Summary
Herman Warner Muntinghe (1773-1827), the protagonist of this study, was the main architect of the new colonial state that emerged in the Indonesian archipelago in the early nineteenth century. Muntinghe was the only administrator who managed to survive all regime changes in the Indies and the motherland between 1806 and 1827, and the only one who retained his influence almost until the end. The life story of this brilliant but idiosyncratic administrator sheds a sharp light on the beginnings of the Dutch East Indies, and thus also on the origins of what is now the Republik Indonesia. Few people in colonial history have been as admired and also vilified during their lifetime as Muntinghe. He led an adventurous and eccentric life that reflected the tensions and shifting norms of his time.
In Europe, after 1795, the newly formed Batavian Republic groped and searched for a suitable form for a new state, the contours of which only took shape a few decades later. There was no blueprint for a new colonial state, and opinions differed on the principles that should underpin colonial governance and political economy. Inspiration came from the ideas of the Enlightenment, which formed the common ground for the new generation of administrators who now ruled the East Indies. From 1808 a new colonial state emerged.
This book focuses on the question of how ideas from the Enlightenment took shape in the Dutch colonial state formation in the Indonesian archipelago and how Muntinghe, between 1806 and 1827, collaborated with his superiors, to develop and implement these ideas. The key to this development of ideas about colonial governance was not primarily in The Hague or in Batavia, but in the interaction between contemporary political theory and practice in the Indies themselves and the rest of the European colonial world. Many concrete plans did not originate from the drawing boards in The Hague, but from practice in the archipelago. Special attention is therefore given to the opposing forces in the Indies. The response of the population to colonial policy largely determined the leeway of the government in Batavia.
One particular aspect of the period between 1770 and 1830 is the prolonged isolation of the Dutch East Indies colony from the European motherland. The enormous distance between patria and the East Indies, which could only be bridged by a long sea journey around the Cape of Good Hope, was already a significant communication handicap under normal circumstances. During the wars with England, which was supreme on the world’s seas, communication almost entirely ceased. This was the case during the war of 1780 to 1784 and during the Napoleonic Wars. However, it was not only the disrupted communication that changed the relationship between the East Indies and patria. It was primarily the application of new ideas about the relationship with the colony, which was often assessed completely differently in the archipelago than in Europe. Thus, not only Daendels, but also his successors Raffles and Van der Capellen developed a tense relationship with the supreme government in Europe, and all three ultimately were replaced. During his long stay in the East Indies, Muntinghe increasingly identified with the Indonesian perspective on the colonial relationship. This perspective is reflected, among other things, in his plans for economic integration of the archipelago and his vision of the Dutch Trading Company (NHM). His conflict with the king over the NHM was actually about the position of the East Indies in the empire. While William I saw the NHM as an instrument for the worldwide expansion of the Dutch economy, of which the Dutch East Indies was a part, Muntinghe saw the NHM as the means to economically recapture the East Indies from foreign competitors. Especially the British earned a lot of money in the Indonesian archipelago, money that could also flow into the Dutch treasury. Muntinghe’s ideal was a thriving colonial economy that would bring prosperity to both the motherland and the Indonesian population.
The worlds of the European motherland and the distant colonies clashed several times. In London and The Hague, people were amazed at the far-reaching obstinacy of the administrators in the colony, in Batavia, people were sometimes shocked at the fundamental lack of understanding of the situation in the East Indies. In British India, where the great transition from trade to governance over increasingly larger territories had already begun shortly after 1750, and in the Dutch East Indies, new ambitions brought the emerging colonial state into conflict with the indigenous states. The enlightened ideas about natural law, human rights and the slogans of the French Revolution led to a strange paradox in the colonies. Along with ideas about a different relationship with the non-Europeans, for example with regard to slavery and forced labour, the possibilities of the colonizers to unilaterally impose their will on non-European population groups had increased considerably and the desire to realize a large revenue was stronger than ever. In the words of Alberts, they wanted to ‘slaughter the colonial chicken, and still continue to collect its golden eggs’. It is the struggle between these conflicting principles that every time pops up again in the career of Herman Warner Muntinghe and his contemporaries in the East, a struggle that was provisionally settled in 1830 when the Culture System was introduced. By then, Muntinghe was already dead. He died in 1827.
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, luitenant-gouverneur van Java 1811-1816, door Charles Hodges. National Portrait Gallery, Londen.
The major break with the VOC past in the Indies occurred in the years 1808 to 1816, the years in which the Napoleonic general Herman Willem Daendels and the British lieutenant governor Thomas Stamford Raffles showed an enormous urge for reform and implemented far-reaching changes in the colony. These years coincide with the rapid rise of Herman Warner Muntinghe as chief adviser to the colonial regime, as secretary-general, as president of the Supreme Court of Justice and as the most important member of Raffles’ council. The political power of Banten and Cirebon came to an end, while Yogyakarta and Palembang were effectively reduced to colonial protectorates. Competing centers of power were no longer tolerated. This rapid development made a deep impression on all involved. The consequences were not only political and military, but also economic. Ultimately, the policy initiated by Daendels towards the most important autonomous states also led to far-reaching consequences for the areas outside Java. Muntinghe played an important role in this expansion.
Ideological disputes in the Indies mainly revolved around the concept of free labor, the well-being of the population as a government objective and the role of the indigenous nobility in domestic governance and justice. The new wave of ideas eventually collided with the desire to involve the colonial population into the imperialist world economy at the lowest possible cost. This was especially true of Muntinghe’s idea that the well-being of the Indonesian people should be a major goal of colonial policy, a view that I describe in this book as humanitarian colonialism. For the current reader it is self-evident that this concept is an internal contradiction, because colonialism with its unequal power relationship between colonizer and colonized is by definition not humanitarian. In the early nineteenth century, however, this was anything but self-evident. On the contrary, a policy aimed at making the colony profitable without harming the well-being of the population was the core of colonial policy under Raffles and Van der Capellen and the constant tension between the two elements of this understanding dominated Muntinghe’s life in the Indies. Humanitarian colonialism was therefore not an anti-colonial ideology, but was related to the economic and geopolitical ambitions of the government in Batavia. In this view, the colonized population had to be protected against all kinds of alleged Eastern despotism, from the sultans to the local nobility and the regents. The colonial administration was supposed to protect the population against exploitation, an idea that we see later in another form with Multatuli and the supporters of the so-called Ethical Politics in the early twentieth century.
The early nineteenth-century debate on the future of the former VOC possessions in the Indonesian archipelago was pre-eminently transnational in character. Ever since the 1770s, Batavia has been closely monitoring the rapid changes taking place in British India and the new forms of exploitation being tested in that colony. The British example was frequently quoted in the publications of Dirk and Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and later in Muntinghe’s writings. The major issues concerning the British East India Company were the subject of debate in the British Parliament, and they were well covered in the newspapers. The colonial discourse thus had a much more public character in England than in the Batavian Republic, culminating in the impeachment case against Governor-General Warren Hastings led by the philosopher and politician Edmund Burke.
In this study I use Muntinghe’s biography as a lens to better understand the origins of the colonial state. By connecting his personal history with the political and economic history of the colony, and by taking Muntinghe’s long career as a starting point, both the coherence and differences between the successive regimes become clearer. It shows that the countless administrative experiments were indeed preceded by lengthy discussions and that personal experiences could have a significant impact on the formation of new insights. Muntinghe’s life story also reveals the personal and political confrontation between the ideas and new norms of the (moderate) Enlightenment, the economic demands of the motherland, and the reality in Indonesia. The collision of these three elements posed serious problems for colonial administrators that were inherently unsolvable and that ultimately could crush the main actors, such as Muntinghe.
This biographical angle is not incompatible with attention to the institutional memory of the colonial administration. However, this study is mainly an argument for another important source of knowledge: the knowledge and experience that colonial administrators brought with them themselves or from their own network and family. Without insight into Muntinghe’s family history and his remarkable doctoral thesis, his humanitarian ideas become incomprehensible, and without his experiences as a private landowner in Indramayu, the dramatic change in his vision in 1817 is a mystery. Colonial officials and administrators were more than small cogs in an imperialist machinery: they each brought their own preoccupations and their own history.
Herman Warner Muntinghe can be considered the most important architect of the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies in the early nineteenth century. From 1801 Muntinghe had a pivotal role in the Asian Council and from 1808 to 1827 he held a wide variety of high positions in the Dutch East Indies. The arguments for seeing him as the most important architect of the colonial state are scattered throughout this study, but essentially boil down to three points.
In the first place Muntinghe was given the highest praise by both Daendels and Raffles. According to Daendels, Muntinghe was the only one who still had an overview of the avalanche of decisions and regulations that this governor-general poured out on the colony, and he had been directly involved in most cases, according to Daendels. Raffles found Muntinghe so indispensable that he even lobbied in Europe for Muntinghe’s position as the pivot that any enlightened government in the Indies could not ignore. The Elout-Van der Capellen-Buyskes triumvirate also made full use of Muntinghe, and his famous memorandum of 1817 determined the direction of policy for many years. Van der Capellen saw Muntinghe as the only one capable of developing a vision of the future of European land ownership. Secondly, there was no one in the colony whose advice and functions covered a field as broad as that of Muntinghe. He issued opinions on economics, trade, agriculture, administration and justice, piracy, Sumatra, Borneo and countless others. He was head of the civil service organization (Secretary General) under Daendels, president of the Supreme Court of Justice, member of the Council of the Indies, president of the Council of Finance, Commissioner of Palembang and member of numerous committees. He was also the initiator of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij. Neither Daendels, nor Raffles, nor Van der Capellen could do without Muntinghe. He gained much practical experience as the owner of large estates on Java’s north coast and as an assertive representative of Batavia in Palembang, where he covered the full scope of administrative action, from the micromanagement of his small retinue to a war against both the English and the sultan and the strategic geopolitics of the archipelago. Thirdly, Daendels’ enormous administrative drive – which marked the beginning of a new era in the years 1808-1809 – coincided exactly with the rapid rise of Muntinghe at the same time. During Muntinghe’s term as secretary-general, the output of decisions by the colonial administration was more than three times that of Daendels’ predecessors, only to immediately drop to a lower level after Muntinghe’s appointment as president of the Supreme Court in August 1809, albeit still high compared to the period before 1808.
What remains of Muntinghe’s legacy after two hundred years? The most visible are the current borders between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. If Muntinghe had not expelled the British from Palembang in 1819, then in that same year, Raffles probably would not have founded Singapore and the boundaries between the British and Dutch spheres of influence would have been drawn differently in 1824. Secondly, to this day, the village (desa) plays a prominent role as an administrative unit in Indonesia, a role that emerged in the second decade of the nineteenth century under the influence of Muntinghe. The third point is the integrated approach to the economy in the archipelago. As Muntinghe outlined, the economy of Sumatra, Borneo and the other islands needed to be better connected to that of Java in order to strengthen the economy. Finally, there is that peculiar mixture of humanitarian and economic goals in colonial (and international) politics, of which Muntinghe is, of course, not the only source, but of which he was one of the first major advocates, and which remained attractive to politicians of various persuasions since his time. The fundamental incompatibility of those goals has marked Muntinghe’s life and work and posed new questions and problems for each generation after him.
The book is structured into eight chronological chapters that cover both Muntinghe’s private life and his work. The main text concludes with an epilogue, while the appendices contain two unpublished documents related to Muntinghe, genealogies, and a glossary of foreign words. The extensive bibliography covers the archival sources and literature.
Chapter I, The Education of a Colonial, covers the entire period of Muntinghe’s life until his departure to the Dutch East Indies in 1806, including his upbringing in a transnational environment, the serious problems between his parents, his student days, a long stay in England, and his early career at the Asian Council.
Chapter II, Daendels’ Machine, outlines the state of the Dutch East Indies at the moment of Muntinghe’s arrival in Java, his relationship with Governor-General Daendels, and his influence on the radical changes that Daendels implemented. Here we see the beginning of Muntinghe’s positioning as an intellectual pillar of the colonial regime.
This last role was further strengthened under the British lieutenant governor Raffles, the subject of Chapter III, Java as a Laboratory. In this chapter, we can follow the development of Muntinghe’s own ideas in some detail for the first time. The major themes during this period were the sale of land to private individuals and the debate on the free labor of the Javanese. Muntinghe played a leading role in both issues.
The arrival of the Dutch under the leadership of the triumvirate Van der Capellen, Elout, and Buyskes is described in Chapter IV, A New Start. After the Napoleonic and British years, the restoration government under Willem I finally had the opportunity to leave its mark on the development of the colony. With his extensive memorandum of 1817, Muntinghe set the course for the coming years. Muntinghe turned out to have been strongly influenced by the events that had taken place on his own estates at the end of 1816, another important theme in this chapter.
In Chapter V, Muntinghe’s War, we encounter our protagonist as an assertive and self-assured colonial administrator in Sumatra, where the commissioners-general had appointed him as commissioner in Palembang with great powers. He drove out the English under Raffles but suffered a significant defeat against Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II. This chapter not only covers Muntinghe’s military expeditions to the interior but also the geopolitical consequences and religious context.
After Palembang and the departure of Elout and Buyskes, Muntinghe became the most important advisor of Governor-General Van der Capellen as a Councillor of the Indies (Chapter VI). He developed his ideas on a wide range of issues in colonial economy and politics. He played a key role in the notorious case of private landowner Andries de Wilde, in which he became a strong opponent of European land ownership.
Chapter VII, Muntinghe’s Stay in the Netherlands and the NHM, first deals with the colonial treaty with England and then with the main theme, the establishment of the Dutch Trading Company, an original idea of Muntinghe, the execution of which personally resulted in great disappointment for him and led him to decide to return to Java.
In the final chapter, Muntinghe’s Last Years, we see his personal and political decline: his influence waned, and his health deteriorated rapidly. A peace initiative to end the Java War failed, and in March 1827, he resigned as a Councillor of the Indies. The Epilogue deals with the ‘rediscovery’ of Muntinghe around 1850, when he becomes a source of inspiration for the growing number of critics of the Cultivation System. The piece concludes with an overview of Muntinghe’s legacy.
