the colony. Immigration within the archipelagoâ€"particularly by ethnic Chinese, Bataks, Javanese, and Bugisâ€"increased dramatically.
The Dutch colonialists formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers, administrators, managers, teachers and pioneers. They lived together with the "natives", but at the top of a rigid social and racial caste system. The Dutch East Indies had two legal classes of citizens; European and indigenous. A 3rd class, Foreign Easterners, was added in 1920.
In 1901 the Dutch adopted what they called the Ethical Policy, under which the colonial government had a duty to further the welfare of the Indonesian people in health and education. Other new measures under the policy included irrigation programs, transmigration, communications, flood mitigation, industrialisation, and protection of native industry. Industrialisation didn't significantly affect the majority of Indonesians, and Indonesia remained an agricultural colony; by 1930, there were 17 cities with populations over 50,000 and their combined populations numbered 1.87 million of the colony's 60 million.
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