The power of prophecy; Prince Dipanagara and the end of an old order in Java, 1785-1855

Dedication

For the family and descendants of Pangéran Dipanagara In honour and respect

‘You alone are the means, but that not for long, only to be counted amongst the ancestors.”

Parangkusuma prophecy, circa 1805

Contents

Preface Abbreviations Maps of eastern and central Java

I The south-central Javanese world, circa 1792-1825

The ‘Versailles of Java’: Yogya in the early nineteenth century 1

Part One: The road to Magelang and Batavia Introduction 657

The colonel’s promise: Dipanagara’s negotiations with Cleerens in February 1830 and the question of safe conduct 660

Treachery or honourable submission? Dipanagara’s arrest at Magelang, 28 March 1830 677

Steamboat to Batavia: how Dipanagara received the governor-general’s life sentence 699

Part Two: The sultan over the water

The Radeau de Méduse: surviving the corvette ‘Pollux’, 3 May-12 June 1830 713

A Minahasan interlude: Dipanagara’s Manado years, 1830-1833 721

Closing the circle: the state prisoner of Fort Rotterdam, Makasar, 1833-1855 734 x Contents

Appendices I Family tree of the Yogyakarta sultanate II Family tree illustrating the connections between

Dipanagara and the Danurejan

III Family tree illustrating the connections between Dipanagara and the Prawiradirjan

IV Pangéran Dipanagara’s wives, family and children

Va Chief ministers (patih) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta, 1755-1847

Vb Major officials of the Yogyakarta administration, 1755-1825

VI List of country estates/rural retreats (pesanggrahan), hunting lodges and pleasure gardens (kelangenan-Dalem) built in Yogyakarta by the first four sultans, 1755-1822

Vila List of religious boarding schools (pesantrèn, pondhok), centres for scholars learned in fiqh law (pathok negari) and tax-free areas set aside for men of religion and keepers of royal gravesites (pradikan, pamutihan, jurukuncèn) in Yogyakarta pre-1832

VIIb List of kyai, haji and religious officials associated with Dipanagara

VIII List of princes (pangéran) and senior officials (priyayi) of the Yogyakarta kraton showing landholdings and pensions, 1808-1820, and allegiance during the Java War

IX Major officials of the Dutch East Indies Company, the British interim administration, and the Netherlands Indies government, 1780-1856

X Rice prices in Yogyakarta (1804-1826) and throughout Java (1817-1825)

XI List of Dipanagara’s heirloom (pusaka) weapons

XH List of Dipanagara’s followers in Manado, June 1830-June 1833

XII Letters written by Dipanagara from Batavia (1830) and Makasar (1837)

XIV Javanese and Western chronology, AD 1785-1855

XV Revenue returns from the tollgate, opium and other tax farms in Yogyakarta, 1808-1825

XVI Comparative values of paper and metal currency circulating in Java in 1811

Glossary of Javanese words Bibliography

760 762 764 766

770 772

807 811 813 816

822 828

Preface

The Java War (1825-1830) was a watershed in the history of Java and of all Indonesia! For the first time a European colonial government faced a social rebellion covering a large part of the island. Most of central and east Java, and many of the pasisir (north coast) areas were affected. Two million Javanese, one third of the total population, were exposed to the ravages of war, one fourth of the cultivated area of Java sustained damage and about 200,000 Javanese died (Carey 1976:52 note 1). In securing their pyrrhic victory over the Javanese, the Dutch also suffered: as well as 7,000 Indonesian auxiliaries, 8,000 of their own troops perished and the war cost their exchequer an estimated 20 million guilders (De Graaf 1949:399). The end of the conflict left the Dutch in undisputed control of the island and a new phase of colonial rule began with the inception of Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch’s ‘cultivation system’ (1830-1870). This proved immensely profitable for Holland. The war thus marked the end of a process, maturing since the period of Marshal Herman Willem Daendels (1808-1811), involving the change from the era of the Dutch East Indies Company,” when contacts between Batavia and the south-central Javanese kingdoms had had the nature of ambassadorial links between sovereign states, to the ‘high colonial’ period when the Principalities occupied a clearly subordinate position to the European power.

This transition should be borne in mind by those who approach the early chapters of this book expecting the Dutch to loom large as the colonial masters of Java (Chapters I-IV). In the late eighteenth century, the island was not a Dutch version of the British Raj. A declining power in Europe, Holland seemed to be on its way out in Java while the south-central Javanese rulers enjoyed de facto sovereignty. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780-1783 was the turning point for the Dutch as a colonial power. Faced with mounting debts, which peaked at 134 million guilders, the VOC was declared bankrupt and its assets taken over by the Dutch state on 1 January 1800 (Boxer 1979:101-2).

1 For the purpose of this volume, the term ‘Indonesia’ will be used to refer to the Netherlands Indies, and ‘Indonesian’ to the inhabitants of the archipelago. The colonial capital will, however, be referred to as ‘Batavia’ throughout rather than ‘Jakarta’.

2 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC, 1602-1799, see Boxer 1979.

xii Preface

Four years earlier control of the Dutch possessions in the East had been taken out of the hands of the Directors of the VOC, the so-called ‘Heeren XVII’ (Gentlemen 17), and vested in the new Committee for the Affairs of East Indies Trade and Colonies.’ The fact that during the international crises which led to the VOC's demise the governor-general and Council of the Indies in Batavia had to turn to the south-central Javanese rulers to help them to defend their colonial capital against possible foreign attack, illustrates the scale of the courts’ military and political independence. Such requests for assistance occurred during the British attack in 1781, and again in 1793 when the Dutch Republic entered the War of the First Coalition (1792-1797) against France.* Following the occupation of Holland by the French Army of the North in December 1794-January 1795, the Republic became a satellite of the grande nation. This had implications for Java. As one of Holland’s overseas possessions, it was included in the policy announced by the exiled Dutch Stadhouder (head of state). This stated that the Republic’s colonies should be handed over to the British to prevent them falling into the hands of the French.” So began a twenty-year period in which Indonesia was drawn into the global conflict between Britain and France. Fought out during the Revolutionary (1792-1799) and Napoleonic Wars (1799-1802, 1803-1813, 1815) in Europe, the archipelago became a battle ground on land and sea. Between 1795 and 1797, British naval forces operating from Madras and Pulau Pinang captured most of the Dutch possessions outside Java. Although returned to Holland under the terms of the Peace of Amiens (1802), all were recaptured by the British in the seven years which followed the renewal of hostilities in Europe (May 1803) when Indonesia was placed under strict naval blockade. So tight was this interdiction that when Marshal Herman Willem Daendels received his appointment

3 Control was exercised first through the Batavian Republic's (1796-1806) Comité tot de Zaken van de Oost-Indische Handel en Bezittingen (Committee for the Affairs of East Indies Trade and Colonies) (1796-1800) and then through its Raad der Aziatische Bezittingen en Etablissementen (Board of Asiatic Possessions and Establishments) (1800-1806).

4 On the 1781 situation, see UBL, BPL 616, Port. 3 pt. 1, W.H. van IJsseldijk (Yogyakarta) to P.G. van Overstraten (Semarang), 8-10-1793. On the Dutch response to the sighting of French warships in the Sunda Straits in September 1793, see W.H. van IJsseldijk (Yogyakarta) to P.G. van Overstraten (Semarang), 28-9-1793, 5-10-1793, 8-10-1793, 30-10-1793 and 4-11-1793. Hamengkubuwana II had insisted that his 1,000 men should be considered as ‘auxiliaries’ (hulptroepen) not as mercenaries, even though they were being paid at the rate of four Spanish dollars a month per man by the VOC. In 1781, during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the VOC had paid five Spanish dollars a month per head for Hamengkubuwana Is troops who were being kept on standby to defend the colonial capital against possible British attack.

5 The exiled Dutch Stadhouder (head of state), Prince William V of Orange (reigned 1766-1785 and 1787-1795), had sanctioned these British conquests through his so-called ‘Kew letters’. Signed in his place of exile in England in February 1795, these ordered VOC officials to place the Company’s possessions in Asia in British hands in order to prevent them falling to the French.

Preface xiii as governor-general from Napoleon’s younger brother Louisé in January 1807, he was sent out to Java with a replacement governor-general, Rear-Admiral A.A. Buyskes, following on a separate fast frigate in case the marshal fell into British hands (Chapter V note 46). As we will see in Chapter V, the parlous financial and military situation of the Dutch was well understood by the south-central Javanese rulers. So much so that one senior former VOC official even suggested in 1808 after Daendels’ arrival that the European government should employ some holy men and ascetics to make favourable prophecies on behalf of the Dutch to disguise their vulnerability. In the same year, an unusual event at one of the regular tiger and buffalo fights staged in honour of the visit of a high Dutch dignitary to the Yogyakarta court may have been interpreted as an indication that Holland would soon be placed hors de combat in terms of their rule in Java (Chapter V).

The tragedy for the Javanese was that just as all the signs seemed to be pointing in the direction of a Dutch collapse, half a world away in Europe events were taking place which would change the Javanese ‘old order’ for ever. The twin political and industrial revolutions then tearing the ancien régimes of eighteenth-century Europe apart would hit Java with the force of an Asian tsunami. In the space of just four years (1808-1812), the relationship between the European government’ and the south-central Javanese rulers was transformed. Yogya bore the brunt of these changes. In quick succession, the re-energised Franco-Dutch regime of Marshal Daendels (1808-1811) and the British-Indian administration of Thomas Stamford Raffles (1811-1816), forced open Yogya’s eastern outlying territories (Chapter VI), plundered its court and exiled its reigning monarch (Chapter VII). After the fall of the kraton (fortified royal capital; court) in June 1812 and the imposition of new treaties, the relationship between Batavia and the princely states came to resemble that of the post-Plassey era in India when the British replaced the Mughal emperors in Lower Bengal (Chapter VII). The returned Dutch administration of Governor-General G.A.G.Ph. van der Capellen (1816-1826) continued this process. Its desperate need for money

6 Louis Bonaparte had been installed by his elder brother as king of Holland, reigning from 1806 to 1810, when the former Batavian Republic was annexed to France, see Chapter VII.

Z Since there were so many changes of colonial regime involving different European powers (Dutch, British, French, Belgian) in the period covered in the present volume, it has been decided for the purposes of succinctness to refer to the colonial power in Batavia as the ‘European government’ throughout. The principle regimes which governed Java in the period 1785-1855 were: 1. the Dutch East Indies Company (to 1796); 2. the Batavian Republic (1796-1806) through its two Committees (note 2); 3. the Franco-Dutch kingdom of King Louis of Holland (1806-1810) and the French Empire (1810-1813), when Holland was annexed to Napoleon Is France; 4. the British-Indian interregnum of lieutenant-governors T.S. Raffles and John Fendall (1811-1816), when Java was under the authority of the governor-general of India; 5. the returned Dutch administration of the three commissioners-general G.A.G.Ph. van der Capellen, C.Th. Elout, and Rear Admiral A.A. Buyskes (1816-1818), who reported directly to the Director-General of Trade and Colonies (Johannes baron Goldberg, in office 1815-1818) of the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands (present-day Holland and Belgium) (1814-1830); and finally 6. the government of the Netherlands Indies (from January 1818), which from 1830 was under the direction of the Dutch crown and — from 1848 — the States-General.

xiv Preface and lack of understanding of the effects of its policies on ordinary Javanese prepared the ground for the Java War (Chapter IX). Adverse environmental and health conditions, in particular the May 1821 cholera epidemic, coupled with soaring rice prices provided the triggers for the massive popular uprisings of July-August 1825 which heralded the outbreak of the Java War (Chapter X).

For the Javanese, this five-year conflict had far-reaching implications: for perhaps the first time a rebellion had broken out at one of the south-central Javanese kraton which had at its heart social and economic grievances rather than dynastic ambitions. The emergence of a strong charismatic leader in the person of Pangéran Dipanagara (1785-1855), who took the title of the Javanese messianic Ratu Adil (‘Just King’), served to bring many disparate social elements under the single banner of Javanese Islam. Widespread millenarian expectations caught the imagination of the peasantry and acted as a catalyst for social and economic grievances, accumulating since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The concept of holy war (prang sabil), imagery from the Javanese shadow-play (wayang), and Javanese nativist sentiments, made up of an intense longing for the restoration of an idealized traditional order — which Dipanagara described as ‘restoring the high state of the Islamic religion in Java’® — all helped to forge a common identity amongst the prince’s followers. In this fashion, nobles, dismissed provincial officials, religious teachers, professional bandits, porters, day labourers, tax-paying farmers (sikep) and artisans were brought together briefly in a common cause (Chapter XI). The Java War was thus of immense significance for Indonesia’s future. The subtle interplay of economic grievances and millenarian hopes created a movement of unique social breadth which in some respects anticipated the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century (Carey 1976:52-3). These nationalist antecedents were noted by F.G. Valck (1799-1842) , a senior Dutch official who served in a number of residency postings in south-central Java during the two decades which spanned the Java War and its immediate aftermath (Christiaans 1992-93:129-30). Writing in 1840, he observed:

[My] nearly twenty years of administrative service in various Residencies has taught me that the spirit of the ordinary Javanese is against us, not because we Netherlanders treat him badly but because he is imbued with a feeling of nationality [...]. Despite all the benefits which he gets from us, he cannot suppress the wish to be governed by his own rulers and chiefs even though they would administer him worse [than we would] [...]. He continues to see in us foreign tyrants, who in morals, customs, religion and clothing etc differ so much from his own [...]. The sight of every European reminds him of his humiliating situation [and] he cannot refrain from giving him looks of hatred or contempt whenever he feels he can get away with it without incurring punishment.”

8 The Javanese phrase used by Dipanagara and his supporters was: mangun luhuripun agami Islam wonten ing Tanah Jawi sedaya, see Carey 1974b:285. ° Dj.Br. 18, F.G. Valck, ‘Geheime memorie behoorende bij het algemeen verslag der residentie

Preface XV

Valck’s views were not alone. Acute observers like the lawyer, Willem van Hogendorp, who served as a senior official in Commissioner-General L.P.J. du Bus de Gisignies’ administration (1826-1830) during the Java War (De Prins 2002:113), confided similar misgivings in his correspondence with his father, !® in 1827-1829 (Van Hogendorp 1913:170):

It is not the war as such or the number of our enemies which constitutes my greatest concern about Java and our rule here [...] but it is the spirit of the whole population of Java from one end to the other, and I include here the spirit of [the inhabitants of] our most important outer island possessions in Borneo, Makassar and throughout Sumatra [...]. They are tired of us.

This strand of anti-Dutch ‘nationalism’, if such it can be called at this early date, will be explored more fully in the chapter which deals in detail on the Java War (Chapter XD.

The cultural dislocation wrought by the impact of the new European imperialism of the early nineteenth century on south-central Java is one of the key themes of this book. It also seeks to explain events through the eyes of its central protagonist, Dipanagara. A key transitional figure, he lived through the shift from the old order of late eighteenth century Java to the new ‘high colonial’ era based on the twin political and industrial revolutions which were transforming Europe in his lifetime. In many ways a traditional figure steeped in the values of pre-modern Java, particularly the world of the south-central Javanese courts, Dipanagara also pointed to the future. One thinks here of his use of Javanese Islam, particularly its millenarian traditions, as a way of forging a new identity for Javanese Muslims in an era when the old Javanese order was crumbling. Dipanagara lived in a world increasingly divided between those who were prepared to accommodate themselves to the new European dispensation and those who saw the Islamic moral order (agami Islam) as the lodestar in a society which had lost its traditional moor-

Djocjocarta over het jaar 1839’ (henceforth: Valck, ‘Geheime memorie’), 31-3-1840. Valck was a fluent Javanese speaker who had served in postings in central Java since the 1820s and had fallen in love with Hamengkubuwana V's favourite unofficial wife (selir) whom he had taken as his young mistress (Houben 1994:109). His knowledge of Javanese society was thus personal as well as administrative. His rather convoluted Dutch text reads: Het bijna twintig jarig bestuur van onderscheidene residentién heeft mij geleerd dat de geest van den gemeenen Javaan tegen ons is, niet omdat wij Nederlanders hem niet goed behandelen maar omdat hij met gevoel van nationaliteit bezield is, en omdat alle der voordeelen die hij van ons erlangd, den wensch bij hem niet kunnen onderdrukken om door zijne eigene vorsten en hoofden alware zulks slechter geregeerd te worden, terwijl hij in ons steeds vreemde overheersers ziet die in zeden, gewoonten, Godsdienst, kleding enz. zoo zeer van de zijnen verschillen dat hij aan zijne vernederende toestand bij het aanschouwen van iederen Europeaan herinnerd wordt en dan ook niet nalaat om hem blijken van haat en minachting te geven wanneer hij zulks slechts ongestraft vermeend te kunnen doen.

10 This was Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp (1762-1834). One of the founders of the kingdom of the United Netherlands (1815-1830), he exercised a significant influence on the development of Dutch colonial policy during the reign of King William I (reigned 1813-1840) (Prins 2002:45-6, 185-6).

xvi Preface ings. The Java War gave impetus to a process which is still working itself out in modern Indonesian society today: namely, the integration of Islamic values into contemporary Javanese and Indonesian identity. Dipanagara’s world view also came to encompass a distinctly contemporary concern with how Javanese Muslims should live in an age of Western imperial domination. For Dipanagara, unlike present-day Indonesian Muslims, the answer seemed to lie in the waging of holy war and the development of a clear distinction, which developed during his five-year struggle, between the wong Islam (‘people of Islam’; Muslim believers), the European kapir laknatullah (heretics accursed by Allah), and the Javanese kapir murtad (apostates; Javanese who had allied themselves with the Dutch). But there was also a deep concern on the prince’s part for the preservation of specifically Javanese values as expressed in language, dress and cultural codes which can be seen most clearly in his treatment of Dutch prisoners during the Java War. We will see in the chapter on the war (Chapter XI), how they were expected to adopt Javanese dress and speak to their captors not in the reviled language of the new colonial state — ‘service Malay’! — but in High Javanese (krama), the medium of the court elite. Despite his adoption of Ottoman dress and titles such as ‘Ali Basah’ (‘The High Pasha’) for his military commanders (Chapter III), Dipanagara was no Islamic reformer. Instead, he was a traditional Javanese Muslim for whom there was no inherent conflict between the spirit world of Java, and membership of the international ummat (community of Muslim believers) and its spiritual and politico-cultural centres in the Hejaz (present-day Saudi Arabia) and Ottoman Turkey. Dipanagara did not prevail in achieving his goal of restoring the high state of the Islamic religion in Java. Indeed, the dignity and integrity which he fought for on behalf of the Javanese ummat would only be achieved in outward form ninety years after his death with the declaration of political independence from the Dutch in 1945. His wider moral vision of securing an honoured place for Islam in the life of the nation, however, is still being negotiated at a time of unprecedented global conflict between what the Islamic community see as the ‘materialistic’ values of the West and the fissiparous loyalties of the worldwide Muslim ummat.

In any other culture, such a key figure would have been the subject of numerous biographies and historical studies. Every aspect of Dipanagara’s life would have been researched in detail, his understanding of Islam and of his Javanese inheritance the subject of weighty monographs. Indeed, one might have expected that his own writings, in particular his impressive autobiography written while in exile in Manado (1830-1833), the Babad Dipanagara, which runs to over 1,000 pages in manuscript, would have long since appeared in a copiously annotated modern text edition. The situation is unfortunately very different. History seems to have little honour in present-day Indonesia and

11 On this Dienstmaleisch, see Hoffman 1979:65-92.

Preface xvii the results of this have been painfully evident in Jakarta’s abysmal handling of its East Timor adventure (1975-1999) and its belated understanding of the particular society, politics and culture of Aceh. There is little money for research or government funds — let alone the scholarly attention and respect needed - for the preservation of manuscripts. The result is that the original pégon (unvocalised Arabic script Javanese) copy of Dipanagara’s babad in the National Library — equivalent to Oliver Cromwell’s common place book or George Washington’s diary — is crumbling to dust (Carey 1981a:lix-Ix note 76). As for the voluminous Dutch Residency reports in the Indonesian National Archives (Arsip Nasional), the backbone of the present study, who can be bothered to use them today? The result is an historiographical void. It is as though the clock stopped at the time when the Dutch military historians DIE Louw and E.S. de Klerck completed their magisterial six-volume work on the Java War (Louw and De Klerck 1894-1909) or the Rusche edition (1908-09) of the Babad Dipanagara was published in Batavia before the First World War. Indeed, since independence in 1945, only a handful of studies have appeared in Indonesian: one thinks here of Yamin (1950), Tanojo (n.y.), Soekanto (1951a, 1952), Sagimun (1965), and Djamhari (2003). These have all afforded access to aspects of Dipanagara’s life and times to a post-independence Indonesian readership, but apart from the last, which is primarily a history of the Dutch bentheng stelsel (system of fortified strong points) in the last three years of the Java War, none have been based on primary research.

The present study should have appeared thirty years ago in the immediate aftermath of its acceptance as a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford (1975). At that time, on the recommendation of the late Professor M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, the thesis manuscript was accepted as the basis for a monograph publication in the ‘Verhandelingen’ series of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde (KITLV, Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) in Leiden. But Professor Meilink-Roelofsz made three important recommendations which were in fact conditions needing to be met before publication could proceed: first, that the text edition of the Surakarta version of the Babad Dipanagara with its extensive annotations, and the thesis preface, which dealt primarily with the Javanese sources for the early nineteenth-century history of Yogyakarta, should be published separately; second, that much more attention should be paid to the social and economic origins of the Java War. In particular, she urged that I investigate further the role of the Chinese in south-central Java and the economic relations between Javanese and Europeans, as well as the workings of the Javanese apanage system. Third, she recommended that the entire structure of the thesis should be recast to allow for shorter chapters and greater thematic coherence. These three conditions were all valid, but they constituted a considerable challenge involving extensive additional research just at a time when I was embarking on xviii Preface an academic career in the University of Oxford teaching British and European history.

In 1976-1977 and 1978, however, before my teaching duties began in earnest with my tutorial Fellowship at Trinity College, I was able to carry out some important further research at the Arsip Nasional in Jakarta by kind permission of the former Director, Dra Soemartini and her staff, in particular the late Pak Sundoyo whose knowledge of the Dutch East Indies colonial archive never failed me. During this period of fieldwork, the British Academy supported me through the provision of a British Academy Travelling Fellowship in Southeast Asia (1976-1977). The bulk of the Dutch archive material used in this study, in particular the letters in the Residency archive of Yogyakarta preserved in the Arsip Nasional, were gathered in that period (Carey 1978). At the same time, the British Academy’s Oriental Documents Committee tasked me with preparing a text edition (Carey 1980; Carey and Hoadley 2000) of all the documents of a non-literary nature collected by the scholar-administrator John Crawfurd, and his close associates in the British administration of Java (1811-1816), Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles (in office 1811-1816) and Colonel Colin Mackenzie, surveyor-general of Madras and chief engineer officer to the British invasion force. These documents derived in the main from the plundered archive of Yogyakarta (Chapter VIII). This allowed me to meet two of Professor Meilink-Roelofsz’s conditions: namely, the publication of the Surakarta version of the Babad Dipanagara (Carey 1981a), and the elucidation of the social and economic background to the Java War (Carey 1986, 1997).

I still struggled, however, to meet Professor Meilink-Roelofsz’s third and perhaps most important condition: namely, to recast the whole work in a more readily accessible format with shorter chapters and greater thematic coherence. This daunted me for the best part of twenty-five years from the early 1980s. During that time, I was also involved in researching and publishing on a much more present-day concern, namely, the Indonesian occupation (1975-1999) of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor (now the Democratic Republic of Timor- Leste). It has only been since Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002, and in particular during a recent six-month period of sabbatical leave (2006), that I have been able to give my undivided attention to recasting and rewriting my original thesis for the purposes of the present publication. Although a considerable amount of new material has been added and the format and chapter headings of the present volume differ considerably from that of my 1975 Oxford dissertation, I have not had the opportunity to conduct sustained research on the period of the Java War itself. There are literally thousands of letters in the General State Archives in The Hague which deal with the conduct of the war, some of which contain important Javanese material. The private collection of the former Dutch commander, Lieutenant-General Hendrik Merkus de Kock (1779-1845), alone could be the basis for a new study of the conflict, as could the numerous Javanese and Malay letters in the De Renesse-Breidbach family archive in the

Preface xix

Algemeen Rijksarchief in Brussels, which contains most of the correspondence of Burggraaf L.P.J. du Bus de Gisignies during his period as commissioner-general of the Netherlands-Indies (1826-1830) (De Prins 2002:262). The French historian Henri Chambert-Loir’s work on the 600-page war diary of Du Bus’ fellow Belgian, Comte Edouard Errembault de Dudzeele (1789-1830), has also opened up a new and highly personal insight into the life of an infantry captain on the Dutch side during the war (Chambert-Loir 2000:267-300). Since fully two-thirds of Dipanagara’s own published autobiography is devoted to the war years (Rusche 1908-09), there is clearly scope for a new analysis of this crucial colonial conflict which could draw on both Dutch and Javanese sources. But I am not a military historian and my focus has remained throughout on the political and economic history of pre-1825 Yogyakarta as well as on Dipanagara’s own life history until his death in exile in Makassar in January 1855. Louw and De Klerck’s magnum opus together with the numerous books on the Java War in Dutch as well as Djamhari’s recent Indonesian publication (Djamhari 2003), all make the five years of the war the most extensively researched period of the prince’s life. It thus seemed otiose to attempt a new survey of such a comparatively well studied topic. But I recognise that some readers may still consider a study of Dipanagara without a detailed chapter on the Java War as a bit like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. If so, then there will clearly be scope either for a second volume or an updated and revised second edition of this work in which greater space is given to the war itself. A new study will also need to be made of the original pégon manuscript of Dipanagara’s autobiographical babad in the A.B. Cohen Stuart collection in the Musium Nasional in Jakarta (Carey 1981a:xxv, lix-lx note 76).

Another consideration for not embarking on new research at this stage has been the need to get this book out in time for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This UK Government Higher Education Funding Council body grades every Faculty in the country every seven years according to their publication record and research output. At the last RAE in 2001 Oxford History Faculty famously scored only a 5, compared to its much smaller former polytechnic rival, Oxford Brookes, which achieved a coveted 5*. Since there is a 31 December 2007 cut-off point for the next RAE, I have been under considerable pressure to complete on time. In a sense, the RAE assessors should be recognised as the immediate inceptors of this publication and I owe them thanks, as well as my RAE adviser in the History Faculty, Professor Richard Carwardine, and the Faculty chairman, Dr Christopher Haigh, for forcing me to see a long-delayed research project through to the publication stage. But I must also acknowledge here many other even more important debts. First and foremost to the KITLV Press, in the person of its principal commissioning editor for the ‘Verhandelingen’ series, Dr Harry Poeze, for having stood by me all these years and kept the opportunity for publication