A common historical perspective on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is to portray the VOC as a uniquely powerful military and economic juggernaut that steadily and deliberately constructed the empire that came to be known as the Netherlands East Indies

In the twentieth century, such a view was frequently shared by Dutch colonial officials and Indonesian nationalists, who spoke of "three hundred and fifty years of Dutch rule" in the archipelago.

The truth, however, is more modest.

The VOC was neither the "first (modern) multinational corporation," as has sometimes been claimed, nor the instrument of a state policy of colonial expansion.

It was founded in the Netherlands in 1602 as an effort to manage the competition and risk of the growing number of Dutch expeditions to the Indonesian archipelago (ten companies, ten voyages, and sixty-five ships between 1595 and 1601), and to compete with the East India Company, formed by the English two years earlier, for control of the Asian trade.

The VOC's initial charter establishes its sole right among Dutch enterprises to do business in Asia and gives it exceptional powers, such as those of keeping an army and using military force, making treaties with local rulers, building fortifications, and issuing coinage.

In addition, it calls for little government oversight and does not require the new company to pay dividends to investors at the end of each voyage (as had been the practice), allowing it to amass large sums of money over longer periods of time.

The purpose of this state-supported enterprise is primarily to make a profit.

At home the directors, known as the Heeren XVII (Seventeen Gentlemen), recognize that fighting wars, establishing colonies (rather than simple trading posts and fortifications), and becoming involved in local disputes diminishes profits, and they generally warn against such activities.

VOC representatives far away in the archipelago, appointed after 1610 as governors general, tend to see the warring and political involvement as necessary and pursue them anyway, often vigorously.

Even the more ambitious of their efforts, however, are restrained by certain realities.

Above all, the VOC is never big enough or strong enough to dominate the entire archipelago and its people, and indeed the company finds it impossible to enforce its will in local affairs without Indonesian allies, who frequently exact a high price for their assistance and whose loyalty can never be taken for granted.

It is also the case that even when it has its way—for example, by gaining control of specific trading ports or routes, or of the main areas in which particular spices are produced—interventions by the VOC often have unintended short- and long-term consequences that it can do little to control.

Finally, of course, the VOC's fortunes are subject to the vagaries of a trading system that stretches far beyond the archipelago, including the rise and fall in world demand for spices and, later, for other products on which it will come to depend, such as coffee.

In the course of nearly two centuries, the company will fail to control the spice trade and establish the stable conditions necessary for mercantile growth, and will come to rule over only minute patches of territory, except for small areas in Maluku in the seventeenth century and Java in the eighteenth.

Throughout the seventeenth century, both indigenous and foreign powers in the Southeast Asian archipelago engage in a complex struggle for control over maritime trade.

The rapidly rising profits from this trade fuel the expansion of ambitious regional states, the most prominent being Aceh (northern Sumatra), Banten (western Java), Makassar (southern Sulawesi), and Mataram (central and eastern Java).

The most formidable external power in this contest is the Dutch-run United East Indies Company (VOC), whose influence steadily grows across the region.

Each indigenous state follows a distinct trajectory during this period, but the broader struggle unfolds between two competing trade models:

• A heavily state-controlled system, where rulers consolidate economic power, and
• A more oligarchic structure, where the orang kaya (merchant elite), often allied with religious and traditional leaders, maintain significant economic and political influence.

This dynamic battle for dominance over Southeast Asia’s lucrative trade networks reshapes the region’s political and economic landscape, setting the stage for future conflicts and transformations.

 

Some of these complexities can be glimpsed in a brief history of Ternate, Maluku, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In 1512 seven Portuguese arrive in Ternate as the guests of Sultan Abu Lais (r. ?-1522), having been rescued by fishermen from a shipwreck of their locally built vessel (their original ship had become too unreliable to continue in service) loaded with spices purchased in Banda.

The sultan seeks an alliance with the Portuguese, of whom he has already heard, and is eager to exchange cloves for assistance against the rival sultanate of Tidore.

When Spanish ships arrive in Maluku in 1521, Sultan Mansur of Tidore seals a similar agreement with them, to which the Portuguese soon respondsby building a large stone fortress on Ternate.

This act touches off decades of warfare among Europeans and their local allies, in which political control, economic ascendancy, and religious identity all are contested, but it also brings change in Ternate itself, for the ruler here becomes essentially a prisoner of the Portuguese, whose increasingly arbitrary and oppressive interference in local affairs, including spice production and harvesting, eventually turns their former allies against them.

Under the leadership of Sultan Babullah (r. 1570-83), Islam becomes a powerful tool with which to create alliances and gather widespread opposition to the Portuguese.

After a siege in 1575 against the Ternate fort, he ousts the Portuguese forces.

Babullah allows a limited contingent of Portuguese merchants to continue trading in Ternate, but the fort becomes the royal residence, and the sultanate rapidly expands its reach to key trading ports as far away as northern and southern Sulawesi until the arrival of the Dutch touches off new and even more complex struggles.

Ayutthaya had received a diplomatic mission in 1511 from the Portuguese, who earlier that year had conquered Malacca.

These were probably the first Europeans to visit the country.


Five years after that initial contact, Ayutthaya and Portugal concluded a treaty granting the Portuguese permission to trade in the kingdom.

A similar treaty in 1592 gives the Dutch a privileged position in the rice trade.

The VOC nevertheless has a shaping influence in the archipelago.

In what today is eastern Indonesia, the company—with, it is important to reiterate, the help of indigenous allies—between 1610 and 1680 fundamentally alters the terms of the traditional spice trade by forcibly limiting the number of nutmeg and clove trees, ruthlessly controlling the populations that grow and prepare the spices for the market, and aggressively using treaties and military means to establish VOC hegemony in the trade.

One result of these policies, exacerbated by the late-seventeenth-century fall in the global demand for spices, is an overall decline in regional trade, an economic weakening that affects the VOC itself as well as indigenous states, and in many areas occasions a withdrawal from commercial activity.

Others are the rise of authoritarian rulers dependent on VOC support and unrest among groups—traditional leaders, merchants, religious and military figures—who oppose one or the other or both.

Among the most prominent examples are those found in the histories of Ternate in the time of Sultan Mandar (r. 1648-75) and the wars against Hitu and Hoamoal (1638-56), and of southern Sulawesi in the era of the ambitious Buginese (Bone) prince Arung Palakka (1634-96) and the wars against the Makassarese (Gowa) and others.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the glories of the spice trade have faded, and the vitality of the large and small states of the post-Majapahit era has been sapped; the weight of affairs has again begun to shift west, to Java.

The VOC had in 1619 seized Jayakerta (Sunda Kelapa), a small but well-protected west Javanese port it had originally contracted from a disgruntled vassal of the sultanate of Banten, renaming it Batavia, forerunner of today's Jakarta.

The resolute Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen (in office 1619-23 and 1627-29) had conceived of this port as a kind of fulcrum of the company's far-flung Asian enterprise, and he defends it vigorously against both Banten (allied briefly with England's East India Company) and, in 1628-29, the powerful land and sea forces of the expanding central Javanese state that had taken the name of Mataram, after the ninth-century kingdom.

Mataram's ruler, Sultan Agung (r. 1613-46), is Java's greatest warrior king since Kertanagara nearly four centuries earlier.

Using iron force and a keen sense of traditional diplomatic opportunities, Sultan Agung assembles a realm that consists of all of Java and Madura (including the powerful kingdom of Surabaya) except Banten in the far west and the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Blambangan in the far east.

Sukadana and Banjarmasin on Kalimantan also fall under his sway.

He is not, however, able to dislodge the VOC, and after the failed campaign of 1628-29 he appears to have accepted the Dutch presence as a minor irritant.

Contemporaneous Javanese historical works treat the company more as a potential ally than as a serious threat, a view that will persist among many in court circles for another century or more.

And, indeed, at the time the VOC is neither interested in nor capable of tackling the full force of Mataram, which, despite the destruction and political tensions wrought by nearly forty years of expansion, remains a formidable military power.

The company sees itself as a maritime power, a rival for the control of produce and trade rather than territory, and it seeks stable conditions for its activities rather than upheaval.

Conditions begin to change, however, during the disastrous reign of Sultan Agung's son, Amangkurat I (r. 1646-77), who lacks his father's talents but seeks to further strengthen the realm by centralizing authority, monopolizing control of resources, and destroying all real or imagined opposition.

His misguided efforts to control trade revenues by twice closing the ports of the Pasisir, and even destroying Javanese trading vessels and forbidding Javanese travel overseas, have the opposite effect, in addition to alienating the commercial community and damaging the wider economy of producers.

His obsessive fear of opposition leads him to kill more than five thousand Muslim leaders and their families in a single, well-planned massacre, and to murder hundreds of court officials and members of the aristocracy, including his own family, actions that of course only increase the hatred and intrigues aimed at removing him.

His attitude toward the VOC is ambivalent, for, on the one hand, he admires its apparent wealth and power and considers it a potential ally and protector, yet on the other hand he seeks to bend it to his will and to extract all he can from its representatives in Batavia.

Beginning in the early 1670s, rebellions begin to rise, the most powerful of which is led by Raden Trunajaya (ca. 1649-80), a Madurese aristocrat conspiring with a disaffected son of Amangkurat I and allied with Makassarese and other forces.

Trunajaya's armies win a decisive victory in 1676 and loot the capital the following year.

Mataram is disintegrating.

Both sides, in the course of this conflict, request assistance from the VOC, which now faces a momentous decision.

The company seeks political stability and a reliable supply of such key products as rice and teak, and it determines for the first time in more than a half-century that, in order to obtain them, intervention in Mataram's internal affairs is necessary.

Company officials view Javanese kingship through a European lens as a relatively absolutist, centralized form of rule that legitimates succession by, if not strict primogeniture, then something very close to it.

This is a misreading of Javanese (and, indeed, other Indonesian) cultural custom, but nonetheless the VOC gradually comes to see itself as the upholder of order (tradition) and to justify its actions in terms of favoring continuity rather than change.

It makes its choices accordingly, often with the ironic result of creating rather than solving discord and of weakening rather than strengthening the sorts of order it hoped to achieve.

In any case, the VOC decides in 1676 to back the forces of Amangkurat I, who dies soon after having fled to VOC-controlled territory on the Pasisir, and then to support his rebellious son as successor, a project requiring five more years of warfare to complete.

The company gains treaties promising, among other things, access to the products and trading rights it sought, as well as repayment of all its military costs.

That these treaty obligations prove difficult to fulfill does not negate the fact that the VOC has now embarked on a course that will slowly and expensively intertwine its own fate with that of Mataram.

The dark legacy of Amangkurat's tyrannical misrule thus lies not only in eighty years of turbulence in Javanese life, punctuated by three destructive wars of succession, but also in the establishment of patterns of Dutch entanglement in indigenous affairs that are to outlive the VOC itself.

Christianity has an impact on Japan, largely through the efforts of the Jesuits, led first by Saint Francis Xavier (1506-52), who arrives in Kagoshima in southern Kyushu in 1549.

Both daimyo and merchants seeking better trade arrangements as well as peasants are among the converts.

By 1560 Kyoto has become another major area of missionary activity in Japan.

In 1568 the port of Nagasaki is established by a Christian daimyo, and turned over to Jesuit administration in 1579.

By 1582 there are as many as one hundred and fifty thousand converts (two percent of the population) and two hundred churches, but bakufu tolerance for this alien influence diminishes as the country becomes more unified and the openness of the period decreases.

Proscriptions against Christianity begin in 1587 and outright persecutions in 1597.

Although foreign trade is still encouraged, it is closely regulated, and by 1640 the exclusion and suppression of Christianity has become national policy.