From company to colony
The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, which had controlled Java and the spice islands, was dissolved in 1799 and its possessions taken over by the Dutch state. During the Napoleonic wars Britain occupied Java from 1811 to 1816, under Stamford Raffles, and then returned it. The colonial state at first controlled little beyond Java and scattered posts; over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it expanded by conquest across the archipelago, in wars such as the Java War of 1825–30, the Padri War in Sumatra, the long Aceh War from 1873, and campaigns in Bali, Lombok and Sulawesi, until by about 1910 it covered roughly the territory of modern Indonesia.
The Cultivation System
After the Java War the governor-general Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultivation System from 1830, under which Javanese villages had to set aside land or labour to grow export crops, coffee, sugar and indigo, for delivery to the government at fixed prices. It produced great profits for the Netherlands, financing a large part of the Dutch budget, and caused hardship and in places famine in Java. Criticism, notably in the novel Max Havelaar by Multatuli in 1860, led to its gradual abolition from the 1870s in favour of private plantations.
The Ethical Policy
In 1901 the Dutch government announced an Ethical Policy, claiming a duty to improve the welfare of the colonised through irrigation, education and emigration from crowded Java. Its results were limited, but it produced a small Indonesian educated class. Nationalist organisations followed: Budi Utomo in 1908, Sarekat Islam in 1912, the Communist Party in 1920, and Sukarno's Indonesian Nationalist Party in 1927. A partly elected advisory council, the Volksraad, was created in 1918, but it had little power, and the colonial government suppressed the nationalist parties and exiled their leaders, Sukarno and Hatta among them.
The end
Japan occupied the Indies in March 1942. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. The Dutch returned and fought four years of war and negotiation, including two large military operations, before international pressure led them to transfer sovereignty on 27 December 1949. Western New Guinea remained Dutch until 1962–63.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
See also
- Batavia — Batavia was the city that the Dutch East India Company built on the site of Jayakarta in western Java after 1619, the headquarters of Dutch trade and rule in Asia for more than three centuries, renamed Jakarta in 1942.
- Java War — The Java War of 1825–1830 was the rising of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta against Dutch colonial rule and its Javanese allies, a long guerrilla war that devastated central Java and ended with the prince's arrest during negotiations.
- Aceh Sultanate — The Aceh sultanate was a Muslim kingdom at the northern tip of Sumatra from the early sixteenth century until the Dutch conquest of 1903, a pepper-trading power, a rival of Portuguese Malacca and a centre of Islamic learning in Southeast Asia.
- Mataram Sultanate — The Mataram sultanate was the Muslim kingdom of central Java founded in the late sixteenth century, which under Sultan Agung dominated most of Java, and which the Dutch East India Company's interventions reduced and finally divided in 1755.
- Dutch India — Dutch India was the network of Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie factories on the Indian coasts, held from 1605 until they were traded to Britain in 1824.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.