Muntinghe and the end of self-rule in the Dutch East Indies in 1826
Contribution to the Leyden conference on Colonialism and the Age of Revolutions (1780-1830), 22 November 2023, by Jan Folkerts
Introduction
During the Age of Revolutions, the Asian colonies of both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom expanded their influence over their overseas territories, ushering in various types of reform. Notably, in British India and, to an even greater extent, in the Dutch East Indies, colonial governors exercised significant autonomy with minimal interference from their European homelands. As Christopher Bayly put it: in the first decades of the 19th century, the British empire was only loosely controlled from its centre, and the same can be said of the Dutch control of their far Asian colony.[1]
Since the days of Bayly and his seminal work The Birth of the Modern World new ways of doing world history have emerged, not least in response to the growing critiques that macrohistories obscure particularity and power and excise the personal from the past, as James David Wilson states.[2] When it comes to southern and southeast Asia, Sivasundaram’s Waves Across the South and Wilson’s Anglo-Dutch Meridian are perfect examples of how to do this new kind of world history.
They challenge us to connect the global with the particular, or – in my paper– to connect the development of colonial governance in the Indies – to a number of incidents and cases that at first sight seem anecdotical, but on second thoughts are the signs of a deeper lying change.
In this paper, I aim to demonstrate that in the years leading up to the Dutch return to Java in 1816, a palpable sense of autonomy had already taken root within the European ruling class. Secondly, after 1816, the concept of opperheerschappij, or constitutional supreme authority over the colony by the King, remained largely theoretical and ineffective for an extended period. Only with the outbreak of the Java War did the era of European self-rule on the island come to an end.
It’s important to clarify that in this context, the term “self-rule” is not used in a strict or legal sense but rather as a descriptor of the de facto relationship between the colony and the motherland. To be more precise, it pertains to the autonomy of the European administration in Indonesia, and does not refer to any form of representation of the population of Java and the other islands.
Two shattered dreams of independence
After 1800, the revolutionary winds that had swept across Europe were, with some delay, also felt in the Dutch East Indies. New ideas encountered fierce resistance from those who had much to lose if a radical transformation of the political and economic system in the colony were to occur.
On the one hand, Java became isolated from Europe, but on the other, the colony became more integrated into the global economy and became a focal point in the struggle between England and France. The communication between the homeland and the Asian colonies, which was already cumbersome under normal circumstances, deteriorated further during the Napoleonic wars.
While there had been a brief attempt in 1792 to exert tighter control over Java by dispatching two commissioners-general from Europe, this endeavor ultimately proved unsuccessful. Although later on communication was eventually restored, governing the colonies from Europe remained a formidable challenge.
New governors-general in the Dutch East Indies were selected from the inner circle of the Dutch administration in Batavia, without any interference from the mother country. However, the threat of a British invasion never diminished. The formidable British fleet aimed to prevent Java from becoming a French stronghold in the East and posed a continuous threat to invade Java and the Spice Islands. As a result, Java became a vital asset in the conflict between the two European superpowers in Asia.
Interestingly, the colonial economy flourished during this period. Coffee and other crops were transported from Java to consumers through neutral ships, primarily from the United States, Denmark, and some North German towns. This was the heyday of the so-called oudgasten, a faction of the European population in Java that benefited the most from the existing status quo.
It was within these circles that ideas about some form of independence began to circulate. In November 1806, shortly after the arrival of a new attorney general named Herman Warner Muntinghe in Java, a pamphlet, aptly called de Droom (the dream), was circulating in Batavia.[3] According to Nicolaus Engelhard, the author of this anonymous pamphlet was Jan Hendrik Carrega, the capable captain of the man-of-war Scipio.[4] But Johannes Wilhelmus Moorrees, the first secretary of the colonial government, was accused of spreading this text.[5]
The droom contained some remarkable proposals. It advocated the immediate evacuation of the colonial capital, Batavia, and the destruction of its fortifications. All Europeans were to be relocated to Surabaya. Those who served on the colonial fleet would be employed as artillerists, with an emphasis on growing this segment of the population, whether they were of European or mixed race. A special plan for these sailors would be devised, whether they were European or ‘metisse’, to grow this part of the population. Children from a certain age would be taken care of by the government. It is a far echo of creole nationalism that reached the East Indies by this pamphlet.
The pamphlet argued that the trade in slaves should be stopped provisionally, new schools teaching Dutch, Javanese, and Malay languages should be established, and a Society for Agriculture should be founded. Europeans of other nations would be invited to settle in the colony.
The idea of a semi-independent Java might have seemed like a chimera, and Moorrees was arrested and dismissed by the government, on the pretext of insulting the King of Holland, when the news of his installation recently had reached Java.[6] While historically this pamphlet has often been treated as an isolated incident, it becomes clearer in a broader context. It is no coincidence that around the time of Moorrees’ arrest, two leaders of the oudgasten party, the former governor-general Siberg and the director-general of Java’s northeast coast, Nicolaus Engelhard, also discussed the idea of a neutral Java or a free colony in their correspondence.[7] And in fact in 1805, Moorrees self had written extensively about his plans to no-one else than Sebastiaan Cornelis Nederburgh, the former commissary-general.[8]
Certainly, Carrega’s plans did not materialize, but they represented something more significant: in this age of revolutions, when the white settler colonies of the Americas largely gained their independence, the self confidence of the Europeans in the colonies grew, and even in colonies with small European populations like the Cape Colony, ideas about getting less dependent on Europe and creole nationalism began to circulate.[9] This had also been the case in the French colony of Isle de France, present-day Mauritius, at least up till 1803.[10] In Java, even conservative circles like the oudgasten were influenced by ideas that had previously been unimaginable.
With the arrival of General Herman Willem Daendels in 1808 as a radical and reforming governor-general, the oudgasten party came under attack, and Engelhard was the first among them to lose his high position as a director-general in northeastern Java. As Daendels centralized the colonial government and introduced a new general secretary, he reinforced the military infrastructure with the construction of a naval base on the shores of the Sunda Strait and the creation of the Great Post Road connecting east and west Java from coast to coast.
Meanwhile, four members of the conservative colonial elite residing in Europe devised a secret plan. These colonial figures, temporarily in the motherland, conspired to secure independence for Java under the Prince of Orange and aimed to make Java a refuge for all political allies. The four key figures among these “Indisch” men, including Daniel van Alphen and Johannes van den Berg, believed that an independent Java was feasible.
Although the Prince of Orange initially supported this scheme, and the English government appeared to back it, opinions about the future of Java changed by late 1810. The English decided to invade the now Franco-Dutch colony as soon as possible. This change was undoubtedly influenced by the strong French military presence in the southern Indian Ocean, particularly on Isle de France and Bourbon, from where the French posed a threat to invade British India. Under these circumstances, the idea of an independent Java no longer aligned with British interests.[11]
A strained relationship between colony and patria
While the British were still breeding on their plans to invade the former Dutch East Indies, governor-general Daendels got into trouble with the homeland. Admired for his military measures and his efforts to reorganize the government, Daendels had got him some mighty enemies, especially those who had been the main victims of his policy. They spread the word about his atrocities, about his lack of respect for the sultans of the principalities of central Java and had many other complaints. The discovery in Europe that Daendels also traded on his own account damaged his reputation. When Daendels in 1810 asked for large military reinforcements to be sent by Napoleon, the emperor already had decided to send a new governor-general and to recall Daendels. In the eyes of his European superior the governor-general had overstepped his boundaries.
After a brief period of French rule under Governor-General Janssens, the British seized control of Java, and a new administration was established with the ambitious Lieutenant-Governor Raffles at its helm. This governing body also included a council of four men, one of whom was Herman Warner Muntinghe, who had previously served as Secretary-General and President of the High Court of Justice under Daendels’ administration. Raffles, known for his proactive and reform-oriented approach, enjoyed the support of British Governor-General Lord Minto. However, it didn’t take long before eyebrows were raised among colonial authorities in London and Calcutta regarding Raffles’ expansion of his authority. Although he had promised substantial financial gains from the colony, the reality was that Raffles required significant financial support from Calcutta.
Matters took a turn when Lord Minto was replaced in 1813, and the new governor-general displayed much less patience with Raffles’ actions in Java. Raffles encountered significant trouble when, in collaboration with Muntinghe, he devised a plan to sell extensive land tracts to Europeans, directly contradicting the wishes of London and Calcutta.
When it turned out that Raffles and Muntinghe stood among the primary beneficiaries of this land sale, Raffles had to defend himself against accusations of corruption by General Rollo Gillespie, a member of his council and the commander of the forces. The charges against Raffles were eventually dismissed, but his standing within the colonial government suffered considerable damage. He was subsequently recalled and went on to serve as the governor of Bengkulu, a relatively remote colonial outpost on Sumatra’s west coast.
It is probably impossible to draw a fine line between a large degree of independence that might be expected from the highest representative of the mother country in a colony at thousands of miles from home and the outright overstretching of a mandate. The most a governor could aspire for is that his deeds would be approved of afterwards.
Both Daendels and Raffles eventually recognized that the military, social, and economic conditions they faced required measures that extended well beyond the confines of their official mandates. Simultaneously, they were eager to demonstrate that they were the right choices for their positions, willingly taking the risk of estranging their superiors back home. Acting too cautiously and belatedly was not in their nature, nor was it what their colonial surroundings demanded.
After the takeover of the East-Indian colony by the Dutch in 1816, the new sovereign King William I must have been well aware of the risks involved in having a powerful governor-general in the rich East-Indian colony and the near impossibility to exercise real control from the European homeland. It was probably for that reason that his choice fell on someone he knew very well and who had shown to be a capable and trustworthy man of independent means. And indeed, it took Godert Van der Capellen longer than Daendels and Raffles to get into trouble with the homeland. But when the governor-general finally got to the tipping point, the consequences reached much farther than with Daendels and Raffles.
Muntinghe and European colonization
A major issue that preoccupied the Indian government in the years before the Java War was the problem of European colonization, as the sale of large tracts of land to enterprising private individuals was commonly called.[12] It was a very important matter, which might have turned Java into a situation comparable with large parts of Latin America and the Philippines, where wealthy landowners of European descent formed a class of their own with large encomiendas exploiting the local population and enslaved people from Africa.
Muntinghe had given a negative opinion about it in a famous report of 1817. However, there was no final decision on this matter, while the issue became increasingly urgent. There was thus no question of a favourable investment climate for European agricultural entrepreneurs. In the Netherlands, the refusal of ambitious planters in Java met with little understanding; it was mainly blamed on Van der Capellen, who seemed to be a lot less ‘liberal’ than many had hoped for. In any case, no support for these private individuals could be expected from Muntinghe, who had compared European planters with parasites, a statement that undoubtedly had earned him new enemies. In the mother country the question was asked whether the Indian government was overstepping its bounds by arbitrarily thwarting European land ownership. The government regulations adopted in 1818 were cited, which provided for the expansion of agriculture through the issuance of lands and the increase of a ‘European population and farmers’.[13]
While King William I was completely in the dark about the situation in the Indies[14], and his ministers might have wondered how to tighten control over the colony on the other side of the globe, Muntinghes ideas developed in an opposite direction. In his first large report after the Dutch takeover of 1816, he had stipulated that a colony existed for the benefit of the mother country, with the exception of every measure contrary to the principles of justice and equity, but seven years later in his minute about the new trading society NHM, he proposed a proper balance between the interest of the mother country and the colony.[15] He wanted the NHM to be a East-Indian-Dutch trading society, but when the King against the wishes of Muntinghe and most of the Amsterdam merchants changed its nature by making it a world wide trading organization, the man who conceived the first plans was effectively sidetracked.
For Muntinghe, European land ownership was not a matter of abstract and non-binding reflections, because as a Councillor of the Indies (since 1819) and as chairman of a special committee in 1822 he was directly confronted with the consequences. It was over this question of European colonization as it was called that one of the final acts was staged about the question who was in charge between the colony and the mother country.
The private lands of Sukabumi and Ujung Berung were the biggest thorn in the side of the Indian government.[16] They both had been acquired by the ambitious estate owner Andries de Wilde during the regimes of Daendels and Raffles. These were excellent coffeelands, and the smuggling of this product from these countries boomed, according to Batavia.
Andries de Wilde had been one of the biggest profiteers from the land sales under Daendels and Raffles. He had been on good terms with both governors. Having started as a surgeon under Daendels, he had managed to acquire large estates in the foothills of the Priangan. In a barely opened-up and sparsely populated area in western Preanger, he had founded the Sukabumi estate in 1814, with Nicolaus Engelhard and Thomas MacQuoid as his partners. De Wilde and his partners sold the surplus from the rice production, and coffee was also grown on the dry land in his domain. This coffee from Preanger had to be delivered to the government at a fixed price. A price that was far too low according to the landlords, encouraged extensive smuggling, a phenomenon inherent to a monopoly system with sales prices below the price on the open market. As a consequence of the now prevailing policy to prevent any further interest of European land owners, De Wilde and Engelhard were constantly thwarted in their operations by the government and its officials.
When Muntinghe had to advise on European land ownership as chairman of a special committee from May 1820, De Wilde was in Europe to plead his case to William I. He had found important supporters in MP Daniel François van Alphen – the same man that had conspired for an independent Java under the prince of Orange- and Anton Reinhard Falck. During an audience in the summer of 1821 with the King – who was virtually unfamiliar with the situation in the East Indies – De Wilde spoke highly of his ambition to increase coffee production to unprecedented levels. To the astonishment of the Indian government, William I, without consulting governor-general Van der Capellen, agreed to De Wilde’s request to be allowed to sell the coffee on the open market from now on, and the King also promised a surcharge on the coffee price for recent years.[17]
After some deliberations the Indian government decided not to execute the kings orders as they were laid down in a royal decree, but began to prepare an extensive defense against these new measures. Muntinghe wrote this report, that was somewhat edited by the governor-general.[18] In this report, Van der Capellen and Muntinghe not only took on the liberals in the mother country, who had persuaded the King to agree with De Wilde, the report was also regarded as an attack by the administration on the influential business lobby on Java, of which De Wilde could be seen as a representative. Muntinghe and Van der Capellen were not against private initiative as such, but against those European and other entrepreneurs who only wanted to enrich themselves at the expense of the population.[19]
A final struggle for autonomy
Although this case was not the direct cause of Van der Capellens recall to the homeland in 1826, it tells us a lot about the measure of independence the Indisch government tried to maintain against the wishes from Europe. The simple refusal of executing the Kings orders, who constitutionally was the supreme authority over the colonies, of course provoked a reaction and damaged the reputation of Van der Capellen and his advisors. One of these advisors, councillor of the Indies Herman Muntinghe travelled to Europe at the end of 1822.
In the winter of 1823, The King had several conversations with Muntinghe in Brussels and he was alarmed by the gloomy picture of the Indisch financial situation Muntinghe had sketched. William I decided to pay more attention to the colony. The king might have had the supreme authority over the colony, up till that time, but he only rarely got any information about his distant domain. The letters of Van der Capellen were always written in an optimistic tone, and the Kings ministers only very rarely took the opportunity to inform his majesty about Indian matters. It was Muntinghe who informed the king, and this set in motion a chain of events that ended the great autonomy of the colony.
On a theoretical and legal level, there barely existed any formal autonomy for the colonial government in Batavia. In reality however, the colony ruled itself to a large degree. Official laws and regulations for the Indonesian colony were published in the Indisch Staatsblad, the official publication of the Batavian government. In the years between 1819 and 1825 98% of all these colonial laws and regulations were issued by either the Indian government or the governor-general and only 2% by the King.[20]
The growing tension over the financial situation of the Indies and the measures of the Batavian government against European landowners[21] contributed to the idea that Batavia was overstepping the boundaries of its own authority and wilfully refused to execute the Kings orders. The new secretary for the colonies, who had been a former member of the Indisch government as a commissioner-general, Cornelis Elout, advised the King to warn his governor-general. In a letter of 12 July 1825 Elout denounced Van der Capellens attitude, who in his opinion strived for the complete independence of the Indisch government, as highly dangerous.[22] Van der Capellen on his turn, was of the opinion that he did not have to take any orders from a secretary, and that he only was accountable to the King. He was furious and accused Elout of wanting to take over the colonial administration by himself. To end any lack of clarity in this matter, Elout persuaded the King to confirm that anything the secretary said or wrote in his official letters to the governor-general should be considered as from the King himself.[23] At that time, the King and his minister were not yet aware of the poor reception that the news of the establishment of the NHM received in Batavia in the summer of 1825. And again Van der Capellen refused to cooperate in an important measure taken by The Hague. Supported by the majority of the Council of the Indies, he refused to supply sufficient coffee to the new company, an important condition for the success of the new initiative.
All this finally led to the recall of Van der Capellen and the nomination of a new commissary-general Du Bus de Gisignies. The instruction that Du Bus took with him to Batavia, could be read as a long complaint against the measures of the Indian government under Van der Capellen. Du Bus intended to tighten the reins but soon had to find out that the spirit of autonomy had not disappeared with the removal of Van der Capellen. The supporters of Van der Capellen still were a dominant force in the Raad van Indië, the Council of the Indies, and resisted a number of new measures.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 1826, when Du Bus asked the Council of the Indies for advice on the new governance regulations that should replace the regeringsreglement of 1819. Muntinghe did a last ditch effort to curb the power of the governor-general in the new regulations by proposing to double the size of the Council of the Indies from four to eight and to introduce super residents in Surabaya and Semarang. Of course, Du Bus did not agree with Muntinghes proposal and it further strained the relation between Du Bus and the Council. The refusal of the Council to cooperate in curbing the spending while at the same times proposing expensive new measures, was the limit for Du Bus. He accused the counsellors trying to thwart the commissioner-general as much as possible and put all his frustrations in a letter to the Council of the Indies that had the effect of a declaration of war. Nevertheless, this incident marked the beginning of the end of self rule. The conflict between Du Bus and his councillors took place in the middle of a dangerous war that needed all his attention. Two of the four councillors, supporters of Van der Capellen, left for the Netherlands, while Muntinghe resigned in 1827. The Java War asked for massive military help from the home country, and the European governing class in Batavia must have realized that without interference from Europe the colony would have no future any more.
Conclusion
All the problems in the relation between the European mother countries and the Asian colonies in the first decades of the 19th century, can be considered as the result of forms of governance that were still under construction. They ask us to look beyond the official relations between the colonial administration and the homeland, and to understand how the distance to Europe, slow or lacking communication with patria, and maybe also the wish of the governors to underline their authority with measures that surpassed the bounds of their mandate, all contributed to a de facto colonial self-rule that lasted for three decades until about 1826. Herman Warner Muntinghe, the main advisor of Daendels, Raffles and Van der Capellen, was one of those who thought that the government in Batavia didn’t need much interference from the homeland. He did not believe in a future white settler colony striving for independence, on the contrary, he considered that option as very dangerous. But when he devised his plans for the NHM, he expressly stated that the majority of its board members should consist of men that had spent at least ten years in the East.
The gap between the ideal of a perfect colonial relationship between the motherland and its Asian empire and the harsh reality of the Dutch East Indies would never be so wide again as in the early 1800s, but it would never close completely.
© 2023 Jan Folkerts
[1] C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (Londen 1989) 194.
[2] James David Wilson, The Anglo-Dutch Meridian in the Indian Ocean World, 1795-1820. (ongepubliceerde dissertatie, University of Cambridge 2018) 3.
[3] Nationaal Archief, Van Alphen, 2.21.004.21, inv.nr. 3.
[4] De Haan, Priangan, I, 83; about Carrega, who was born in Genua, Italy, see Jansen, Omwille van een gezegend eiland 61-62, BWN III (1858), J.H. Carrega.
[5] Statement by Van Polanen to D’Ozy, 2 October 1808, De Roo I, 73-94, i.e. 90.
[6] Van Polanen to D’Ozy, 2 oktober 1808, L.W.G. de Roo ed., De Opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië (supplement op het dertiende en laatste deel; Den Haag 1909) I, 90.
[7] Engelhard to Siberg, 8 november 1806: Nationaal Archief, collectie Van Alphen en Engelhard, 2.21.004.19, inv.nr. 3.
[8] Moorrees aan Nederburgh, 20 maart and 26 mei 1805: Nationaal Archief, collectie Nederburgh, 1.10.59, inv.nr. 739.
[9] C.H.E. de Wit, De strijd tussen Aristocratie en Democratie in Nederland 1780-1848 (Heerlen 1965) 232.
[10] Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South. A New History of Revolution and Empire (Londen 2020) 102-103.
[11] Derk Jansen, Omwille van een gezegend eiland. Het leven van jhr. D.F. van Alphen tot 1816 (Deventer 2001) 87-95.
[12] Jan Folkerts, De koloniale illusie. Herman Warner Muntinghe (1773-1827), architect van de koloniale staat (Amsterdam 2024) 244.
[13] Regeringsreglement 1818, art. 93. Folkerts, De koloniale illusie, 245.
[14] P. Mijer, Jean Chrétien Baud geschetst (Utrecht 1878) 235: ‘Onder het Ministerie van 1818-1824 vernam de Koning zelden iets officieels van Indië; nu en dan berigten van buitengewone voorvallen, van eene behaalde overwinning, zoo als die op Palembang of dergelijke, overigens meestal eene mondelinge verzekering dat alles naar wensch ging’.
[15] Folkerts, De koloniale illusie, 269.
[16] Ibidem, 247.
[17] Ibidem, 249.
[18] Bijlage 3, ‘Wie schreef het kolonisatierapport van 1822?’, in: Jan Folkerts, Architect van de koloniale staat. Het excentrieke leven van Herman Warner Muntinghe (1773-1827) (ongepubliceerde dissertatie, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 2023) 315-316.
[19] Het rapport is gepubliceerd in S.J. Ottow, De oorsprong der conservatieve richting. Het kolonisatierapport Van der Capellen, uitgegeven en toegelicht door S.J. Ottow (Utrecht 1937) 212-301.
[20] N.S. Efthymiou, De organisatie van regelgeving voor Nederlands Oost-Indië: stelsels en opvattingen (1602-1942) (Amsterdam 2005) 178-179.
[21] According to The Hague, these measures were in violation of art. 106 of the Regeringsreglement (Government Regulations) of 1818, which had never been officially adopted. Efthymiou, 175.
[22] Ibidem, 185.
[23] Ibidem, 183-184.
