“'Your horse is very well behaved,' the lady noted to the resting rider.'Oh, that’s true,' he replied. 'When we come to a fence, he always stops quickly and lets me go over first!”"Your voice is your brand," Sansevieria moved on. "Your voice is your tool for highlighting the unique strengths and special talents that you possess. It’s your vehicle for delivering your value proposition, says Loretta Malandro. There’s no way around it: you can’t show up until you speak up. Your collegues measure your effectiveness and understand your competencies by how you ask questions and how you share your points of view. So, to win the respect of others, you need to take every chance you get to speak up and make meaningful contributions. Speaking up requires that you express exactly who you are, with no window dressing. You must be vulnerable. You must be authentic. You must move beyond your comfort zone. Yes, it’s possible that others might not like the real you, but you’ll need to take that risk. The may mock you as 'Julid' [ridiculing], but remember this, 'Julid is in the eye of the beholder,' it's their problem, not yours. Most people want to know the genuine you. The more you step up by speaking up, the more people will lean in and listen.Robert E. Atoerti and Michael L. Emmons suggests that it is not only possible but most desirable that each of us develop a high sense of personal worth, and a behavioral style which is self-assertive. Neither self-denying nor other-denying behavior is good for you or the people around you. When a person develops an adequate repertoire of assertive behavior, she/he may choose an appropriate and self-fulfilling response in a variety of situations. In the assertive style, you will answer spontaneously, speak with a conversational tone and volume, look at the other person, speak to the issue, openly express your personal feelings and opinions (anger, love, disagreement, sorrow), value yourself equal to others, and hurt neither yourself nor others.In the non-assertive style, you are likely to hesitate, speak softly, look away, avoid the issue, agree regardless of your own feelings, not express opinions, value yourself 'below' others, and hurt yourself to avoid any chance of hurting others. In the aggressive style, you typically answer before the other person is through talking, speak loudly and abusively, glare at the other person, speak 'past' the issue (accusing, blaming, demeaning), vehemently expound your feelings and opinions, value yourself 'above‘ others, and hurt others to avoid hurting yourself. It is not difficult to see the advantage of the assertive response in countless interpersonal circumstances. So, capture the full potential of your voice with these four things: speak up with confidence: speak up with integrity, speak up with courage, and speak up with conviction.Now, it's time to continue our topic about Batavia. In the previous session, we already knew from Jean Gelman Taylor's presentation, how Governor Coen tried to introduce the Dutch bourgeois aristocratic style to Batavia, but what emerged instead was a Feudal society, 'caused by the Company's soldiers were men of low character in addition to being poorly educated and without resources.Leonard Blusse mentioned that in the eighteenth, there were three cities which he called 'visible cities,' Batavia, Canton, and Nagasaki, because no other cities in eighteenth-century Asia were portrayed (and possibly even written about) as often as these ports, where East and West met in strikingly different but also similar ways. Batavia, designated as the rendezvous point for the ships of the Dutch East India Company’s trading empire, lived by the grace of maritime trade. Ideally located near the Sunda Strait, the thoroughfare between Java and Sumatra that connects the Indian Ocean with the China Seas, Batavia sat as a spider in its web. While Canton and Nagasaki were the outlets of two more or less self-absorbed agrarian empires with rich but in many ways also suppressed commercial traditions, Batavia was established as the emporium of a vast maritime trading empire that fed on the regional economies of Monsoon Asia and provided Europe with Asian consumption goods for almost two centuries.All three ports were relatively recent configurations in the millennia old monsoon trade: the Canton-Macao tandem dates from 1567, and Nagasaki and Batavia were established as international ports of trade in 1571 and 1619, respectively. Fujianese merchants formed the large majority in the Chinese communities in Batavia and Nagasaki, and even the networks of Co-hong merchants, with whom the foreigners had to deal in Canton, also hailed from Fujian Province.When the Napoleonic Wars broke off Dutch shipping connections with Asia at the end of the 1790s, the VOC was declared bankrupt and its East Indiamen on the Batavian roadstead were replaced by vessels under neutral flags, among which the Stars and Stripes figured predominantly.When the Napoleonic Wars broke off Dutch shipping connections with Asia at the end of the 1790s, the VOC was declared bankrupt and its East Indiamen on the Batavian roadstead were replaced by vessels under neutral flags, among which the Stars and Stripes figured predominantly. As a trading company, the VOC pursued its activities in a large number of countries on the east coast of Africa and in a large area of Asia, from the Cape of Good Hope to the island of Deshima in Japan. These activities produced an inestimable contribution to the history of those nations in the making. Of all the trading companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), which was created in 1602, was indubitably the most successful.In 1594, Reiner Pauw, Jean Corel, and Dirk van Os, along with a small group of merchants hailing from Antwerp and Amsterdam, established a syndicate of their own. They called their new company the 'Compagnie van Verre'– the Company of Far Lands. The next year, the CFL sent 249 sailors, spread over 4 ships, to India on a quest for spices and other blue-chip items.This expedition took the ships to Banten, a province in the Java island of Indonesia. The ideal location was also a major pepper port. There, Dutch crewmen were fended off by both indigenous natives angered by the unannounced trip and Portuguese merchants who had previously claimed the land. The Dutch crew moved along to the northern coast of the island, but they were only greeted with more conflict. An ambush by Javanese locals resulted in the casualties of 12 Dutch crewmen and a Javanese prince at Madura.In late 1600, van Neck's ships produced results that put a sparkling grin on the faces of Dutch merchants everywhere. His successful voyage became the first to touch bases with the “Spice Islands” of Maluku. This eliminated the need for Javanese middlemen, and in turn, Dutch merchants raked in a 400% profit. It was then that the Dutch knew they were truly in business.On March 20, 1602, 6 rival companies–the United Amsterdam Company, the Veerse Compagnie, the Verenigde Zeeuwse Compagnie, the Magellaanse Rotterdamse Compagnie, the Moucheron van der Hagen & Compagnie, the Een andere Rotterdamse Compagnie, and the Delftse Vennooteschappe Compagnie–combined their powers into a single entity. The new 'mega-merger' of a corporation became known as Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – formally referred to as the United Dutch Chartered East India Company. Traders from the nearby cities of Enkhuizen and Hoorn were also invited to the trade of the newly-formed cartel.Soon after its incorporation the VOC succeeded in firmly forcing back the Portuguese, who had established their commercial empire in Asia a century earlier, and pretty well eliminating them as competitors in the trade between Europe and Asia. The principal competitor of the VOC, the English East India Company (EIC), which had been founded in London in 1600, initially lacked the financial capacity, the organizational ability and governmental support to offer the Dutch Company any real threat. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that the EIC developed into a potent rival worthy of its steel, which would cut the ground from under the feet of the VOC in various regions in the course of the eighteenth century. None the less, until the end of its existence as a trading company in 1800, the VOC remained the largest of the Asiatic companies.VOC was the first multinational and international company, the first publicly traded business as well as the first limited liability joint-stock corporation with a permanent capital base. The entire economic system we know today is due to the trailblazing made by this company. It was undoubtedly a huge business; some even dubbed it the first megacorporation. Through its 200 years of existence, more than a million people worked for it, and its net worth can be measured in trillions of modern-day US dollars. It helped to shape the modern world to such a magnitude that some historians claim it was as influential as the Roman Empire, if not more. Without it, the world would have surely been a substantially different place. But the question is where does this great wealth come from? Where else could it come from if not draining the blood and flesh of 'Ibu Pertiwi.' So, wanna be colonialized again by uncle X[censor beep sound]? If so then you will agree with Governor-General Jan Pietersz Coen, mastermind of the Dutch empire in the East. According to Blusse, for Coen, there was no doubt that Batavia would have to depend on Chinese trading networks and Chinese manpower for its survival in the Indonesian Archipelago. More important, he believed that the opening of the China market, held the key to any further success for the expansion of the VOC’s trading networks in Asia. Built on the ruins of the former kingdom of Jayakarta, which under the name of Sunda Kalapa, already figured in Chinese sources as a port of trade, the Dutch intended Batavia to be the terminus of the Chinese Xiyang route.Why did Batavia expand to Bogor dan Depok? According to Taylor, the Company seaman and poet, Jan de Marre first sailed to Batavia early in the eighteenth century. Something of the impression, the city made on the visitor after months at sea, can be felt in this excerpt from his long poem mentioned 'Lovely Batavia': the arching vaults of Town Hall, the broad Tiger Canals replenished with fresh water, like an avenue of eternal spring green. However, these were to be the last years of the city's prosperity, although individuals made fortunes at the Company's expense throughout the eighteenth century. Malaria, the unsanitary life style of the immigrant Dutch, combined with cholera and typhoid epidemics to decimate the city's population. Such mortal dangers emptied Batavia of its wealthy, encouraging them to build spacious, airy villas beyond the limits of the old settlement. By mid-century the country houses of Batavia's elite extended as far south as Bogor. But, the move away from the old city had, in fact, begun long since. Gunung Sari was built by Frederik Julius Coyett in the third decade of the eighteenth century. It was was fairly modest in size and ornamentation. Petronella Speelman-Wonderaer described herself in 1680 as living on her 'estate, named Wonderwel, outside this city of Batavia.' De Graaff wrote, 'Outside the Town, one finds many beautiful Pastures, Rivers, Rice and Sugar fields and Estates, all of them planted to fruit trees, and some with splendid houses and delightful pleasure gardens.' De Bruijn was also a guest of Cornelis Chastelein on his Depok property, thirty years earlier.At first, country estates were principally used for a few hours' relaxation, the owner returning to the safety of Batavia's walls by nightfall. Only in the eighteenth century did fashionable society spend weeks at a time in the country and retired officials take up permanent residence in country villas. This change in living habits depended in part on two conditions. One was the accord signed with Bantam in 1684 which guaranteed Batavia from attack. The other was the transformation of Batavia's environs into cultivated fields. The advance on the heavy vegetation surrounding the city lessened the dangers to life and property from wild animals and from runaway slaves. Willem van Outhoorn, who was living in retirement in a villa situated a little distance from the town. 'The whole countryside is planted to rice,' the Dutch painter Comelis de Bruijn wrote when reaching Batavia early in 1706.Eighteenth-century villas around Batavia, all shared certain characteristics. First, they were set in huge grounds. Second, they were built beyond the Castle's walls, in the heart of today's Jakarta but at that time often one or two hours' distant by boat or carriage. Third, they were maintained by large retinues of slaves and their owners continued traditional Indonesian practice in drawing upon the labor of inhabitants of the lands they leased or purchased. Their owners lived in a grand seigneurial manner that struck the eighteenth-century observer forcibly. That living style, dealing with the great property owners of the period, members of all the major divisions within the colonial elite: native European, Eurasian, Creole, and Asian Christian.That living style, dealing with the great property owners of the period, members of all the major divisions within the colonial elite: native European, Eurasian, Creole, and Asian Christian. Colonial society of VOC times and a little later, was made up of groups whose externals alone were European. Since Asian, Eurasian, and Creole constituted the majority, they strongly influenced the immigrant minority of Dutchmen in manners, style of living, and recreation.Wealth and its public demonstration preoccupied Batavia's government too. Concern did not arise from distaste, as with the travelers, but rather from an aversion to the notion that members of a hierarchically ranked society should appear equal in affluence. With the prescriptions of Javanese and Japanese court societies as their models, Batavia's rulers set about spelling out degrees and forms of magnificence appropriate to each rung in society for Company employee and free burgher alike. Wealth, and the leisure following from it, were demonstrated by the ownership of slaves. This is the other face of the society of sumptuary codes and of country estates. Batavia's slaves were purchased by residents for household use and were totally under their control.The glue that held this society together was the family system. Under the VOC political and economic structure, promotions were largely controlled by patronage in which family relationship played a key part. The ruling elite was preoccupied by the definition of "European." Technically, included under the term were all persons born in Europe, all born in Asia to European parents (Creoles), women married to European men, legitimate children of European fathers, and all illegitimate children acknowledged by a European man.By the mid-eighteenth century, when Baron van Imhoff took office, Indies society was formed. Its culture was clearly not Dutch any longer. Netherlands society at the time may be defined broadly as racially homogeneous, Calvinist, and patriarchal, its cities run by oligarchies of prosperous businessmen and its industries controlled by guilds. Thrift and sobriety were highly prized qualities. Average Hollanders lived in narrow, closed houses and their diet was based on red meats, cheeses, and bread. The upper classes were literate in French and German as well as in Dutch. By contrast, Indies society was exceedingly polyglot in composition, and its 'European' elite secular before agnosticism was a common condition in Europe. Nor was the colonial elite patriarchal. By the eighteenth century, access to these privileged positions was governed by connections, and the basis of connections was marriage into Indies families. Van Imhoff's colonial program recalls J. P. Coen's proposals in many points, for he too wanted to develop a distinctively Dutch character in the colonial capital by bringing in burgher families as settlers and allowing them to trade in categories of goods and in ports hitherto under Company monopoly. The early business of his government was to restore the Company's trade and revenues, encourage a return of Chinese retailers and market gardeners, build a second hospital, and provide for more medical assistants. The second part of his plan was devoted to keeping alive the culture of the homeland among immigrants and to supplanting the Mestizo culture among leaders of the locally born men with European status. This latter task was to be accomplished principally through establishing special schools for sons of selected Creole, Eurasian, and Asian Christian families. The first of these schools was a theological seminary which was opened in 1745. The seminary's 'foremost aim' was 'to help foster the establishment of the Christian reformed religion in these parts' through training a 'sufficient number' of young men for the ministry. The seminary was a boarding school, its rector, assistant, and junior master residing at the college too.The expansion of the French Empire under Napoleon, annexed the Netherlands win 1806, and with Napoleon's selection of Marshal Hennan Daendels, a new, self-conscious reformer stepped into the governor-generalship. Daendels considered himself a son of the Revolution, and it was as representative of the new spirit of the age that he took office. In his brief tenn he set about remaking Batavia. He did this by completing the move from the old city to the southern suburbs, laying out a great public park and promenade for the European citizenry, building the Hannonie as a clubhouse for a select group of men who would all be Europeans, and planning a palace which was to be the new residence of the governor-general. In 1809 he razed the Castle. More than any other deed, this symbolized the end of an era. For the Castle had represented the Company in the East, its system of monopolies, and the history of its servants in Asia.Daendels had planned to alter the Company relationship with Indonesians, ending the old tributary relationships and cutting off the 'feudal' aspects by prohibiting Europeans from using on their estates the unpaid corvee labor of the inhabitants. Lack of resources and the need to prepare Java's defenses against the expected British attack made him turn to pressed labor gangs as the means of building the Great Java Road from Anyer to Panaruka, while his measures concerning domestic slavery were likewise directed to mitigating its most flagrant abuses rather than to abolishing the institution itself.In the British Interregnum, the new ruling class differed from its VOC ruling class. It was an officers' caste, composed of younger sons and lesser branches of old English families, their commissions purchased in regiments with long traditions and with assiduously cultivated esprit de corps. Or they were civilian officials of Britain's East India Company, educated men, representing Britain and the Indian Empire at a time of its rising ascendancy, when confidence in British morals and manners was not yet shaken.The distinctive culture dissolved into its constituent parts, and Indonesians and Dutch went their separate ways, when Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence on 17 August 1945, on the fasting month and they both were fasting as well. The long and winding history of Jakarta was still still rolling and there was no doubt when the founding parents agreed to designate Jakarta as the capital of the Republic of Indonesia. And now, in the era of 'hasten' policy, whether it is said because of pollution—I'm not saying about collusion, or intending to repeat the history—when President Marcos issued Presidential Decree 824, in 1975, establishing the Metro Manila Commission (MMC), the central government of Metro Manila, and named Imelda to head it, making her Governor of Metro Manila from that point until the Marcoses were deposed in 1986—Jakarta wanna be erased from the list of capitals in the world.Joel Kotkin, in 2020 wrote, 'Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited into the historical dustbin.' Let's talk about it on the coming session. Bi 'idhnillah."While welcoming the next session, Sansevieria sang John Denver's country song,Dark and dusty, painted on the skyMisty taste of moonshine,teardrop in my eyeCountry roads, take me homeTo the place I belong *)
Citations & References:
- Robert E. Atoerti, PKD. and Michael L. Emmons,Ph.EX, Stand Up, Speak Out, Talk Back! The Key to Self-Assertive Behavior, 1975, Pocket Books
- Leonard Blusse, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans, 2008, Harvard University Press
- Charles River Editors, The Dutch East India Company: The History of the World’s First Multinational Corporation, 2017, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
- J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy, 2010, Cambridge University Press
- G.L. Balk, F. van Dijk & D.J. Kortlang, The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Local Institutions in Batavia (Jakarta), 2007, BRILL
*) "Take Me Home, Country Roads" written by John Denver, Mary Catherine Taffy Nivert-Danoff, William Thomas Danoff
