new policies including land rent. Unfortunately, it did not work as successful
as he expected. De Haan and van Niel have argued its failure was based on the
lack of capable civil administrators supported by technical experts.1 Moreover,
before Raffles could do anything further, the British government handed the
land back to the Dutch based on The Congress of Vienna in 1814. When the
colony was actually returned to the Dutch in 1816, they were left with a partially
implemented British land tax system that required a massive overhaul. The unfair
land tax, which was not based on exact land measurements, coupled with the
failed monetary policy meant the Dutch East Indies was not productive for the
mother country—which had suffered through a financial crisis during the wars.
The main priorities for the Dutch at that time were economic recovery and order
re-establishment. To do that, the central government in the Netherlands sent
special Commissioners (Kommissarissen Generaal) in 1816 with the specific task
to construct a government in the East Indies archipelago under the sovereign rule
of the King of the Netherlands. They were given the power to accept, reject, or
alter policies and institutions, as seemed best, to fit the humanitarian freedoms
and rights while respecting the customs and religions of all.2 The period of 1816
onward was also the starting point of the recognition of the colony as a political
entity. Although the state character was present under the Dutch East Indies
Company (VOC), the regime in 1816 onward formalized the legal position of the
Dutch toward indigenous populations and therefore was closer to the modern
concept of a state. The bureaucracy development that followed was a direct result
of a colonial state formation.
The commissions lasted four years, and in 1819 the authority in the Dutch East
Indies was entrusted to a Governor General as the representative of the Dutch
crown. Before leaving, however, a constitution (Regeringsreglement) was issued
as the guideline for governance. Along with the enactment of this regulation,
organizations were established as part of the Dutch East Indies government's
assisting bodies, among them the Raad van Indië (Indies Council) which
formed Hoge Regering (High Government), Binnenlandsch Bestuur (Internal
Affairs), Raad van Financiën (Financial Council), Algemene Rekenkamer (General
Accounting Office), and Hoog Geregtshof (Court of Justice), and a secretariat to
assist the Governor General and High Government, Algemene Secretarie (General
Secretariat). The decision-making process in the colony involving interactions
among government organizations produced a massive amount of administrative
output which still exists today in the archive.
As one of the forms of information, archives are an indispensable basis for
decision making of the government. For the present day user they are also the
connector to the past. As primary sources of historical scientific research they
are sometimes seen as the representation of the truth, reality, or what was
happening. Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler uses the term 'archival turn' to
describe how historians should not only focus on mining information from
individual documents, but should read the archive itself as an artefact. The
changing focus on history as narrative and history writing as a charged political
act over the last decades has also provided new theoretical basis for the archives,
bringing a shift from archives-as-source to archives-as-subject.3 To Stoler, what
COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA -
THE DUTCH ARCHIVES
1 Niel, Java's Northeast Coast 1740-1840, 280.
2 Niel, Java's Northeast Coast 1740-1840, 291.
3 Stoler, 'Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance', 86.
114