Dutch East Indies

The Dutch East Indies was the Dutch colony that became Indonesia. Its roots were in the trading empire of the Dutch East India Company, built from the early seventeenth century, and it came under direct rule by the Dutch state in 1800. It lasted until the Japanese invasion of 1942 and Indonesia's declaration of independence in 1945.

The islands of today's Indonesia had long been part of Asian trade networks, with kingdoms such as Srivijaya and Majapahit, and Muslim sultanates such as Aceh, Banten, Mataram, Ternate and Makassar. The Moluccas, or Spice Islands, were the world's only source of cloves, nutmeg and mace. The Portuguese arrived in the early sixteenth century, and the Dutch followed in 1596.

The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, founded in 1602, had the right to make war, sign treaties and govern. In 1619 its governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, seized the port of Jayakarta and renamed it Batavia, now Jakarta, which became the Company's Asian headquarters. In 1621 Coen conquered the Banda Islands to control the nutmeg trade, killing, enslaving or expelling most of the population of around 15,000. The VOC destroyed spice trees elsewhere to keep prices high, and fought local rulers, such as Sultan Agung of Mataram, who besieged Batavia in 1628–1629, and the kingdom of Gowa-Makassar, defeated in 1669. Batavia had a large Chinese community; in 1740, Dutch authorities and others massacred thousands of Chinese residents.

The VOC went bankrupt and was dissolved in 1799, and its possessions passed to the Dutch state. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain occupied Java from 1811 to 1816, under Thomas Stamford Raffles, who introduced land reforms and studied Javanese history, before returning it to the Dutch.

In 1825 Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, angered by Dutch interference and a road built across his ancestral tombs, led the Java War. It lasted until 1830, when the Dutch arrested him during negotiations; around 200,000 Javanese died. To pay for the war and Dutch debts, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultivation System in 1830, requiring villages to grow export crops such as coffee, sugar and indigo for the government. The profits funded the Dutch state, but the system caused famines in Java in the 1840s. Criticism, including the novel Max Havelaar by Multatuli in 1860, led to its gradual end and the opening of the colony to private plantations.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Dutch extended direct rule across the archipelago. The Aceh War, from 1873 to around 1904, in northern Sumatra, was long and bloody. Dutch forces conquered Bali in 1906 and 1908, where Balinese royal families walked into Dutch gunfire in ritual mass suicide, puputan. Plantations of rubber, tobacco and palm oil spread on Sumatra, and oil was discovered, leading to the founding of Royal Dutch Shell.

From 1901 the Dutch adopted an "Ethical Policy", investing in irrigation, education and migration from crowded Java. A small educated class emerged. Kartini, a Javanese noblewoman who wrote letters about women's education, became a symbol of emancipation. Nationalist organisations formed: Budi Utomo in 1908, Sarekat Islam in 1912, the Indonesian Communist Party in 1920, and the Indonesian National Party, led by Sukarno, in 1927. In 1928 the Youth Pledge declared one homeland, one nation and one language, Indonesian. The Dutch exiled nationalist leaders.

Japan invaded in early 1942, and the Dutch surrendered in March. The Japanese occupation was harsh: millions were forced into labour, the romusha, and famine killed many, but the Japanese also released nationalist leaders and trained Indonesian forces. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence. The Netherlands fought to restore control, launching two "police actions" in 1947 and 1948. Under international pressure, the Netherlands transferred sovereignty in December 1949, keeping western New Guinea until 1962–1963.

Our maps use the name from 1650 to 1938, including the earlier period of Company rule. Its largest outline, about 1.7 million square kilometres on the 1650 map, lies entirely in today's Indonesia, drawn more broadly than the Company's actual control at that date. Jakarta lies inside it throughout. On the 1945 map, the region appears as Indonesia.