The naval and administrative capital of the Dutch East India Company.
Batavia, now modern-day Jakarta, is located on the northwestern tip of the island of Java. Soldiers of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC; Dutch East India Company) captured Batavia, then called Jaya Karta, from its Muslim rulers in 1619. The capture of the city by the VOC was the latest in a string of Spice Island conquests that began in 1605. The Dutch completely rebuilt Jaya Karta, erected massive fortifications, and renamed it Batavia.
Strategically placed along the main sea route through the Spice Islands, the Sunda Strait, Batavia quickly developed into the center of Indonesian trade for the Dutch Republic. Providing administrative and military services to the factories of Amboina, Ternate, Tidore, Bantam, and the Bandas, Batavia also served as a rendezvous point for Dutch ships and cargo from India, the China Sea, and Japan. Within a relatively short period, Batavia became the foremost European settlement in Asia, surpassing Goa, Melaka, and other Spanish and Portuguese colonies. From 8,000 residents in 1624, Batavia grew to a population of over 70,000 by 1700. Of this number, 6,000 were Europeans, mostly soldiers, sailors, and employees of the VOC. The remainder was a highly diverse population of Chinese, Malays, and other ethnic Indonesians. Like other sizeable towns in the Dutch Republic, Batavia boasted a city council, schools, an orphanage, and a Dutch Reformed Church consistory.
Founded by Muslim traders in 1527, Jaya Karta was renamed Batavia after its capture by the Dutch in 1619. The capital of the Netherlands East Indies and a key exporter of tin and rubber in the first half of the twentieth century, Batavia—shown here in a 1940s’-era photo—was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and recaptured by the allies in 1945. It was renamed Jakarta after Indonesian independence in the late 1940s. (Library of Congress)
The primary commercial goods that flowed into and through Batavia during the 1600s were spices such as cloves, nutmeg, and mace from the Indonesian archipelago and trade wares from China and Japan. In the late seventeenth century, however, after several decades of slow westward expansion on the island of Java, the Dutch introduced coffee, indigo, and sugar. The Dutch developed a highly profitable local industry centered on Batavia, compelling local farmers to grow the new products. Thus, by the late seventeenth century, Batavia was the focal point of a vast and profitable VOC empire.
At its peak, Batavia served as the colonial capital for a trading company that employed some 25,000 soldiers, sailors, and administrators and possessed some 200 ships, 50 of which were menof-war. The volume of shipping between Batavia and the Netherlands increased decade by decade until the 1720s, when 200-plus vessels made the round-trip journey. Though French and English pressure in Asia began chipping away at Dutch commercial supremacy in East Asia, Batavia and the territories it administered remained rich and powerful.
The decline of Batavia under Dutch rule coincided with the failure of the VOC. Throughout the sixteenth century, the company had returned profits as high as 63 percent to its shareholders. By 1724, however, the VOC was unable to pay a dividend; it maintained solvency only through the extraction of taxes and levies from the native inhabitants of Java and other Indonesian territories. The remainder of the eighteenth century saw a steady decline in the fortunes of the VOC and by extension, the city of Batavia.
Reasons for this rapid decay were many. Financial mismanagement, foreign competition, native unrest, and political instability in the home country were the primary factors in the failure of the VOC. The most startling evidence of the weakness of the company came during the fourth Anglo-Dutch War. In 1780, English forces seized Ceylon and other southern Indian outposts, and captured VOC ships and cargo valued at 10 million guilders. By 1795, the French-influenced government of the Netherlands dissolved the VOC and formally assumed control of its possessions in 1798.
A brief interruption of Dutch rule of Batavia occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, when first the French and then the British occupied the city. Control of Batavia and other East Indian territory was restored to the Netherlands in 1814 after the defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte. Amid economic difficulties and a costly native uprising that lasted from 1825 to 1830, the Dutch recognized the need to revive the flagging East Indian trade. In 1830, Batavian officials, at the behest of the home country, instituted what was called the Culture System. In this scheme, native Javanese farmers were required to devote one-fifth of their arable land to cash crops for export. While extremely profitable for the administration at Batavia, and for the Netherlands as a whole, the Culture System was blamed for several years of famine, encouraged anti-Dutch sentiment in Java, and became one of the grievances of the future Indonesian nationalist movement.
Dutch rule of its East Indian territories from Batavia continued into the twentieth century amid growing native unrest, which included communist uprisings in 1926 and 1927. Independence was finally granted to the Dutch East Indies in 1949. Java and the surrounding islands were renamed “Indonesia,” and Batavia became Jakarta once again.
Jefferson T. Dillman
See also: Amsterdam
Boxer, C.R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. New York: Penguin, 1965.
Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Murphey, Rhoads. A History of Asia. New York: Longman, 2000.