Science and Medicine

Batavia, Dutch East Indies

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 Weltevreden (the relatively newer city), on higher ground to the south. It was a European colonial city for about 320 years until 1942, when the Dutch East Indies was occupied by Japan during World War II. During the Japanese occupation and after Indonesian nationalists declared independence on 17 August 1945, the city was known as Jakarta. It remained internationally known by its Dutch name until Indonesia achieved full independence in 1949, when the city was renamed Djakarta, and eventually Jakarta.

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• ▸Cyanoacrylate
• ▸Dazu Rock Carvings
• ▸Age of consent in the United States

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.