Peter H. Pott's claim that colonial authorities in the Netherlands East Indies had only inadvertently transferred Indonesian materials to the home country during the colonial era reaffirmed the museum director's long-held reservations about returning contested items from Dutch national collections. The Dutch state took over the company's Asian territories, including its Indonesian ports, and Batavia became the Dutch administrative capital of the Netherlands East Indies. The last category included natural history “specimens,” whose possibly unclear ownership the government should investigate. Centuries before post-colonial questions emerged about returning cultural property, the Dutch began a history in the Indonesian archipelago. Instead of simply providing positive or negative exemplars of post-colonial return, critical historical research helps position the return of cultural property within a broader framework of the shifting post-colonial relations negotiated between former colonizers and leaders of newly independent states. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.