The Liberal Period refers to the economic policies instituted in the Dutch East Indies from the mid-19th century.
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The Liberal Period refers to the economic policies instituted in the Dutch East Indies from the mid-19th century.
Under the cultivation system (or "tanam paksa" in Indonesian) in place for most of the 19th century, the Dutch colonial government in the Indonesian archipelago required indigenous farmers to deliver, as a sort of tax, fixed amounts of specified crops, such as sugar or coffee. Much of Java became a Dutch plantation, making it a profitable, self-sufficient colony and saving the Netherlands from bankruptcy and helping it become a thriving and modernised bourgeois society. [1] The Cultivation System, however, brought much economic hardship to Javanese peasants, who suffered famine and epidemics in the 1840s, attracting much critical public opinion in the Netherlands. [2]
Prior to the late 19th century recession, the Liberal Party had been dominant in policy making in the Netherlands. Its free market philosophy found its way to the Indies where the cultivation system was de-regulated. [1] Under agrarian reforms from 1870, producers were no longer compelled to provide crops for exports, but the Indies were open up to private enterprise. Dutch businessmen set up large, profitable plantations. Sugar production doubled between 1870 and 1885; new crops such as tea and cinchona flourished, and rubber was introduced, leading to dramatic increases in Dutch profits. [2]
Changes were not limited to Java, or agriculture; oil from Sumatra and Kalimantan became a valuable resource for industrialising Europe. Frontier plantations of tobacco and rubber saw the destruction of jungle in the Outer Islands. [1] Dutch commercial interests expanded off Java to the outer islands with increasingly more territory coming under direct Dutch government control or dominance in the latter half of the 19th century. [2] Tens of thousands of coolies were brought to the Outer Islands from China, India, and Java to work the plantations and they suffered cruel treatment and a high death rate. [3]
Liberals said the benefits of economic expansion would trickle down to the local level. [1] However, the resulting scarcity of land for rice production, combined with dramatically increasing populations, especially in Java, led to further hardships. [2] The world wide recession of the late 1880s and early 1890s saw the commodity prices on which the Indies depended collapsed. Journalists and civil servants observed that the majority of the Indies population were no better off than under the previous regulated Cultivation System economy and tens of thousands starved. [1] Some unconfirmed sources also state as that mostly rich Non-indigenous people (such as European and Chinese) and rich Indigenous Nobles who profitted under this system yet leaving the non-wealthy indigenous people unable to gather capitals and their standard of living not any different than Java War.
Concern over the welfare of indigenous populations in the Indies resulted in Queen Wilhelmina proclaiming in 1901 a new benevolent "Ethical Policy", intended to bring progress, prosperity and improved education to the natives.
The history of Indonesia has been shaped by geographic position, its natural resources, a series of human migrations and contacts, wars of conquest, the spread of Islam from the island of Sumatra in the 7th century AD and the establishment of Islamic kingdoms, as well as by trade Bowls, Jars, Jugs and so on, economics and politics. Indonesia is an archipelagic country of 17,000 to 18,000 islands stretching along the equator in South East Asia. The country's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade; trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history. The area of Indonesia is populated by peoples of various migrations, creating a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and languages. The archipelago's landforms and climate significantly influenced agriculture and trade, and the formation of states. The boundaries of the state of Indonesia match the 20th-century borders of the Dutch East Indies.
The Indonesian National Revolution, or the Indonesian War of Independence, was an armed conflict and diplomatic struggle between the Republic of Indonesia and the Dutch Empire and an internal social revolution during postwar and postcolonial Indonesia. It took place between Indonesia's declaration of independence in 1945 and the Netherlands' transfer of sovereignty over the Dutch East Indies to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia at the end of 1949.
West Java is a province of Indonesia on the western part of the island of Java, with its provincial capital in Bandung. West Java is bordered by the province of Banten and the country's capital region of Jakarta to the west, the Java Sea to the north, the province of Central Java to the east and the Indian Ocean to the south. With Banten, this province is the native homeland of the Sundanese people, the second-largest ethnic group in Indonesia.
Batavia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The area corresponds to present-day Jakarta, Indonesia. Batavia can refer to the city proper or its suburbs and hinterland, the Ommelanden, which included the much-larger area of the Residency of Batavia in the present-day Indonesian provinces of Jakarta, Banten and West Java.
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The Dutch colonial empire comprised the overseas territories and trading posts controlled and administered by Dutch chartered companies—mainly the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company—and subsequently by the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), and by the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands after 1815. It was initially a trade-based system which derived most of its influence from merchant enterprise and from Dutch control of international maritime shipping routes through strategically placed outposts, rather than from expansive territorial ventures. The Dutch were among the earliest empire-builders of Europe, following Spain and Portugal and one of the wealthiest nations of that time.
The Java War or Diponegoro War (ꦥꦼꦫꦁꦢꦶꦥꦤꦼꦒꦫ) was fought in central Java from 1825 to 1830, between the colonial Dutch Empire and native Javanese rebels. The war started as a rebellion led by Prince Diponegoro, a leading member of the Javanese aristocracy who had previously cooperated with the Dutch.
A plantation economy is an economy based on agricultural mass production, usually of a few commodity crops, grown on large farms worked by laborers or slaves. The properties are called plantations. Plantation economies rely on the export of cash crops as a source of income. Prominent crops included cotton, rubber, sugar cane, tobacco, figs, rice, kapok, sisal, and species in the genus Indigofera, used to produce indigo dye.
The Cultivation System was a Dutch government policy from 1830–1870 for its Dutch East Indies colony. Requiring a portion of agricultural production to be devoted to export crops, it is referred to by Indonesian historians as tanam paksa.
The Dutch Ethical Policy was the official policy of the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies during the four decades from 1901 until the Japanese occupation of 1942. In 1901, Dutch Queen Wilhelmina announced that the Netherlands accepted an ethical responsibility for the welfare of their colonial subjects. The announcement was a sharp contrast with the former official doctrine that Indonesia was a wingewest and also marked the start of modern development policy. Other colonial powers talked of a civilising mission, which mainly involved spreading their culture to the colonised peoples.
The Dutch East Indies campaign of 1941–1942 was the conquest of the Dutch East Indies by forces of the Empire of Japan in the early days of the Pacific campaign of World War II. Allied forces attempted unsuccessfully to defend the islands. The East Indies were targeted by the Japanese for their rich oil resources which would become a vital asset during the war. The campaign and subsequent three-and-a-half-year Japanese occupation was also a major factor in the end of Dutch colonial rule in the region.
The Indonesian National Awakening is a term for the period in the first half of the 20th century, during which people from many parts of the archipelago of Indonesia first began to develop a national consciousness as "Indonesians".
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The colonial architecture of Indonesia refers to the buildings that were created across Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, during that time, this region was known as the Dutch East Indies. These types of colonial era structures are more prevalent in Java and Sumatra, as those islands were considered more economically significant during the Dutch imperial period. As a result of this, there is a large number of well preserved colonial era buildings that are still densely concentrated within Indonesian cities in Java and Sumatra to this day.
The economic history of Indonesia is shaped by its geographic location, its natural resources, as well as its people that inhabited the archipelago that today formed the modern nation-state of the Republic of Indonesia. The foreign contact and international trade with foreign counterparts had also shaped and sealed the fate of Indonesian archipelago, as Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and eventually European traders reached the archipelago during the Age of Exploration and participated in the spice trade, war and conquest.
The French and British interregnum in the Dutch East Indies of the Dutch East Indies took place between 1806 and 1816. The French ruled between 1806 and 1811, while the British took over for 1811 to 1816 and transferred its control back to the Dutch in 1816.
PT Perkebunan Nusantara IX (Persero) (abbreviated as PTPN IX), is an Indonesian state-owned agricultural company for the cultivation and processing of sugar cane, rubber, tea and coffee. Its own plantations and factories are located at locations in Central Java.
The Dutch Suikerwet of 1870 regulated part of the shift from the cultivation system to private enterprise in the Dutch East Indies.