The Submission of Prince Dipo Negoro to General De Kock, by Nicolaas Pieneman
The last instance of armed resistance to the Dutch colonial regime by the aristocrats of Java and an inspiration to future generations of Indonesian nationalists who celebrated it as a patriotic struggle uniting noble and commoner alike. Essentially a guerrilla conflict, villagers of central Java accounted for most of the 200,000 casualties due to combat, disease, and starvation (the island’s total population in 1830 was around 7 million).
The British occupation of Java during 1811–1816 caused great unrest, particularly in the old, semi-autonomous kingdoms of central Java, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta. Conditions were not improved by Dutch attempts to reassert their weakened authority after the British returned the East Indies to them in 1816. Their governor-general passed a decree, highly unpopular with the nobles, that prohibited them from leasing their land to European and Chinese planters. Rebellion broke out in July 1825. Its leader was the charismatic Pangeran Dipanagara (1785–1855), eldest son of the Yogyakarta sultan who had been promised, then denied, the throne.
Dipanagara united in himself diverse strands of Javanese culture: Islam (the theme of holy war against the Dutch infidels), Javanese mysticism (he meditated in sacred caves and claimed the Goddess of the Southern Ocean came to him in a vision), and the royal traditions of the Mataram Dynasty, which had fought against, then been subjugated by, the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Common people as well as nobles were attracted to these appeals, and the Dutch found themselves hard-pressed to reimpose control, especially in Yogyakarta.
By implementing the bentengstelsel (fortress system), the Dutch matched the speed and flexibility of Dipanagara’s guerrillas through the construction of a network of fortified points linked by roads, where they posted mobile columns. These could strike quickly, before local resistance organized. By 1827–1828, the course of the war turned against Dipanagara. He was imprisoned by the Dutch while conducting negotiations with them in March 1830 and exiled to the eastern island of Sulawesi.
The Java War taught the Dutch the need for brutal, grassroots policing of the villages and the wisdom of co-opting the old nobility. Many central Java aristocrats, including the ruler of Surakarta, chose to back the Dutch against the rebels. After 1830, they evolved into a parasitic class who prospered while Javanese farmers were ground down by Holland’s increasingly harsh policies of economic exploitation.
