ABSTRACT
From the outset, the armed forces used by the Dutch in Southeast Asia, although always rather small, were never made up exclusively of Dutchmen. The United East India Company soon found it convenient for both military and financial reasons to strengthen its power with locally recruited soldiers and sailors.1 Its European forces, moreover, counted a considerable number of foreigners among its members, mostly Germans, coming to the Netherlands from impoverished areas of the German Empire. After the fall of the United East India Company, its successor (first the Dutch Republic, later the Kingdom of the Netherlands) continued these arrangements. The Dutch Colonial Army became, in its European part, a veritable ‘Foreign Legion’. The majority of its indigenous soldiers were recruited from among the Javanese and, in the east and almost at the opposite end of the vast archipelago of the Indies, from the Ambonese of the Moluccas (the Spice Islands).
