The story of the British Interregnum in Java, 1811-16
Originally published in History Today magazine, September 2011
http://www.historytoday.com/tim-hannigan/when-raffles-ran-java
On the afternoon of 4 August 1811 a fleet of 81 frigates, sloops and cruisers anchored off a little fishing village called Cilincing on the north coast of Java. Eight miles west along the muddy foreshore lay Batavia, the grand old capital of the Dutch East Indies, but these ships were not flying the flag of Holland: Union Jacks and the red and white ensigns of the British East India Company fluttered limply from their topmasts. As the sun slanted away towards Sumatra an armada of longboats ferried some 12,000 soldiers – redcoats and Indian sepoys – ashore from the ships. The British had arrived to invade Java.
***
Two
hundred years after its opening act the British invasion of Java and the five-year
occupation which followed – usually known as the British Interregnum – are
almost completely forgotten, in both the United Kingdom and Indonesia. If it is remembered at all it is only through
the slanted prism of the biographies of the man who served at the head of its
administration and who is better remembered today for his later achievements in
Singapore: Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826). Yet the interregnum was a half-decade of high drama and controversy. It was the point at which ascendant European
power first came into outright, open and consequential conflict with the major
local powers, and the British brought attitudes and ideas with them which would
set the tone and lay the groundwork for the coming colonial century in Java.
Java is the loadstone of the Southeast Asian archipelago. It was variously influenced by Chinese trade and Indian religion in the first millennium AD, and then later by the arrival of Islam. European involvement began in the 16th century as Portuguese, English and Dutch ships vied for control of the lucrative spice market. The Dutch ultimately came to dominate. From their base at Batavia, their Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compangnie (VOC; Dutch East India Company) established a network of outposts amongst the islands, laid a lacquer of Dutch territory along the north coast of Java, and became ever more involved in the affairs of the local sultans who still ruled much of the hinterland. Britain, meanwhile, had concerns further west, and as its own East India Company became entrenched in India, its interest in Java fell away.
But then, in the chilly
tail-end of 1794, a world away from the Javanese tropics, Napoleon sent his
French Republican forces across the frosty flatlands of northwest Europe and
invaded Holland. For the British all Dutch overseas possessions became de facto enemy territory.
Though the idea of
invading Java was discussed at once, it took a decade-and-a-half for the plan
to come to pass. In 1810 the then
governor-general of Britain’s Indian territories, Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto (1751-1814),
received instructions to ‘proceed to the conquest of Java at the earliest
possible opportunity’. A fleet was
assembled; regiments were raised, and Raffles, an ambitious young clerk who had
been serving in the administration of Penang, was employed to lay the
diplomatic and academic groundwork as ‘Agent to the Governor-General with the
Malay States’.
In August 1811 the deed
was done
Abandoned beach
The British had chosen
the Cilincing beach for their landing as a spot unlikely to be defended. It was unguarded, but when the advance under
the command of Colonel Rollo Gillespie (1766-1814) - a feisty, short-statured Irish
aristocrat with an impressive list of conquests on the battlefield and in the
bedroom to his name - moved west to the original walled town of Batavia, they
found that that too had been abandoned by the Dutch.
The man organising the
Dutch defence was the Governor-General, Jan Willem Janssens (1762-1838). In 1800 the new Napoleonic administration in
Holland had disbanded the VOC and brought the Dutch East Indies under direct
state control, and staunchly pro-Napoleon Dutchmen like Janssens had been
placed in charge. In August 1811
Janssens had at least 18,000 men at his disposal around Batavia, but he had
chosen to retreat early to a modern fortress at Meester Cornelis, six miles
south of Old Batavia, in the hope that the British would start dying of fever
before the first serious engagement – for Batavia had a notoriously unhealthy
climate. But though fever did claim its
first casualties within 24 hours of their arrival, the British managed to move
forward and to besiege Meester Cornelis.
At dawn on August 26th they launched their final assault.
Meester Cornelis was sited on a strong defensive position, flanked by a meandering river on one side and a deep canal on
the other, but many of Janssens’ troops were uncommitted to the Napoleonic
cause. The defence collapsed, and by
mid-morning the attack had turned into a rout.
As the triumphant British rounded up prisoners one appalled republican
soldier reported seeing ‘more than one [Dutch] officer amongst them trample on
his French cockade to which he had sworn allegiance, uttering scandalous
imprecations and swearing and assuring the English: “I am no Frenchman, but a
Dutchman.”’
Janssens had escaped
east to Semarang with a small body of supporters, but on September 17th, at the garrison
town of Salatiga in the mountains of Central Java he submitted and handed over
the Dutch colony of Java to the British.
***
The conquest of Dutch
Java was an unequivocal triumph for the British, but the occupation that
followed was in reality an improvised, opportunistic operation.
Britain could ill afford to take on some new tranche of territory at the
time, and Lord Minto’s official instructions had ordered him only to organise
‘the expulsion of the Dutch power, the destruction of their fortifications, the
distribution of their arms and stores to the natives and the evacuation of the
Island by our own troops’.
Raffles and Minto,
however, had developed a vision of Java as a ‘the Land of Promise’, and viewed
the idea of handing it over to the native courts as anathema. Taking advantage of distance, and citing
concern about ‘the disruptive and calamitous consequence to so ancient and
populous a European Colony’ if it was abandoned post-conquest, Minto quietly
disregarded his instructions and made the 30-year-old Raffles – who had been a
mere clerk 12 months earlier – the lieutenant-governor of a grand new British
territory. Rollo Gillespie was appointed
commander of the forces.
Raffles and Minto knew that
they would need to work hard to convince the East India Company’s board of
directors in London of the value of their new unsolicited possession. Colonial Java, however, was tottering on the
brink of bankruptcy. Decades of
corruption and mismanagement had ruined the VOC, and at its disbandment in 1800
it had been a credit-crunching 85 million guilders in the red (approximately
half a billion pounds in today’s terms).
There had been no recovery during the subsequent republican decade. Revenues were paltry; hard cash was hard to
come by, and reams of paper money had been printed to pay the daily needs of
the colony, prompting chronic inflation.
As Lord Minto sailed
back to Calcutta in October he wrote to the East India Company’s board of
directors to assure them ‘that Java will supply resources at the least for its
own expenses’. The truth was otherwise.
Royal Subjugation
Though the greatest
controversies of the British Interregnum would be borne of Raffles’
increasingly frantic attempts to make good the promises of profit, for the
people of Java the most profoundly shocking aspect of the episode was the
approach which the British took towards the native courts. Less than one year into his tenure, in an
effort to ‘impress upon them the Character and power of our Government’,
Raffles ordered something which no Dutch governor-general had ever dared or
wished to sanction – the storming, sacking and outright subjugation of the most
powerful royal court in Java.
In the early 19th
century the two most significant native powers in Java were those of Yogyakarta
and Surakarta, a pair of cousinly kingdoms at the core of the island. Both had lost ground to the Dutch over the
decades, but entrenched in their magnificent walled palaces, or kratons, they viewed the foreigners as
allies rather than masters.
Royal prerogative in Java was closely linked
to ideas of the supernatural; power was believed to be drawn from possession of
sacred pusaka heirlooms, and sultans
earned kudos from reports of their connections with the spirit world. On a more temporal level rigid protocol governed
all aspects of courtly life. Earlier
generations of Dutchmen had at least paid lip service to all this: residents at
the courts usually learnt to speak the high, formal Javanese that was the only
acceptable language for consultations with kings. Raffles, however, brought a new kind of
European attitude with him: he was determined to assert outright British
dominance, and within months of arriving at Batavia he had decided that he
should engineer some kind of crushing military victory as ‘decisive a proof to
the Native Inhabitants of Java of the strength and determination of the British
Government’.
During his first visit
to Yogyakarta he provoked confrontation by demanding that he be seated on an
equal level with the sultan, Hamengkubuwono II (1750-1828), and by addressing the court in
Malay, a language deemed offensively coarse and uncultured by aristocratic
Javanese. Old ideas of compromise and
accommodation had been abandoned.
An assault on
Yogyakarta was first mooted at least as early as January 1812; by April there
was a thin pretext – a correspondence between the two courts was uncovered, in
which the ruler of Surakarta was attempting to instigate an uprising against
the Europeans in Java. But though
Surakarta was the source of the insurrection, Raffles considered its
counterpart the more important target: ‘I shall immediately adopt decisive
measures with regard to Djocjocarta’, Raffles wrote to Minto.
On 20 June 1812 a 1,200-strong
British force stormed the walled royal city of Yogyakarta. The Javanese outnumbered the attackers by
almost ten to one, but they were so taken aback by this unimaginable turn of
events that their resistance collapsed at once. One chronicler, a minor Yogyakarta prince
named Arya Panular, reported that for the mystically-minded Javanese the
British and their Indian troops appeared to be divinely driven: ‘In battle they
were irresistible… they were as though protected by the very angels and they
struck terror into men’s hearts.’
Within one short morning
Yogyakarta was totally subjugated and largely destroyed, with the loss of only
23 British soldiers. The Sultan was
arrested and exiled, and the court was looted.
Raffles and the British resident at Yogyakarta, John Crawfurd (1783-1768), seized
the entire contents of the court archives, while Gillespie’s personal booty was
valued at £15,000 in gold, jewels and hard currency (the equivalent of £500,000 today).
The profound shock of
the conquest for the Javanese was underscored the following day when the Crown
Prince was placed on the battered throne.
A Javanese coronation was supposed to be an affair of high ceremony, designed
to emphasise the semi-divine nature of the sultan. But the hastily convened coronation which the
British oversaw took place not in in the Siti Inggil pavilion on the sacred
axis between the mountains and the ocean, but in the main hall of the Dutch-built
residency. The crown prince was made
Sultan Hamengkubuwono III, and when the courtiers rose to the dais to pay him homage
John Crawfurd physically pushed them to the floor and forced them to kiss
Raffles’ knees in the ultimate Javanese act of submission. In two centuries of Dutch involvement in
Java, no aristocrat had made such humiliating homage to a European.
Two days later Raffles
wrote to Lord Minto to inform him of his success in Yogyakarta:
The blow which has been struck at Djocjo
Carta, has afforded so decisive a proof to the Native Inhabitants of Java of
the strength and determination of the British Government, that they now for the
first time know their relative situation and importance,’ he wrote; ‘The
European power is now for the first time paramount in Java.
Establishing British Rule
With paramountcy
assured, a semblance of a settled colonial society emerged in the early years
of the interregnum. A weekly newspaper –
the Java Government Gazette – rolled
off the presses in Batavia, and a few months after the fall of Yogyakarta the
first annual Salatiga Races were held in the mountains of Central Java, with
horse riding, cricket and a meeting of a new pack of staghounds.
A minor clash of
civilisations came about between the brisk newcomers and the old-established
European community. Two centuries in the
tropics had seen an Indo-Dutch creole culture develop in the ports of Java; generations
of European men had married local women, and many ‘Europeans’ in Java were, in
fact, mixed race. These Indo-European
women often spoke no Dutch; Malay was the language of choice, and they usually
dressed in local style sarong and kebaya,
even at grand society events. They had,
a rather appalled Lord Minto noted, become ‘a mixed breed, are now the wives
and ladies of rank and fashion in Java’.
In British India,
however, the earlier era of the ‘white mughals’ – Englishmen with silk turbans
and native bibis – was rapidly
passing. Bone fide British wives –
including Mrs Olivia Raffles – had joined the invasion, and a change in the
dress code was called for. By mid-1812
the Gazette was noting with approval
that ‘an improvement has been introduced in respect to the attire of the Dutch
Ladies, since the British authority has been established. The Cabaya appears now generally disused and
the more elegant English costume adopted.’
The British readily
adopted one old Dutch practice, however – slavery. Raffles, Lord Minto and many of the other
British had arrived in Java with high Wilberforcian ideals about the Rights of
Man. But though they did ban the import
of slaves from other islands they quickly discovered that domestic service
depended entirely on bondage. There were
around 30,000 slaves in European ownership in Java, and without them dinners
would go uncooked and clothes unwashed.
Elsewhere, energetic
efforts were made to catalogue the relics of Java’s pre-Islamic past. The military engineer Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821) had
made an enthusiastic early assessment of the 8th century Hindu
temple complex at Prambanan. Raffles –
who was planning a grand treatise on the history of Java – employed an
experienced Dutch surveyor called Hermanius
Cornelius and a British engineer called George Baker to make records of many of
the island’s other relics (the oft-repeated claim that Raffles ‘discovered’ the
huge Buddhist stupa at Borobudur is untrue, however – it was well known to the
locals, and had first been recorded by a Dutchman named Frederik Coyett in
1733), and elsewhere translations of Old Javanese manuscripts were
collected. This was all scholarship with an orientalist
agenda: ‘Knowledge is power, and in the intercourse between enlightened and
ignorant nations, the former must and will be the rulers’. Raffles once wrote.
Clash of personalities
Throughout the early
months of the interregnum Raffles clung to the idea that Java might remain a
British possession forever, but as the years passed and the promised revenues
failed to materialise it became clear that the East India Company Directors
would seize any opportunity to disengage from the island. Various attempts to raise revenue failed, and
the cost of the Yogyakarta campaign and another military expedition against the
Sumatran state of Palembang pushed Java’s account further into the red. When Lord Minto was replaced as
Governor-General by the less romantically-minded Lord Moira in 1813, there was
no longer a sympathetic ear in Calcutta.
To make matters worse
Raffles’ relationship with the second most powerful man in European Java, Rollo
Gillespie, was rancorous.
They were ill-suited to being left together in charge of a complex
colony – one man a bruising aristocratic war veteran, the other a youthful and
ambitious middle class civilian. They
were, one observer noted, ‘at daggers drawn and constant variance’. In late 1813 Gillespie returned to India,
where he submitted formal allegations of corruption and incompetence against
Raffles.
By the time Gillespie’s
charges were laid, peace was threatening in Europe and British Java was clearly
doomed. In the final stages Raffles
furiously battled the accusations levelled against him; he organised the
annexation of the lands of the minor coastal sultanates of Cirebon and Banten,
and pressed ahead with his scholarship.
But the administration was coming apart at the seams, and the financial
crisis continued.
Raffles had ambitiously
attempted to reform the colonial land revenue system, replacing the old and
inefficient VOC method of monopolies and rent in kind with an Indian-inspired
system called ryotwari, in which
farmers paid cash rents to the state based on the innate value of their land,
rather than what they grew on it. ‘The
introduction of a money rent’, Raffles believed, ‘would bring forward a large
proportion of coin which at present lies unemployed’. But there was almost no hard cash in Java,
and the preliminary research for the new system had been inadequate. In the words of the critical John Crawfurd,
Raffles ‘saw it break down even before he had himself quitted the
administration of the island’.
Return of the Dutch
By the end of 1815 the
Napoleonic Wars were over, and Britain was happily arranging to return seized
territories to Holland. Java would be a
Dutch colony again by August 1816, but the failure of all Raffles’ attempts to
make the island pay, coupled with the lingering stigma of Gillespie’s charges, had
made his position untenable. Just eight
months short of the handover the East India Company announced that ‘we are of
the opinion that his continuance on the Government of Java would be highly
inexpedient’. Raffles had been sacked,
and a trustworthy caretaker, John Fendall, was left to manage Java until the
handover.
The Java that the Dutch
regained in August 1816 was not the same place they had departed five years
earlier. The overall financial state of
the colony was, if anything, worse than it had been before the British
arrived. Devalued paper currency was
still in circulation, and the old systems of revenue collection had been dismantled.
The incoming Dutch
Governor-General, Van der Capellen, sent a civil servant named De Bruijn to
tour the island and to try to make sense of the barely functioning new land-rent
system. De Bruijn found that in many
cases the projected rents had never been collected; elsewhere the demands for
cash had forced local farmers into the hands of unscrupulous Chinese
moneylenders. With no collateral they
had had to borrow against the projected value of future crops; around Surabaya
the farmers owed years of future harvests to the loan sharks.
But as he travelled De
Bruijn came to an unexpected conclusion: the system might have failed
miserably, he decided, but Raffles had the right idea: it was ‘beyond all
doubt’, De Bruijn wrote, ‘that the land rent, modified and improved on a
well-considered and regulated plan, is the only true and sufficient way to pour
out the rich produce of these remote regions into the lap of the Motherland’. Ultimately it was a different revenue system
which the new administration instated, but the basic motivation – of extracting
as much as possible from the Javanese countryside – endured, especially in the
notorious ‘cultivation system’ later in the century.
Elsewhere the Dutch
discovered that opium use had increased exponentially – British opium barons in
Calcutta had had the island thrown open to free trade in the drug. By the middle of the next decade opium sales
were contributing 12 per cent of the colonial income in Java. And the stern gaze of the English memsahibs
had caused a shift in attitudes. Though
native concubines and mixed-race children always remained more common in Dutch
Java than in British India, the old creole culture of the ports was
increasingly shunned by the upper echelons, and Malay-speaking Indo-European
women were no longer ‘the ladies of rank and fashion’.
But the biggest change
of all was in the balance of power between the European administration and the
Javanese courts. Any vestige of
independence had been removed in Banten and Cirebon, and the consequence of
both Surakarta and the once-mighty Yogyakarta had been drastically
reduced. For all the economic rack and
ruin, the British had indeed handed back to the Hollanders a Java in which ‘the
European power’ was ‘for the first time paramount’, and though there was one
final stand against European dominance, in the form of the Java War of 1825-30, the days of Javanese independence were over; the groundwork had been
laid for the coming colonial century in Indonesia.
Raffles and the Raj
In his own lifetime,
Raffles’ professional reputation never really recovered from the financial
catastrophe of Java. But thanks to later
biographers, he is usually remembered today as a liberal scholar and a
visionary reformer, an acceptable exception to the ugly rule of imperialism,
celebrated for the founding of Singapore.
His actions in Java, however show him to be one of the pioneers of the
very attitudes that fuelled the rise of the Raj, when ‘knowledge was power’ and
rivals to British dominance needed to be ‘taught a lesson’.
A close examination of
the forgotten episodes of the British Interregnum in Java has much to tell us,
about Raffles himself, about the later developments in the Dutch East Indies,
and about the wider mores, modes and mind-sets of the coming epoch of high
Victorian imperialism. Indonesians too,
who have forgotten the episode as thoroughly as Britons, would find much of
interest. Many of their own received
versions of history – of a glorious pre-Islamic past, of the Dutch as perfidious
practitioners of divide and rule,
and of Hindu Bali as a ‘living museum’ – were voiced for the first time in the writings of Raffles and John Crawfurd, and the
role of the royal courts in the colonial scheme was finalised not by the Dutch,
but by the British.
There is one other
eminently palpable legacy, instantly apparent to anyone who visits Indonesia
today: the first traffic regulations were laid down during the British
Interregnum, and two centuries later the howling maelstrom of buses, trucks and
bikes that floods through modern Jakarta travels on the left-hand side of the
road, rather than on the Continental right.
The full story of the British Interregnum and Raffles' forgotten role in Indonesian history is told in Tim Hannigan's award-winning new book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java, published by Monsoon Books.
For more information see https://rafflesandjava.wordpress.com/
