A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  ‘Truly their situation is lamentable and really miserable’,Vitalis wrote. ‘What else can one expect? On the roads as well as the plantations one does not meet people but only walking skeletons, which drag themselves with great difficulty from one place to another, often dying in the process’.

  When he reached the district headquarters Vitalis grilled the local regent, Raden Anggadipa II. The regent was a scion of a princely dynasty, part of that old stratum of aristocrats that had always run the countryside for indigenous sultans and VOC officials alike. Daendels had despised them, of course, but in the 1830s they were back in favour. Raden Anggadipa reported that ‘some of the labourers who work in the plantations are in such a state of exhaustion that they die almost immediately after they have eaten from the food which is delivered to them as an advance payment for the produce to be delivered later’. When Vitalis demanded to know why the bodies of the victims were left to lie at the roadside instead of being given a decent burial, the regent shrugged. There was, he said, no need to make the effort: ‘Every night these bodies are dragged away by the tigers…’

  It would have been easy enough for Vitalis to dismiss the outrage as entirely the doing of the ossified aristocrat before him, and to place the blame on ‘oriental despotism’. But he knew that such excuses would not stand up to much scrutiny, for the regent was merely effecting the orders for a wider system, introduced five years earlier and designed to raise colonial revenues—and, it was claimed, to improve the lot of the peasants in Dutch-held territories. It was painfully obvious, however, that here in Priangan this so-called Cultuurstelsel, this ‘Cultivation System’, had gone horribly wrong.

  In the years after the British interregnum, and in the run-up to the Java War, the new leaders of the Dutch East Indies had struggled to make sense of how to extract money from what was now a genuine imperial possession. At the time, there was a great tension between the liberals and the conservatives when it came to deciding on a policy for the colony. It is always important to remember that the political designations of the past may not mean quite the same thing as they do today. In the post-Napoleonic milieu, ‘liberalism’ was first and foremost of the economic variety—that is, an advocacy of private capitalism and free trade. This sentiment might have found inspiration in ideas about the Rights of Man, but as both Daendels and Raffles had demonstrated, real humanitarianism was often nothing more than an airy theory. ‘Conservatives’ of the day, meanwhile, were unlikely to have much in economic common with their modern-day, right-leaning counterparts: far from it—they were generally the ones advocating an old-fashioned system of government monopoly.

  To begin with, the liberals seemed to have the floor. But if ethical liberalism had always been up for compromise whenever there was a road to be built or a war to be fought, then pragmatism had also got the better of free-market ideals from time to time. As liberals, both Raffles and Daendels had fervently believed in free trade. But they had also desperately wanted their cash-strapped administrations to make money, and if there was a particularly lucrative government monopoly, then they were generally loath to let it go. Under British rule, peasants across most of Java were free to grow what they pleased, but in the Priangan highlands the old VOC system of compulsory cultivation of coffee for exclusive sale to the state was kept in place—coffee, after all, was a cash crop of the first rank. By the 1820s, with no sign of a decent financial surplus emerging from the East Indies and with the cost of wars in Java, Minangkabau and Palembang spiralling out of control, the official pendulum had swung firmly in favour of this sort of hard-headed pragmatism. The man who put the pragmatism into play was Johannes van den Bosch.

  Van den Bosch had come out to Java as a soldier in 1797. However, his eighteeth-century attitudes led to an almighty falling out with Daendels, and in 1810 the Thundering Marshal had him evicted from the Indies. He shipped home to the Netherlands and set about studying politics and economics. Once the Napoleonic Wars had passed he took to publishing pamphlets condemning the ‘perverted Liberalism’ of Daendels and Raffles. The establishment in 1824 of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Netherlands Trading Society, or NHM), a company owned by the Dutch Crown for the exclusive purpose of trading Archipelago products into Europe, suggested that the pro-state ideals of van den Bosch were beginning to find official favour, and in the aftermath of the Java War he found himself appointed the new governor-general of the Dutch East Indies.

  Taking stock of the raw scars of Diponegoro’s recent rebellion, the new chief could not deny that there was a great deal of ill-feeling towards his countrymen in the green fields of Java—and, as far as he was aware, elsewhere in the Archipelago. ‘Our policies have done nothing to overcome this popular hate towards us’, van den Bosch declared. ‘On the contrary it has increased whenever we have come into closer contact with the people…’

  Back in the days of the VOC, van den Bosch insisted—with rose-tinted spectacles firmly in place—there had been ‘not a trace of rebellion or riot’ because of the policy of devolving much of the day-to-day administration to the local regents. The trouble, he felt, had all started when Daendels and Raffles set about overturning this system with their new-fangled nonsense. Van den Bosch was never coy about explaining why he felt this way:

  The intellectual development of the average Javanese does not reach beyond that of our children from twelve to fourteen years, while in general knowledge he is left far behind by them … to give to such people institutions suitable for a fully grown society is just as absurd as to give children the rights of adults and to expect that they will put them to good use … Only a patriarchal government suits the Javanese. The government must take care of them and must not allow them to do things for themselves, because of their limited capabilities. This, of course, must be done with fatherly consideration…

  Here, then, was the ultimate fruition of Enlightenment ideals, the ethos of nineteenth-century imperialism writ large and the final unashamed iteration of the unvoiced idea that had tormented Raffles and Daendels and that had led them to all their untenable hypocrisies as self-proclaimed believers in the universal equality of man. In no time at all, the pukka sahibs would be talking of the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

  In the Dutch East Indies, this new attitude was manifest in the form of the Cultivation System. The idea was simple, and it combined what the likes of van den Bosch considered to be the best of both the VOC and Rafflesian worlds. A colony-wide and carefully constructed land revenue system would be put in place, but as in the old days its actual enforcement would be left to regents and village chiefs. And what was more, as in the old days, the emphasis would be on payments in kind. Villagers in Dutch territories in Java, in Minangkabau in Sumatra, and in Minahasa in the far north of Sulawesi, would be exempt from paying rent if instead they gave a fifth of their lands over to the growing of cash crops prescribed by the government. These crops—coffee, inevitably, was foremost amongst them, but there was also indigo, tea, tobacco, cochineal, and sugarcane—would be delivered to the government at a fixed and rather paltry price, processed in factories run by Chinese and European entrepreneurs, and then shipped to Europe to be sold at a vast profit by none other than the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij.

  It was said that the system would not only free the peasantry from the grip of the moneylenders by doing away with a compulsory cash rent; farmers would also have the potential to make a profit if their haul of government crops sold for more than the amount they were due to pay in taxes. But in truth, the entire business was about making money for the government, and within a year of the Cultivation System’s launch in 1830 the colonial budget had been balanced for the first time in decades.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century remittances from the East Indies, raised through the Cultivation System, were almost a third of all state revenues in the Netherlands. The Dutch-ruled Archipelago had been turned into a powerhouse of agricultural production. There was, however, scant liberalism on the ground, for in pr
actice the system essentially amounted to one of forced production. Each season there were fresh demands for coffee, indigo and sugarcane. Any excess was warmly appreciated, and so there was every reason for Dutchmen in the field, as well as the local regents and headmen, to push for ever higher yields. In some places, forced labour was expected in lieu of forced cultivation, and corrupt local governance meant that many villagers found that they still had to pay taxes in cash as well as in crops.

  Today, the Cultivation System is popularly remembered as an unmitigated evil of exploitation, a procession of skeletal peasants fed one by one into the grinders of a great colonial sugar mill with pure profit dribbling out the other side. Nothing is ever black and white, however, and had a system which involved around half the entire Javanese population (and an unknown proportion of Minangkabaus and Minahasans) been so unremittingly appalling it surely wouldn’t have survived for three decades without prompting either mass mortality or mass rebellion. Around the fringes of the system there were incidental benefits. Carters were called upon to carry cane to the mills; skilled machinists were required in the plants; bridges and roads had to be built for the transport of cut crops; and men whose fathers had been nothing more than part-time artisans found themselves turned into full-time professional craftsmen. And there was cash in the countryside for the first time, allowing small purchases and petty indulgences. A proper economic network was beginning to emerge, and at the same time the population was booming.

  But reports of the kind raised by Louis Vitalis in Priangan had not simply been invented, and while the Cultivation System did not lead to universal hardship, in very many instances it most certainly did cause suffering. In some places attempts were made to grow cash crops that were ill-suited to the local soils, and villagers were compelled to work for many months planting coffee or indigo that never yielded a harvest. When crops were successful, meanwhile, local administrators tended simply to shunt the land tax assessments arbitrarily upwards and pocket whatever notional profit the peasants had earned from the excess. The coastal regions of the Java Pasisir around Cirebon and Pekalongan were particularly hard pressed; in the 1840s famine broke out there as a result of so much former rice land being used for forced production of cash crops. Louis Vitalis himself was still on the scene, and he reported gangs of starving children haunting the roads in this, one of the most fertile of all Dutch territories:

  It is sad to have to admit that poor, hungry people who came in droves to beseech private people in the Residency of Cheribon [Cirebon] for food did not dare to turn to the government officials. When they were asked why they did not go to the officials for help, the answer was: ‘We fear them’!

  Inevitably, word of all this began to filter out back home in the Netherlands, and with the liberals still clamouring for private enterprise to be given a free hand, an increasingly critical eye was being cast on the Cultivation System. The critics received an unusual boost in 1860 with the appearance of one of the strangest novels ever published, a positively incendiary tract by the name of Max Havelaar.

  The book had been written by a bitter former colonial official named Eduard Douwes Dekker—though he gave himself the self-pitying Latin nom de plume, Multatuli (‘I have endured much’). He had been born in 1820 into a moderately prosperous middle-class family, and had sailed for the East Indies in his teens. He seems to have made a habit of falling in love and falling into debt, but he was also possessed of considerable administrative talents and he was given government posts in Sumatra and Maluku. Then in 1856, after a furlough in the Netherlands during which he lost just about everything at the card tables, he was appointed assistant resident in the West Java district of Lebak. It was here that the trouble began.

  His predecessor in Lebak, a rugged district in what had once been the sultanate of Banten, had died suddenly at his post, and Douwes Dekker quickly began to suspect that there had been nothing natural about his passing. The man had been investigating the outrageous abuses of power by the local regent, yet another member of the old co-opted aristocracy that underpinned the workings of the Cultivation System. Douwes Dekker enthusiastically continued the dead man’s work, and after just four weeks in Lebak he attempted to charge the regent with various crimes, including the poisoning of the former assistant resident. The colonial authorities were not impressed, and rather than being rewarded for his efforts in the name of truth and justice, Douwes Dekker was roundly rebuffed. He resigned, headed home, and ended up drifting bitterly around the casinos of Europe in the company of a former prostitute.

  Embittered former colonial employees pontificating about the wrongdoings of the empire for which they had once toiled were something of a nineteenth-century cliché, and there were plenty of other Dutch and Englishmen doing the same thing. The more energetic of their number might write a letter to a newspaper, or even publish a pamphlet. But Douwes Dekker went one step further—in the autumn of 1859, in a flurry of production in a Brussels garret, he penned an entire novel. He then rather blotted his copybook as a man of high ethics by using the manuscript for a clumsy blackmail attempt: he sent it to the Colonial Minister offering to refrain from publishing if the government would grant him not only a new and prosperous post in Java, but also a knighthood. The response was predictably unfavourable, and so the book appeared in print the following year.

  It was a very odd sort of book, and as no less than D.H. Lawrence would later write, ‘As far as composition goes, it is the greatest mess possible’. It was certainly chaotic, with multiple changes of narrator and incessant editorial interjections. It is also hard to think of another book that gives such an irresistible impression that the author is shouting at you. But for all that, it was very powerful indeed. It was essentially a barely disguised autobiographical account of what Douwes Dekker had seen and experienced in Lebak. Indeed, in the final paragraphs he went so far as to kick his narrator off the page, drop all pretence that the thing was a novel at all, and appear in person as Multatuli to sign off in a welter of ellipses and italics with a demand to know of the King of the Netherlands ‘whether it is Your Imperial will … that yonder Your more than thirty million subjects be MALTREATED AND EXPLOITED IN YOUR NAME?’ Unsurprisingly, the book raised a storm of controversy.

  Today, casual readers might be forgiven for coming away with the idea that Eduard Douwes Dekker single-handedly brought an end to the Cultivation System. His book certainly helped it on its way. It was not, however, ethical concerns that provided the real impetus. The real drive for change came from the free marketeers, and from 1862 they began to get their way. The government monopoly on pepper was abolished first; cloves and nutmeg came next, and tea and indigo soon followed suit. As the second half of the nineteenth century got under way, commercial agriculture in Java was turned over to private enterprise on an enormous scale, and the cash-rich colonial society became ever more sophisticated. Luxurious hotels and social clubs opened in the towns; new urban technology came into play, and lavish entertainments were laid on for Europeans. Elsewhere in the Archipelago, however, things were rather more wild, as one of the most remarkable of all the foreign travellers to pass between the islands during the imperial heyday was finding out.

  The house stood amongst the trees where the land angled upwards towards the island of Ternate’s central volcanic peak. It was an old building. The space between the low retaining wall and the shaggy thatched roof was filled with palm-leaf matting and the narrow veranda gave onto a gloomy interior. Below the house the rooftops of the little town showed between the palms, stretching away along the shore to the northeast. Across the water, the hills of Halmahera rose dark from a forested shoreline. It was February, and away to the southwest columns of monsoon rain would be marching across Java and Sumatra. But here in Maluku the seasons are reversed, and the breeze that shifted the branches of the trees around the house was fiery and dry. Five and a half thousand feet above, the smoke from the summit of the central volcano made a pale streamer in the bleached sky.


  Ternate and its southern twin Tidore—little peaks of land rising from the depths off the coast of Halmahera in northern Maluku—had a troubled past. They were the seats of a pair of feuding sultanates, and in earlier centuries they had found themselves in the very crucible of the spice trade. The Portuguese had settled here and built fortresses in the early sixteenth century. They had tussled with passing Spanish ships and engaged in endlessly appalling conflicts with the locals. One bout of violence in 1529 erupted after a pig escaped from the Portuguese fort and went rampaging through Ternate’s Muslim quarter. When the outraged locals killed the offending swine, the Portuguese kidnapped one of their senior religious officials and smeared his face with bacon fat by way of revenge. Unsurprisingly, the mortified cleric then declared a holy war against the pork-loving infidels. There were similarly foul-tempered conflicts throughout the century until 1575, when the Portuguese pulled out altogether. A couple of decades later the Dutch arrived, and more intercultural bickering continued throughout the seventeenth century.

  But those days were now long past. It was 1858 and the spice trade was a shadow of its former self. That so much blood had been spilt over this tiny island seemed absurd, and though it was still the headquarters of a Dutch residency claiming nominal authority over a galaxy of islands stretching all the way to the head of New Guinea, it was unmistakably a backwater.