The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia / Edition 2

by Jean Gelman Taylor

Overview

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a trading base at the Indonesian site of Jacarta. What began as a minor colonial outpost under the name Batavia would become, over the next three centuries, the flourishing economic and political nucleus of the Dutch Asian Empire. In this pioneering study, Jean Gelman Taylor offers a comprehensive analysis of Batavia's extraordinary social world--its marriage patterns, religious and social organizations, economic interests, and sexual roles. With an emphasis on the urban ruling elite, she argues that Europeans and Asians alike were profoundly altered by their merging, resulting in a distinctive hybrid, Indo-Dutch culture.
Original in its focus on gender and use of varied sources--travelers' accounts, newspapers, legal codes, genealogical data, photograph albums, paintings, and ceramics--The Social World of Batavia, first published in 1983, forged new paths in the study of colonial society. In this second edition, Gelman offers a new preface as well as an additional chapter tracing the development of these themes by a new generation of scholars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299232146
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/16/2009
Series:	New Perspectives in SE Asian Studies
Edition description:	2
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jean Gelman Taylor is professor of history at the University of New South Wales and author of Indonesia: Peoples and Histories.

Read an Excerpt

THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BATAVIA

Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia

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By Jean Gelman Taylor
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Copyright © 2009

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.


ISBN: 978-0-299-23214-6

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Chapter One Origins of the City of Batavia

POPULATION

WHEN THE DUTCH NAVIGATOR Cornelis Houtman first put in at Jacatra on 13 November 1596, the town was a minor port lying across the mouth of the Ciliwung River on the northwest coast of Java. Its inhabitants, principally members of the Sundanese ethnic group and numbering several thousands, lived within a bamboo enclosure; there was a small settlement of Chinese traders and arrack brewers outside the wall on the north side. Jacatra was a vassal of Bantam, which was at the time a major port in the pepper trade and one of the sultanates defying claims by the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram to suzerainty over the entire island.

The Dutch were the first Europeans to stop at Jacatra. Portuguese traders never settled there. The town's chief harbor master spoke Portuguese, however, which illustrates how that tongue had established itself as a major language of international commerce in the markets of Asia. From 1596 to 1610 Dutch ships called at Jacatra for provisions. In the latter year a contract was signed between the town's ruler, Wijaya Krama, and Jacques I'Hermite, agent for the Netherlands East Indies Company, giving the Dutch land in the Chinese quarter and permission to build a stone house within a walled compound.

The first years at Jacatra passed peaceably enough. Towards the end of 1618, however, agents of England's East India Trading Company were also assigned land and privileges in Jacatra, and Jan Pieterszoon Coen, then second-incommand for the Dutch Company in Asia, determined to establish supremacy over the town. He would make it a rendezvous for shipping, the chief entrepot for Dutch warehouses, and the seat of Dutch government in the East. The Company's directors had been urging this course since their first appointment of a governor-general nine years earlier. Late in 1618, then, Coen withdrew to the Moluccas to assemble a fleet that was to destroy the Jacatrans and Bantammers and their English allies.

On 23 December 1618, while the Dutch compound at Jacatra was under siege from the groups leagued against the VOC, a roll call had been taken by senior merchant Pieter van den Broeck of all residing within its walls. Already the Dutch were showing characteristics that were to be enduring features of their settlements in Asia and for which they had no precedent in their native city-states in the Netherlands: they were owners of slaves and took concubines from among the local women. Thus those answering to the roll call, some 350 in all, were found to include both free and slave Asians, as well as European merchants, settlers, women, and soldiers. These were the key elements of colonial society throughout Company times. They will be reviewed here in the categories originally assigned to them within the Company's system of governance.

Principal among the inhabitants of the beleaguered Jacatra settlement and in all the Dutch settlements in Asia was the group known as merchants. They derived their authority from the central board of directors of the VOC, whose policy decisions, taken at their twice-yearly meetings in Holland, were binding on all their representatives in the East. The six commercial chambers which composed the East Indies Company outfitted their own ships and recruited their own personnel for service in Asia. But appointment of the chief of these, the governor-general, his second-in-command the director-general of trade, and the councillors of the Indies-who together made up the supreme government of the Dutch in Asia-was made by the directors.

The governor-general and his Council were required to report annually to the Company's directors and to submit for their approval all appointments, regulations, and edicts enacted locally. In the East, however, in the VOC centuries, when the interval between reporting decisions taken and receipt of confirmation or disallowance could be as long as thirty months, the governor-general and his colleagues on the Council held near-absolute power over the inhabitants of Dutch settlements.

In the first years of settlement the most senior officials were sent out directly from Holland to conduct the Company's business. But soon they were chosen also from among men with years of experience in Asia who were promoted locally, although such promotion always required confirmation from the Europe-based directors. Just below this group of senior officials were the merchants in three descending ranks: senior merchant, merchant, and junior merchant. A trading post might be headed by a man with rank of senior merchant or governor, according to its size and importance in the Company's Asian empire. Governors were named councillors extraordinary of the Indies.

All Company officials in the East were subordinate to the hierarchy at Batavia, as Jacatra was renamed following Coen's destruction of the town. It was from Batavia that appointments to the subsidiary settlements were made and general orders issued, and it was to Batavia that officials looked for transfer and promotion. All senior boards of the VOC in Asia were located in Batavia: the governing Council of the Indies, the supreme court, the chief bookkeeper's office, and warehouses.

If we now look at the civilian arm of the Dutch East Indies Company in Asia from the bottom up, we find at the lowest level copyists and clerks. In the early years of Batavia they were quartered at the Castle that replaced the original Dutch compound. They ate at a common table, for it was as a bachelors' society that the settlement was first run. Their hours were long and exacting, taking no more account of the climate than of the food they ate or of the heavy woollen clothing they clung to.

In theory, a clerk possessed of diligence and wit could move up the ranks of the Company to assistant and then bookkeeper, and by degrees to junior merchant and then merchant. He could next expect to act as administrator of one of the Company's warehouses or be sent to head one of the other settlements. Later he could be raised to governor of one of the more important settlements such as Ambon or Malacca. With good health and luck the former clerk could then be transferred back to Batavia as councillor and eventually even become governor-general. In fact some did. Governors-General Hendrik Zwaardecroon, Jacob Mossel, Johannes Thedens, Abraham Patras, and Reynier de Klerk, in the eighteenth century, started as either ship's boy or soldier, switching to the civilian, clerical service when they arrived in Batavia. Governor-General Antonio van Diemen took this route in the first half of the seventeenth century, closer to the period we are discussing.

Those so succeeding were few in number. Death took a great many men within years of their leaving Holland, and patronage and connections also played their part in a man's rise. Mattheus de Haan, for instance, who became governor-general in 1725, spent twenty-four years in climbing from assistant to senior merchant and fifty-three years altogether in reaching highest office. Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, on the other hand, rose through the ranks of junior to merchant and then senior merchant in only four years, and was installed as governor-general after just fifteen years of service. His promotions were accelerated by his powerful connections with the Company's directors in Amsterdam.

Also influencing a man's climb in the hierarchy was his nationality. Many states in Europe were represented among the Company's employees, but it was only the Dutch who held the highest posts. Exceptions to this rule were few: a couple of Germans, in Thedens and van Imhoff; a descendant of French Huguenots, in Patras; a Eurasian, in Dirk van Cloon, for instance. A man's religion also influenced his career. Civilians were required to be of the Reformed faith, although even in the seventeenth century a man like Governor-General Joan Maetsuyker, who was rumored to be a Roman Catholic, could reach the top. It was not until the middle of the following century, however, that a governor-general could afford openly to display allegiance to a Protestant denomination other than the Dutch Reformed.

Civilians signed renewable contracts committing them to five years of service. Coen, when governor-general, constantly complained to the directors of incompetence in men sent out and on occasion returned them to the Netherlands in disgrace, but others who signed contracts renewed them again and again, and some chose to remain as free townsmen and settle permanently in Indonesia. As time went on, the consequence which senior officials had enjoyed while in office compelled recognition after their retirement, and they continued to take precedence over lesser men in public ceremonies.

For some, the confines of Batavia were the confines of the world. Others had more varied careers, moving between the secondary settlements, accompanying embassies to China and Japan, journeying into the interior of Java to the Mataram court, or following VOC annies. In whatever position, the merchant group stood at the apex of European communities in the Asian settlements, and they remained, throughout the VOC era, superior in rank, authority, and social distinction to the captains of the Company's army and navy. A few among this merchant group were also men of learning, and recorded in prose or verse the momentous events in which they took part, or dedicated themselves to translating the Bible into Asian tongues. The history of their intellectual pursuits and growing knowledge of the world in which they found themselves will unfold with the narration of the growth of colonial settlement. Throughout the VOC era, however, while dominating colonial life in the East politically and setting social standards for all the Company's subjects, the merchant group constituted but a fraction of the populations of Batavia and the subsidiary settlements. More numerous among the European group were the soldiers of the VOC army.

Approximately seventy of those responding to senior merchant van den Broeck's 1618 roll call in the Jacatra compound were in fact soldiers. They were not all Dutch, if we are to judge from figures C. R. Boxer gives for the year 1622. The Batavia garrison was then 143 strong and 77, or half, were Germans, French, Scots, English, Danes, Flemings, and Walloons. The presence of other nationalities than Dutch was to be a constant feature of the Indies army. The Norwegian Frederik Andersen Boiling, who signed up with the Dutch Company's army in 1669, for instance, explains daily brawls among soldiers as arising because "there were so many different nationals," and another foreigner in the VOC army, Johann Gottlieb Worms, says that in 1710 there were only ten Dutchmen in all Batavia's militia. Clearly it was not a distinctively Dutch culture that was transmitted in contacts with local people. This fact partly explains why Dutch was not naturally used as the language of Company settlements.

Seventeenth-century Europe was a battleground for politics and religion. Many of those signing the five-year bond of service as Company soldiers were displaced persons and the destitute. They were often in poor health before they undertook the sea journey to Batavia. In the seventeenth century the voyage could last as long as ten months. Confined quarters and spoiling food further undermined the soldiers' health.

We have descriptions of conditions aboard the East Indiamen from Nicolaus de Graaff, who in the course of his long life and many years at sea made five journeys to Indonesia. As ship's surgeon he was in an excellent position to observe the fevers that struck passengers and crew as they neared the equator. De Graaff first saw Batavia on 10 September, 1640 after a voyage lasting eight months and four days. Eighty of the 300 leaving Holland had died. "It was as if the plague was in the very Ship," de Graaff later recalled, "and the men were tormented and half-crazed. Some of them had to be tied to their Bunks. ... Teeth simply fell out of the mouths of many because of Scurvy, and their gums were so swollen, blackened and rotted that we had to cut and wash away the flesh every day. Many of our Crew also had serious, cancerous ulcerations." Many died within months of setting foot on shore.

It has been common to suppose that the Company's soldiers were men of low character in addition to being poorly educated and without resources. Such a view starts principally with Coen. Writing to the directors in 1628, he complained of the soldiers' laziness, stupidity, and smutty language. Some recruits were orphaned boys, sent by the charity houses of Dutch towns on ten-year bonds and at a few guilders a month. But others were men of education and standing in their communities. These, however, were soon transferred to the civilian arm of the Company's service and rose through the ranks as bookkeepers and merchants.

Of the ordinary soldier we catch only glimpses, and then from sentences passed by the supreme court that was established in Batavia in 1617. The most common crimes were insubordination, blasphemy, brawling, and drunkenness, and punishments included branding, labor on the chain gang, and execution. More than a century passes before a soldier's voice is heard, and then it is through letters begging release from the contract and repatriation.

The common soldier also makes his appearance in records the Batavia church kept of baptisms, communicant membership, and weddings. In pages of the Marriage Register reproduced in E. C. Godee Molsbergen's illustrated history of the Dutch East Indies Company, one can still read the entry for 10 February 1630. On that day Claes Jacobsz. of Gouda, soldier, married Wybrecht Jansd. of Amsterdam, widow of one Jan IJsbrantsz. Another entry states that in 1622 Abraham Strycker, "captain of this place," married Aeltjen Lubberts of Amsterdam, who had reached Batavia on the ship Heusden.

It will be noted that both Strycker and Jacobsz. married women who had emigrated from Holland, though that is not the usual image we have of Batavian life in the early seventeenth century. Few Dutchwomen migrated before the opening of the Suez Canal (in 1869), with the result that ordinary soldiers usually took local women as their partners. It became common in ballads to celebrate the pleasures of wine, "black women," and the walks of Batavia. The hostility and contempt for Asian women that are such striking features of some ballads, however, may also reflect the ordinary soldier's point of view. Take, for instance, these verses from "Farewell to Batavia":

I give to you Batavia As I depart for my Fatherland. There lives my soul, my joy, my heart and life On Netherlands' sweet strand. India, you may parade your harlots. Those black, lewd cattle never shall Lead me from out the citadel of virtue However beguilingly they eye me.

Soldiers were always the largest European component in Dutch settlements in Indonesia. From sheer numbers, theirs was the group to have most contact with local peoples, and this mainly through their liaisons with Asian women. But since there were few among them possessed of an education, there is none to tell us of the exact nature of relations struck between soldiers of the Honorable Company and Asians. One can only conjecture that little in the way of European civilization was transmitted. Bereft of formal education, stemming from the deprived of Europe, soldiers could not pass on a typically Dutch bourgeois culture to their wives, mistresses, or children.

Few of these children grew to adulthood counting themselves as part of the European group. A handful might find their way to the Company's poorhouse or orphanage. The majority, it must be assumed, were abandoned by the father through either his death, his desertion of the mother, or his escape to the Netherlands. Such children grew up in the mother's ethnic ward of the city or perhaps eked out an existence in one of the Christian Indonesian quarters. There the boys became candidates for companies of militia formed as early as 1622 for night watch duty and fire prevention and as auxiliaries in the Company's campaigns. The girls were brides for new generations of soldiers and men of that mixed group designated variously by the Dutch as Mardijkers (free[d]men) and Christian Natives (to be introduced in the next chapter).

It is unlikely that changes in living patterns-in food, entertainment, vocabulary, and so forth-which European soldiers acquired through their Asian wives and mistresses had much influence beyond the barracks. The social gap between them and civilians stretched wide, particularly after 1650 when the governor-general no longer felt beholden to call army officers to his table. Until that time it had been customary for governors-general to give dinners to officers departing for battle, captains of the return fleet, and envoys to the courts of Asia.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BATAVIA by Jean Gelman Taylor Copyright © 2009 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations       
List of Maps       
Acknowledgments       
Guide to the Text       
Preface to the Second Edition       
Introduction       

1: Origins of the City of Batavia       
    Population
    Institutions and Laws
2: Growth of the Settlement Society       
3: The Web of Colonial Society: Batavia and Environs in the Eighteenth Century       
4: The Assault on Indies Culture       
    The Enlightenment in Batavia
    The British Interregnum
5: The Destruction of VOC Society and the Creation of the New Colonial       
6: The Inner Life of Late Colonial Society       
Epilogue       
Further Explorations of European-Asian Encounters       
Maps       
Appendix 1: Family Trees       
Appendix 2: Governors-General and Their Wives       
Appendix 3: Family and Position in VOC Batavia       
Notes       
Glossary       
Selected Bibliography       
Index   

Editorial Reviews

"A most welcome update of Jean Taylor's study of the role of women in the construction of Dutch colonial cultures in the East Indies, from the 17th to 19th centuries. This new edition provides a updating of her earlier arguments, drawing on new discoveries and sources and bringing the story into the twentieth century. A particular emphasis is given to visual depictions of colonial Indonesia. Once again Jean Taylor demonstrates her originality and insight in a revision which will ensure that Social World of Batavia remains a seminal scholarly work."--Nigel Worden, University of Cape Town, author of Slavery in Dutch South Africa

"Jean Gelman Taylor analyzes the formation, development, interaction, and eventual disappearance of the various groups which constituted the colonial society of Batavia and gave it its distinctive Mestizo character. She shows how this society, far from being static, underwent an evolution; how it opened or closed itself to external influences, transformed immigrants or was changed by them, and loosened or tightened its links with the European homeland through time."--Michèle Boin in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

"The best analysis in English or Dutch of the colonizers' interaction with Asian and Eurasian women and the distinctive Indo-Dutch, Mestizo culture that resulted."--Michael Adas, Journal of Asian and African Studies

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