Batavia City and its Environs

The small port of Sunda Kelapa was one of the six or so harbours from which foreign products were sent upstream to the old Sundanese kingdoms in the highlands of West Java. To stop the encroachments of the Portuguese, the Muslim chief of Demak, Fatahillah, conquered this port in 1527 and renamed it Jayakarta. Since 1596, the Dutch had been regular visitors at the nearby port of Banten and in 1610 they built a lodge and warehouse in Jayakarta. After causing trouble with the local ruler about the construction of a stone stronghold and keen to cut out the English competitors Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen decided to conquer the port in 1619. It was renamed Batavia, a reference to the legendary, and supposedly free and independent German (Dutch) tribes, the Batavi, who occupied the Rhine Delta in the Roman period.

After 1619, Dutch sources often still read ‘Jaccatra’. Large collections of archives of Old Batavia are still preserved. Those of the Orphan Chamber (which includes the probate court), Notaries, College of Aldermen (the city court) all date back to the early seventeenth century. Although Batavia became gradually the most important and largest colonial city in Southeast Asia at the end of the seventeenth century (Portuguese Goa and Spanish Manila were two other large colonial cities), research into the city’s history on the basis of primary archival sources has largely been neglected. One of the reasons has been a lack of interest in such an explicitly colonial topic after Indonesian independence in 1945.

Batavia’s city archives offer at first glance information about a number of well-known topics such as the functioning of the city boards, the publication of regulations (‘Plakkaten’) and the history of some of the remaining buildings such as the Town Hall or Stadhuis (1710) and the ‘Portuguese’ church (1696). However, the main challenge for this website is to demonstrate that the daily social life, the ups-and-downs of small entrepreneurship and inter-ethnic and multi-cultural community life can still be reconstructed in great detail. So far, the history of Batavia has invariably been connected to the social lives of the Company elite. Barely has it dealt with the daily reality of the often successful lives of the more than ninety percent of the Asian inhabitants in and around the city.

In particular, the ‘Ommelanden’ or Environs offer a rich field of study. Many present-day names, for example Kuningan, Kalibata(s), Lebak Bulus, Pondok Gedé (Cililitan) already appear in the seventeenth-century books kept by the District Council which supervised the maintenance of infrastructure and registration of landed properties and estates. Kampong life, water management, paddy and sugar cultivation, land ownership, bondage and slave labour, and the intermarriage of people of diverse ethnic backgrounds have emerged as favourite topics in the revision of Batavian history, to say nothing of the origins of the ethnically diverse orang Betawi. The Harta Karun collection has accorded priority to the selection of such documents, which are so revealing about the Asian and Indo (mestizo) citizenry of Batavia, their whereabouts and social life. They have thus helped to give the city back some of its hitherto neglected Asian character.

	IV.1 Urban Boards, Public and Religious Order Governing and administering a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual city of around 100,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventeenth century was a real challenge. Various urban boards were appointed to oversee law and order, land surveys and property administration, matrimonial affairs, and the care of orphans and the poor. The College of Aldermen (1620-1809) was the most important body. It was housed in the Town Hall which is still located in the middle of Kota Batavia, the old town. (0 articles) read more...
	IV.2 Laws, Regulations and Rebellions The Supreme Government, the Council of Justice and the College of Aldermen were responsible for issuing plakkaten or public decrees on posters: placards. Placards is a collective term for public announcements, ordinances, public oaths, statutes, instructions, rules, notifications, resolutions and laws. ‘Placard’ can also refer to the posting of documents of public interest in public places. These public decrees were often translated into Javanese, Chinese and Malay and nailed to the doors of public buildings or displayed on special boards at the corners of the busiest streets. (0 articles) read more...
	IV.3 Crimes, Justice and Punishment The Batavian crime scene and the contemporary punishments meted out to various individuals seem very harsh to the modern observer. Murder, rape, kidnapping, poisoning, theft, assault and battery and street fights seem to have been ubiquitous when one reads the oldest criminal records of the College of Aldermen. Capital punishment had to be approved by the Supreme Goverment, after which it was registered each month in the Daily Journals of Batavia. (0 articles) read more...
	IV.4 People, Social Life and Rituals Batavia was one of the early modern world’s biggest experiments as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and cosmopolitan city. Modern historiography tends to typify the several approaches of popular culture as ‘small history’, ‘subaltern history’ or ‘diaspora history’ for immigrant groups as the Indians. Batavia’s popular culture can be reconstructed and analysed on the basis of archives which bear comparison with those produced in early-modern European cities. (0 articles) read more...
	IV.5 Economy, Labour and Slavery The Batavian economy was roughly divided into two categories: trading businesses, handicraft, markets and shops in the city and agriculture and rural industry in the Environs (Ommelanden) of the city. The busy trading activities of the VOC also supported key sectors of the city economy including transportation of goods in the harbour, warehouse management, logistics and the repair and maintenance of ships at the world famous naval dockyard at Pulau Onrust. Some contracts between private shipowners and investors tell us about the scope permitted private maritime enterprises. (0 articles) read more...
	IV.6 Buildings, Estates, Houses and Interiors Batavian houses showed a mix of Dutch and Portuguese seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architectural styles and Asian influences. Some houses were decidedly Dutch, but painted in a variety of colours more reminiscent of the Iberian or Chinese worlds. The Chinese especially, who were used to building with bricks and mortar and using plaster washes, also influenced the street scene with their houses aligned along the street. Ornamentation on the top of the side walls and a roof with cantilevers and small verandas at the front characterized their houses. (0 articles) read more...