SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF COLONIAL INDONESIA AND DUTCH COLONIAL POLICY:

FROM VOC TO COLONIAL STATE, c. 1700-1850

National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague

on microfiche

Historical background

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Dutch had been involved in Indonesia for nearly 200 years, yet their presence there remained quite limited geographically and somewhat precarious politically. In the first half of the following century, however, they established the basis of a truly colonial state and initiated the expansion that was to bring virtually the entire archipelago under their control by the first decade of the twentieth century.

In 1795 Dutch "patriots" backed by invading French revolutionary troops established the Batavian republic. The Dutch East India Company was disbanded for corruption and its properties in Indonesia fell to the new Dutch state. Under Napoleon’s brother Louis, the resolutely anti-feudal general Daendels was appointed governor general of Indonesia (1808-1811). Under his short tenure the first attempts to reform colonial administration in the east were made. In the revolutionary and Napoleonic period the British occupied the Moluccas (from 1796) and Java (1811-1816) under Sir Thomas Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Raffles, inspired by the same anti-feudal and reforming ideals as Daendels, introduced the concept of “land rent” on Java, a tax maintained when the Dutch recovered the colony in 1816.

From 1816 onwards, the Dutch began to reassert and expand their control. A new East Indian army (the KNIL), was set up. The exploitation of the colony for the benefit of the mother land could begin in earnest.

Java war

By the 1820s social unrest among the people was widespread. When the governor general Van der Capellen tried to reform the leasing of land by aristocrats, thus threatening their incomes, discontent led part of the traditional nobility on Java to revolt. The rebellion that broke out in 1825, under the leadership of Diepo Negoro, took five years to defeat and cost the lives of an estimated 200,000 people. Other uprisings took place in this period on Sumatra and elsewhere.

The cultuurstelsel and the exploitation of colony

By the late 1820s the Dutch were eager to put right colonial finances, sapped by among others military costs, and to make the colony a paying proposition for the Netherlands.

The authoritarian philanthropist and military officer Johannes van den Bosch launched his “cultuurstelsel” initiative at this time and was appointed governor general by King William I to install this system, which its author believed would benefit both the indigenous population and the colonists. The cultuurstelsel amounted to forcing the Indonesians to cultivate various cash crops (the most successful were coffee and sugar) that were to be paid to the colonial government instead of the land rent inaugurated under the British. The colonial government would then sell these crops on the world market through the Nederlandsch handelmaatschappij that had been set up in 1824 under royal patronage. At first there was concern among officials for the effect various measures would have on the indigenous population, but by about 1835 such solicitude ebbed. By 1840 the first famines provoked by increased exploitation were reported. By the middle of the century the system had brought great wealth to the colonial power, but was coming under more and more criticism both in Indonesia and the Netherlands.

Archives of four colonial administrators

In the present project undertaken by the General State Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague and MMF Publications the archives of four prominent actors in this half-century were selected for publication on microfiche;

• Nicolaus Engelhard, Governor of Java’s Northeast Coast
• Gérard J.C. Schneither, Personal Secretary to the Governor General
• Johannes van den Bosch, Governor General; Minister of the Colonies
• Jean Chrétien Baud, Governor General; Minister of the Colonies

Their careers span the six decades from the demise of the old VOC regime in the 1790s until the establishment of a full-blown colonial system by the 1850s.

Types of documents

The official papers contained in these four archives are rich and varied, including a wide range of correspondence, public and secret reports, budgets and many others. The new colonial administrator of the post-Napoleonic period was typically concerned to acquire as much faithful documentation as possible on which to base his decisions and then to explain and justify those decisions to the government as clearly and thoroughly as possible. In this way officials amassed archives covering not only the contemporary period, but also going back in time to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Subjects covered

Among the many subjects are:

• colonial government in general
• government of particular regions and places
• relations with indigenous authorities
• agriculture and the cultuurstelsel
• trade and relations with other European powers
• finances
• military matters
• culture and religion, including reports on the activities of European Christian missionaries.