Sovereignty and Treaties as Colonial Instruments: The British Occupation of Java 1811–1815

Abstract

This article examines how sovereignty and treaties functioned as colonial instruments during the British occupation of Java (1811–1815). The British East India Company imposed the language of sovereignty not to engage with Javanese polities, but to justify conquest and colonisation to audiences in London: the Court of Directors, Parliament, and the Crown. Treaties concluded with the Susuhunan of Surakarta and the Sultan of Yogyakarta were not negotiated settlements between equals but performative acts of legality – legal pantomimes designed to transform wars of aggression into wars of self-defence and to mask unlawful conquest beneath the veneer of international law. By selectively translating and circulating documents such as the 1749 deed of Pakubuwono II, Daendels’s 1808 proclamation, and the 1792 Yogyakarta contract, Lord Minto and Thomas Stamford Raffles constructed a fictive genealogy of European paramountcy in Java. In dispatches, they presented Javanese rulers as dependent vassals whose independence had long since been extinguished, even as those rulers – particularly Sultan Hamengkubuwono II – continued to assert political authority and resist British demands. The disjuncture between British claims and Javanese realities culminated in the assault on Yogyakarta in June 1812, where plunder and violence resolved the contradiction between colonial narrative and indigenous autonomy.