In 1795 what had been the slow process of the decay of the Dutch position in
Asia suddenly accelerated, severely undermined by developments in Europe, as
a consequence of the wars in the wake of the French Revolution. For the next
twenty years the colonial world of Asia was also thrown into turmoil; a troubled
time, which naturally had consequences for the bureaucracies involved in ruling
the Dutch possessions, both those at home in the Netherlands and on the spot in
Asia. The same story unfolds for the archives produced by the activities of these
bureaucracies. Eventually, the turmoil led to an interruption in tried and tested
ways of governing and reporting; to such an extent in fact that they came to a
halt altogether. The focus of this paper is the way in which archive formation
changed and an analysis of the consequences of these changes in terms of
content, in particular in relation to information about developments in Asia and,
to a lesser extent, in South Africa. Before reaching this point, an introduction to
the political and institutional changes of the period will be in order. This will be
followed by a short description and comparison of the structure and content of
the VOC archive and those of its successor organizations. After this the content
of the successor archives will be analyzed in greater detail. The paper will finish
with the drawing of some conclusions.
Political and institutional changes, 1786-1813
The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780 to 1784 had brought the VOC to the
brink of virtual bankruptcy. In the subsequent years with the backing of the
government of the Republic of the United Netherlands the VOC worked on a
programme of recovery. At first, this programme was substantially hampered by
disagreements between the States of Holland, dominated by the Patriot party,
and the States-General, the Orangist-oriented federal government. In 1786, a
compromise between the two parties led to a limited degree of state control of
the affairs of the VOC, in the sense that only in one of the six 'Chambers' of
the VOC, namely that of Amsterdam, by far the most important, was a body
of control, the so-called Fifth Department, formed. Four years later, the States
of Holland nominated another commission to investigate the plight of the
VOC, but these measures only affected the management in the Netherlands.
The overseas establishments or colonies themselves were only subjected to an
attempt to improve their administration in 1793. In that year, a Commission
General, consisting of Sebastiaan Cornells Nederburgh, formerly First Advocate
(general secretary of the Gentlemen XVII, the Board of Directors of the VOC),
and the naval officer Simon Hendrik Frykenius, was set up. These persons were
dispatched to the Indies from the Netherlands and, on arrival in Batavia, joined
by the two most senior members of the High Government: Governor-General
Willem Arnold Alting and Director-General Johannes Siberg, in an attempt to
device a new policy which would set in on the road to recovery.2
In the meantime, the Dutch and the English had concluded a Treaty of
Association in 1788, in which they stipulated that their friendship would extend
to allowing each of them to enter the other's overseas territories militarily in
COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA -
THE DUTCH ARCHIVES
2 Colenbrander, Koloniale geschiedenis, 295-298; Schutte, Nederlandse patriotten, 53-54, 96-97, 101.
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