The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0020/00205.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 44KB | 668 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00205}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Indonesia
Chapter 1B.   The Coming of the Dutch}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{dutch
java
voc
system
british
javanese
century
war
trade
government
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Title:       Indonesia
Book:        Indonesia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald M. Seekins
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 1B.   The Coming of the Dutch

     By the last decade of the sixteenth century, the Dutch had become a major
seafaring power. The two provinces of Holland and Zeeland became centers not
only of trade and shipping but also of international finance by this time, and
Amsterdam served as Europe's principal center for commerce and banking. The
ambitions of the "Sea Beggars," as the Dutch were known, rapidly took on
global proportions. The union of Spain and Portugal under the Spanish crown
from 1580 to 1640 led the Dutch to war against both, and Portuguese bases were
the main targets of Dutch wrath in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian
archipelago.

     A Dutch fleet of four ships entered Indonesian waters in 1596, landed at
Banten, the principal port of the kingdom of the same name, and then proceeded
along the north coast of Java to Madura. There followed a few years of "wild"
or unregulated voyages, when a number of different Dutch trading concerns sent
out ships to the Malukus and elsewhere. In 1602, however, these companies
merged to form the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie-VOC) under a charter issued by the Dutch parliament, the
States-General. This made the VOC a unique institution, combining military and
political with commercial functions. Not only was it responsible for
conducting profitable trade in the East, but it could also wage war, build
fortresses, administer justice, and conclude treaties with Asian rulers in
order to achieve this end. Its directors, the Seventeen Gentlemen (Heeren
Zeventien), envisioned gigantic profits accruing from an effective monopoly of
the spice trade, and the VOC pursued this goal throughout the seventeenth
century with ruthless determination.

     The VOC established its first permanent base at Banten, a main port for
the pepper trade, in 1603. In the Malukus the Portuguese had made themselves
thoroughly disliked despite the successes of Catholic missionaries, and the
Dutch, with the cooperation of the local ruler, expelled them from their
settlement at Ambon southeast of the island of Ceram in 1605. Ambon's
Christians subsequently converted from Catholicism to Calvinist Protestantism.
In 1607 the sultan of Ternate made an alliance with the Dutch against the
Spanish, who were moving in from the Philippines. Although the British East
India Company, which had been established in 1600, had only one-eighth the
financing of the VOC, and Britain and the Netherlands were technically allies
in the struggle against the Iberian powers, the growing British presence in
the Malukus, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and Java was regarded by the Dutch as
a genuine threat to their interests. The rulers of Indonesian coastal states
welcomed the new infusion of Europeans, as competition would drive up prices
for their commodities, but the Dutch had no intention of tolerating a free
market once they were established.

     In 1610 the post of governor general of the VOC was created with broad
powers, as it proved virtually impossible for the Heeren Zeventien to direct
its operations from Europe. Jan Pieterzoon Coen, governor general from 1619 to
1623 and again from 1627 to 1629, is credited with establishing the firm
dominance of the VOC in the archipelago. His first act as governor general
was to seize the port of Jayakerta (Jakarta) on the western end of Java from
the forces of the sultan of Banten and to establish there a city named
Batavia; this became the principal VOC base in the western archipelago and a
subsequent center of Dutch rule in the region. Coen perceived control of
Indonesian trade as vital to his country's interests and proved unscrupulous
in his methods to impose and maintain it. When the people of the small Banda
archipelago south of the Malukus continued to sell nutmeg and mace to British
merchants, virtually the entire original population was killed or deported.
The islands were repopulated with VOC servants who worked the nutmeg groves
with slave labor. Coen was implacable toward the British, opposing their
trading activities at every turn. His subordinate, the governor of the Dutch
settlement at Ambon, was responsible for the execution on trumped-up charges
of 10 British merchants there in 1623. The Amboina Massacre embittered
relations between the two erstwhile allies and marked the beginning of the end
of a significant British presence in the archipelago until the late eighteenth
century.

     As the example of Banda shows, control of the spice trade was gained at
the cost of much suffering for Indonesian populations. Maintenance of a
profitable monopoly remained the centerpiece of VOC policy during the time of
Coen's successors, and this involved not only the forcible exclusion of
non-VOC competitors but also a careful regulation of spice production to keep
prices artificially high. This necessitated active intervention in the
politics of the coastal states where spices were grown or transshipped. An
anti-Dutch alliance grew up among some of the Maluku sultans, which was
suppressed with great severity in the 1650s. The Hoamoal peninsula in western
Ceram was depopulated in 1656 and its groves of clove trees destroyed by
Dutch and Christian Ambonese "war fleets" in order to enforce the monopoly of
clove production on Ambon. The Spanish gave up their bases in Tidore and
Ternate in 1663, and the former swore allegiance to the VOC. Ternate was
subdued by 1683. The Makasarese sultanate of Gowa in southern Sulawesi, which
had encouraged anti-Dutch resistance in the Malukus and continued to carry on
free trade, was defeated in 1669 after a bloody war in which Gowa's rival, the
Bugis state of Bone (modern Watampone), allied with the VOC. The Dutch
established forts on the site of the Gowa capital of Makassar (modern Ujung
Pandang) and at Manado in northern Sulawesi, expelling all foreign merchants.
Malacca had been captured from the Portuguese in 1641, though its importance
as a trade center and its prosperity had much dwindled, but VOC forces were
unable to dislodge them from the eastern part of the island of Timor in the
Lesser Sunda Islands, which carried on a valuable export trade in sandalwood
with China and remained a part of the ramshackle Portuguese overseas empire
until 1975.

Developments in Java, 1619 to 1755

     The establishment of Batavia in 1619 as the center of VOC operations
involved it decisively in the Machiavellian politics of the inland states and
led to its domination of Java by the end of the century (see fig. 4). This was
apparently not Governor General Coen's original objective. The VOC continued
to see its mission primarily in economic terms: the maintenance of a network
of trading posts that would bring a good return to investors back home. Yet
economic interests entailed military and political ones, and from the very
beginning the Dutch at Batavia were involved in confrontations with Javanese
rulers.

     The most important of these were the sultans of Mataram, a state
established in the mid-sixteenth century in eastern Java. Its greatest ruler,
Sultan Agung (1613-45), had dreams of restoring the glory of Majapahit. By
1625 he had conquered Surabaya, a powerful rival, extended his power as far
west as Cirebon on Java, occupied the island of Madura after a bloody
campaign, and forced the submission of the sultanates of Banjarmasin and
Sukadana on Borneo. Sultan Agung subsequently moved on the western Javanese
kingdom of Banten. The Dutch at Batavia found themselves in the unenviable
position of battling two enemies at their gates: the forces of Banten, whi