In the morning of 17 August 1945, the two most important leaders of the Indonesian nationalist movement, Sukarno and Hatta, appeared in front of a house in Jalan Pegangsaan Timoer in Jakarta. The first read a statement which they had written down the night before:

Proclamation:

We, the people of Indonesia,
Hereby proclaim the independence of Indonesia
All matters pertaining to the transfer of power etc.,
Will be carried out expediently and in the shortest possible time.

Jakarta, August 17, 1945

On Behalf of the Indonesian People

Soekarno - Hatta

It was the birth of the Indonesian Republic, which was dated on 17 August 2605, following the Japanese calendar. Several years before Jakarta was named Batavia and it was the capital of the Dutch Indies, a mighty colonial empire, which stopped existing after the Japanese army conquered it on Sunday 8 March 1942. Due to the act of Sukarno and Hatta, there was no way of restoring colonial power again.

So, what was the Dutch Indies exactly? Asking the question is easier than answering it, however the Dutch professor J. de Louter had no problem explaining what it was in his well-known Handbook of the state- and administrative rights in the Dutch Indies:' Ned. Indië, he wrote' is located between 6° Northern latitude and 11° Southern latitude and between 95° and 141 eastern longitude Greenwich and concludes all islands, parts of islands on which the Dutch state rules.' There is no more clear answer possible. There where the Dutch government ruled, it was named the Dutch Indies. But this is a very formal explanation of the word. The question still is whether there was any right for calling it Dutch anyway, in another way, could the Dutch simply do and say it was theirs and did they also have the influence they said? Big parts of it, when De Louter wrote this down, had never been visited by an European and until far into the 20th century only three Dutch people ruled New Guinea, an area the size of France.

The sociologist J.A.A. van Doorn subscribes this by calling the Dutch Indies a 'project' and the 'biggest Dutch adventure', that started when the first Dutch ships arrived near the Javanese coast and ended with the independence of Indonesia. In his eyes, 'Indies' means 'the way Europeans, in special the Dutch, have shaped the natural landscape and local cultures they found in the archipelago'. Is seems a very good starting point. The history of the Dutch Indies then becomes primary the history of the Dutch act in the Indian archipelago and the way the local population reacted on this.

You have to keep in mind that for a long time the Dutch didn't have interest for founding a colony. The period before 1800 was signed by the activities of a large trade company, the V.O.C (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie). Only around the begin of the 19th century the Dutch government starts owning goods in Asia. This colonial state that was created in the Indian archipelago, would eventually have a range of governmental tasks and numerous private Europeans were able to try their luck in the Dutch Indies.

The history of the Dutch Indies can best be situated in this last period: between the collapse of the VOC and the creation of the Indonesian republic. Whenever the pressure is on the colonial rule of the Dutch and other Europeans, it is clear that some parts of the Indonesian archipelago were more important than others. The history of the Dutch Indies is, totally different than the history of the Indonesian archipelago, or in other words: Indonesia. So it was that there only was colonial rule outside Jawa and Madura at the end of the 19th century, while it's useless to say that other parts had a history before that as well, but that doesn't belong in the history of the 'Principality of Insulinde which lingers around the equator, as a belt of emeralds,' as Multatuli once said.

This history is most shaped around 1900. The arrival of many Europeans, the extension of activities of the European companies and the way of rule by the government gave the Dutch Indies a more colonial view than ever before. It was a period in which many residents remarked the Dutch presence for the first time. For the biggest part of Indonesia, the Dutch colonial rule lasted remarkably short: from the arrival of the first Dutch soldiers and civil servants around the turn of the century (1900) until the Japanese invasion in 1942, even shorter than half a century. However it may be: the Dutch Indies in this shape was created before that. At the base of it were several 19th century Dutch and British rulers which were looking for new ways to rule and govern the area of the VOC.