ABSTRACT
There was clearly no organized resistance to the VOC’s domination and the system of compulsory cultivation and delivery. However, this does not mean that the landed gentry of the Priangan gave their full cooperation to the new regime. The regents and, through them, the lower chiefs were paid commissions for their mediation, but not generously enough for money to have been their only incentive. Most of them accumulated an enormous debt to their benefactors in Batavia. Political coercion, or the threat of it, was potentially a more important motive for collaborating. The annual appearance of the regents at the colonial headquarters gave added gloss to their superiors’ power and was intended to reaffirm the chiefs’ sense of dependence. Although this arrangement offered them no opportunity to display their own grandeur, once they had returned to their home bases in the hinterland, the regents no longer acted as the eager jobbers that the VOC wanted them to be. Far removed from their superiors in Batavia, they had wide-ranging powers which they could exercise with little fear of being checked up on. The Company had no desire to concern itself deeply or constantly with indigenous affairs. This reluctance even took on the form of antipathy, caused not only by a complete lack of interest but also by a blissful ignorance of the way indigenous society was structured and organized.
