Batavia, the Headquarters in Asia
What set Batavia, the VOC headquarters in Asia, apart from its Iberian sisters Goa, Malacca, or Manila was the fact that it was established and ruled by one large mercantile corporation, which, by its special charter or octrooy, had acquired a monopoly over trade in Asia.
This commercial link was evident in the extraordinary amount of space allotted in town to warehouses for storing trade goods and wharves for building and repairing the ships of the Company.All of the municipal institutions of Holland's burgher society were replicated in Batavia. Even the canals, lined by rows of trees and neatly built town houses in this city bordering on the sea, echoed the homeland. A town hall, hospitals, plague house or hospital for contagious diseases, an orphanage, a Court of Justice, and several churches, as well as institutions of correction for “drunk and adulterous women,” “rasphouses” or gaols, and an almshouse, all contributed to the familiar Dutch Calvinistic atmosphere. Batavia was nonetheless very different from its free-trading sister cities in the Dutch Republic: it was ruled by one large business corporation which, in addition to its jealously guarded monopolies, also remained fully in control of its burgher population.
An outstanding feature of the walled colonial town of Batavia, built adjoining the castle in which the merchant elite of the company were lodged, was the ethnic urban groups on whose military assistance and industry its survival depended: respectively, the so-called Mardijkers (orang merdeka), free Christian burghers of Asian and mestizo extraction who formed together with Company servants the city's militiamen, and the industrious Chinese who, while exempt from militia-service, paid a monthly head tax. In contrast to Manila, where Spanish and Chinese were strictly segregated, the Dutch and Chinese townspeople of Batavia lived within the walls of the same town, served by large numbers of domestic slaves from across the Indonesian Archipelago and even the Indian Subcontinent.[2117] In the so-called Ommelanden, or environs/surrounding districts of the city, the company granted tracts of land, where the Indonesian “martial nations” were concentrated in kam- pong of their own. The Balinese, Bugis, Madurese, and Ambonese who lived here provided—when called upon—manpower and troops for military campaigns elsewhere in the Archipelago.[2118] Around 1700, about 20,000 people resided within the walls and another 50,000 outside the city.
About 5,000 Europeans and Christian mestizos and 3,500 Chinese lived in the town and, of course, large numbers of sailors lodged in the inns or on the ships in the roadstead.Located only a hundred sea miles from the Sunda Strait, one of the two main thoroughfares between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, Batavia's roadstead catered to an extraordinarily widespread network of shipping, which extended in a westerly direction via the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea to Mocha on the Red Sea, eastward via the Java and Banda Seas to the Moluccas or Spice Islands, and northward via the South and East China Seas to Ayutthaya in Siam, Tonkin in North Vietnam, Guangzhou (Canton) in South China, the island of Formosa (Taiwan), and finally the man-made island of Deshima in the bay of Nagasaki. In contrast to most other ports in Monsoon Asia, Batavia with its sheltered bay was an all-weather port, accessible throughout the year. During the dry season between May and October, steady winds blew from the east, and, after the monsoons in November, wet westerly winds began to blow in December, generally lasting until the end of March. The monsoon set the rhythm for all of the shipping movements of the Dutch East India Company from and to its headquarters in Asia.