Who ruled Jakarta?

Jakarta lies on the low, swampy north-west coast of Java, where the Ciliwung River and several smaller streams reach the Java Sea. A harbour at the river mouth made it a pepper port for local kingdoms, and in 1619 the Dutch East India Company seized it and built Batavia, the headquarters of its trading empire in Asia. That colonial city grew into the capital of independent Indonesia and one of the largest urban regions in the world.

The oldest written record from the area is the Tugu inscription, carved in the 5th century for a king of Tarumanagara, an early Hindu kingdom of western Java. In the later Middle Ages the port of Sunda Kelapa served the Hindu kingdom of Sunda, shipping pepper to traders from across Asia. Seeking an ally against the rising Muslim states of Java, Sunda signed a treaty with the Portuguese Empire in 1522, allowing it to build a fort. Before the Portuguese could return, forces under Fatahillah, acting for the Muslim sultanate of Demak, captured the port in 1527 and renamed it Jayakarta, "victorious city". The city still celebrates 22 June 1527 as its founding date. Jayakarta then came under the sultanate of Banten.

In the early 17th century Dutch and English merchants both set up posts at Jayakarta. In 1619 the Dutch East India Company of the Dutch Republic, led by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, destroyed the town and built a walled settlement in its place, named Batavia. It became the Asian capital of the company, which controlled the spice trade of the archipelago from it. Batavia was laid out with canals in the Dutch manner, and its population included Dutch officials, Chinese traders and artisans, enslaved people brought from across Asia, and many other communities. In October 1740 tensions with the Chinese community ended in a massacre in which thousands of Chinese residents, by many estimates about 10,000, were killed. Stagnant canals bred malaria, and the old town gained a reputation as one of the unhealthiest places in Asia.

After the company was dissolved in 1799, Batavia passed to the Dutch state as the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The British held Java from 1811 to 1816, during the Napoleonic Wars. Through the 19th century the city's centre of gravity moved south to healthier ground at Weltevreden, where broad squares and government buildings were laid out.

Japan occupied the Indies in 1942, in the course of World War II, and renamed the city Jakarta. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence in Jakarta. Four years of conflict with the returning Dutch followed, until the Netherlands recognised Indonesian sovereignty in December 1949. Sukarno began grand projects in the capital, among them the National Monument and the Istiqlal Mosque. The city was the centre of the upheavals of 1965 and 1966 and of the riots of May 1998 that preceded the resignation of President Suharto.

Jakarta has since grown into a vast metropolis: the city itself has more than 10 million people and the wider urban region about three times that. Severe flooding and land subsidence, as groundwater is pumped from beneath the city, led the government of Indonesia in 2022 to begin building a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo, though Jakarta remains the country's largest city and economic centre.