Colonisation

If you have little or no interest in the history of Colonisation you may want to skip the next, more contemporary, section.  There are no pictures in this section but then again, you might find my spin on it interesting.  If you want to object to something I've said, please feel free to make a comment below.

In the dreamtime, for thousands of years before the Europeans took an interest, people in South East Asia got on with their lives in much the same way as Australian Aborigines and New Guinea highlanders did until recently: enjoying nice days and huddling against those less pleasant; hunting and gathering and sowing and reaping; and dancing; and having sex and babies; and making weapons and fighting neighbouring tribes as a kind of sport to relieve boredom or as an opportunity to dress-up or to seize food or shelter or in satisfaction of some slight or sexual dalliance.  Spirits imbued the land and rocks and trees and animals with mystical properties and those of dead ancestors still inhabited the dark places, sometimes bringing disease or natural disasters. 

The equatorial regions were rich in a vast array of unusual plants, insects and animals. Among these were plants that had evolved a range of strategies to protect themselves from predators or to exploit them to breed.  And some of these turned out to have interesting flavours and aromas; the ability to extend the life of food; to treat fabrics; or to have interesting medicinal properties.

Europeans first heard of Indonesia as a mythical place, even before Magellan, when Arab traders first came to Java in search of spices. At that time several of these spices were worth much more than their weight in gold in Europe. For example, pepper was relatively inexpensive, by weight, compared to say cinnamon or nutmeg, a reputed aphrodisiac.  In 1500 you could buy about 1.6 grams of pepper for a ducat.  A ducat contained 3.545g of pure gold, thus pepper was worth twice its weight in gold, making a shipload of pepper twice as valuable to a trader as a shipload of gold bullion.  Several other spices were even more valuable.

In 1494, the Spanish Pope Pope, Alexander VI, divided the trading and colonizing rights for all newly discovered lands of the World, between Portugal and Castile (later applied between the Spanish Crown and Portugal) to the exclusion of other European nations. 

Initially this Treaty of Tordesillas favoured Spain but the next Pope Pope, Julius II, was Portuguese so in 1506 God changed his mind and moved this line of possession 1907 km west, enabling Portugal to claim the coast of Brazil and ultimately the whole modern country.

Meanwhile, the other demarcation line crossed unknown territories on the opposite side of the world and remained shadowy as there were few reliable maps available to Rome. So, in 1529, the Treaty of Zaragoza arbitrarily drew the other line through almost unknown territory.  It happens to pass through Eastern Russia, right through Japan and New Guinea and across Eastern Australia.  This gave Portugal the rights to the strategic straights of Malacca and Maluku Islands or the Moluccas, that came to be known as the Spice Islands, situated north of Timor and west of New Guinea.  The Spanish got most of the new world gold but given the relative price of gold and spices the Portuguese got the better deal.  As a result the agreement was reneged upon by Spain when it sized the Philippines (that were indisputably in the Portuguese zone).  Hostilities broke out for a period but these were resolved by further Divine intervention and a Royal marriage, so Spain got to hold on to the territory. 

The Treaty of Tordesillas says that henceforth all these heathen lands are 'owned' by either Portugal or Spain. So you might ask, what does 'owned' mean?  A papal bull, Romanus Pontifex, written by Pope Nicholas V to King Afonso V of Portugal in 1454 had already made this clear. 

Usurpation and conversion would go hand-in-hand.  And the slave trade would become a world-wide industry.  Rather annoyingly for those seeking profit before souls, Catholic missionaries followed quickly on the heels of the conquerors and soon local people found that they could give themselves some protection against arbitrary murder and slavery by accepting Jesus as their saviour.

That there were pre-existing Empires in these regions was neither here nor there, the Portuguese and Spanish had the ships and guns and decades of experience fighting Saracens (Muslims) at home, the pre-existing empires would pose little resistance. 

Needless to say the Treaties and the authority they purported to endow on the two Catholic Powers were soon to be repudiated by England; France; Germany; and after its liberation from Spain, the Dutch. These predominantly Protestant countries, and later the United States, set about taking the territories thus granted by Rome away from Spain and Portugal; generally by force of arms.  The Spice Islands, in particular, became a battleground between the Portuguese and the Dutch and later the British.  A bit later still the Philippines became a battleground between Spain and the USA, along with a number of other Spanish possessions. 

Although Protestant missionaries were just as fervent as their Catholic forbears the moneymaking was now privatised.  British, French, Dutch and German trading companies brought technology and raised local armies and negotiated trade deals in the interest of their shareholders.  Unlike Spain and Portugal they had no constitutional commitment to converting the heathen and were quite happy to deal with and support a local Prince no matter what his religion. Thus the pre-existing religions prevailed in their colonies, whereas in Timor and the Philippines, in particular, Roman Catholicism was forcibly imposed at the point of a gun. In Java, Malaysia and much of Indonesia, Islam was not only tolerated but was strengthened by the various trade deals and even military support to ruling families. Elsewhere, as in India, the Hindu religion benefited, while Buddhism was supported in much of Indochina.  Of course if any of these rulers who benefited from the trade deals stepped out of line they got slapped-down very quickly.

So what has this to do with Bali? 

Much pre-European history in South East Asia has been the stuff of myth and legend.  But now archaeologists and anthropologists are recovering lost or distorted stories handed down by epic poem or word of mouth.  The pre-existing indigenous populations had long been dominated and exploited by an upper-class of kings and princes that has variously originated from the North: from China; India and Arabia, in much the same way as was Britain after the, almost contemporary, Norman Conquest. 

There is evidence that the Hindu religion was present in Java from around 200 BCE and there was a Tamil presence in Malaya.  The advent of the Mughal empire in India caused a new wave of migration of Hindus to Sumatra and by the 13th century the kingdom of Java was Hindu.   That these early conquerors came from India to rule Java is supported by both cultural and DNA analysis in Bali. 

In 2005 a group of scientists from the University of Arizona led by Tatiana M. Karafet traced the Y-chromosomes of 551 Balinese men to assess the genetic contributions of Pre-Neolithic Hunter- Gatherers, Austronesian Farmers, and Indian Traders to the Balinese population.  They pointed out that the island of Bali has served as a stepping-stone for early migrations of hunter-gatherers to Melanesia and Australia and for the more recent migrations of Austronesian farmers from mainland Southeast Asia to the Pacific.  During the last ice age sea levels were much lower and a determined traveller could have walked here from England. I've discussed these Neolithic and pre-modern hominid migrations elsewhere on this website: When did people arrive in Australia? 

Bali is the only Indonesian island with a population that currently practices the Hindu religion and preserves various other Indian cultural, linguistic, and artistic traditions and this had led to the hypothesis of recent paternal gene flow from the Indian subcontinent. The researcher's set out to test this theory.  The ancestry of these Balinese men was compared with a much larger Y-chromosome dataset from the region.  It was found that three waves of migration of Austronesian speakers account for nearly 83.7% of the population while approximately 12% originate in India and 2.2% of contemporary Balinese Y chromosomes may represent the pre-Neolithic component of the Indonesian paternal gene pool (ie related to Australian Aborigines and New Guinea Highlanders on their migration South).

We could guess that the Y-chromosome lineages correspond roughly to the Hindu caste system in which the Sanskrit using upper class correspond to the remnants of the Hindu Majapahit Empire and the 83% correspond to the current Shudras - peasants - who today make up more than 90% of Bali's native population. 

Who were these Majapahits? 

Reasonably reliable Chinese sources record that  in 1293 a fleet of a thousand ships was sent by the Yuan Dynasty Emperor Kublai Khan to punish King Kertanegara of Java for failure to pay tribute to China.   It is interesting that one website represents this as a Muslim Mongol attack, yet the court of Kublai Khan was polytheistic and favoured Buddhism.  By various complex means, too detailed to relate here, this superior force was foiled by the Hindu kingdom (see Wikipedia) and Java then embarked on a period of conquest, briefly controlling as far north as modern day Malaysia and Singapore.

Thus between the 13th to the 16th centuries the Hindu Majapahit Empire dominated much of what is to day modern Indonesia, before a series of defeats forced them to shrink back to Java.  Bali was the first kingdom conquered by the Majapahits and the longest lasting. 

Final defeat of the Majapahits came at the hands of the Sultanate of Demak that had been set up by Arab Traders in Java.  Following an ill advised Majapahit request for Portuguese assistance against Demak interests in 1498, a large number of courtiers, artisans, priests, and members of the Hindu royal family fled from Java to Bali.  With the consequent fall of Majapahit on Java the remaining Hindu populations moved either to Bali or to the Tengger mountains in East Java.

After the Dutch and British defeated the Portuguese during the Spice Wars.  The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 ceded Malacca to the British and British interests in Java to the Dutch.

Fast forward to the Second World War. 

After Pearl Harbour bombing in 1942 the Japanese declared war and allied themselves with the Axis powers. They very quickly overran Malaya, Singapore the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies where there was a young firebrand architect called Sukarno who was bitterly opposed to Dutch colonialism and who, like Ghandi in India, decided that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  The British were able to lock Ghandi up for the duration and similarly the Dutch were holding Sukarno and his family on a remote island in exile.  The Japanese promptly released him.  Although the Dutch held out for some time they were in no position to resist both the Japanese and an internal rebellion and the Japanese soon controlled most of Indonesia.  When you visit the allied graveyards on the Burma Railway in Thailand you will find that the Dutch graves are among the most numerous. 

Australia seemed to be the next likely port of call for the Japanese.  But first they had to complete their defeat of the US Navy and to win the land battle in New Guinea, where the natives were on our side. They managed to do neither, in the second case due to the efforts of men like Wendy's father who's wartime memoir A Digger’s Tale is on this website.