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Indonesia VOC Bankruptcy and the British Occupation
Not only continuous wars on Java but also the VOC's own
greed
and shortsightedness led to its undoing by the end of the
eighteenth century. Its personnel were extraordinarily
corrupt,
determined to "shake the pagoda tree" of the Indies, to
use a
phrase popular with its eighteenth-century British
contemporaries,
to get rich quick. Although the VOC preserved its monopoly
over the
spice trade, it could not prevent foreign rivals,
especially the
British and French, from growing spices on their own
territories in
the West Indies and elsewhere. Thus, European markets were
assured
a cheap supply. Moreover, the development in Europe of
winter
forage in the late seventeenth century made spices less of
a
necessity, since livestock did not have to be slaughtered
in autumn
and its meat preserved with spices over the cold season.
War
between the Netherlands and Britain in 1780-84 also
prevented the
VOC from shipping its goods.
The VOC turned to new cash crops and products: pepper
and
textiles from Sumatra, and coffee and tea grown in the
mountainous
Priangan Districts. In Priangan, inhabited by people of
the
Sundanese ethnic group, the local rulers collected coffee
from
cultivators and delivered it to the VOC. Coffee became
Java's most
profitable crop from the early eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth
century. But despite such diversification, the Dutch
StatenGeneraal in 1789 discovered the company had a deficit of
some 74
million guilders. The Netherlands was occupied by French
troops in
1795, and a French protectorate established. The new
government
abolished the VOC by allowing its charter to lapse in
1799. VOC
territories became the property of the Dutch government.
In 1808 Louis Bonaparte, who had been made king of the
Netherlands by his brother Napoleon, appointed Herman
Willem
Daendels as governor general of the Dutch possessions.
Daendels,
imbued with the ideas of the French Revolution, had scant
patience
for the intricacies of Java's "feudal" political system
and
introduced a comprehensive set of reforms. In doing so, he
earned
the hostility of the Javanese nobility who had benefited
from the
old system of indirect rule. But in 1811, a year after the
Netherlands had been incorporated into the French empire,
the
British occupied Java. In August 1811, they seized Batavia
and a
month later received the surrender of French forces.
Thomas Stamford Raffles was appointed lieutenant
governor of
Java (1811-16) and its dependencies by the British East
India
Company in Calcutta. Raffles, best known for being the
founder of
Singapore in 1819, attempted, like Daendels, comprehensive
reform.
Many of his ideas were enlightened: abolition of forced
labor and
fixed quotas for cash crops, peasants' free choice of
which crops
to grow, salaries for government officials, abolition of
the slave
trade in the archipelago, and improvement of the lot of
slaves (his
goal of total opposition to slavery was deemed
impractical).
Raffles also sponsored the establishment of a subsidiary
court,
Pakualaman, in Yogyakarta in 1812, further dividing the
authority
of the Yogyakarta sultanate. But there was little time for
these
efforts to take root. At the outset of the Napoleonic
Wars, the
British government had promised the Dutch
government-in-exile that
at the end of the war occupied territories would be
returned to the
Netherlands. Over the objections of Raffles, Dutch
authority was
reestablished in 1816.
Data as of November 1992
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