Sin, the Tai governor of the Ayuttayan…

Mount Papandayan, a complex stratovolcano located in Garut Regency, to the southeast of the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia, is about fifteen kilometers to the southwest of the town of Garut.

At the summit, there are four large craters that contain active fumarole fields.

An eruption in 1772 causes the northeast flank to collapse producing a catastrophic debris avalanche that destroys forty villages and kills nearly three thousand people.

The eruption truncates the volcano into a broad shape with two peaks and a flat area one point one kilometers wide with Alun-Alun crater in the middle, making the mountain appear as a twin volcano; one of the peaks is called Papandayan and the other Mount Puntang.

War between southward-migrating Xhosa and eastward-migrating Afrikaners erupts in December 1779 when the two groups meet in an armed clash near the Great Fish River, a result of allegations of cattle theft by Xhosa people.

The Afrikaners, mainly farmers, are known by the Dutch term, Boers, which will eventually come to mean any rural Afrikaner.

Word of the Anglo-Dutch War reaches Sumatra, where both the Dutch and British companies have trading outposts, in August 1781.

The directors of the British company at Fort Marlborough receive instructions from Bombay to destroy all of the Dutch outposts on the west coast of Sumatra.

Quite fortuitously, a fleet of five East Indiamen arrives not long after, and the directors seize the opportunity for action.

Henry Botham, one of the directors, commandeers the fleet, and with one hundred company soldiers sails for Padang.

Jacob van Heemskerk, the VOC chief resident at Padang, surrenders all of the west coast outposts without a fight on August 18, unaware that Botham's force is relatively weak.

The capture nets the British five hundred thousand florins in goods and money.

The fortress at Padang will be destroyed before the town is returned to VOC control in 1784.

The signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783-1784) makes Negapatnam, in India, a British colony.

Ceylon is restored to Dutch control.

The British gain the right of free trade with part of the Dutch East Indies, which had been a major war aim for British merchants.

The French also return the other Dutch colonies they had recaptured from the British, including the ones in the West Indies (like St. Eustatius, which had been taken by Admiral Rodney in February 1781, but had been retaken by the French Admiral De Grasse on November 27, 1781)

The war has proved a disaster for the Netherlands, particularly economically.

It also proves to be confirmation of the weakening of Dutch power in the eighteenth century.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the bad result is blamed on the stadholder's mismanagement (if not worse) by his opponents who coalesce into the Patriot party.

These manage  for a while to roll back a number of the reforms of the revolution of 1747, strongly diminishing his powers.

However, this Patriot revolt will be suppressed in 1787 by Prussian and British intervention.

The Patriots will be driven abroad, but will return in 1795 with the help of the French revolutionary armies and establish a Batavian Republic in place of the old Dutch Republic.

The Low Countries remain central to British strategic thinking, and they will send expeditionary forces to the Netherlands in 1793, 1799 and 1809.

Dutch opium commerce on Java has fostered both a vast state enterprise and a large illicit traffic.

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, having developed a large clientele of native Javanese opium smokers, has imported an average of fifty-six tons of opium annually from 1640 to 1799.

The Netherlands regains responsibility in 1816 for the East Indies—actually a welter of mostly coastal territories, some controlled directly and many others engaged through varying treaties—but the way forward is uncertain.

The growth of trade with Sulawesi and the establishment of plantation economies, especially those producing sugar (eastern and central Java) and coffee (western Java and western Sumatra) have begun to loosen customary ties and introduce elites to new sources of both riches and indebtedness.

In Java, the general population increases and grows more prosperous but, on the other hand, falls victim to increasing crime, heavier taxation, and exploitation by local Chinese, especially in their roles of tax farmers, tollkeepers, and leasers of plantation lands.

The legitimacy of ruling elites is questioned more widely.

Both traditionalists and Muslims feel their ways of life threatened by changes they tend to identify with growing European influence.

A Dutch decision in 1823 to end what it views as the abusive leasing of land and labor among central Java's aristocracy alienates many who had begun to adjust to the new circumstances and pushes them to support rebellion.

The general atmosphere of restlessness in a time of change that few understand also becomes charged with superstition and millennial expectations in reaction to crop failures, outbreaks of disease, and, near Yogyakarta, a destructive eruption of the Mount Merapi volcano.

The pepper trade produces new wealth for the Sultanate of Aceh and for the rulers of many smaller nearby ports that had been under Aceh's control, but are now able to assert more independence.

These changes initially threaten Aceh's integrity, but a new sultan Tuanku Ibrahim, who controls the kingdom from 1838 to 1870, reasserts power over nearby ports.

The Dutch continue their eastward creep in Indonesia with the 1828 takeover of the western half of New Guinea as Netherlands New Guinea, the first European claim on the island.

Java is experiencing liberalist and nationalist risings against the Dutch occupation.

The jihad invoked by Prince Pangeran Diponegoro, called the Great Java War, has seen large losses on the side of the Dutch, due to their lack of coherent strategy and commitment in fighting Diponegoro's guerrilla warfare.

Ambushes are continually set up, and food supplies are denied to the Dutch troops.

Diponegoro also enjoys popular support among the population of Central Java.

The struggle takes a turn against the Javanese rebels when the Dutch, led by General De Cock, win a major encounter in 1828 and then establish several strongholds around the country.

The conflict is fated to be the final resistance of the Javanese aristocracy to Dutch rule.