by Tim Hannigan
Out of combined enervation and necessity, the VOC had always farmed out the administration of its territories to local regents, drawn from the mid-ranking Javanese aristocracy. These administrators had largely been allowed to behave as feudal lords, as though they were vassal princes under an indigenous kingdom rather than the salaried staff of a European merchant company. They made up the very layer of administration that van Hogendorp had suggested be removed. It was inevitable that Daendels would look unfavourably upon them. They were aristocrats, after all, and in the Napoleonic scheme of things aristocrats were generally for the chop. He was not able to actually send the regents to the guillotine, but he did begin to treat them as what they technically were—government-employed civil servants.
Daendels even went so far as to regard the post-Mataram courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta in a similar light. The old and uneasy compromise in which the Javanese could think of the Dutch as deferent allies was to be overturned. Daendels wanted no mistakes about who was in charge. He radically rewrote the rules for his residents at the royal courts. No more were they to take the role of Dutch ambassadors to a sovereign power—and no more were they respectfully to remove their hats when approaching the sultan or the susuhunan! They were instead, he wrote, ‘to give the rulers an impression of the power and splendour of the present Royal government in Holland and of the protection of the great Napoleon, and to inspire them with awe and respect’. Unsurprisingly, this all went down spectacularly badly in Central Java, and for a long spell Dutch and Javanese teetered on the brink of outright hostilities.
But before he’d had time to really stir things up with the courts, the new governor-general also had to embark on the most ambitious engineering project that Java had seen since the temple-building heyday of the Hindu-Buddhist era. He had arrived with instructions to construct a modern road along which troops could be moved at speed all the way from one end of Java to the other. It was certainly needed—the slow advance of the Mataram armies along atrocious mountain trails had been one of the reasons that early Batavia had withstood the sieges of the 1620s. In the subsequent two hundred years there had been little improvement, and almost all communication between Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya still went by sea. But with British frigates now prowling the Java Sea from their outposts on the Straits of Melaka, an alternative was essential, and Daendels presided over the building of a 870-mile (1,400-kilometre) highway, running from Merak in the west, through Batavia, up to the mountains around Bandung, back to the coast at Cirebon, and then all the way along the Pasisir to Panarukan in the east. It was called De Grote Postweg, the ‘Great Post Road’.
The job was done in a year, and Daendels was obliged to abandon all his haughty ideals about the Rights of Man to see it through. His original job description had instructed him to ‘improve the lot of the common man and protect him from arbitrary treatment’, but now Daendels called on the very Javanese regents that he held in such disdain to organise forced labour for the Great Post Road project. Tollgates along the completed sections of the road were leased to the most profit-minded Chinese and European usurers on hand, and government lands were sold off to rapacious private investors to raise construction funds. The death toll—a toll paid almost entirely by the local communities along the route of the road—was enormous. Labourers died in their thousands as they hacked away at green hillsides or raised embankments over malarial flatlands, but there could be no doubt that the Great Post Road was an engineering triumph. Its real significance was not realised at first, however: it had been meant to facilitate defence against attack from the seas, but in fact it provided the vital thread that would eventually bind the disparate parts of Java into a single, bone fide colonial possession.
Daendels would not get to see that particular project through, however. He had made endless enemies amongst the old guard, and when word of his apparent megalomania reached Europe, his masters became rather nervous. In 1810 they ordered his removal on the grounds of ‘rapacity, brutality and incompetence’. He was replaced the following year by another Napoleonic officer, Jan Willem Janssens. But Janssens would survive little more than three months in his post before the arrival of the man who would properly pick up the baton that Daendels had set down—and that man was no Hollander. He was a highly ambitious young English civilian by the name of Thomas Stamford Raffles.
On 4 August 1811, a fleet of eighty-one British warships dropped anchor in the murky waters of Batavia Bay, and a massed force of eleven thousand English redcoats and Indian sepoy soldiers came splashing ashore through the shallows. The idea of a British assault on Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia had been batted around in the debating chambers of London and Calcutta ever since Napoleon first sent his troops into the Netherlands in 1794. But with more pressing priorities elsewhere, the project had been delayed for a decade-and-a-half. The Archipelago had fallen off the British map since the steamy days of the spice race, and their own East India Company’s properties in the region amounted to nothing more than the Straits backwater that was Penang, and Bengkulu—a knuckle of atrociously unhealthy and unprofitable land on the west coast of Sumatra, which the British had occupied since 1685. But in 1811 a fleet finally set sail from India, and bore down on Batavia.
Remarkably, the British Government did not actually want to take control of the proto-colony for itself. Colonialism, they recognised, was a costly business, and the instructions issued to Lord Minto, the British governor-general in Calcutta, were to overwhelm the Dutch forces, destroy their fortifications, dish out their guns and ammunition to the locals, and ‘hand the island over to the Javanese’. At this crucial moment, on the very threshold of the colonial century, the Archipelago came within a whisker of being freed from European colonialism altogether. That things panned out so very differently was entirely down to a spectacular piece of disobedience: Lord Minto decided to ignore the orders. He felt that in far-off London ‘the disruptive and calamitous consequence to so ancient and populous a European Colony, the property and lives of which must fall as sacrifice to the vindictive sway of the Malay [sic] Chiefs … have not been fully contemplated’. He would therefor unilaterally embark on ‘the modification of all their orders’.
Lord Minto’s concern for the Dutch civilians in the Archipelago was doubtless genuine, but more importantly he’d had his head turned by Raffles, an East India Company clerk who had been serving out his apprenticeship in the sleepy administration of Penang and who had developed the romantic idea that Java and the surrounding islands could be turned into some sort of economic and ideological Eden under an enlightened British administration.
The invasion was over within a few weeks. Despite Daendels’ efforts to expand the colonial army and improve fortifications and communications, the rotten VOC structures and attitudes were still in place; local recruits deserted at a rate of seventy a day, and the entire Dutch defence rapidly collapsed. Jan Willem Janssens signed a formal capitulation in September 1811, and Java and the other Dutch territories in the Archipelago were handed over to Britain. Lord Minto then installed Raffles—aged just thirty and with virtually no practical experience of government—as his lieutenant-governor in Java and the other former Dutch possessions in the Archipelago, with free rein to do as he pleased.
If Daendels had represented the bruising, bully-boy facet of the new nineteenth-century imperialism, then Raffles was in some ways a personification of its intellectual aspect. ‘Knowledge is power’, he once wrote, ‘and in the intercourse between enlightened and ignorant nations, the former must and will be the rulers’. Today he is popularly remembered in Indonesia for cataloguing the relics of Java’s Hindu-Buddhist past and for producing one of the first major orientalist texts on Southeast Asia, the hulking two-volume opus that is The History of Java. But in fact Raffles did just as much chest-thumping as Daendels. He shared the same essential sympathies, declaring that ‘a much more regular, active, pure and efficient administration was established by Marshal Daendels than ever existed before
’. He was also every bit as inclined as his predecessor to furious disputes with his detractors.
Raffles was also as unprepared to tolerate true indigenous sovereignty as Daendels. With the strange sense of personal insecurity that often marked his character, he worried that the Yogyakarta sultan in particular looked ‘upon us as a less powerful people than the [Dutch-Napoleonic] Government which proceeded us’, and decided that it was ‘absolutely necessary for the tranquillity of the Country that he should be taught to think otherwise’. He quickly decided that some sort of crushing military assault was essential to establish his authority. Less than a year into his tenure he got his way. The British had learnt of a tentative correspondence between the estranged Mataram courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, in which the then susuhunan of the former was attempting to provoke the then sultan of the latter (Mangkubumi’s heir, Hamengkubuwono II) to rise up against the European presence in Java. In light of this it really ought to have been Surakarta which felt the wrath of Raffles. However, the Englishman had correctly identified Yogyakarta as the grander of the two courts, and he swung for the sultan with all his might.
Before dawn on 20 June 1812, an expeditionary force of 1,200 English and Indian troops came storming out of the VOC-built fortress north of the Yogyakarta kraton. They jogged steadily across the alun-alun, the banyan-studded ceremonial square in front of the royal gateway, flung up bamboo ladders, and surged over the curtain wall. The British were outnumbered by a factor of ten to one, but so taken aback were the Javanese by the turn of events that the defence collapsed almost immediately. By mid-morning the sultan and the crown prince had been arrested and a wild orgy of looting had erupted.
The dethroned sultan was exiled, and his son installed as puppet king in a hasty coronation in the old Dutch residency. During the ceremony the princes and courtiers were forced to kneel and kiss Raffles’ knees in the ultimate act of submission. It was the first time in the two hundred years since Cornelis de Houtman’s ramshackle fleet hove into view off Banten that Javanese aristocrats had paid such humiliating obeisance to a European. A treaty was hammered out, giving the British all manner of rights in what had once been sovereign Mataram territory and telling the new sultan that ‘His Highness acknowledges the supremacy of the British Government over the whole Island of Java’. Two days later Raffles wrote a celebratory letter to let Lord Minto in India know what had happened:
The blow which has been struck at Djocjo Carta, has afforded so decisive a proof to the Native Inhabitants of Java of the strength and determination of the British Government, that they now for the first time know their relative situation and importance. The European power is now for the first time paramount in Java.
In the coming years Raffles proceeded to crush other Archipelago courts. The minor Javanese sultanates of Cirebon and Banten were brought under the colonial yoke, as was the outlying island of Madura. Courts further afield—in Borneo, Bali and Bone—also came under fire. There had been wars between Dutch and local forces since the earliest days of the VOC, of course, but those battles had always been fought for a tangible end—control of a particular avenue of trade, in most cases. These new ‘chastisements’ were principally an assertion of dominance. The local kings were being taught a lesson.
Once Raffles had cowed the courts of Java, he turned to another issue which had also been on Daendels’ reformist roster: land revenues. The new ‘land rent’ system that Raffles attempted to enforce in Java (the British did not have a sufficient territorial footing to put it into play elsewhere in the Archipelago) sidestepped the local regents just as van Hogendorp had demanded, and gave the peasantry direct responsibility for their individual plots. But the Englishman then went one step further: he wanted rent paid to his government in cash, not in kind.
In practice the new system was a catastrophe. The values on which the land rent was based were arbitrary and astronomical, and rents were never properly collected. What was more, most of rural Java had never known a proper cash economy; the farmers had no money with which to meet these radical new demands, and so the institution of the Chinese moneylender and an endemic debt culture came into play on a large scale in the countryside for the first time. But whether successful or not, the attempted reforms had at their heart a crucial new concept: a colonial economy based on much more than just trade, with revenues directly extracted from the Archipelago through an organised system of European government.
Like Daendels before him, Raffles’ overreaching ambitions eventually got the better of him. He, too, was removed from his post in 1816 on grounds of incompetence, financial mismanagement and alleged—though never proven—corruption. Napoleon had by this time been defeated in Europe, Dutch sovereignty had been restored and friendly relations between Britain and the Netherlands re-established. Not long after Raffles was shipped out of the Archipelago the territories were handed back to the Hollanders.
Both Daendels and Raffles had been very much of the intellectual moment, but rather ahead of their time on the ground in the Archipelago. Between them they had pushed the colonial economy still further into the red, and antagonised virtually every member of the traditional elites, both Dutch and Asian. Even Raffles’ claim of European paramountcy ultimately proved hollow. But they had brought vital new ideas into play, ideas that would, within a few short years, be made good. Nothing would ever be the same in the Archipelago again. The Nusantara of Majapahit and Mataram was giving way to the Dutch East Indies, and that entity in turn would provide the blueprint for Indonesia itself. The indigenous powers would not go down entirely without a fight, however.
The city of Palembang lies some forty miles from the sea, deep in the green levels of southeast Sumatra. Today it is a big and earthy town, a thumbprint of bright light on a dark patchwork of palm oil plantations. There is a pungent whiff of diesel and durian to the place. For all its 1.7 million inhabitants, it feels a long way from anywhere, and the roiling band of the Musi River still seems like the most obvious way out.
This, of course, was the old seat of Srivijaya, but that fact was quickly forgotten once the Buddhist trading state disappeared. Palembang fell off the map altogether until the sixteenth century, when a vagabonding Muslim—an exile from Demak in Java, according to local legends—came ashore and created a new sultanate on the north bank of the Musi.
The Palembang sultanate had a strange pedigree. It made much of its Javanese origins; some sort of Javanese remained the language of the court in this, the original wellspring of the Malay language, and even today Palembang Malay has some of its vowels rounded by a distant Javanese influence. But the place also drew in Arab traders, and the sultans took Arabic names and claimed Arab genes as well as Majapahit bloodlines. Although Sultan Agung of Mataram had claimed the town as his vassal in the early seventeenth century, it remained an isolated place. It had no agricultural wealth to speak of, and it would have offered little to would-be colonialists but for one thing: Palembang had tin.
Off the mouth of the Musi lay a pair of rugged islands—Bangka and Belitung—and streaking their hard granite bedrock were deep veins of tin ore. The tin was mostly shipped out to China, where it was used as a silvery backing for the spirit money to be burnt in temple offerings, and it raised a respectable revenue for the sultanate. The VOC had noticed this, of course, and in the 1720s an ambitious young Palembang prince had noticed their noticing. He took advantage of Dutch commercial interests to call in European backing for a coup against the then sultan. The coup was successful; he took to the Palembang throne himself, paid the VOC a mercenary’s fee of eighty slaves and 400,000 dollars, and signed a treaty that allowed them a trading post opposite his palace and an annual delivery of tin at a fixed price in silver. It was a perfect example of the way the old company style of colonialism could, from time to time, work for the mutual benefit of local kings and European traders. But in the nineteenth century there was no way that that sort of equitability could continue.
Palembang’s troubles had started wi
th Thomas Stamford Raffles in 1810. With a keen eye on the tin-rich islands, the British had energetically attempted to convince the then sultan, Mahmud Badaruddin II, to tear up his treaty with the Dutch and to evict the European trading community from his territory well before any British warships reached Batavia. The reason for this demand was never explained to the sultan, of course: Raffles and his boss, Lord Minto, knew well that should the Napoleonic Wars ever come to an end, then any Dutch territory they had seized would likely be handed back to its former owners. But if Palembang was to declare unilateral independence ahead of any British action in the Archipelago, then there would be a legal argument for any subsequent British annexation of the tin islands to stand in perpetuity. The sultan, however, was a canny man himself, and he prevaricated until he knew the outcome of the 1811 invasion. As soon as word of British successes reached him, he did exactly what he felt had been asked of him: he declared independence and evicted the two-dozen Dutch traders from his territory with extreme prejudice—they were all dead by the time they reached the mouth of the Musi.
The British, by this time ensconced in Batavia, cooked up a storm of manufactured outrage in response and despatched a fleet to Palembang. The city unravelled in a horrific outbreak of rioting even before they arrived. Sultan Badaruddin fled to the jungle; the British placed his younger brother, Najamuddin, on the throne; then annexed Bangka and Belitung—as had been planned all along—and sailed off into the sunrise. The new sultan, however, was rather unpopular, and a profound sense of injustice continued to simmer in what was left of the Palembang aristocracy—so much so that a subsequent British official there decided to return the exiled Badaruddin to the throne in 1813, apparently with Najamuddin’s happy acquiescence. Unfortunately this resident, William Robison, had never had much favour with his chief in Batavia, and when Raffles found out what he had done he insisted that things be flipped around yet again: after a month back in the Palembang palace Badaruddin was evicted once more and his brother returned to the throne.