ABSTRACT
Batavia, as Jakarta was called under colonial rule, was the fi rst foothold of
the Dutch in the East Indies in the seventeenth century. Nearly 300 years of
colonization and occupation produced only modest changes in the landscape of
the original settlement. Only after 1900 did the Dutch begin to treat Batavia with
the dignity and determination befi tting their colonial capital city and by far the
region’s most important commercial centre. The period from 1900 through the
1930s witnessed, according to Lindblad, the ‘political integration of Java and the
Outer Islands into a single colonial polity’ with Batavia positioned administratively
and economically at the head of the regime. Through the military force of the
Royal Netherlands Indies Army, tranquillity and order (ruste en orde) had been
achieved in the colonies by 1910 and internal vigilance ensured the continuation of
The glory of Batavia of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not as a
colonial capital, but as the nerve centre of an overseas economy directed by the
privately-held Dutch East India Company (or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie)
or, as it was commonly known, the VOC. Under the VOC during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and subsequently during the nineteenth century under
both Dutch and English control, Batavia was not so much a colonial capital
as an international trading port. ‘Batavia was outward-looking, and not keen
to engage itself in territorial control of inner Java’ let alone the vast network
of Outer Islands.2 It drew its population from overseas (Europe and China), it
secured its wealth from overseas trade, and only tentatively did the city expand
in the nineteenth century beyond the boundaries of the fortifi ed commercial hub
that had been erected at the mouth of the Ciliwungi River two centuries earlier.
