Dutch East Indies

It was the third-largest colonial empire in Asia and the most profitable per head for its rulers. Its history is the history of how that profit was made — through forced cultivation, a legal order that divided people by race, and a police state in the outer islands — and of how the people it ruled ended it.

At a glance

What was the Dutch East Indies?

The colony that replaced the Company. The VOC was dissolved on 1 January 1800 with debts of 134.7 million guilders, and the Batavian Republic took over its territories, its debts and its obligations. For a century and a half afterwards the archipelago was governed as a Dutch possession: a governor-general at Batavia, a civil service recruited in the Netherlands, and an army — the KNIL — recruited largely from the islands themselves.

Its wealth came from the land. Coffee, sugar, tobacco, indigo, tea, tin and later oil were produced for the Dutch market, and the colonial state took a share of the proceeds that made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest small countries in Europe.

How was it governed?

Through a legal order that divided people by race. The 1854 Regeringsreglement set the framework: a governor-general with wide powers, a civil service with a monopoly of administration, and a population classified as European, Foreign Oriental (Chinese, Arab, Indian) or Native, each with its own courts and laws. The categories were extended in 1855, 1919 and 1925, and the principle was summarised in the notorious formula that "like over like is welcome" — a European was tried by European law, a native by native law.

Representation was minimal. The Yogyakarta court kept a privileged position within it, while the Volksraad, created in 1918 with 39 members, was enlarged to 60 in 1931 and remained advisory; the colony was governed by decree, not by consent. The police state lay behind it: a Coolie Ordinance that bound indentured labourers to their employers, a exile camp at Boven Digoel for political prisoners, and a network of informers that Snouck Hurgronje's advice helped design.

What was the Cultivation System?

The machine that made the colony pay. From 1830 the government required villages to devote a fifth of their land, or sixty-six days a year, to export crops — coffee, sugar, indigo, tobacco — which were sold through the state and delivered as tribute. The system produced the batig slot, the annual surplus sent to the Dutch treasury: some four per cent of Dutch GDP and more than half of state revenue in the 1850s.

It also produced famine and resistance, and it was dismantled slowly: formally phased out between 1862 and 1917, not in 1870 as the textbooks say, and replaced by private plantation agriculture under the Agrarian Law of 1870, which opened the colony to Dutch capital while confirming that land not proven private belonged to the state.

Who lived there?

Sixty million people, and the census of 1930 is the best measurement: 60,728,000 in total, of whom 41,717,000 — about sixty-nine per cent — lived in Java and Madura, the most densely populated large island in the world. Some 242,000 were classed as Europeans and 1,343,000 as Foreign Orientals, mostly Chinese.

Those figures are legal categories, not ethnic ones, and Furnivall's warning applies: the colonial state counted people by the law that governed them, so a Chinese Indonesian born in Java was a "Foreign Oriental" and a Dutch-Indonesian child might be a "European". The plural society that Furnivall described — groups living side by side but not together — was produced by that legal architecture as much as by migration.

What was the Ethical Policy?

A change of justification, not of extraction. From 1901 the Dutch government announced an "Ethical Policy": irrigation, education, health and emigration from Java to the outer islands, funded by colonial revenue, justified as a debt of honour. It built schools, clinics and railways, and it produced a small Western-educated elite which, within a generation, demanded independence.

The same decades saw the conquest of the outer islands: Aceh, where the war ran from 1873 to 1914; Bali in 1906–08; Sulawesi, Borneo and the Moluccas in the 1900s. The colony reached its greatest extent at the moment it began to lose its legitimacy.

What was the economy in the twentieth century?

Plantations, oil and debt. Rubber and oil became major exports; Royal Dutch–Shell, formed in 1907, made the Indies one of the world's oil producers; and Dutch shipping, banking and engineering firms dominated the modern sector. The Depression wrecked it: colonial debt rose from 93 million guilders to 1,030 million, exports collapsed, and the government cut spending, which fell hardest on the schools and clinics of the Ethical Policy.

The economy was also extractive by design. The colony's surplus was transferred to the Netherlands, its industry was restricted to protect Dutch manufacturers, and its labour was cheap by law. Historians still argue about the size of that transfer — Elson is sceptical of the "drain" thesis, Booth and van Zanden measure it differently, and de Zwart, Gallardo-Albarrán and Rijpma have recently estimated Indonesian living standards against other Asian colonies — but not about its direction.

How did it end?

In three years of war and four of revolution. The Japanese invaded in 1942 and the colonial state collapsed in days — the governor-general surrendered on 8 March, and the Netherlands Indies government in exile never recovered its authority. On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed independence; the Dutch, backed by British and then Indian troops, tried to restore control; and after four years of fighting, negotiations and two "police actions" that shocked world opinion, sovereignty was transferred on 27 December 1949.

The transfer was to a federal state, the United States of Indonesia, which within a year became the unitary Republic of Indonesia. The Dutch kept New Guinea until 1963, and the memory of the colony — the tempo doeloe nostalgia, the war of independence, the reparations — shaped Dutch politics for a generation.

Common myths about the Dutch East Indies

Timeline of the Dutch East Indies

What the map shows next

At 1930 on the map the colony is at its greatest extent, and Surakarta is a protected court within it.

At 1949 on the map sovereignty is transferred, and the Fijian and Papuan states are still decades away.