International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 160

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016 Dutch. Without a thorough knowledge of this language, it is impossible to form any accurate idea of the modes of thinking or acting among the people of this country. 45 With the intervention of the British occupation (1811-1816) and the occupation of the Netherlands by Napoleon, the East Indies was then under direct control of the Netherlands and became a part of the Netherlands’ official and formal empire. The direct takeover only caused much suffering to the East Indies peasants. The natives’ education was totally neglected. The nineteenth century was marked by the slave trade and export in the Cultivation System, large plantations and forced cultivations system to enhance Dutch income through the international trade system. Besides spices, two significant indigenous products were exploited by the Dutch. The first was petroleum deposits which then brought about the necessity to build the Royal Dutch Company for Exploitation of Petroleum Sources in Netherlands Indies in 1883 which was simply known as ‘de Koninklijke’ and which then merged with British capital becoming Shell Transport and Trading Company in 1907 or simply called as Royal Dutch Shell.46 In 1920, Shell was producing about 85% of the total oil production in Indonesia. The second product was rubber. By 1930, Indonesia was producing nearly half the world’s rubber supply which was the result of the Cultivation System previously imposed by the Dutc h colonizer. During the Cultuurstelsel, Dutch imperialism reached its height in collecting income for the Netherlands’ crown. On the contrary, the quality of life in East Indies significantly decreased as famine was widespread. This misery was debated among the conservatives and liberals in the centre of the Empire, as liberals urged for a better quality of life for the people of the East Indies. During the Cultivation System, the colonial government introduce a new form of trade system which was imported from the European ‘laissez-faire’ principle. The introduction of the tax had made the government regulate the system of land administration. The East Indies officers distributed the land to the landowners and the peasants were supposed to rent the lands in the hope that the peasants would produce much more crops and could pay the necessarily imposed tax. The effect was that most of the landowners were those who were feudally connected with the local kingdoms and the Chinese settlers who had a powerful hold on the local trade and economy. The system of liberal economics in the East Indies lead to the expulsion of the poor peasants from their land and finally made them paupers. They had become wholly the subjects of the arbitrariness of foreign capitalism. Such views were shared by Governor-general Van de Capellen who said: Measures, that if seen at three thousand miles distance apparently are liberal, here prove to be highly illiberal in their effect. I must assume that in the Netherlands 45 T.S. Raffles, 1814, “A discourse delivered at a meeting of the Society of Arts and Sciences in Batavia, on the twenty-fourth day of April 1813, being the anniversary of the Institution”, Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen 7, pp. 13-14, in Groeneboer, Op. Cit., p. 70. 46 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 195. 160 | P a g e