Coen’s Vision and Its Limits

Professor Kumar opens by referring back to J. P. Coen’s idea of a far-flung web catching the trade of Asia in its mesh. In the seventeenth century, the VOC had maintained widely dispersed factories and forts, often established and defended by military campaigns across many parts of Southeast Asia.

But Coen’s vision proved not to be viable in the long run. To exclude rival traders, whether European or Asian, it was not enough to control a few forts. Rival merchants could use native states, harbour towns and coastal refuges beyond Dutch control. The attempt to suppress competition therefore forced the VOC into repeated wars against one sultanate or principality after another.

These wars were expensive. They also pushed the Company beyond its original commercial model. A trading company trying to control maritime exchange was drawn steadily into politics, fortification, alliance-making and territorial intervention.

Why the Trade Empire Failed

Several factors undermined the VOC’s original trade empire. Many posts operated at a loss. Monopoly policy reduced the profits available to local Asian inhabitants, which in turn reduced their purchasing power. The Company wanted two-way trade, but its own restrictions could damage the very markets it hoped to exploit.

Internal corruption compounded the problem. Company servants engaged in private trade, siphoned off goods and used their positions for personal gain. Professor Kumar notes the structural reason for this: salaries were low, pensions were absent, and men did not go east expecting to return as poor as when they had left.

The VOC still showed profit in the late seventeenth century, but by the eighteenth century losses mounted. Dividends continued to be paid to maintain public confidence, while the gap was covered by borrowing. The Company’s outward prosperity increasingly concealed financial weakness.

The Turn Toward Java

As international trade became less reliable, the VOC turned toward a different kind of operation, centred mainly on Java. Java offered fertile land, dense population, long-established political structures and access to export commodities.

The Company began to depend increasingly on extracting produce from Java. Teak was important because Java still had extensive forests. Coffee became especially important after its introduction into the hilly regions of West Java, especially the Preanger.

This was a decisive transformation. The Company’s fortunes were no longer tied only to ships, forts and inter-Asian trade. They became tied to land, crops, regents, labour and the administrative capacity to compel production.

Regents and Forced Deliveries

Coffee was produced through the agency of native regents, or bupati. Under systems of forced delivery, regents guaranteed that specified quantities of produce would be delivered to the VOC at agreed or imposed prices.

At first, the price might be determined by agreement between the Company and the regent. Over time, however, the VOC’s stronger position allowed it to dictate terms more heavily. Regents were expected to raise their own taxes in kind and to pay their own subordinates.

In districts outside the coffee and teak areas, contingencies operated. Here a regent signed an agreement to deliver part of the produce of his regency as a form of tribute, sometimes without payment. In practice, the distinction between forced deliveries and contingencies could become blurred.

Coffee-Sergeants and Early Colonial Administration

Professor Kumar identifies the beginnings of later Dutch colonial administration in the appointment of overseers, or opzieners, also known as coffee-sergeants. Their role was to ensure that cultivators planted and delivered the required crops, especially coffee.

These officials were supposed to supervise cultivation and keep an eye on the regents. Yet they also became part of the informal economy of extraction. Some advanced money to regents at interest, allowing them to finance cultivation before payment was received, while profiting personally from their intermediary position.

The coffee-sergeant therefore stands as a revealing figure: small in rank, but historically significant. He marks the emergence of a more intrusive administrative apparatus, reaching from Batavia into the Javanese countryside.

Java and the Wars of Succession

VOC military activity in the eighteenth century also concentrated heavily on Java. Banten had become a dependent state, while Mataram became the central theatre of repeated Dutch intervention.

The first half of the century was marked by the Javanese wars of succession. In 1704, the First Javanese War of Succession saw Mangkurat III dethroned by the Dutch in favour of Pangeran Puger, later Pakubuwana I. In 1706–7, the Company sent expeditions against Surapati, who had allied with Mangkurat III.

A second succession conflict followed in 1719, when the succession to Pakubuwana I was contested. Again, the VOC intervened to secure the ruler it favoured. These interventions reveal that the Company was no longer merely trading beside Javanese politics. It was actively shaping dynastic outcomes.

The Chinese Crisis of 1740

The period from 1740 to 1757 was one of almost continual warfare on Java. It began among the Chinese community in Batavia — a large community whose presence owed much to Dutch encouragement. Coen had regarded the Chinese as commercially essential to Batavia’s success.

Chinese residents were active as tradesmen, artisans, small traders, restaurateurs, arak distillers and commercial agriculturalists, especially in sugar. Yet later Dutch administrators became alarmed by unemployed Chinese migrants and itinerant groups.

Regulations were introduced for the deportation of Chinese people deemed not usefully employed. Abuses followed. Officials extorted money under threat of deportation, and rumours spread that Chinese deportees were being thrown overboard at sea.

As tensions escalated, many Chinese fled Batavia and began organising armed resistance. When this became known, violence erupted inside the city. The remaining Chinese population was attacked, and the crisis spread along Java’s north coast and inland into Mataram.

Pakubuwana II and the North Coast

The ruler of Mataram, Pakubuwana II, initially joined forces with the Chinese resistance and killed the Dutch garrison. He then reconsidered and made peace with the VOC. But Javanese involvement had developed its own momentum, and the anti-Dutch party continued the struggle without him.

The VOC eventually regained control with the help of Cakraningrat IV of Madura, who hoped to profit from alliance with the Dutch. Pakubuwana II was restored, but at a major cost. He had to cede the whole north coast of Java to the Company and renounce claims to sovereignty over Madura.

After regaining his throne, Pakubuwana II shifted the capital to Surakarta. Yet peace did not last. Mangkubumi and Mas Said rebelled, gaining considerable support. The war increasingly took on the aspect of a struggle against Dutch control.

The Partition of Mataram

In 1755, the VOC had established enough control to partition Mataram through the Treaty of Giyanti. Mataram was divided into two main principalities: Surakarta, under Pakubuwana III, and Yogyakarta, under Mangkubumi, who took the title Hamengkubuwana.

Both states acknowledged VOC sovereignty. In 1757, a third smaller principality, the Mangkunegaran, was created for Mas Said. Its territory depended on Surakarta and was named after the title of its rulers.

The territories of these principalities were not consolidated into single blocks. They were fragmented into scattered tracts interspersed with land belonging to other principalities. This arrangement was designed to prevent dangerous concentrations of power.

Balambangan and the Oosthoek

The last major Dutch campaign on Java was the conquest of the Oosthoek, between 1757 and 1777. The political apparatus of this region centred on Balambangan, the last Hindu kingdom on Java and a territory belonging more to the Balinese cultural sphere than to the Javanese.

Balambangan became a refuge for anti-Dutch elements: descendants of Surapati, Chinese who had fled after the 1740 troubles, Buginese, Makassarese and Madurese. It represented not merely a peripheral kingdom, but a gathering point for those displaced or threatened by VOC expansion.

One striking cultural result of the Dutch conquest was that the Dutch enforced a change in the state religion from Hinduism to Islam in order to weaken Balambangan’s ties with Bali. The episode shows that VOC intervention could reach beyond commerce into culture, religion and regional identity.

The VOC’s Financial Collapse

By 1777, the VOC had extinguished or subjugated its major rivals on Java. Yet it did not long survive to extract profit from this expanded domain. Its difficulties were not only Indonesian. Professor Kumar follows Van Leur in stressing developments in European politics.

The American War of Independence brought Dutch conflict with Britain. British naval superiority made it increasingly difficult for the VOC to move Indonesian products to European markets. The Treaty of Paris in 1784 forced the Dutch to grant the English trading rights in their territories, breaking the Company’s monopoly.

The French Revolution then transformed the political situation in the Netherlands. In 1795, the Batavian Republic was established, protected by French Revolutionary armies. The Dutch ruler, William V, fled to England and issued instructions from London affecting Dutch possessions overseas.

British forces took the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Dutch posts in India, the west coast of Sumatra and Malacca. Java was not taken at this point, but the crisis revealed how vulnerable the VOC had become to European war and imperial rivalry.

Dissolution and Inheritance

The Batavian Republic regarded the VOC as a pillar of the old regime and took over its territorial possessions at the end of the eighteenth century. It also assumed the Company’s debts, which Professor Kumar records as enormous in relation to its original capital.

The dissolution of the VOC marked a formal end to one phase of Dutch colonial history. Yet it did not erase the structures that had been built. The systems of forced deliveries, regents, coffee supervision, military intervention and territorial partition remained historically decisive.

The Company disappeared, but the colonial apparatus it had helped create became the foundation for later Dutch state rule in Indonesia.

What Kind of Europeans Were the Dutch?

Toward the end of the lecture, Professor Kumar warns against assuming that the Dutch were “like us” simply because they were Europeans. Europeans of the early modern period were also very different from modern observers, and in some ways had more in common with Asian societies of the same period than we might expect.

She cautions against reducing the Dutch to hard-headed businessmen, indifferent to religion and concerned only with profit. They were children of their own age, and that age thought instinctively in religious categories. Dutch commercial, legal and religious attitudes were intertwined.

This observation broadens the lecture. The VOC was not merely an economic machine. It was also a social world, shaped by European assumptions, anxieties, punishments, religious categories and moral codes.