Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (44 page)

But let us return to the Dutch, for it was they who created today’s Indonesia. Indeed, both Sukarno and Suharto ruled in the baronial and centralizing style of the Dutch, even as they built on and further fortified the messy empire that the Dutch had wrought.

The Dutch were the most utilitarian of imperialists, a character trait that arose out of their own struggle against nature in the Netherlands, where the landscape is a mazework of waters, polders, windmills, and pumping stations. Everywhere “the voice of the waters, telling of endless disaster, was heard and feared.” Throughout the Netherlands there was the need
for “precise coordination and cooperation—the engineer’s mentality,” the “drive for order.” There developed, too, a corresponding need to be on time, for arriving late was associated with failure and irresponsibility. Discipline was everything. In this culture there was ultimately no room for “Catholic pomp and circumstance” and the “frivolity of Rome.” Life was lived according to a strict Calvinistic code.
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You could “manage” the water but could not “force” it. Thus, there developed the supreme need for tolerance within their own community, out of which such coordination and cooperation could emerge. It was a culture of “consensus.”

But if geography had determined national character, why hadn’t such a mechanistic, technological, and cooperative society developed in that other gargantuan estuarial delta: Bengal? In Bengal, as in the Netherlands, watery nature was endlessly on the rampage, and thus it would seem to also require the cooperative hand of man to tame it. But the Bengali character turned out different than that of the Dutch because, again, the choices made by individual men are as important as geography. In Bengal there were “local lords to whom the farmers … paid tribute and taxes.” If the Ganges changed course and the sea overran the land, the farmers, who did not own the land they tilled, simply moved to the nearest piece of dry land and began tilling again. It was only after the English colonists in Bengal introduced land ownership that the local lords began protecting their new property with dikes and other constructions in order to control the water.
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Just as domestic discipline materialized out of the deep insecurity that the encroaching waters imposed on a land of sea-level flatness in northwestern Europe, imperial discipline materialized out of their “tenuous hold” on colonial outposts; indeed, the Dutch “lost their position in Formosa … were kicked out of Brazil,” and the British threw them out of New York. The whole ocean trade itself “was a gamble.”
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Yet the Dutch empire of the seas grew and prospered, particularly in the Indian Ocean and East Indies. The Dutch writer Geert Mak informs us that at its height in the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch had more than seven hundred ships at sea, “a fleet larger than the English, Scottish, and French fleets combined.”
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Between 1600 and 1800 a total of 9641 ships sailed from Europe to Asia, nearly half of them Dutch. “By 1648 the Dutch were indisputably the greatest trading nation in the world,” writes C. R. Boxer, “with commercial outposts and fortified ‘factories’ scattered from
Archangel to Recife and from New Amsterdam to Nagasaki,” with the Indian Ocean as their centerpiece.
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Most extraordinary about the dominance of this compact little country was that its ships and outposts were not backed by a strong military.
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Whereas the Portuguese went to the Indian Ocean as crusaders, the Dutch went as traders first and foremost. Trade was to them a religion.
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In this way seventeenth-century Holland presages the business and economic empires of major corporations, small and modest-sized Asian states like Singapore and South Korea, and the mega-sized European Union in a post-American multi-polar world, in which military might, while certainly a contributing factor to national power, is not necessarily a determining one.

The late British historian J. H. Plumb writes that the faces that stare out of the canvases of Dutch masters such as Rembrandt and Hals are “cautious, prudent, self-satisfied, unostentatious … giving little away of their unconscious drives, but speaking eloquently of the sobriety and dedication of their lives.”
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Truly, there is a very modern, in fact, a very corporate steely resolution that these Dutchmen of high empire exhibit. And that is no accident. In addition to having their national character formed by private land ownership and the constant need to prevent coastal flooding, the Dutch, like the British, established an imperialism that was run by a company to a large degree. In 1602 the United Netherlands Chartered East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) was allowed a monopoly of trade and navigation east of the Cape of Good Hope across the Indian Ocean and west of the Straits of Magellan across the Pacific.

The company was a state within a state, able to conclude treaties, make alliances, and wage defensive war in the name of the United Provinces, the precursor to the modern Netherlands. The Dutch conquests of the East were not national conquests but those of private merchants, entitled to sell these strongholds to whomever they wished. “In advocating freedom of international trade in general and the freedom of the seas in particular, the merchant-oligarchs of Holland and Zeeland were primarily … actuated by self-interest,” observes the historian Boxer.
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The Dutch empire came into being and expanded its influence in a manner vaguely similar to the present-day European Union. Seven rebellious provinces or states of the north European lowlands, of which Holland was by far the most important, agreed in the 1579 Union of Utrecht
to present a common front to the outside world, and consequently put foreign policy in the hands of the States-General at The Hague, a parliament with administrative authority. Gradually, despite their many differences, these seven states cohered around economic and commercial policy, leading to the formation of the East India Company as one of several culminations in this process. It was a progression that made Amsterdam a thriving hub of an international maritime network, which was, in turn, built on the overseas networking zeal of Hollanders, Zeelanders, Flemings, Walloons, and Marranos, whose merchant communities were about to span the globe.

The Indian Ocean presented the Dutch with a natural zone of expansion for their trade in the Mediterranean and the Levant. This tendency was further encouraged by Dutchmen who had sailed with the Portuguese and therefore knew the East Indies well. There was also the lure of the much-sought-after porcelain, tea, and pepper and other spices of the East; not to mention the European desire for Indian textiles, particularly cotton from Gujarat; Persian, Bengali, and Chinese silks; and Javanese coffee and sugar. There was, too, a demand within and from Asia for indigo and saltpeter from India, elephants from Ceylon, and slaves from Arakan and Bali. Thus it was that the early decades of the seventeenth century saw the Dutch compete with, blockade, and over time displace Portuguese settlements in the Moluccas, Malaya, Ceylon, and India, among other places.
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What was the “company” actually like in the Indies? How did the Dutch behave? The answer is: abominably. The historian Holden Furber writes: “In singlemindedness of purpose, in ambition for personal wealth, in callous disregard for human suffering,” there was no one worse than the conqueror of the little Javanese port of Jakarta himself, Jan Pieterszoon Coen. Coen was right out of the mold of empire builders in Africa two centuries ahead of his time. He sought to make Jakarta—renamed Batavia by the Dutch—the hub of Asian sea trade between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Japan. His principles were territorial expansion throughout much of the archipelago, a ruthless monopoly of the
three main spices—cloves, nutmeg, and mace—and the import of Dutch settlers supported by slave labor.
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Among Coen’s accomplishments was the near-complete extermination of the indigenous population of the Banda Islands in the Moluccas. And Coen was not unique in his ruthlessness. The gulf between the civilized faces drawn by the Dutch masters and the uncivilized criminals who manned Dutch ships was indeed yawning. Although Holland was much further on the path toward modernity than Portugal, it made little difference in terms of its behavior toward the natives of the tropical lands they encountered. The nineteenth-century Islamic scholar Snouck Hurgronje points out:

He goes on to explain that, as it would turn out, the inhabitants of Asia came into contact with the very “dregs of the Dutch nation, who treated them with almost unbearable contempt, and whose task it was to devote all their efforts to the enrichment of a group of shareholders in the Fatherland.”
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The company paid few of its employees a decent wage, forcing them to resort to dishonest means to earn a livelihood. There were, too, the hardships of six to eight months at sea to consider, and the dangers of living in a tropical environment where little was known about disease prevention. Because of the unwillingness of the average Dutchman to sustain such privations, the company’s foot soldiers were often the lowest of the low, and the merchants who did choose to go out to the East the most unscrupulous. The crews, which whored, drank, stole, and murdered, had to be ruled with a “rod of iron like untamed beasts.”
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Beatings and lashings were common, and the punishment for homosexuality was throwing the two culprits, bound together, into the sea.

The recruitment of men for the Dutch East India Company, writes the author Geert Mak, was carried out by so-called
zielverkopers
(soul merchants), who plucked homeless men off the streets and gave them food and shelter until making it known to them, “amid much drumming and trumpeting,” that it needed hands on deck. The men were then hustled onto
the ships, where they died in droves: falling from the masts, swept overboard, murdered by pirates, contracting scurvy, malaria, or dysentery, “or would go down with their ships.” One in ten deckhands died on the outbound journey; of 671,000 men who left Amsterdam, 266,000 never returned.
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Dozens of corpses were thrown overboard every week of delay in the Atlantic doldrums en route to, or returning from, the Cape of Good Hope.
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Once east of the cape, many captains, who themselves often enjoyed meat and wine on board, cut down on the crew’s rations and pocketed the profit in Batavia. The ships on which they sailed east, called Indiamen, while picturesque on the outside, were dark, cold, dank, and ill ventilated on the inside, with little room to move about, cluttered as the ships were laden with sea chests, buckets of drinking water, and other provisions. Consequently, there was no room either to separate the sick from the healthy. A host of diseases spread fast, particularly as some men did not bother to use the heads and relieved themselves in corners. Dirt and filth abounded. Food was old, full of insects, from the worst cuts of meat. Many became so seasick on the oceanic voyages that they could not even make it to the heads to relieve themselves.

The voyage from Amsterdam southward around the Cape of Good Hope and eastward along the “roaring forties”—36 to 50 degrees south latitude—to Indonesia’s Sunda Strait often took seven months. From 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck planted the Dutch flag there until the opening of the Suez Canal more than two centuries later, “the Cape was the half-way house between Europe and Asia,” the “ ‘Tavern of the Indian Ocean,’ ” where sailors reprovisioned, got drunk, and rested before another long bout of clositered hell on the high seas.
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As with the Portuguese, such privations produced cruel men who onshore were inebriated much of the time and mistreated the natives, even as they proclaimed their racial superiority. All cultures contain riffraff, and both the Dutch and the Portuguese sent their worst sorts out to the colonies and outposts. Thus, the natives experienced the bottom social stratum of what these Western nations had to offer.
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The strengths and weaknesses of the various imperialisms are determined by who exactly provides the face of it to the indigenous inhabitants. With the British in
India, by and large, it was less the worst sorts than simply their mediocrities whom they sent out to the colonies. Because the United States has had no real colonies, but mainly military outposts, it has been highly trained and, in most cases, well-disciplined, working-class troops who have provided the face of great power projection in recent years. (It cannot be denied the invasion of Iraq produced massive cruelties, but these were a result of grand policies emanating from Washington rather than from the behavior of individual troops, exceptions like Abu Ghraib notwithstanding.) As a result, British and American imperialism (such as the latter actually exists) have been generally more benign than the Portuguese and Dutch varieties. Exceptions to this rule include the accommodating behavior with which the Dutch treated the inhabitants of Japan, Formosa, and Persia, whose powerful leaders, whether a shogun or shah, they were bent on cultivating.

Overall, the Dutch left less of a cultural mark on their colonies than the Portuguese did. The Portuguese went native to a degree that the Dutch did not, settling for the rest of their lives in places the Dutch could not wait to leave once their years of service were up. Moreover, the Roman Catholicism of the Portuguese was a gaudy spectacle that transfixed the inhabitants of far-off Indian Ocean lands, and was in some ways quite similar to—with its gorgeous use of rosaries, the cult of saints, and so forth—the religion of the Hindus and, in some cases, Buddhists. Dutch Calvinism, with its cold logic and austere ceremonies, simply could not compete. Furthermore, whereas Portuguese priests were celibates who stayed in one place for many years and consequently developed strong ties with the local community, Dutch ministers were married, had families to care for, and were frequently moved from place to place. The Calvinists also sent out few missionaries compared to the Roman Catholics, preoccupied as they were with religious disputes within Europe. Calvinism simply made little impression on the peoples of the East once the support of the East India Company was dropped. All these factors helped to make Portuguese the lingua franca of coastal Asia for centuries, whereas the only place Dutch, or at least a form of it, took root was in South Africa.