4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST clearly predominant position in the maritime region south of the Philippines. Their capture of Djakarta in 1619 marked an important step in the conquest of the Indonesian archipelago, a process which, however, took ihree centuries thereafter and was never actually completed.2 Britain abandoned for the time being the seemingly unequal and futile struggle and retired to digest the Indian subcontinent though after final expulsion from Bantam in north-west Java in 1684 the British kept toeholds at Benkulen and other points on the west coast of Sumatra. Between the close of the seventeenth century and the opening of the nineteenth, major shifts affected the relative positions of the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the principalities of the Malay maritime crescent. It is impossible to do more than summarise these here.3 In the first place, the major indigenous economic and political powers were progressively undermined and fragmented. Whereas at the outset the European powers had had, by and large, to fit into a pre-existing network and system of trade, by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was impossible to overlook the emergence, and gradual reinforcement to the western advantage, of overall unequal economic relations.4 Whole regions, once flourishing, were ruined; local merchants once prominent in international trade were reduced to petty trading and piracy; and the assiduous farmers of Java became, in effect, rack-rented t(nants of the Dutch while their local handicrafts and manufactures withered before European competition and discrimination. Secondly, we should note the relative economic decline of the Netherlands in the course of the eighteenth century.5 There were many factors at work in this process : the archaic prestige of trade at the expense of industrial entrepreneurship; the bankruptcy and corruption of the East India Company; and unfortunate involvement in wars. However strong attachment to free trade at home, the Dutch had sedulously pursued exclusivist and mercantilist policies in the East Indies, recognising the superior quality as well as quantity of manufactured exports available to their European trade rivals. The East Indian monopoly, while far from complete, had been an important prop of the Dutch East India Company, and through it of the Dutch economy. By the Treat\ of Paris in 1784, however, Holland was punished for participation in the American War of Independence by being forced to throw its East Indian possessions open to free trade—something obviously of especial advantage to Great Britain, then in triumphant economic ascendancy. With the decay of its trade, the Dutch East India Company was inexorably driven back into exploiting its territorial acquisitions on Java for the ftudalistic (precapitalistic) cultivation of such crops as coffee and sugar. Further misfortunes were to overwhelm the Netherlands in the half-century spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century : humiliation in the Napoleonic Wars; final collapse of their East India Company; secession of the industrialised Southern Provinces (Belgium); British occupation of the Netherlands East Indies ur.der the egregious