The country Indonesia is full of diverse cultures, religions, and many kinds of people from different tribes. But it wasn’t always like this, there was a time in Indonesia history when the people from different tribes were abused and colonized. This defining chapter of Indonesia’s history is the colonization of the Dutch which lasted for three and a half centuries, from the early 1600s all the way to the middle of the 20th century, it was not just for a single year or even a couple of years, it was in many ways, a slow, painful, and agonizing part of Indonesia history that eventually led to the reshaping of the entire civilization of the nation.
Understanding this part of Indonesia’s dark history means retracing how exactly the Dutch colonization began, how it went down, the struggles the Indonesians went through during that period of time, and the eventual end of the colonization. We will explore it all.
The Spice That Started It All
Before the Dutch even arrived in Indonesia, the Indonesian archipelago was already a crossroad. Many merchants from many countries across the wide world had long been drawn to the Indonesian archipelago, merchants from India, Malay peninsula, China, and Arabia were eying the archipelago, and they had good reasons for doing so. The Moluccas or what the Europeans liked to call as the “Spice Islands” produced many kinds of spices like nutmeg, cloves, and mace, these spices are worth a lot in European markets, so much so that it was valued more than gold by the Europeans. A small sack of these spices could fund an entire voyage, imagine how much it is worth when a ship returns with a full hold of it, it could make a merchant rich for the rest of his life.
The Portugals got there first, they were able to establish trade footholds in the early 1500s. But the grip that Portugal had was never total and by the end of the 16th century, a new maritime power was on the rise in northwestern Europe. The Dutch Republic, after the rebellion against the Spanish rule, was ambitious, well-organized, and prepared for commerce.
The Dutch’s conquest all began in the late 16th century, the first ever Dutch fleet arrived on the archipelago in 1596, merchants from Dutch were aiming to gain direct access to the “Spice Islands” (the Moluccas) but the relations between the Dutch and the local rulers at the time was very tense so the Dutch really did not make a particularly graceful entrance, but that did not deter the Dutch, they kept coming back again, and again, until finally in 1602 the Dutch created something that would change and stir the course of history of Southeast Asia, they created the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) or the Dutch East India Company.
The VOC is the world’s first multinational corporation, it was able to take hold of a government-granted monopoly on Asian trade. The VOC is without a doubt, one of the most powerful commercial entities that exist in human history, the VOC has legal authority to start war, negotiate treaties, mint coins, and establish their own colonies, these powers are something that companies today could never think of or dream of ever obtaining. To achieve VOC’s primary objective, they used brutal tactics like monopolizing the spice trade, eliminating competitions, and extracting profit with as little overhead as possible. But they didn’t stop there, they would often raid and burn entire harvest of cloves or nutmeg on islands that didn’t want to sell their spices exclusively to the VOC. They waged war against local sultanates and In 1621 it resulted in the near depopulation of Banda Islands. They were almost completely exterminated because the VOC Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen wanted to ensure the Dutch’s control over nutmeg production after the local population tried an attempt at trading nutmeg with English merchants.
Coen is a complicated symbol for both the Netherlands and Indonesia, in Coen’s mind he probably thought he was building something grand, a commercial empire that will enrich the nation he came from, in reality what he actually built was constructed on the sea of corpses of innocent lives, something that will define the relationship between the two countries for the next three and a half centuries.
Batavia
During this time, the Dutch did not show intrest in governing the inland territories of Java or Sumatra, instead they focused on strategic coastal outposts like Batavia, which is now known by the name “Jakarta” in modern-day, the capital of Indonesia. The city of Batavia was made in the ruins of the Sundanese port of Jayakarta, it became a pivotal nerve center point for the Dutch operations and activities in the archipelago. The Dutch shaped it to resemble the look of a Dutch city as much as possible, so that it would seem as if a Dutch city had been constructed in the tropics, it was an act of culture imposition and declaration that this land had been conquered by the Dutch, that it belonged to another world.
But the construction of Batavia was full of troubles, the canals were pretty much open sewers in a tropical climate, on top of that many diseases killed Dutch colonizers and the enslaved labor workers. The city was built on the backs of coerced and forced slave laborers that were brought from across the archipelago and beyond, from places like Bengal, Bali, Sulawesi and even as far as Madagascar and East Africa.
Outside of Batavia, the Dutch’s control was spreading wide and evolving, the VOC slowly moved from purely just doing spice trading to territorial governance, they signed deals with local rulers that gradually stripped those rulers of their powers while maintaining the facade that those local rulers were still in charge. This strategy allowed the Dutch to build their empire in the archipelago, and this strategy would also remain as one of the defining features of Dutch policy for generations.
The Fall of VOC
But by the late 18th century, the VOC had fallen into corruption, poor management, and the shifting tides of global trade. The company was crumbling under the weight of the corruption by its own members, embezzlement everywhere and the members at every level were also skimming profits. The rise of competition from other European countries eroded VOC’s monopolies and contributed to VOC’s downfall.
In 1799, VOC was dissolved and its territories were transferred to the Dutch government. This caused a transition for the Indonesians, going from corporate colony to state colony, but this change did not improve or helped the Indonesians at all, in fact, it even brought new kinds of systematic exploitations by the Dutch. The most infamous one was the Cultuurstelsel, the Cultivation System, this new system was introduced by the Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in 1830.
The cultivation system would make Javanese farmers pay by giving a fifth of their land, or 60 days of labor per year, to produce crops like coffee, sugar, and tea for the Dutch colonial government. It was veiled to make it look like the farmers are just paying taxes, but in reality it was closer to forced labor, and the farmers that refuse to pay were punished, this system gave a huge amount of wealth to the Netherlands, meanwhile a large chunk of Javanese were left to starve and die.
The “Ethical Policy”
In the turn of the 20th century, criticism of the harsh exploitation from within the Netherlands was growing, a young Dutch writer named Eduard Douwes Dekker, whose pen name is Multatuli, published a novel in 1860 named “Max Havelaar”, this novel exposed the cruelties of the cultivation system, it became a very influential book in Dutch history and eventually prompted Queen Wilhelmina to announce a new approach, called “the Ethical Policy”.
But the Ethical Policy was never about Indonesian welfare, it was really about making the colonial administration more efficient to run, more sustainable. And so, the Dutch shifted their philosophy toward the “Ethical policy”. Acknowledging a debt of honor to the Indonesian people, and so the government invested in irrigation, migration, and most importantly, education with the goal of creating a low-level indigenous bureaucracy that can run the colony efficiently, this was the moment the Dutch dug their own graves, because the small elite of western-educated Indonesians started to apply the European concepts such as democracy, liberty, and nationhood to their own situation, and this period of time saw the rise of organizations like Budi Utomo (1908), Sarekat Islam, and eventually the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) that was led by a young man named Sukarno, who would later become the first president of Indonesia in 18th of August, 1945.
Fall of The Dutch Rule
The end of the Dutch rule happened in 1942, the Dutch colonial order that was already under stress from the nationalist movement, fell apart pretty quickly in 1942 when the Japanese forces swept through Southeast Asia, and in just a couple of months, the empire that was built over three centuries completely crumbled. The Japanese Empire rapidly ousted the Dutch and shattered the myth of European invincibility.
Ultimately, the colonization of Indonesia by the Dutch served as a catalyst that united an entire nation. Because of VOC, a diverse group of people across 17.000 islands found a common cause and a common name. The history of the fall of the Dutch in Indonesia is also the story of the birth of Indonesia.
By: Kennata Keanu Risang
Write and Win: Participate in Creative writing Contest & International Essay Contest and win fabulous prizes.
About the Author
