Java by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore — Read

While the Dutch East India Company held the monopoly of trade and production in Java, farmed out the revenues, and exacted forced labor and forced delivery of produce, this tropical possession yielded an enormous revenue. With the company's monopoly of trade with Japan, and only Portugal as Holland's great rival in the ports of China, the company made Amsterdam the tea- and spice-market and the center of Oriental trade in Europe. The early Dutch traders not only cut down all the spice-trees on the Molucca Islands, and forbade the planting of clove-, cinnamon-, and nutmeg-trees, save on certain Dutch islands, but they burned tons of spices in the streets of Amsterdam, in order to maintain prices in Europe and realize their usual profit of three hundred per cent.

The Dutch East India Company acquired control of Java through pioneer preëmption, purchase, conquest, strategy, and crooked diplomacy, and, finally, as residuary legatee by the will of the Mohammedan emperor at Solo. The company then claimed the same sovereign rights over the people as the native rulers, who had exacted one fifth of the peasant's labor and one fifth of his crops as ground-rent, the land being all the inalienable property of the princes. When the colony passed from the company to the crown of Holland, Marshal Daendels at once turned such feudal rights to profitable account and instituted public works on a great scale. With such forced labor he built the great double post-road over the island from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi,-that road upon whose building twenty thousand miserable lives were expended,-so that difficulty of communication no longer interfered with the delivery of products at government warehouses on the sea-shore. He further established government teak- and coffee-plantations, but the natives who were forced to cultivate them were no more tyrannized over nor oppressed than they had been under their own princes, the change of masters making small difference in their condition. Previous to Daendels's time all the coffee came from the Preangers, whose princes, having yielded their territories by treaty in the middle of the last century, retained sovereignty and their old land-revenues on condition of paying the Dutch East India Company an annual tribute in coffee, and after that selling the balance of the crop to the company at the fixed rate of three and a half florins the picul (133 1/3 pounds).