Osing people

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.

The VOC and the court of Mataram, at the same time rivals and allies, are by the mid-eighteenth century exhausted by war.

The dying ruler, Pakubuwono II (r. 1726-49), with his kingdom still threatened by rebellion from within and his court deeply divided over the proper course for the future, cedes Mataram to the company, perhaps thinking in this way to save it.

The treaty is of little importance because it cannot be enforced and the VOC is incapable of ruling Java, but it is followed in 1755 by the Treaty of Giyanti, which imposes a different solution.

Mataram is to be ruled by two royal courts, one at Surakarta (also known as Solo) and one at Yogyakarta, out of which the junior courts of Mangkunegaran (1757) and Pakualaman (1812), respectively, later evolve by apportioning appanage rights among them.

This division produces an extended period of peace lasting well into the nineteenth century, from which the Javanese populace benefits economically.

The courts, particularly that of Yogyakarta, make use of their considerable autonomy and grow in prosperity and power, while the VOC consolidates its control over the Pasisir and pursues its commercial ventures.

Although clearly recognized (and often resented) as the paramount power, the company interests itself in the courts' affairs and plays a role in choosing who reigns but refrains from meddling too deeply.

It is a strange conquest.

The peace is in many respects also strange, for rather than settling Java into a calm "traditional" existence, it provides the setting for ongoing social and cultural ferment as Javanese reassesses not only their past but also their present.

The literary reflections of this crisis have been insufficiently studied, but works ascribed to the Surakarta court poets Yasadipura I (1729-1803) and his son Yasadipura II (? -1844), for example, suggest that efforts to reexamine and revitalize old histories fail, not least because the ability to read them accurately had been lost, and that attempts to understand the Java—and "Javaneseness"—of their own day lead frequently to searing critiques of their own social hierarchy and customs, as well as those of foreigners and Islam.

This sort of questioning and restlessness is not necessarily fatal, however, and might under different circumstances have permitted a continuation of the equilibrium already achieved or even conceivably have led to a kind of Javanese renaissance and a different, more advantageous relationship with the Dutch, but changes in the larger world determine otherwise.

The last in a series of Anglo-Dutch wars cost the Netherlands, including the VOC and its far-flung interests, dearly in the early 1780s.

Nearly half the company's ships are lost, and much of their valuable cargoes; enormous debts accumulate, which, despite state loans, cannot be repaid.

While the company certainly is burdened with other fiscal and administrative problems, among them a high level of corruption among its employees, the British war seems to have been the critical factor in its fiscal collapse.

In 1796 the VOC is placed under the direction of a national committee until the end of 1799, when it is liquidated, its debts and possessions absorbed by the Dutch government.

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.