A CUP OF JAVA: COFFEE AND CONSEQUENCES

The coffee plant, native to Ethiopia, was introduced to the mountainous southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula around the fourteenth century. Coffee bushes and the habit of drinking coffee were not introduced into Indonesia by Arabs but by the VOC in 1696. Dutch men with personal interests in botany and agriculture and who owned private estates around Batavia had their local workforce experiment in raising and propagating the seedlings. VOC officials used their personal networks with Sundanese nobles to establish the coffee industry in the highlands of west Java. Plants were given to Sundanese district heads who directed farmers to deliver the harvested beans to fulfill their tax obligation. The first harvest was in 1718. The VOC paid the district heads in cash and textiles. It took over the coffee business at the warehouse where the beans were packed and stored until they could be transported to Europe.

At first the VOC paid high prices for coffee, giving local farmers an incentive to grow more coffee than their tax quota for sale to VOC agents. The opportunities attracted migrants into the area. By 1725 three million pounds were harvested and the district chiefs were becoming rich from their percentage of the profits. As supplies of coffee from Java added to coffee available from other production areas in Amsterdam’s market, prices for the luxury product began to decline in Europe. The VOC’s solution was not to expand the number of coffee drinkers but to reduce the amount   of   coffee   grown   by   cutting   the   prices   paid   the   west   Javanese farmer, requiring some coffee bushes to be uprooted, and banning sales of coffee   to   private   wholesalers.   Such   actions   brought   economic   loss   to communities just learning to enjoy a higher standard of living, marked by the increased numbers of Sundanese households able to own a buffalo.

This experiment in coffee production was undertaken by officials who argued for more direct VOC involvement in Indonesian societies. They wanted to bypass Indonesian kings and court factions to work directly with the provincial nobles who controlled networks of village heads and jagos.

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SMALLPOX AND SLAVERY: CAUSES OF A FREELANCE INTELLECTUAL

Willem van Hogendorp was a founding member of the academy, a senior VOC official, and a successful businessman. He spent the years 1774 to 1784 in Java. The academy gave him a reason for pursuing his intellectual interests and a means of disseminating them through its journal. He drew on Batavia’s archives to write histories of the Muslim kingdom of Jayakarta and of the VOC in Java. Van Hogendorp was also exponent and publicist of scientific developments in Europe. He worked to create public support for vaccination against smallpox by publishing a play and an essay in 1779 and by establishing a cash prize for the best essay on vaccination.

Van Hogendorp’s principles led him to be critical of slavery. He found the government-licensed printer, Lodewyk Dominicus, willing to publish his protest in the form of a play. Harsh Blows, or Slavery criticized the treatment of slaves by that segment of Batavia’s population called “Portuguese,” that is, Eurasians and Asian Christians. (It did not treat Dutch or Indonesian slaveowners.) In the play, the vicious treatment of domestic slaves by a Eurasian woman and her Indonesian overseer leads to murderous revolt by the household’s victims.

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PRINTING AND THINKING

Printing was an ancient invention of the Chinese. Europeans made the press a major tool of intellectual life with the advantages of a twenty-six-letter alphabet and a measure of freedom in some western European cities. Within four decades of printing the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz in 1455, printing was introduced into Islamic lands by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The Ottoman Turks banned setting Arabic into type, so the first Muslim press of the Arabic world was not set up until 1822. As a result, books from the Islamic heartland that found their way to the Indonesian archipelago before the middle of the nineteenth century were hand written, few in number, and costly.

Printed books arrived in Indonesia through the Dutch. From 1617, presses in Holland published books and pamphlets in Dutch and Malay for communities in the Indonesian archipelago. Because Arabic had been printed in Europe since 1530, the Dutch were able to set Malay in Arabic script too. Devotional texts, such as the Bible, prayers, and catechism, were printed in Malay in both Roman and Arabic scripts and exported to VOC settlements in Asia. The first printing press was shipped from Holland in 1624.

Presses were portable. They consisted of a wooden frame and a tray for the type and were operated by turning handles. Draftsmen and supplies of paper, printer’s ink, lye baths, and proof plates had to be sent from Holland.

Regulations and notices were printed by the Batavia presses, while daily record keeping was handwritten. As in Europe, printers in Indonesia combined academic interests and artisan skills with commerce. Dutch men who ran presses employed Indonesian assistants, and they published books intended for Indonesian as well as Dutch readers. For instance, Lambertus Loderus held the license for government printer in Batavia in the first years of the eighteenth century. He printed official documents under contract and also published and sold books. He researched, wrote, and published a Dutch-Malay dictionary in 1707. Another publisher, Harmanus Mulder, brought out a Malay-language catechism in Arabic type in 1746.

The Indonesians for whom printed books had the greatest impact were Christians and men who worked in VOC offices as clerks and assistants. Most Indonesian scholars rejected the press until the mechanical production of books became acceptable in Islamic countries. Sumatran and Javanese printers borrowed techniques developed by Muslim publishing   houses   in   India   for   typesetting   Arabic   to   produce   books   that closely resembled manuscripts. From the middle of the nineteenth century Indonesian publishers printed books in Malay on Islamic topics for a clientele in religious schools and mosques and used the traveling scholar and catalogue as their publicity and distribution network. This different history of access to printed books meant that Christian Indonesians were exposed to sources of Western knowledge two hundred years before most Muslim Indonesians. All publishers, Dutch and Indonesian, worked under government surveillance.

photocredit: blog.nathanbransford.com

JAVA CAREERS: THE STORY OF SLAMET

Slamet’s journey began in slavery. A Balinese slaver delivered him to Semarang where he became the employee of senior VOC merchant, Willem Dubbeldekop. In the port city world of north Java, the Hindu Balinese   converted   to   Islam   and   took   the   Muslim   Javanese   name   of Slamet. After Dubbeldekop emancipated him, Slamet set up in trade on his own. Using his VOC connections he was appointed representative for Malay   merchants   at   Juwana.   During   the   wars   of   the   1740s,   Slamet trapped a Chinese rebel leader, killed him, and sent his head and amulet to the Dutch commander of Juwana’s fort. As a reward the Dutch made Slamet head of a village of twenty-five Javanese households near Rembang and assigned to him sole right to levy taxes in goods and labor on its inhabitants.

SURAPATI’S LEGACY: THE CONVERSION OF EAST JAVA

In 1743 Pakubuwono II (r. 1726–1749) rid himself of problems in Mataram’s eastern provinces by transferring Surapati’s former lands to the   Dutch. Rebel bands used east Java as a place of retreat; Balinese princes still considered it as tributary territory to their kingdoms in Bali.

The VOC could defeat Indonesian armies, but it could not directly administer territories distant from its Batavia headquarters. Its method was to use local officials and Chinese networks to get production and trade moving. When it became chief landlord of east Java, the company continued Surapati’s system of administration. It appointed as officials only men who were Muslim, and ordered them to make conversion of the Hindu population a priority of office. The second strategy was encouraging immigration of Muslim farming families from Madura and central Java. In this way the VOC achieved Surapati’s goals: Balinese influence was lessened, the forest refuges of rebel bands were reduced, and the landscape was permanently settled by farmers who raised crops for export.

Over time Muslim immigrants became the majority population. East Java was detached from Bali’s orbit and was integrated into the history of Muslim Java under the Christian overlordship of the Dutch.

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HENDRIK LUKASZOON CARDEEL, A.K.A. PANGERAN WIRAGUNA

Hendrik Lukaszoon Cardeel was born in Holland, raised as a Christian,   employed   by   the   VOC   as   a   stonemason,   and   posted   to Batavia around 1670. By 1675 Cardeel was a Muslim and employee of Sultan Ageng of Banten in charge of constructing a new fortified palace following the latest European design. His conversion to Islam was signaled by circumcision, Indonesian name, and Muslim marriage. Cardeel became Raden (later Pangeran) Wiraguna, husband to Nila Wati, one of Ageng’s palace concubines.

European men entered Indonesian histories when they found an Indonesian employer for their skills. They established families with local women and usually disappeared from VOC records. Wiraguna distinguished   himself   from   such   men,   however,   because   in   1682,   when VOC forces were fighting in Banten, he sought to return to Christianity and a new life in Batavia, Ceylon, or Holland. A VOC investigation conducted in 1684 described Cardeel as “completely Javanese,” unemployed, and husband to a “shrewd” woman. Eventually the VOC permitted Wiraguna to reestablish himself among the Dutch as Cardeel. He appears in VOC records in 1695 as a self-employed resident of Batavia, a landowner and operator of a saw mill with a contract to supply the VOC with timber. In 1697 he divorced Nila Wati. Four years later he named as his heir a boy born to the slave woman Magdalena of Batavia. In 1704, the Banten palace demanded that Cardeel make restitution for the eight male and female slaves who had been given him as a wedding gift by Sultan Ageng. In that year VOC records show Cardeel remarried, this time by Christian rite, with an Anna Stratingh. The last reference to Cardeel in VOC records is in 1706, when he was a supplier of charcoal to the company.

Cardeel’s history in Java represents the Dutch freelancer or entrepreneur who adjusted himself to meet the demands of his employer. European men, like Chinese men, lifted themselves out of circles their origins seemed to dictate and became part of Indonesian histories.