International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 160
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
Dutch. Without a thorough knowledge of this language, it is impossible to form any
accurate idea of the modes of thinking or acting among the people of this country. 45
With the intervention of the British occupation (1811-1816) and the occupation of the
Netherlands by Napoleon, the East Indies was then under direct control of the Netherlands
and became a part of the Netherlands’ official and formal empire. The direct takeover only
caused much suffering to the East Indies peasants. The natives’ education was totally
neglected. The nineteenth century was marked by the slave trade and export in the
Cultivation System, large plantations and forced cultivations system to enhance Dutch
income through the international trade system. Besides spices, two significant indigenous
products were exploited by the Dutch. The first was petroleum deposits which then brought
about the necessity to build the Royal Dutch Company for Exploitation of Petroleum Sources
in Netherlands Indies in 1883 which was simply known as ‘de Koninklijke’ and which then
merged with British capital becoming Shell Transport and Trading Company in 1907 or
simply called as Royal Dutch Shell.46 In 1920, Shell was producing about 85% of the total oil
production in Indonesia. The second product was rubber. By 1930, Indonesia was producing
nearly half the world’s rubber supply which was the result of the Cultivation System
previously imposed by the Dutc h colonizer.
During the Cultuurstelsel, Dutch imperialism reached its height in collecting income
for the Netherlands’ crown. On the contrary, the quality of life in East Indies significantly
decreased as famine was widespread. This misery was debated among the conservatives
and liberals in the centre of the Empire, as liberals urged for a better quality of life for the
people of the East Indies. During the Cultivation System, the colonial government introduce
a new form of trade system which was imported from the European ‘laissez-faire’ principle.
The introduction of the tax had made the government regulate the system of land
administration. The East Indies officers distributed the land to the landowners and the
peasants were supposed to rent the lands in the hope that the peasants would produce
much more crops and could pay the necessarily imposed tax. The effect was that most of
the landowners were those who were feudally connected with the local kingdoms and the
Chinese settlers who had a powerful hold on the local trade and economy. The system of
liberal economics in the East Indies lead to the expulsion of the poor peasants from their
land and finally made them paupers. They had become wholly the subjects of the
arbitrariness of foreign capitalism. Such views were shared by Governor-general Van de
Capellen who said:
Measures, that if seen at three thousand miles distance apparently are liberal, here
prove to be highly illiberal in their effect. I must assume that in the Netherlands
45
T.S. Raffles, 1814, “A discourse delivered at a meeting of the Society of Arts and Sciences in Batavia, on the
twenty-fourth day of April 1813, being the anniversary of the Institution”, Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch
Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen 7, pp. 13-14, in Groeneboer, Op. Cit., p. 70.
46
Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 195.
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