It has just been mentioned that the missives of the provincial governments are
available only in the National Archives in Jakarta in so far as they concern areas
which were included in the post-1816 Netherlands Indies. The reasons the others
are not there is the logical consequence of the fact that these provinces were
lost to the British. As was the case of Ceylon, which was lost by the Dutch in
1796. The archival legacy of Dutch rule in Ceylon has been concentrated and is
consistently preserved in the Sri Lanka National Archives. The archival legacy of
the provinces located in present-day India is mostly concentrated in the archives
in Chennai, formerly Madras. These concern Bengal, Coromandel, Malabar
and Surat. The greatest number of such records are those concerning Malabar,
which was definitively lost to the British in 1795. The other three provinces,
actually no more than a few trading-posts, were returned to the Dutch after the
Napoleonic Wars. When the Dutch finally left these places, around 1825 in
compliance with the exchange of territories with the British, they usually took
their archival legacies with them to Batavia.38 As mentioned above, in 1863 the
documents concerned were shipped to The Hague to become the collection Dutch
Possessions India.39 It might have been expected that the same fate had befallen
the archival legacy of the province of Malacca fate as those located in the Indian
sub-continent. For a long time many, at least in the Netherlands, believed that
the archives formed locally in Malacca had been irretrievably lost. However, this
was not the case, because in 1927 the Government of the Straits Settlements sent
everything still present at that time in Malacca to the India Office in London.
Consequently, nowadays this remnant can be consulted in the British Library.40
As far as the Cape of Good Hope is concerned, missives from the provincial
government were sent to the Netherlands in the period 1803 to 1806, but
without the usual appendices. Fortunately, the archives in Cape Town do contain
the usual series of a regular administration.41
Conclusion
Summing up, a few things have been clarified in the foregoing. First, because
of British blockade and conquest, the reporting from the Dutch possessions in
Asia, South Africa included, rapidly dwindled to a trickle. In fact, the bulk of
the reports were from the central government, while reports from the provincial
governments were few and far between. But even at the level of the central
government reports were far from what they had once been, in the sense that
some series of the central government as well as documents of the lower echelons
of the administration in or around the capital, as appendices to the letters of
the High Government, were simply not dispatched. Compared to the Generale
Missiven of the VOC, the letters of the Governor-General to the Netherlands
after 1800 are pretty thin. Consequently, by the time Daendels came to office
the flow of paper from the colonies to the home country had declined by more
COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA -
THE DUTCH ARCHIVES
38 Van Kan, Compagniesbescheiden, 14-19, 113-114, and 209-211. An extensive description of the Dutch
archives in Colombo is Jurriaanse, Catalogue. This description is limited to the central government of
Colombo and the surrounding districts. In addition to this a full description of the documents concerning
the districts belonging to Galle and Jaffnapatnam is provided in: Mottau, Inventory.
39 HaNA, Dutch Possessions India, entry number 1.04.19..
40 Verhoeven, 'The Lost Archives', 16, and 18; Baxter, 'Dutch Records', 105, and 126-127.
41 Botha, The Collected Works, 63-68 and 138-141.
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