A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Taking all this in isolation, observers of the late eighteenth-century Archipelago might have been forgiven for predicting that the Dutch were set to go the same way as the Portuguese who had come before them—swamped by their surroundings, their institutions overwhelmed, their very ethnicity diluted to the point of vanishing, and ultimately amounting to nothing more than another dash of spice in the Southeast Asian stew.

  But as the nineteenth century reared up over the horizon of history, a new global connectivity was coming into play that would allow the zeitgeist of Amsterdam, London and Paris to rattle the walls of Batavia and Yogyakarta. And even as the East India companies of both Britain and the Netherlands lumbered wearily towards extinction, a fresh impetus was being forged in the crucible of a war-torn Europe. With Napoleon on the rampage and with Enlightenment sensibilities finding strange new form in an aggressive expansionist impulse, the true age of European empire in the Archipelago was only now about to begin.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE CLASH OF

  CIVILISATIONS:

  FROM COMPANY

  TO EMPIRE

  The low country of Central Java lay to the west under a fine lavender haze. This had been the cradle of the mighty Sanjaya and Sailendra dynasties a thousand years earlier, and the countryside was still studded with their blackened and crumbling temples. Now it was the seat of the Muslim incarnation of Mataram—a sweep of green ground, thick with forest, dappled with flooded rice fields and speckled with villages. From this vantage point on the slopes of Gunung Lawu the panorama seemed peaceful. In truth, however, the countryside of Central Java was scarred and seething, wracked by decades of rebellion and rancour. But on this day—15 February 1755—a drastic step was being taken to bring the troubles to an end.

  The two Javanese royals, sitting a few feet apart at a heavyset table carried into place for this meeting at the little village of Jatisari, could hardly bring themselves to look at one another. Every effort had been made to make the setting agreeable—a gamelan orchestra was in full flow and ranks of courtiers were watching quietly from the sidelines. But still, the two Javanese royals were overcome with emotion. It was left to the host, a Dutchman, to ease things along. Nicolaas Hartingh, governor of the VOC’s north coast territories and official point of contact with the Mataram court, spoke in flowing Javanese. This, he declared, was a special moment: after decades of turmoil there was finally peace in Java. He took the hands of the two men—Susuhunan Pakubuwono III, and his uncle Mangkubumi, officially recognised just a few days earlier at a spot higher up the mountain as the first sultan of what was to become Yogyakarta—and called for three glasses of beer. Nudged gently onwards by the Dutchman, the royals swore to fight each other no more. All three men raised their glasses and drank.

  After almost two hundred years, Mataram, the first truly great Javanese kingdom since the fall of Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit, had been cleaved in two—with a Dutchman as the powerbroker.

  At his death in 1645, Sultan Agung had bequeathed to his descendants the most extensive indigenous polity that Java had ever known. Despite his failure to crush Dutch Batavia in the 1620s, Agung had consolidated his power in the Javanese heartlands, and made Mataram a major exporter of rice to other, less fertile corners of the Archipelago. But as soon as he was interred in his hilltop tomb at Imogiri, a sacred site south of the capital on the road to the coast, his heirs set about making a mighty mess of the kingdom. For the next hundred years, the Mataram court lurched from crisis to crisis. According to the Javanese chroniclers, Sultan Agung’s heir, Amangkurat I, was a ‘king who had sunk to the level of the beasts’, and he was by no means the only inept and unpleasant scion of the dynasty. The Islamic title of ‘sultan’ had been dropped at Agung’s death for the Javanese honorific susuhunan, and over the decades a procession of struggling susuhunans took to shunting the Mataram capital, complete with its sacred banyan trees, to fresh locations in search of auspicious new starts. But though the court moved from Karta to Kartasura to Surakarta, the troubles continued. There were uprisings and intrigues, famines and natural disasters, and the court was sacked by rampaging Madurese warlords on several occasions. And all the while the VOC was becoming ever more entangled in the internal affairs of the state.

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Dutch were a near-permanent presence as powerbrokers in Mataram. Many of the more traditionally-minded Javanese aristocrats were resentful and suspicious of the presence of these non-Javanese and non-Muslims; they were unconscionable infidels from whichever side of the well-established Javanese dualism you approached the question. But floundering kings couldn’t resist calling upon Dutch firepower whenever there was a troubled succession or a threatened rebellion. The Dutch, meanwhile, had their own best interests at heart. They never attempted actually to annex Mataram; they simply used their powerbrokering position to ensure that whichever king occupied the throne was a man that they could work with, and to ensure that ever more favourable treaties were signed. It was a kind of imperialism by stealth, unfolding organically over the generations.

  By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, however, the state of crisis in Mataram had reached an impasse that not even Dutch assistance could surmount. The reign of the king of the day, Pakubuwono II, had been an unmitigated disaster. He had faced endless upheavals; at one point he had ended up on the run with rebels rampaging through his Surakarta kraton, and by the 1740s he was embroiled in the biggest rebellion of all.

  The revolt had been started by an ambitious princeling by the name of Mas Said. He was, it was said, a very small man, but he more than made up for it with a surfeit of compensatory energy. A VOC official reported that ‘fire and vivacity radiate from his eyes’. Part jago, part Ratu Adil, he hated the Dutch, despised the decayed corruption of the court, and claimed that the Queen of the Southern Ocean was on his side. He joined forces with an even more impressive rebel prince, Pakubuwono II’s half-brother Mangkubumi. Before long they were rampaging through Central Java at the head of an army of 13,000 malcontents. This time the Dutch could not help. The rebellion was simply too big, and what was more, the VOC itself was in a state of terminal decline.

  It is unsurprising, therefore, that at this point Pakubuwono II seems to have given up the ghost. Dying was apparently the only way out, and he set about the terminal task with considerable enthusiasm. When the Dutch governor of the coastal regions came to visit him on his deathbed in late 1749, the king made a quite spectacular offer: he would cede his entire kingdom to the VOC if only it would earn him a final moment of peace.

  The colonial officials were understandably flabbergasted by this unprecedented offer, but they battered out a treaty nonetheless, and hustled the crown prince onto the throne as Susuhunan Pakubuwono III, leaving the old king to die in peace five days later. This did not amount to the inception of a new, Dutch-ruled Mataram, however, for at exactly the same time, at a tented rebel court a day’s ride to the southwest, a wildcat enthronement had taken place. Mangkubumi had also been declared Susuhunan Pakubuwono Senopati Ingalaga Ngabdurahman Sayidin Panatagama, King of all Mataram. The conflict, it seemed, was intractable.

  By the 1750s everyone was exhausted. Pakubuwono III was as miserable as his father; the VOC had troubles enough of their own, and Mangkubumi had fallen out with Mas Said, turning the whole sorry business into a monumental stalemate. Some sort of solution, no matter how unpalatable, was essential. Nicolaas Hartingh, a smooth operator and a fluent Javanese speaker, was the VOC’s man on the scene by this stage. During the fiery dry months of 1754 he set up a correspondence with Mangkubumi’s rebel court at Karta, and by the time the year spluttered out in a succession of monsoon downpours they had come up with a radical solution: they would cleave the kingdom in two.

  And so, on 13 February 1755 at Giyanti—a misty, murky spot perched high on the slopes of Gunung Lawu—Mangkubumi met with Hartingh to sign a contract. It gave the rebel a jumbled half of the Mataram realm, and half of the twenty-thousand
-dollar rent which the VOC had agreed to pay for what was still notionally Mataram territory on the north coast. Two days later, the whole party rode down the lower slopes to that spot at Jatisari where a gamelan was playing and Pakubuwono III was waiting with tears in his eyes. From now on what had once been Mataram would have both a susuhunan and a sultan.

  In the received version of history that is taught today in Indonesian high schools, the Treaty of Giyanti is the ultimate example of imperialist divide and rule tactics, depicting the horrible Hollanders at their very worst. Those in possession of a more fertile imagination and a firm grip on Indonesia’s favourite literary clichés will tell you that Nicolaas Hartingh, with his slick language skills and glib turns of phrase, was the dalang, the puppet-master, in whose hands the Javanese royals had been rendered into wayang kulit shadow puppets, held up against the screen of history with a volcano for a back-light. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not really true. The idea of splitting the realm had been as much Javanese as Dutch—and they had the story of Airlangga’s supposed partitioning of his own Kahuripan kingdom seven hundred years earlier as a precedent. They had almost certainly not expected the arrangement to be permanent. Instead, just as in Airlangga’s day, it would allow breathing space before the complete kingdom eventually reconvened under some new ‘Righteous Prince’. There is nothing to suggest that, as they rode away from Jatisari in the cool mists of February 1755, either the Javanese kings or the accompanying Dutchman ever supposed that this time things would prove to be different.

  As sultan, Mangkubumi presided over a grand new capital close to the original Mataram seat at Karta. Officially founded in 1755, it was named Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat. The first part of the name was taken from Ayodhya, the mythical birthplace of the god Rama (Mangkubumi is often regarded as the man who presided over the perfection of Java’s synthesis of Islam and other, older cultural threads). From the outset it was better known as Yogyakarta, and it quickly became a burgeoning wellspring of Javanese culture and power. Up the road in Surakarta, too, peace had allowed a certain vigour to return to kraton life. Meanwhile, Mangkubumi’s one-time rebel sidekick Mas Said had also come in from the cold, and for his belated loyalty he had been granted a kingdom within the kingdom—direct hereditary rule over a pocket of four thousand households within Surakarta territory.

  The VOC, meanwhile, was on its very last legs. In the outer reaches of the Archipelago the Dutch had reduced many of their unprofitable outposts to mere token presences—sometimes little more than a single feverish resident. Closer to the centre, corruption and incompetence were endemic, and in the new bifurcated Mataram—which they had helped to create—the Dutch often ended up looking decidedly lacklustre alongside the resurgent Javanese. In Yogyakarta, bumbling incompetence meant that it took the VOC some twenty-five years even to build a small fortress, while the Javanese managed to throw up a three-mile curtain wall around the entire city in a matter of weeks. Mangkubumi’s ‘most notable physical trait’, it was claimed, ‘was the habit of answering importunate Dutch requests with an enigmatic smile’.

  Had things continued in this fashion, then perhaps the sons and heirs of Mangkubumi might have been able to shake the Dutch off altogether, and even to have reasserted outright indigenous sovereignty over Java, with the outer islands of the Archipelago following suit. But in 1789 something dramatic happened 7,500 miles from Java: on a July day in Paris, a mob of revolutionaries attacked a fortification rather larger than the one the VOC was trying to build in Yogyakarta. The storming of the Bastille and the launch of the French Revolution would set in train events that would rattle the rafters in many corners of the globe. In the Archipelago they would alter the course of history.

  Strange new currents had been flowing through the salons of Europe for a century. Today we look back on this period as ‘the Enlightenment’, and enlightened it often appears as any lingering medievalism is swept aside in a deluge of scientific and political enquiry. Abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the political and economic ideals of Thomas Paine, Adam Smith and others: all emerged from this heady ferment. On paper the key philosophical notions of the age appear impeccable; indeed, they seem more suited to inspiring an end to nascent imperialism than to presaging its true beginnings. But something is implicit in the idea that ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’: if that thought was the exclusive luxury of the educated young thinkers of northern Europe, then the notion that those young thinkers were at the apex of civilisation was inevitable…

  Out of the Enlightenment came the ideas of European intellectual and moral superiority and the spurious moral imperative that would underpin both the British Raj and the Dutch East Indies—the idea that ‘we know what’s best for them’, which in turn generated the contemptuous notions of ‘the ignorant native’ and ‘the Asiatic despot’. The ultimate upshot was all the hubris and racism of high nineteenth-century imperialism.

  It would be a mistake to view the older style of company-based European involvement in Asia as benign by comparison, however. In its commercial motivations it was often little more than piracy, and as Cornelis de Houtman’s 1596 shenanigans show, it could frequently descend into the most appalling barbarity. But it did allow space for pragmatism, acculturation and—crucially—the tolerance of authentic indigenous sovereignty. Now that was all about to change. The nineteenth-century zeitgeist would arrive in the Archipelago with an almighty bang in the persons of two men—one Dutch, and the other English.

  At the end of 1794, a French army came thundering across the Low Countries to invade the Netherlands. At the same time an internal revolution with republican sympathies unseated the fifth Prince William of Orange. He fled across the water to find succour with his royalist friends in England, and a Napoleonic government was set up in his stead.

  One of the first things that the new administrators of the Netherlands did was to cast a critical eye over the accounts of the VOC. What they found there was horrific. The Company had been cooking its books for the best part of two hundred years. The expectations of the investors had been met with an endless relay of short-term loans, and the whole edifice amounted to a monumental 134 million-guilder debt. The Heeren XVII, the Seventeen Gentlemen who had presided over the chaos, were unceremoniously evicted from their chambers, and on the first day of the first month of the first year of a brand new century the VOC was formally disbanded, and both its pestilent assets and its staggering debts were turned over to the Dutch-Napoleonic state. Nobody, however, knew quite what to do with them.

  There were certainly plenty of ideas floating around as enlightened thinkers attempted to bend revolutionary ideals to distant tropical circumstances. The most notable proposals came from a man named Dirk van Hogendorp, who had served in both British India and Dutch Java. He had decided that the traditional VOC approach of indirectly extracting labour and payments from the peasants in the Archipelago through local middlemen ought to be overturned. Instead, van Hogendorp believed, the villagers should be made individually responsible for the land they worked. This, if you slipped a rose-tinted lens before your eye, could be made to fit with fashionable ideals about the Rights of Man, but more importantly it would allow a colonial government to extract taxes directly from the commoners without having to work through the calcified layers of a co-opted indigenous elite.

  The political situation in Europe meant that putting such ambitious ideas into practice was a little tricky: the Napoleonic Wars were in full swing, and the Netherlands had become a de facto enemy of Britain, meaning its overseas territories were fair game for English attack. Low-level naval warfare in the Indian Ocean was hampering communication between Batavia and Amsterdam, and colonial finances were decidedly precarious. In 1806, however, Napoleon installed his brother Louis on the throne of the Netherlands, and the new ruler decided to despatch to the Archipelago a new governor-general thoroughly steeped in the ideals of the day. His name was Herman Willem Daendels.

 
; Daendels has gone down in history as ‘the Thundering Marshal’, the very epitome of the swaggering Dutch imperialist. He had lofty ideals and a short fuse: he once threatened to shoot the Dutch envoy to the United States, who he profoundly disliked, if he were ever to set foot in the Indies. But he was nothing if not radical. Born in 1762 in the medieval town of Hattem, out in the flat countryside of the eastern Netherlands, he had studied law at the University of Harderwijk. A fully paid-up adherent to Napoleonic ideals, he had been sent to the Archipelago with specific instructions to shake the colony out of its corrupt lethargy. For the previous two hundred years every single governor-general had already served time in the Archipelago before his appointment. Some had even started out as common soldiers in the VOC army or as cabin boys on Dutch trading ships. But this new sixty-sixth governor-general was a highflying executive, parachuted in directly from Europe on a mission to overturn age-old practices. In doing so, Daendels would demonstrate all of the uncompromising energy—and all of the fiery temper—of his long-dead predecessor, Jan Pieterszoon Coen.

  He arrived in Batavia in the wet January of 1808 when the city was at its diseased and mud-splattered worst, but he lost no time in kicking the enervated inhabitants from their slumbers. He ordered that the crumbling, mosquito-filled fort at the head of the city be demolished at once, set about building modern cantonments in the less feverish fields to the south, and filled the new barracks with a rapidly expanded army of local recruits bolstered with Napoleonic regiments from Europe. All this activity alone was enough to put plenty of noses out of joint in the old-established Dutch community, but worse: Daendels had been ordered to ‘cure the abuses which had crept in under the company’. He started to take a moral stand against the slavery that had been a feature of Archipelago life for centuries (though only when it served his purposes—at one point he ordered the purchase of 750 slaves from Bali to serve as soldiers), and he began to enforce the long-ignored anti-graft measures. None of this made him particularly popular with the more entrenched of the European residents, but it was the high-ranking Javanese who really reacted rancorously to Daendels and his radical anti-feudalism.