Batavia, Dutch East Indies

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Batavia was an imperial Dutch port city that eventually, after two centuries of Dutch occupation, became the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The area corresponds to modern Jakarta, Indonesia. Batavia can refer to the city proper or its suburbs and hinterland, the Ommelanden, which included the much larger area of the Residency of Batavia in the modern Indonesian provinces of Jakarta Banten and West Java. The founding of Batavia by the Dutch in 1619, on the site of the ruins of Jayakarta, led to the establishment of a Dutch colony; Batavia became the center of the Dutch East India Company's trading network in Asia. Monopolies on local produce were augmented by non-indigenous cash crops. To safeguard their commercial interests, the company and the colonial administration absorbed surrounding territory. Batavia is on the north coast of Java, in a sheltered bay, on a land of marshland and hills crisscrossed with canals. The city had two centers: Oud Batavia (the oldest part of the city) and...

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