Batavia

Jayakarta and the Dutch

Before the Dutch, the port at the mouth of the Ciliwung river was Sunda Kalapa, the harbour of the Hindu kingdom of Sunda, and from 1527 Jayakarta, a dependency of the Muslim sultanate of Banten. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, set up a trading post there, and in 1619 its governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, destroyed Jayakarta and built a fortified city on its site. The Company named it Batavia, after the ancient name of the Dutch homeland.

The Company city

Batavia became the hub of the VOC's network, which ran from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan and included factories and forts on the coasts of India and Sri Lanka. The city was laid out with canals, a castle, a town hall and walls, in deliberate imitation of a Dutch town. Its population was mixed: Dutch officials and soldiers, a large Chinese community that dominated trade and sugar milling, slaves from India, Bali, Sulawesi and elsewhere, Mardijkers who were freed Christian slaves, and Javanese and other Indonesians.

Sultan Agung of Mataram, the strongest ruler in Java, besieged Batavia in 1628 and again in 1629 and failed both times, after which the Company was able to expand its influence in the island.

1740

By the 1730s the sugar economy around Batavia was in crisis, and the authorities had begun deporting Chinese labourers. Rumours spread among the Chinese that deportees were being thrown overboard, and armed groups attacked the city's outposts. In October 1740 the Dutch authorities, fearing a rising inside the walls, allowed soldiers and residents to attack the Chinese population, and several thousand were killed over a few days. The massacre led to a wider war in Java in the following years.

Colonial capital

Batavia's low-lying old town was unhealthy, and from the late eighteenth century mortality from malaria and other diseases was very high. After the VOC was dissolved in 1799, the colonial government, under Governor-General Daendels, moved its centre south to Weltevreden. The British occupied Java from 1811 to 1816, under Stamford Raffles as lieutenant-governor. Batavia then became the capital of the Dutch East Indies, which expanded in the nineteenth century to cover most of present-day Indonesia.

The Japanese occupied Java in 1942 and renamed the city Jakarta. On 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence in Jakarta, and after four years of war and negotiation the Netherlands transferred sovereignty in December 1949. The old Company town survives in the Kota district.