In Indonesian history, Britain has never been considered aprominent player in the politics of the archipelago. From an Indonesian perspective, the British presence only lasted a brief five years (1811–1816) during short-lived interregnum regime led by Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826).
This began with the British seizure of Java from the Franco-Dutch administration of Marshal Daendels (1808-1811) and his successor, General Janssens (May-September 1811), and ended with the formal return of the colony to the Netherlands on 19 August 1816. However, as this article demonstrates, Britain has had a long-lasting and decisive influence on modern Indonesian history, dating from the time when the archipelago entered the vortex of global conflict between Britain and Republican France in the 1790s.
The presence of the British navy in Indonesian waters throughout the century and a half which followed Britain’s involvement in the War of the First Coalition (1792-1797) dictated inter aliathe foundation of new cities like Bandung which grew up along Daendels’ celebrated postweg (military postroad), the development of modern Javanese cartography, and even the fate of the exiled Java War leader, Prince Diponegoro, in distant Sulawesi (1830-1855). As witnessed in the 20thcentury, the existence of the Dutch as colonial masters in the Indonesian Archipelago was critically dependent on the naval defence screen provided by the British.
When the British lost their major battleships (Prince of Walesand Repulse) to Japanese attack off the east coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941 and Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was sealed. Today, the vital role played by the Royal Navy in guaranteeing the archipelago’s security up to February 1942 has been replaced by that of the Honolulu-basedUS Seventh Fleet but the paradoxes of such protection have continued.
In this whole story, it is evident that Britain and its naval defence played a critical determining role in the continuation of Dutch colonialism in Asia. After the British naval defeats at the hands of the Japanese on 10 December 1941 and the Battleof the Java Sea (27 February 1942) and the fall of the British military base in Singapore on 15 February 1942 the Dutch colonial state could not long survive. Its collapse was sudden and humiliating. But for the Indonesians it indirectly opened the opportunity for the birth of a new Indonesian state as Sutan Sjahrir (1909-66) clearly stated in his September 1945 pamphlet ‘our Struggle’ (Perdjoeangan Kita) (Sjahrir 1945). However, this kind of reliance on foreign naval power—post-war provided courtesy of the United States with the massive power of its Honolulu-based Seventh Fleet—has continued with its double-sided repercussions to this day.
Authors:
Peter Carey,1* ChristopherReinhart 2*
1* ChristopherReinhart21Oxford University, United Kingdom
2* Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesi
Source: https://ejournal2.undip.ac.id/index.php/jmsni/article/view/9343/6283