Commissioners-General of the Dutch East Indies

The commission consisted of the following three members: Godert van der Capellen, Arnold Adriaan Buyskes, and Cornelis Theodorus Elout.

Sir Stamford Raffles had, as lieutenant-governor, made an energetic start with the conversion of the institutions of the colony, but he built on the work of the last Dutch governor of Java, Jan Willem Janssens,[4] who actually acted on the authority of the French Empire, as Napoleon had in 1810 annexed the Kingdom of Holland (the successor state to the Batavian Republic).

On board of the De Ruyter were Buyskes and Elout, the botanist Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt, and about 600 soldiers of the Indies Brigade who had served at the Battle of Waterloo, but now came to fulfill the original task of the brigade: defending the Dutch East Indies, under command of Carl Heinrich Wilhelm Anthing; another 1200 were spread over the remaining ships.

The Commissioners further decided to leave Raffles' cash-based land tenure system (known as the landrente[20]) in place, as well as the monopolies from the time of the VOC, and the obligations for the population to plant and produce certain agricultural commodities.

When the Moluccas were handed over to the Dutch commissioners sent out by the Commissarissen Generaal in early 1817, they had disbanded this regiment, causing great distress to Matulessy and his colleagues.

As to the military organisation, he formed three "divisions", named after the three warships: Evertsen, Nassau and Prins Frederik, each consisting of 46 armed sailors, complemented by a battalion of soldiers.

[32] The next part of the campaign was the conquest of the island of Saparua, which started with the posting of the Evertsen division in Fort Duurstede (which was again in Dutch hands) on 5 November 1817.

[l][47] However, Elout did not think this was enough to protect the Dutch interests, so he convinced his colleagues to introduce another restriction on inward bound foreign traffic: an obligation for all imports to be landed in Batavia, which was to function as a kind of Staple after the example of the Amsterdam Entrepôt of old.

[48] Not only did this hurt the interests of ports like Semarang and Surabaya, who had a much more important hinterland then Batavia, but the accompanying bureaucracy suffocated especially the trade of non-European businessmen in the Indies, who were less used to having to navigate such obstacles.

It was a private concern, but one endowed with quasi-sovereign rights, such as the competence to make war and peace with foreign entities, and to engage in international treaties on behalf of the sovereign of the Dutch Republic, the States General of the Netherlands.

Oranje shows that these liberal views of trade had already under the VOC regime existed as a minority opinion, and that the British during their occupation had replaced the monopolies with a system of tariffs and excises on economic activities.

Also, as long as businessmen had free access to the Governor General, a possible conflict would not immediately have international repercussions in the absence of foreign representatives.

The Dutch colonial official Herman Muntinghe, who assisted Raffles with the design of the landrente system deserves a large part of the credit for this.

This would be achieved by levying the tax for the moment in kind, in the form of obligatory amounts of prescribed products, but in future cash was supposed to take the place of these deliveries.

[57] The Commissioners came, after long study, to a variant of Raffles' landrente, that was based on a mixture of individual and communal tenure of the land that was formally owned by the government.

[61] An ancillary source of revenue for the East Indies government was the leasing of coffee plantations in the Preanger region of West-Java to the local population.

The Commissioners sought to give this cultivation a new lease on life by introducing a system that gave Javanese outside the Preanger region an incentive to engage in it.

[62] The government of the East Indies would henceforth lease out plantations to local village dwellers (with exclusion of Europeans and ethnic Chinese as Raffles had allowed[63]) and not individually, but to entire dessas, for fixed terms.

The plantations would be leased for 6-year terms to entire dessas that would collectively be responsible for the cultivation, including the replacement of diseased trees, and perform new planting to an extent of one-sixth of the existing acreage.

The stated purpose was to protect the population from arbitrary treatment; to improve their circumstances; to guarantee them the fruits of their labor; and to treat them on the same footing as other subjects of the king.

[o] The Commissioners, however, continued the policy instituted by the British to promote the gradual abolition of slavery by way of a "Java Benevolent Society" to aid the manumitted slaves.

The position of the Regents and their remuneration was also codified in accordance with the new legal fiction that they were no longer sovereign in their fiefs, but subject to the Dutch king and his representatives in the colony.

[76] The position of the Governors and Residents in the areas in the archipelago that were not under direct rule was similar, with the proviso that these had to deal with sovereign Indonesian princes (like the Sultan of Aceh), or European powers (like the Portuguese settlements in East Timor[77]), which introduced an aspect of the maintenance of appropriate foreign relations.

[78] The appointment of Residents and Regents, and all other colonial officials, was to be the competence of the Hoge Regering (High Government) of the Dutch East Indies, i.e. the Governor General, "in council", or acting on his own authority.

The Instruction in many respects overlapped with the draft-regulation, but its intent was to function as a regulation for this specific provisional government, that the Commissioners General, seen as a collective, were also to be for the colony.

And that is what they did, leaving much of what they found (like the high-handed change in constitutional fiction that Daendels had brought about, and thankfully adopted by Raffles, namely that the European king, whether he was called Napoleon, or George, or William, was the legitimate "owner" of the Indonesian soil, and the inhabitants his "tenants") in place.

[83] The Regeringsreglement as it was eventually drafted had the following layout: The High Government (Hoge Regering) was to consist of the Governor General "in council", or acting alone.

This included foreign relations (i.e. concluding treaties); military affairs; legislation, but also dispensation of laws; financial administration and levying of taxes; execution of punishments and giving pardons; special police powers (such as deporting of undesirable persons), and immigration and settlement matters; and so on, again with the proviso that the Hoge Regering had to report on all relevant matters to the government in Patria on a quarterly basis, which implied the possibility that the king would overrule measures or policies.

It was clear that the ship would founder before long, so Buyskes (despite overstepping his role as a mere passenger) ordered Ver Huell to sail to Diego Garcia.

The treaty was negotiated by the Dutch ambassador at the Court of St James's, Anton Reinhard Falck, without any apparent input of Van der Capellen.