Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
xsampa
Banned
The Ottomans already have Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans so the loss of *Iraq isn’t that severe
BTW, I once had an idea where a Bohemian noble raises a unit of light cavalry around the town of Budweis to crush a popular rising which becomes known as the Bud Lights. Its bolstered by foreign recruits, the most common being English adventurers which are known as Bud Light Limeys.
The civic steam networks remind me of the Paris Compressed Air Network from OTL.
Here's a link (Section about the network starts about halfway down, sorry.): History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy
Here's a link (Section about the network starts about halfway down, sorry.): History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy
Thande
Donor
Thanks. As with semaphore, it feels as though 19th century France is a rich vein of alternate technologies - my concept of the telephone-based music distribution system in TTL Russia is also based on an OTL French system.
Thande
Donor
Please note: I intend to update today as usual, however the United Kingdom is currently under assault by Storm Ciara and my house has already lost electricity (and internet) once today. So I will be writing the update (on my laptop to ensure battery backup!) but if it's not posted today, it should be tomorrow.
You know the weather is bad when the news stations keep being cruel to their local weather people by forcing them to be outside, to experience the maximum amount of weather. Such as on the seafront.
Oh THAT'S what the howling winds that started at 2 am or so last night were!
268
Thande
Donor
Part #268: The Spice of Death
“White Gate to Gold Dolphin…yes, Orpington One Two has put his foot in it…I said foot, Finchley, Orpington, Orpington, Tyburn, very funny…don’t ask me, I suppose Barking Barking Six had better try to pull it off before any of the Pimlico Orpington Lewishams get suspicious…well tell her to complain to Orpington One Two! This has nothing to do with…well I suppose it impacts on all of us, aydub…but I’ll be damned if I let the Pimlicos know that yet, then the chances of keeping this secret are…well, quite.”
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From: Motext Page EX521K [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX Political Studies Revision: Syllabus A and C”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
In 1900, there was one fountainhead of what we now call orthodox Societism, the Societism of ‘Zon1Urb1’, of the former Platinea, and there were four primary deviationist groups. Only two of these survive in some form to this day. The four were the Viennese School, the Constantinople School, the Las Estrellas or Californian School, and the Batavia School.
The Viennese School, of course, formed quite organically in the aftermath of the defeat of the Danubian Confederation in the Pandoric War, seeking to understand not only why the war had been lost, but why it had been allowed to happen in the first place. After all, the ultimate cause of the war had been a clash between two armed forces on the opposite side of the world, neither of which had anything to do with Danubia (unless one counted the involvement of a Hiedler, the Hapsburgs’ old nemesis!) They have sometimes been known historically as the Grey Societists, though this has occasionally caused confusion with the grey colour adopting but otherwise orthodox Societist groups of France. In the long term, as you probably know, the success of the Viennese School proved a bigger problem for the orthodox Sanchezistas than any Diversitarian move.
The Constantinople School initially could be considered an Ottoman counterpart of the Viennese. Both grew up in multi-ethnic empires that already used unusual methods of racial and linguistic classification to run themselves, methods which other states would consider unorthodox; it was a much smaller leap to consider the ideas of Societism for a Danubian or an Ottoman subject than it would be for, say, a German or a Frenchman. The Constantinople School was moderate successful in the short term, but ran afoul of the fact that the Ottomans ended up fighting African Societist forces led by Karlus Barkalus around the African Great Lakes. Denounced as traitors by an embarrassed Grand Vizier, senior Constantinople Societists were executed and the rest expelled. Many of them went to join Barkalus in Africa, and would ultimately go on to help run Societist Darfur. This did, however, mean that Societism in the Empire proper had had its slate wiped clean, and later developments would be decidedly more orthodox and outside-influenced in nature rather than organically grown from within.
The Las Estrellas School was, as the name implies, based in the multi-ethnic republic of California. In counterpoint, it later gave birth to the opposing Cometa School of Contrasanchezista thought, which would be one of the biggest influences on Diversitarianism. The Las Estrellas School has survived as a minor part of the Californian political landscape. The orthodox Societist relationship with California has historically been a very peculiar one; in an ideology where the idea of national exceptionalism is anathema, such a position nonetheless seems to underwrite the way Combine Societists approached California. Sanchez himself wrote of it approvingly as the first glimpse of the future he wanted, and while the Combine never had that much difficulty ‘reinterpreting’ some of his desires when convenient, this point was regarded with almost romantic fascination by many senior Combine leaders. Californian Consul Roderick Cusnez (served 1980-1985) wrote in his memoirs of the almost ‘creepy’ devotion by visiting Combine officials to the Californian people, even when the image of California contradicted their own demented policies back home. Because of this, the Combine essentially just shoved funding in the direction of the Las Estrellas Societists and never seemed to worry about them deviating from the orthodox line, actions which would have (and did) result in ruthless intervention when it came to Societist groups in other countries.
And finally, The Batavian School already existed before the Pandoric War, and can be considered similar to the other three in that it arose largely organically from an existing complex multi-ethnic situation. The Batavian School was mostly made of exilic Dutch descendants and Meridian visitors (some of whom had ties to the Societists back home, albeit more those in the mould of Bartolome Jaimes than Alfarus) but did also include some representation from the native peoples, particularly the Javanese aristocracy. How it came to an end is a complex tale…
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From: Motext Pages AR118C;N [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
ARCHIVE: THE GREAT CIVILISATIONS INDEX PAGE
Welcome to the Motext archive index page for The Great Civilisations, Series II: The Nusantara. (Information on the current series, The Indian Subcontinent, can be found on Motext index page MS118A). Series II is regularly repeated on Public Pulsefeed 3, on a two-year delay after the initial broadcast of that series on the HorizonStar MotoSub Service.
This series was presented by Dr Jan van Boeijan (sadly no longer with us) and Profa Itje Rasyidin. There will always be information that even these fine presenters could not cover in an hour, so to go alongside the magnificent vistas of their travels through space and time, see the pages below for supplementary information.
AR118K Kings of the Mountain and the Sea
AR118L Creed and Shadowplay
AR118M Strangers from the West
AR118N Variety and Tragedy
MS118F Variety and Tragedy
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Throughout the previous episodes, you’ll have noticed that everything we’ve said about the fascinating and complex history of the Nusantara has had to come with many caveats. It’s not uncommon, when talking of the ancient world, to warn that our narratives may be built on shaky foundations, glued together with supposition, indirect evidence and secondary accounts. Later histories can be biased, rewritten after the fact, or lost altogether. We are well familiar with such things when dealing with civilisations such as ancient Babylonia, or Egypt—where we are at least spared mediaeval misunderstandings, as we were unable to interpret her ancient writings at all until the twentieth century.[1]
Perhaps it was not a surprise to you that we made such caveats when speaking about the past of the Nusantara. The great thalassocratic empires of Srivijaya, Singhasari, Melaka and Majapahit; the complex interplay between the faiths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity as they washed over the islands one after another. Great kings such as Sri Jayanasa and Kertarajasa who founded dynasties and empires. Gajah Mada, the fourteenth-century general and mahapatih (Prime Minister) of Majapahit, who swore he would not eat spiced food until he had conquered the whole Nusantara for the Empire of Majapahit. By the narrower definition of the Nusantara used at the time,[2] he succeeded and brought the empire to its peak of power, only to be dismissed by King Hayam Wuruk after his actions against the Sundanese royal family at the Battle of Bubat in 1357. We can talk of all these great stories, yet too often, by the exacting standards of modern history, we cannot defend them. Even before the twentieth century, the Nusantara was not a conducive place for leaving historical records. The tropical climate and chokingly successful flora meant that ruins and written records could be easily lost (as opposed to, for example, the preservation of the baking deserts of Egypt and Babylonia). Some kings deliberately destroyed or edited old records to shore up their own legitimacy, as was the case in many civilisations around the world. Finally, when European colonisers arrived—the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English—historical records and artefacts were often destroyed or looted. At least the latter tended to survive the later conflagration, safely residing with museums or collectors in Europe. But for the most part, even in 1900 historians mostly looked to oral histories and traditional poems (such as Javanese babads and kidungs) to shore up their knowledge of old events.
In the Nusantara, as in other regions, the ability for ordinary people to preserve such folk memories is impressive, yet they are frequently subject to corruption or influence over time. Is it really true, for example, that the latter-day Sundanese people still felt a resentment against Gajah Mada centuries after his death, or is that mere guesswork by later historians with a Diversitarian agenda?[3] We also only have access to a fragment of what was once remembered by the diverse peoples of the islands. Some of it written down by Dutch, Batavian and other academics in the nineteenth century; other parts were preserved when refugees fled Societist rule. Yet so much was lost, and that hampers our ability to construct a coherent historical narrative.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and there is some justice to the complaint made by Dr Diego Reyes in his monogramme of 1989, in which he pointed out that historians and archaeologists seem to care far more for bemoaning the lost heritage of the southern islands, whilst ignoring the surviving heritage of the Philippines and Peninsular Malaya. Nonetheless, when one reads accounts of the former bewildering diversity of those islands, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their present state represents perhaps Societism’s greatest crime against the nations.
It was of these islands that the Belgian master spy Vincent de Gerlache was speaking when he wrote his private memoirs in the 1880s. Thirty years earlier, de Gerlache had failed in his attempts to suborn control or influence over the islands from the Batavian Republic to the Belgians, who ineffectually claimed an inheritance over the former Dutch East India Company and its resources. By the time he was writing, of course, the Batavian Republic itself had become a mere arm of the Hermandad, one that was interested in turning a profit rather than dictating to the peoples of the islands how they should live their lives.[4] De Gerlache complained of the sheer difficulties in becoming an ‘East Indies hand’ and becoming familiar with the complexity of the many languages, ethnicities and faiths of the islands. At a time when (we should remember) Societism’s reputation was primarily one of being a harmlessly eccentric secret society for the upper classes and bourgeoisie, de Gerlache incautiously wrote: “If any part of the world would benefit from being simplified by Señor Sanchez’s absurd notions, be assured it would be this one.”
Despite the obvious offhand and dismissively joking context of de Gerlache’s words, it is a measure of how the twentieth century went that they have become an iconic target of condemnation around the world. Indeed, those attacking Belgium’s colonial depredations more often turn to these words than any of the more concrete crimes inflicted by the Maximilians’ men on native peoples. More often, they are used more generally to condemn the actions of Europeans and to create the narrative that colonialism was only an earlier incarnation of the crimes of Societism; the destructions of writings, histories and cultural practices (either deliberately or accidentally) being compared to the more extensive and organised programmes inflicted by the Combine. Examples have been drawn from the Spanish in Mexico to the Russians in Yapon. It would be wrong to say that this narrative entirely lacks merit, but to focus on it too much can obscure the fact that, initially, Societism was frequently regarded as an anti-colonial ideology, and was popular with some oppressed peoples. After all, it attacked the idea of one race being superior to another, which was used (albeit often knowingly not very seriously) as justification for hierarchies of government in colonial states.
It is one of the greatest ironies that one of our European sources for the old kingdoms of the Nusantara is none other than Pablo Sanchez himself, in his voyages on the “Centauro” and later the “Douro”.[5] Indeed, some have suggested that there was a particular fanatical hatred of the Nusantara’s many languages and cultures by the later Combine because Sanchez wrote of his frustration with them during those voyages. However, it seems more likely that—as with Karlus Barkalus in Africa—the Combine simply picked and chose its targets based on what was available at the time.
To understand the situation in the Nusantara at the end of the Pandoric War, we must step back a little—and by a little, we mean centuries. Putting aside the Spanish in the Philippines, the Portuguese were the first European traders and colonisers to intrude into the Nusantara, establishing trading outposts at the strategically important sites of Malacca, Amboina and Timor in the sixteenth century. They were far from the first foreign visitors, however; Arabs and Chinese had both settled in large numbers in the islands (as we saw in previous programmes), a Mongol invasion had been thwarted in 1293 by Singhasari forces, and the great Chinese explorer Zheng He had visited (and recorded valuable observations for our historical record) in the early 1400s. More Chinese continued to settle into the colonial period, and became an important (but sometimes fractious) demographic for European colonial efforts.[6]
In the seventeenth century, Portugal was put into personal union with Spain and declined overseas as a consequence, while the Dutch Republic broke away from Spanish control and established trade colonies to help fund its Eighty Years’ War against the Hapsburgs. The pattern of the Dutch benefiting at the Portuguese’s expense was seen both in Guyana[7] and in the East Indies. The Dutch and English fought for trade in the latter, but the Dutch generally came out on top—leading the English to focus on Bengal instead, with the exceptions of establishing a few outposts in Malaya and Borneo.[8] The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, slowly expanded its influence in Java, Celebes [Sulawesi], Sumatra and the other islands.
Trying to draw a picture of what the Nusantara (or the ‘East Indies’ to use the contemporary term) looked like at the dawn of European involvement is tricky. Our picture is never made quite complete by historical accounts even without the specific later tragedy of this region. Like Europe for most of her history, the Nusantara only made a vague distinction between familial dynasties and national entities. Her vast number of ethnic groups and languages also complicate matters. The early European explorers often had difficulty discerning the distinctions; from their perspective the Nusantara peoples had many parallels, such as their love of shadow-puppet theatre, gamelan music and epic poems, their grandiose wedding celebrations, their inventive skill at building kinds of ships unfamiliar to the Europeans, and their cuisine with its emphasis on savoury spices and rice. These parallels were in part exaggerated by the fact that this era saw an expansion of Mataramese culture across Java and beyond, influencing other nations and peoples. In fact there was much diversity within those broad strokes; countless individual cuisines, puppet theatre traditions, forms of poetry and clothing. It took time before this became apparent to the Europeans, who did, however, focus on language learning for trade purposes. For example, the influential VOC trader and explorer Frederick de Houtman was imprisoned by the Sultan of Aceh for two years and spent this time learning the Malay language—which he published the first dictionary and grammar of.
Broadly speaking, we can call attention to many pre-colonial states. Sumatra in the far west was home to the Sultanate of Aceh on its northern tip, of great interest from Europeans due to its black pepper resources; the breakaway Deli Sultanate based in the large and old city of Medan; Jambi and Palembang, the latter founded by exiles from the fallen Demak Sultanate; and Banten, an empire which also extended to the east over the Sundanese peoples of western Java. Java, always the most densely populated of the islands by far, was home to many sultanates, but the largest and most powerful of these was Mataram. Ironically, Mataramese people rarely called themselves by that name; it was a historical call-back to an earlier state of that name in the first part of the second millennium. To many Mataramese people, their home empire was simply ‘Java’. In the east of the island, the Cakraningrat princes ruled from the isle of Madura, sulkily subordinate to Mataram, which had conquered the old independent Duchy of Surabaya in 1625. The large island of Borneo was inhabited by the Dayak people, as well as the Malay Sukadana kingdom, the Banjarmasin state in the south, and Sarawak in the north controlled (eventually) by the Sultan of Sulu. Bali, a defiant Hindu island in a mostly Islamised sea, lay to the east of Java. The states of Celebes and the Moluccas tended to fall under Portuguese, then Dutch control rapidly from the outside. Finally in the east, the Sultanate of Tidore exercised influence over much of New Guinea from its island seat.
This ignores neighbouring lands such as the Philippines and Peninsular Malaya, which are also part of the modern definition of the Nusantara. Javanese people were the largest ethnic group, but Malays, Sundanese, Madurese, the Batak and Minangkabu peoples of Sumatra, and many more were also significant—again, ignoring the Philippines with its own complex ethnic mix. A new ethnic group, the Betawi (‘Batavians’) was even created from the complex mix of people in the capital of the Batavian Republic.
Islam was the largest religious group, but to simply state this simplifies a more complex situation. Few Nusantara people were what might be considered strict Muslims (with some exceptions, notably some Malays and the Acehnese with their continuing ties to the Asian Muslim nations). Frequently the Mataram model predominated: Islam at court and lip service elsewhere, but a largely inherited Hindu-Buddhist hybrid cultural model at large, lacking Islamic institutions of government such as sharia law. Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, entered the mix as well, most notably in the Moluccas and in northern Celebes. Yet frequently, as in some other regions of the world, an ordinary person would state their allegiance to one of the big religions whilst simultaneously continuing to practice traditional animist folk beliefs on a day-to-day basis.
For much of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch steadily increased their control and influence in the East Indies. Most of the existing states were suborned or conquered, frequently due to the Dutch taking advantage of succession struggles and other crises. On recorded occasions the Dutch were even invited in to mediate succession disputes. European and colonial conflicts elsewhere periodically intruded to redraw the map around the edges. Penang, a former English colony in Malaya, became French after the War of the British Succession. Dutch forts on Menado, Tigore and Amboina were temporarily seized by the Anglo-Americans during the Jacobin Wars; they were mostly returned, but Menado was expanded into an American colony on northern Celebes. Bengkulu was expanded into the American Sumatra colony, and a third small colony at Mempawah in Borneo was established. For the most part, however, the biggest challenge to the Dutch came not from the Anglo-Americans but from the Portuguese. Having long been reduced to eastern Timor from their previous heights, the Portuguese re-invested in the East Indies as part of a plan to help fund the recovery from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The Sultanate of Mataram, formerly driven into quiescence by the VOC, now began to drift away from Dutch influence and increase its capabilities with Portuguese help—in exchange for new trade concessions. Distracted by troubles closer to home, the Dutch were unable to prevent this, although Surabaya and Madura were taken from Mataram and placed under VOC control as punishment.
During the Watchful Peace, the Portuguese-backed Castilians fought the Philippine War against the New Spanish (the latter having covert aid from the Meridians) and ultimately failed to secure the islands. The rising Sultanate of Sulu took the opportunity to expand its influence in Mindanao as a result. Following Meridian aid being crucial to the New Spanish (temporarily) regaining control of Old Spain from the Portuguese, the islands were given to the Meridians. UPSA traders had already had some interest in trading with the Spice Islands, but this established a foothold for serious Meridian influence in the region. This coincidentally, but crucially, came at the same time that the Dutch Republic collapsed and was annexed by Flanders, creating the new Kingdom of Belgium. With exilic Dutch traders around the world mostly refusing to go over to the new regime, three new republics were established: the Guyanese, Batavian and Cape Republics. All three would, eventually, come under Meridian influence. A few years later, the Batavian Dutch ejected the complacent Portuguese from Timor, providing the trigger for the Panico de ’46. This ultimately led to the Portuguese Revolution and, once again, exilic Portuguese traders abroad mostly fell into the Meridian sphere of influence. Sultan Amangkurat V of Mataram seized this moment to attack the Dutch, recovering Madura and Surabaya, leaving the Batavians with only the eastern part of Java around the titular city of Batavia.
However, if this seemed to presage a continuation of conflict, it did not. With the Batavians weakened and Mataram and Sulu strengthened, the situation was ripe for Meridian ‘residents’ to play one off against the other. Indeed, the independent sultanates would go on to be equal partners of the Hermandad, on the same level as the Batavians. Perhaps it was a small comfort to see the Dutch on the receiving end of the same callous corporate treatment they had dealt out to many other peoples across the world, as the late nineteenth century era of Meridian corporatocracy inflicted itself on the islands. Plantations, on a new industrial level, were established for cash crops such as spices, gutta-percha, rubber and shellac.[9] Palm oil, and later mineral oil, were also important resources. Frequently the native people employed on such concerns were treated badly, and were something of a cause celebre for non-Jacobin Colorado thinkers, as well as many Societists (ironically), before the war. Meanwhile, the Siamese Empire had gradually pushed its way down Peninsular Malaya, expelling the French from Penang and leaving the only independent Malay state as the Sultanate of Johor. This was backed up by the French and other Europeans, who rebuilt the fortress city of Singapur as an ICPA base. Aceh also fell into Siamese hands, ironically after the Dutch and Portuguese had weakened one another fighting over it.
The fragmented and debatable control by the Batavian Republic and the two Sultanates, typical of the Hermandad of the period (an ambiguity ultimately responsible for the outbreak of the Pandoric War) meant that the islands were a popular site for pointless flag-waving colonies by rising nations, along with parts of Africa. The Riau Islands off Sumatra had been the only part of the former Dutch East Indies that the Belgians had managed to exert their authority over, which grew into a colony taking in part of mainland Sumatra (and providing a buffer against farther southern expansion by the Siamese). The Germans claimed Sukadana in Borneo—just a fragment of the former state by that name, now largely taken over by Sulu—and two-thirds of New Guinea, the latter being mostly an ineffectual claim with almost no influence outside their fort at Johann Georg Stadt [Port Moresby]. In practice, most coastal New Guineans who wished to trade did so with the Batavians or the visiting Mauré. As well as American Mempawah, the French also established a small colony on Borneo, at Sarawak.[10] The volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, devastating much of Sumatra and the surrounding area.
The islands were a largely forgotten front of the Pandoric War. Cygnian troops, facing little opposition, were able to take over the Batavian-controlled parts of Sumatra, which had been run to emphasise profit rather than defence. The peace treaties did not consider the East Indies except in the vaguest terms, not least because every power was jockeying for position and was uncertain of the situation there, with chaos between the Batavians, Mataramese and Sulu in the sudden removal of Meridian power. The Cygnians slightly expanded the Mempawah colony in Borneo, and Belgium theoretically acquired New Guinea from Germany (which meant precisely nothing beyong changing colours on a map and a flag on a fort) but, on the whole, the situation was left to resolve itself. It is likely that the French might have turned more attention here, as it seemed a prime problem in need of a Marseilles Protocol solution, had their focus not been consumed by the failure of the IEF intervention in South America. Even while the Societists were fighting for the survival of their movement,[11] Alfarus and other early leaders were less forgetful of the Nusantara.
Textbooks frequently pass over this period of history with a vague wave of a hand at a before-and-after map, giving the implicit message that the Combine simply inherited the Hermandad states overnight as some sort of legal heir to the UPSA. This is not only incorrect, but actively offensive to those peoples who suffered as a consequence. An opportunity existed for the former Hermandad states to be saved from Societist domination; an opportunity that was not taken by complacent European and Novamundine powers, licking their wounds and dreaming of the next conventional war, blind as to the new horror that had been unleashed on the world.
Alfarus and his early, now forgotten rivals saw the East Indies as an ideal place to send the former supporters of Carlos Priestley and the corporatocracy who had backed them out of fear of Monterroso’s Colorados. (Meanwhile, Alfarus was busy sending the former supporters of Monterroso, who had backed the Societists out of fear of the revenge of Priestley’s corporatocracy, to attack Portuguese-Brazil). Despite being launched early in the Combine’s history when its future looked uncertain, the operation was typically well-organised and insidious in its planning. There were already Societists active in the region, particularly in the city of Batavia itself (the so-called ‘Batavian School’ of Societism). There were two crucial points: firstly, these Societists included many powerful and wealthy people high up in the Batavian Republic hiearchy, including three of the Lords Seventeen themselves—though many of these people had likely only been active in the ‘harmless eccentric secret society’ nineteenth-century version of Societism. Secondly, those running the Republic were desperate. Sulu, Mataram and the Siamese—the latter trying to dispose of their riotous ‘Red Sash Brigade’ rebels—were all trying to carve up the corpse of the Republic in the absence of Meridian protection. Some Meridian loyalist forces were acting as warlords out of their former forts. The Batavians were willing to turn to anyone for help.
The Societists could not, initially, send much in the way of military—that is, “Celator”—aid. The conflict with the French and IEF was still ongoing for the early part of the struggle in the East Indies. Typically, their intervention more took the form of guile, with the advantage that they had inherited many of the experienced Batavian traders who knew the principals involved well. The Societists approached King Sanphet XII of Siam and were able to organise a number of agreements which played the Siamese, Mataramese, Sulu and rebel groups off against one another. The fact that the aid sent included many former Priestley loyalists made it relatively easy to gain control of the Meridian and Hermandad auxiliary military forces remaining, who would never have knowingly followed the Societist government in South America.[12] Before they knew it, they were trapped, separated and leavened with Celatores recruited from elsewhere.
As elsewhere, we should not ignore the fact that many people willingly flocked to the black banner. Much of the Mataramese empire-building, or local rebellions to resurrect the power of former sultanates, implicitly came with the message that those who had benefited from the status quo had better watch out. The wrong ethnic group in the wrong place at the wrong time could suffer a massacre, as had already happened many times in Nusantara history. For that reason, the East Indies Chinese in particular tended to throw their lot in with the Societists and fight on their side, which made a big difference. The Sundanese were also concerned about the idea of Mataramese overlordship, while Surabaya and Madura already saw the Matramese as more their direct colonial occupier than the Meridians had been, and took this opportunity to rebel against Sultan Pakubuwono IV in Yogyakarta. For this, they received aid from the Societists (and the Siamese, concerned about Mataram growing too powerful).
The new status quo did not happen overnight. As late as 1910, maps still showed something rather like the pre-war situation; but it was a lie, or a misunderstanding. President Faulkner of the ENA was criticised for the fact that American Sumatra and Mempawah, enlarged by Cygnian blood in the war, were allowed to fall into chaos on his introverted watch. Cygnian-born Jack Tayloe in part ran on using this to attack Faulkner’s legacy, but by the time he became President, it was too late. America had been shut out of the East Indies altogether, with the sole exception of North Celebes, whose people fought loyally for the Empire to avoid the risk of their Christian faith being persecuted by a potential Muslim takeover from the south. Belgium would only officially pull out in 1930, after the Black Twenties, but this was merely recognising a situation that had long been the case. Siam and Johor would also hold onto their lands and peoples, soon to be swamped with refugees. In later years, many of the Huaqiao Chinese of the East Indies would also find themselves refugees in China. There would be small wave in the immediate aftermath of the war to flee the chaos, then a pause before a much larger one following the Black Twenties, when many of the East Indies Chinese began to deeply regret their decision to back the Societists.
Another reason for the success of the Societists was their understanding that most outsiders’ business in the Nusantara, barring Germany and Belgium’s pointless flag-flying, was trade. They implemented a number of policies to take advantage of that. From a native point of view, they gave locally-appointed farmers governance over the plantations, and offered a small but guaranteed income with basic housing provided, with protection from physical mistreatment. For many plantation workers, who had listened to big dreams of empire and anti-colonial rebellion but privately just wanted better lives, this was a seductive message. For an outward-facing perspective, the Societists adopted a similar policy to that which they did elsewhere: they would allow ships from any nation to stop and trade in East Indies ports, providing they lowered their flags and renounced the protection of their governments first. They would also offer better trade deals and discounts to those, both native and European, Chinese or Novamundine trader, who would conduct their negotiations in the Novalatina language—thus incentivising them to learn. This went back to a very old monogramme by Sanchez himself in which he had predicted that such traders would be the vanguard of the Final Society, noting that many linguas franca had arisen from trade pidgins. Some traders at the time compared Societist rule in the East Indies to ‘a gigantic pirate republic’, evoking those of centuries past. This was not simply a punning note on the Societists using black flags, but reflected the effective governance of such ports. While Societists have historically been known for their opposition to democracy (something which began with Sanchez’s criticism of the 1843 Meridian general election)[13] when away from the central Combine and its meritocratic ‘tests’, they would use informal votes as a means to choose leaders. The continued use of this practice by the Batavians is one of the bigger aspects of their later being labelled as deviationists.
By the start of the Black Twenties, not only were almost all the islands under effective Societist control, but the former independent Sultanates had been silence. Mataram still existed on paper, but with Pakubuwono IV slain and his young son Amangkurat VII a puppet, it was only a matter of time. Her forces had fought valiantly and well, but her command decisions had ultimately been blindsided by how the Societists had manipulated rebellions against her. The Sultan of Sulu had also been caught offguard by Societist rebellions—unrelated to the Batavian School—which began among the usually loyal Moro peoples of the southern Philippines. The latter, meanwhile, had experienced an influx of Meridian Refugiados and become a subordinate ally of Siam, setting a northern limit for the expansion of Societism.
It is often unclear—and made deliberately so—at what point the Combine began actively and openly using the ‘Scientific Weapon’, as they euphemistically called death-luft. It would appear that in the immediate aftermath of the Scientific Attack, the Societists had taken a careful two-faced approach, in which they took full credit for the attack to the Meridian people to paint themselves as saviours, whilst attributing the attack to the Monterroso regime when addressing the outside world. Over time, these two narratives were slowly brought together and reconciled with one another, until something approaching the truth was used: that the weapon had been a creation of the old regime, but it had been used by the Societists to save the people of the ‘Liberated Zones’ from the Anglo-Americans. A few memos survive suggesting that the decision to go with this narrative was reached with some surprise, as the Societists had expected the Scientific Weapon to remain a taboo subject, yet while it was offically banned at the Ratisbon Conventions, many nations continued to secretly work on developing their own death-luft and countermeasures. In particular, the Ratisbon Convention only strictly forbade the use of death-luft in ‘warfare’, i.e. in armed conflict between recognised powers. It said nothing about its use against rebels within one’s own territory, something which was first taken advantage of by the Russians in 1912 in order to put down a revolt in Samarkand. Global condemnation was half-hearted, emboldening the Chinese to do the same to some Indian rebels the year later.
Around this time, the Societists began quietly using the Scientific Weapon once again. Occasionally this was used as a terror weapon in South America itself against rebellious villages, but much more often it was deployed abroad. As with Karlus Barkalus in Africa, the Combine at this time typically took pragmatic decisions about how to go about its stated aims of eliminating all differences between humans, in contrast to the later full-throated fanaticism of the post-Alfarus era. Just as the central Combine typically assumed that the eventual ‘perfect homogenised’ human culture would look suspiciously like the pre-war culture of an average person living in Cordoba, the Batavian Zones’ leadership tended to strike at cultures that deviated from the Javanese majority (excluding the Dutch and Meridians, of course). New Guinea was the obvious place to start, with its countless primitive tribes[14] isolated from the world. A few passing linguists had written of how the tribes had countless languages and dialects which few outsiders had ever experienced or written down. The Batavian Societists were keen to ensure that nobody ever would.
Thus the first major crime against the nations of the Batavian Societists took place in a land that was theoretically supposed to be a Belgian colony, without the Belgians holed up in Karl Theodor Stadt [Port Moresby again] even realising it. The Batavian Societists combined the use of death-luft with the pragmatic approach to Garderism that had developed in parallel in Africa; do not take away the children of true believers, but take those of outsiders or rebels and raise them in creches. Thousands died in the attacks on New Guinea, but thousands more were taken away to be raised away from their ancestral language and culture, immersed in Novalatina.
Emboldened by the lack of world reaction to this, during the Black Twenties the Batavian Societists would then target the island of Bali. It was at this point that tensions rose between Batavia (or ‘Zon9Urb1’) and the central Combine, as the targeting of Bali seemed to come with suspicious motivations. Yes, Bali stood out from its neighbouring islands as a survival of Hinduism, and had unique cultural aspects of dance and theatre, but it still seemed a lot more like the decision a Muslim Javanese cultural supremacist would make rather than someone judging all cultures to be equally worthy of annihilation.
Though the Black Twenties meant that central intervention took longer than it might have, what might have been the first Societist civil war was ruthlessly quashed. Many of the Batavian ringleaders were exiled for their crimes of ‘deviationism’ and had their own children taken away. The Combine took a clear position that just because the Javanese were in the majority did not mean their culture was not also worthy of destruction. In practice, the sheer numbers did mean that Javanese culture significantly influenced the eventual homogenised culture of the Combine, not least because of the later reaction against carrying on Meridian cultural practices. But in terms of specific examples of literary survival and so on, amid constant rebellions and unrest, the Javanese identity would be attacked as much as that of the Dayaks, Sundanese and others. Malay culture would survive in the Siamese lands no matter what happened, but the multitudinous other cultures of the East Indies—that fractured rainbow of endless diversity—would be ground down to mere suggestions of what they had been.
It was, in the words of the exiled Javanese poet Kenarok Saleh, “The murder of all it is to live as a human being…the holocaust of heritage…the massacre of memory.” The images of burning libraries and puppet theatres remain permanently ingrained into the global popular memory as a wake-up call to recognise the evil of the Societists. And yet, that is very much a hindsight view. As the Societists had calculated, few in Europe or the Novamund cared about the fate of the East Indies. So long as trade could continue—and it could—traders cared not for the smoke going up from burning villages behind the port. Only in California, where exiles taught local yachtsmen how to build ‘proa’ sailing ships with outriggers, did public awareness of the magnitude of the disaster become clear.
And so as the Black Twenties dawned, for so many countries, the biggest threat to the world seemed to come not from the Combine, but from Russia…
[1] Due to the Rosetta Stone not being discovered in TTL, and a suitable source for cracking hieroglyphs not being found until about a century later.
[2] In TTL ‘Nusantara’ has come to mean the whole Malay Archipelago / Maritime Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and so on. In OTL the term often more restrictively means only the Indonesian islands, plus Malaysian Borneo, East Timor etc.
[3] In OTL modern Indonesia, Gajah Mada is frequently treated as a national hero and unifying figure for his work in unifying much of what constitutes the modern country, but the Sundanese-dominated city of Bandung is one of the few to resist naming a street after him thanks to the ancestral memory.
[4] This is a rather rose-tinted way of putting it, of course, as the Batavians were quite happy to tell the native peoples they needed to get out of their houses right now because their village was being bulldozed tomorrow to build a railway line, and so forth.
[5] See Part #100 in Volume II and Part #121 in Volume III.
[6] The biggest OTL example of such tensions is the ‘Chinese War’ (or ‘Java War’) of 1741-43, in which the Dutch attempted to deport Chinese settlers, but rumours they were simply drowning them at see led to riots and revolt by the Chinese in Batavia followed by massacres by the Dutch. This conflict drew in the Sultanate of Mataram and the rival Cakraningrat princes of Madura, and was the ultimate trigger for the decline in Mataramese power and Mataram’s partition a few years later. In TTL it was avoided, which was important as it kept Mataram a viable power for long enough for Portuguese intervention to have an impact.
[7] Used in a broader sense to mean northern Brazil, the historiography influenced by the later borders. An OTL book would likely use the word ‘temporary’ to refer to the Dutch conquests at this time (as they were later won back by Portugal and inherited by Brazil), but, while this did happen in TTL, they later became part of the exilic Dutch-led Guyanese Republic, so the situation is a little more confused.
[8] This is described more dismissively than it would be in an OTL book, because in OTL the English colonies in Malaya would become the foundations of what became British Malaya (and thereafter the modern state of Malaysia), but in TTL trading outposts in wars and the expansion of Siam put paid to that.
[9] Shellac is of course an animal product, but the lac bugs are farmed on specially cultivated trees.
[10] This is in the older sense of the word, more referring to the city now known in OTL as Kuching rather than a much wider area of northern Borneo.
[11] This is expressing, perhaps unconsciously, the common (but incorrect) narrative assumption that the purpose of the French/IEF intervention was to strangle the Combine in the cradle.
[12] This is supposition, of course.
[13] See Part #162 in Volume IV.
[14] Using contemporary language.
“White Gate to Gold Dolphin…yes, Orpington One Two has put his foot in it…I said foot, Finchley, Orpington, Orpington, Tyburn, very funny…don’t ask me, I suppose Barking Barking Six had better try to pull it off before any of the Pimlico Orpington Lewishams get suspicious…well tell her to complain to Orpington One Two! This has nothing to do with…well I suppose it impacts on all of us, aydub…but I’ll be damned if I let the Pimlicos know that yet, then the chances of keeping this secret are…well, quite.”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
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From: Motext Page EX521K [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX Political Studies Revision: Syllabus A and C”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
In 1900, there was one fountainhead of what we now call orthodox Societism, the Societism of ‘Zon1Urb1’, of the former Platinea, and there were four primary deviationist groups. Only two of these survive in some form to this day. The four were the Viennese School, the Constantinople School, the Las Estrellas or Californian School, and the Batavia School.
The Viennese School, of course, formed quite organically in the aftermath of the defeat of the Danubian Confederation in the Pandoric War, seeking to understand not only why the war had been lost, but why it had been allowed to happen in the first place. After all, the ultimate cause of the war had been a clash between two armed forces on the opposite side of the world, neither of which had anything to do with Danubia (unless one counted the involvement of a Hiedler, the Hapsburgs’ old nemesis!) They have sometimes been known historically as the Grey Societists, though this has occasionally caused confusion with the grey colour adopting but otherwise orthodox Societist groups of France. In the long term, as you probably know, the success of the Viennese School proved a bigger problem for the orthodox Sanchezistas than any Diversitarian move.
The Constantinople School initially could be considered an Ottoman counterpart of the Viennese. Both grew up in multi-ethnic empires that already used unusual methods of racial and linguistic classification to run themselves, methods which other states would consider unorthodox; it was a much smaller leap to consider the ideas of Societism for a Danubian or an Ottoman subject than it would be for, say, a German or a Frenchman. The Constantinople School was moderate successful in the short term, but ran afoul of the fact that the Ottomans ended up fighting African Societist forces led by Karlus Barkalus around the African Great Lakes. Denounced as traitors by an embarrassed Grand Vizier, senior Constantinople Societists were executed and the rest expelled. Many of them went to join Barkalus in Africa, and would ultimately go on to help run Societist Darfur. This did, however, mean that Societism in the Empire proper had had its slate wiped clean, and later developments would be decidedly more orthodox and outside-influenced in nature rather than organically grown from within.
The Las Estrellas School was, as the name implies, based in the multi-ethnic republic of California. In counterpoint, it later gave birth to the opposing Cometa School of Contrasanchezista thought, which would be one of the biggest influences on Diversitarianism. The Las Estrellas School has survived as a minor part of the Californian political landscape. The orthodox Societist relationship with California has historically been a very peculiar one; in an ideology where the idea of national exceptionalism is anathema, such a position nonetheless seems to underwrite the way Combine Societists approached California. Sanchez himself wrote of it approvingly as the first glimpse of the future he wanted, and while the Combine never had that much difficulty ‘reinterpreting’ some of his desires when convenient, this point was regarded with almost romantic fascination by many senior Combine leaders. Californian Consul Roderick Cusnez (served 1980-1985) wrote in his memoirs of the almost ‘creepy’ devotion by visiting Combine officials to the Californian people, even when the image of California contradicted their own demented policies back home. Because of this, the Combine essentially just shoved funding in the direction of the Las Estrellas Societists and never seemed to worry about them deviating from the orthodox line, actions which would have (and did) result in ruthless intervention when it came to Societist groups in other countries.
And finally, The Batavian School already existed before the Pandoric War, and can be considered similar to the other three in that it arose largely organically from an existing complex multi-ethnic situation. The Batavian School was mostly made of exilic Dutch descendants and Meridian visitors (some of whom had ties to the Societists back home, albeit more those in the mould of Bartolome Jaimes than Alfarus) but did also include some representation from the native peoples, particularly the Javanese aristocracy. How it came to an end is a complex tale…
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From: Motext Pages AR118C;N [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
ARCHIVE: THE GREAT CIVILISATIONS INDEX PAGE
Welcome to the Motext archive index page for The Great Civilisations, Series II: The Nusantara. (Information on the current series, The Indian Subcontinent, can be found on Motext index page MS118A). Series II is regularly repeated on Public Pulsefeed 3, on a two-year delay after the initial broadcast of that series on the HorizonStar MotoSub Service.
This series was presented by Dr Jan van Boeijan (sadly no longer with us) and Profa Itje Rasyidin. There will always be information that even these fine presenters could not cover in an hour, so to go alongside the magnificent vistas of their travels through space and time, see the pages below for supplementary information.
AR118K Kings of the Mountain and the Sea
AR118L Creed and Shadowplay
AR118M Strangers from the West
AR118N Variety and Tragedy
MS118F Variety and Tragedy
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Throughout the previous episodes, you’ll have noticed that everything we’ve said about the fascinating and complex history of the Nusantara has had to come with many caveats. It’s not uncommon, when talking of the ancient world, to warn that our narratives may be built on shaky foundations, glued together with supposition, indirect evidence and secondary accounts. Later histories can be biased, rewritten after the fact, or lost altogether. We are well familiar with such things when dealing with civilisations such as ancient Babylonia, or Egypt—where we are at least spared mediaeval misunderstandings, as we were unable to interpret her ancient writings at all until the twentieth century.[1]
Perhaps it was not a surprise to you that we made such caveats when speaking about the past of the Nusantara. The great thalassocratic empires of Srivijaya, Singhasari, Melaka and Majapahit; the complex interplay between the faiths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity as they washed over the islands one after another. Great kings such as Sri Jayanasa and Kertarajasa who founded dynasties and empires. Gajah Mada, the fourteenth-century general and mahapatih (Prime Minister) of Majapahit, who swore he would not eat spiced food until he had conquered the whole Nusantara for the Empire of Majapahit. By the narrower definition of the Nusantara used at the time,[2] he succeeded and brought the empire to its peak of power, only to be dismissed by King Hayam Wuruk after his actions against the Sundanese royal family at the Battle of Bubat in 1357. We can talk of all these great stories, yet too often, by the exacting standards of modern history, we cannot defend them. Even before the twentieth century, the Nusantara was not a conducive place for leaving historical records. The tropical climate and chokingly successful flora meant that ruins and written records could be easily lost (as opposed to, for example, the preservation of the baking deserts of Egypt and Babylonia). Some kings deliberately destroyed or edited old records to shore up their own legitimacy, as was the case in many civilisations around the world. Finally, when European colonisers arrived—the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English—historical records and artefacts were often destroyed or looted. At least the latter tended to survive the later conflagration, safely residing with museums or collectors in Europe. But for the most part, even in 1900 historians mostly looked to oral histories and traditional poems (such as Javanese babads and kidungs) to shore up their knowledge of old events.
In the Nusantara, as in other regions, the ability for ordinary people to preserve such folk memories is impressive, yet they are frequently subject to corruption or influence over time. Is it really true, for example, that the latter-day Sundanese people still felt a resentment against Gajah Mada centuries after his death, or is that mere guesswork by later historians with a Diversitarian agenda?[3] We also only have access to a fragment of what was once remembered by the diverse peoples of the islands. Some of it written down by Dutch, Batavian and other academics in the nineteenth century; other parts were preserved when refugees fled Societist rule. Yet so much was lost, and that hampers our ability to construct a coherent historical narrative.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and there is some justice to the complaint made by Dr Diego Reyes in his monogramme of 1989, in which he pointed out that historians and archaeologists seem to care far more for bemoaning the lost heritage of the southern islands, whilst ignoring the surviving heritage of the Philippines and Peninsular Malaya. Nonetheless, when one reads accounts of the former bewildering diversity of those islands, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their present state represents perhaps Societism’s greatest crime against the nations.
It was of these islands that the Belgian master spy Vincent de Gerlache was speaking when he wrote his private memoirs in the 1880s. Thirty years earlier, de Gerlache had failed in his attempts to suborn control or influence over the islands from the Batavian Republic to the Belgians, who ineffectually claimed an inheritance over the former Dutch East India Company and its resources. By the time he was writing, of course, the Batavian Republic itself had become a mere arm of the Hermandad, one that was interested in turning a profit rather than dictating to the peoples of the islands how they should live their lives.[4] De Gerlache complained of the sheer difficulties in becoming an ‘East Indies hand’ and becoming familiar with the complexity of the many languages, ethnicities and faiths of the islands. At a time when (we should remember) Societism’s reputation was primarily one of being a harmlessly eccentric secret society for the upper classes and bourgeoisie, de Gerlache incautiously wrote: “If any part of the world would benefit from being simplified by Señor Sanchez’s absurd notions, be assured it would be this one.”
Despite the obvious offhand and dismissively joking context of de Gerlache’s words, it is a measure of how the twentieth century went that they have become an iconic target of condemnation around the world. Indeed, those attacking Belgium’s colonial depredations more often turn to these words than any of the more concrete crimes inflicted by the Maximilians’ men on native peoples. More often, they are used more generally to condemn the actions of Europeans and to create the narrative that colonialism was only an earlier incarnation of the crimes of Societism; the destructions of writings, histories and cultural practices (either deliberately or accidentally) being compared to the more extensive and organised programmes inflicted by the Combine. Examples have been drawn from the Spanish in Mexico to the Russians in Yapon. It would be wrong to say that this narrative entirely lacks merit, but to focus on it too much can obscure the fact that, initially, Societism was frequently regarded as an anti-colonial ideology, and was popular with some oppressed peoples. After all, it attacked the idea of one race being superior to another, which was used (albeit often knowingly not very seriously) as justification for hierarchies of government in colonial states.
It is one of the greatest ironies that one of our European sources for the old kingdoms of the Nusantara is none other than Pablo Sanchez himself, in his voyages on the “Centauro” and later the “Douro”.[5] Indeed, some have suggested that there was a particular fanatical hatred of the Nusantara’s many languages and cultures by the later Combine because Sanchez wrote of his frustration with them during those voyages. However, it seems more likely that—as with Karlus Barkalus in Africa—the Combine simply picked and chose its targets based on what was available at the time.
To understand the situation in the Nusantara at the end of the Pandoric War, we must step back a little—and by a little, we mean centuries. Putting aside the Spanish in the Philippines, the Portuguese were the first European traders and colonisers to intrude into the Nusantara, establishing trading outposts at the strategically important sites of Malacca, Amboina and Timor in the sixteenth century. They were far from the first foreign visitors, however; Arabs and Chinese had both settled in large numbers in the islands (as we saw in previous programmes), a Mongol invasion had been thwarted in 1293 by Singhasari forces, and the great Chinese explorer Zheng He had visited (and recorded valuable observations for our historical record) in the early 1400s. More Chinese continued to settle into the colonial period, and became an important (but sometimes fractious) demographic for European colonial efforts.[6]
In the seventeenth century, Portugal was put into personal union with Spain and declined overseas as a consequence, while the Dutch Republic broke away from Spanish control and established trade colonies to help fund its Eighty Years’ War against the Hapsburgs. The pattern of the Dutch benefiting at the Portuguese’s expense was seen both in Guyana[7] and in the East Indies. The Dutch and English fought for trade in the latter, but the Dutch generally came out on top—leading the English to focus on Bengal instead, with the exceptions of establishing a few outposts in Malaya and Borneo.[8] The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, slowly expanded its influence in Java, Celebes [Sulawesi], Sumatra and the other islands.
Trying to draw a picture of what the Nusantara (or the ‘East Indies’ to use the contemporary term) looked like at the dawn of European involvement is tricky. Our picture is never made quite complete by historical accounts even without the specific later tragedy of this region. Like Europe for most of her history, the Nusantara only made a vague distinction between familial dynasties and national entities. Her vast number of ethnic groups and languages also complicate matters. The early European explorers often had difficulty discerning the distinctions; from their perspective the Nusantara peoples had many parallels, such as their love of shadow-puppet theatre, gamelan music and epic poems, their grandiose wedding celebrations, their inventive skill at building kinds of ships unfamiliar to the Europeans, and their cuisine with its emphasis on savoury spices and rice. These parallels were in part exaggerated by the fact that this era saw an expansion of Mataramese culture across Java and beyond, influencing other nations and peoples. In fact there was much diversity within those broad strokes; countless individual cuisines, puppet theatre traditions, forms of poetry and clothing. It took time before this became apparent to the Europeans, who did, however, focus on language learning for trade purposes. For example, the influential VOC trader and explorer Frederick de Houtman was imprisoned by the Sultan of Aceh for two years and spent this time learning the Malay language—which he published the first dictionary and grammar of.
Broadly speaking, we can call attention to many pre-colonial states. Sumatra in the far west was home to the Sultanate of Aceh on its northern tip, of great interest from Europeans due to its black pepper resources; the breakaway Deli Sultanate based in the large and old city of Medan; Jambi and Palembang, the latter founded by exiles from the fallen Demak Sultanate; and Banten, an empire which also extended to the east over the Sundanese peoples of western Java. Java, always the most densely populated of the islands by far, was home to many sultanates, but the largest and most powerful of these was Mataram. Ironically, Mataramese people rarely called themselves by that name; it was a historical call-back to an earlier state of that name in the first part of the second millennium. To many Mataramese people, their home empire was simply ‘Java’. In the east of the island, the Cakraningrat princes ruled from the isle of Madura, sulkily subordinate to Mataram, which had conquered the old independent Duchy of Surabaya in 1625. The large island of Borneo was inhabited by the Dayak people, as well as the Malay Sukadana kingdom, the Banjarmasin state in the south, and Sarawak in the north controlled (eventually) by the Sultan of Sulu. Bali, a defiant Hindu island in a mostly Islamised sea, lay to the east of Java. The states of Celebes and the Moluccas tended to fall under Portuguese, then Dutch control rapidly from the outside. Finally in the east, the Sultanate of Tidore exercised influence over much of New Guinea from its island seat.
This ignores neighbouring lands such as the Philippines and Peninsular Malaya, which are also part of the modern definition of the Nusantara. Javanese people were the largest ethnic group, but Malays, Sundanese, Madurese, the Batak and Minangkabu peoples of Sumatra, and many more were also significant—again, ignoring the Philippines with its own complex ethnic mix. A new ethnic group, the Betawi (‘Batavians’) was even created from the complex mix of people in the capital of the Batavian Republic.
Islam was the largest religious group, but to simply state this simplifies a more complex situation. Few Nusantara people were what might be considered strict Muslims (with some exceptions, notably some Malays and the Acehnese with their continuing ties to the Asian Muslim nations). Frequently the Mataram model predominated: Islam at court and lip service elsewhere, but a largely inherited Hindu-Buddhist hybrid cultural model at large, lacking Islamic institutions of government such as sharia law. Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, entered the mix as well, most notably in the Moluccas and in northern Celebes. Yet frequently, as in some other regions of the world, an ordinary person would state their allegiance to one of the big religions whilst simultaneously continuing to practice traditional animist folk beliefs on a day-to-day basis.
For much of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch steadily increased their control and influence in the East Indies. Most of the existing states were suborned or conquered, frequently due to the Dutch taking advantage of succession struggles and other crises. On recorded occasions the Dutch were even invited in to mediate succession disputes. European and colonial conflicts elsewhere periodically intruded to redraw the map around the edges. Penang, a former English colony in Malaya, became French after the War of the British Succession. Dutch forts on Menado, Tigore and Amboina were temporarily seized by the Anglo-Americans during the Jacobin Wars; they were mostly returned, but Menado was expanded into an American colony on northern Celebes. Bengkulu was expanded into the American Sumatra colony, and a third small colony at Mempawah in Borneo was established. For the most part, however, the biggest challenge to the Dutch came not from the Anglo-Americans but from the Portuguese. Having long been reduced to eastern Timor from their previous heights, the Portuguese re-invested in the East Indies as part of a plan to help fund the recovery from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The Sultanate of Mataram, formerly driven into quiescence by the VOC, now began to drift away from Dutch influence and increase its capabilities with Portuguese help—in exchange for new trade concessions. Distracted by troubles closer to home, the Dutch were unable to prevent this, although Surabaya and Madura were taken from Mataram and placed under VOC control as punishment.
During the Watchful Peace, the Portuguese-backed Castilians fought the Philippine War against the New Spanish (the latter having covert aid from the Meridians) and ultimately failed to secure the islands. The rising Sultanate of Sulu took the opportunity to expand its influence in Mindanao as a result. Following Meridian aid being crucial to the New Spanish (temporarily) regaining control of Old Spain from the Portuguese, the islands were given to the Meridians. UPSA traders had already had some interest in trading with the Spice Islands, but this established a foothold for serious Meridian influence in the region. This coincidentally, but crucially, came at the same time that the Dutch Republic collapsed and was annexed by Flanders, creating the new Kingdom of Belgium. With exilic Dutch traders around the world mostly refusing to go over to the new regime, three new republics were established: the Guyanese, Batavian and Cape Republics. All three would, eventually, come under Meridian influence. A few years later, the Batavian Dutch ejected the complacent Portuguese from Timor, providing the trigger for the Panico de ’46. This ultimately led to the Portuguese Revolution and, once again, exilic Portuguese traders abroad mostly fell into the Meridian sphere of influence. Sultan Amangkurat V of Mataram seized this moment to attack the Dutch, recovering Madura and Surabaya, leaving the Batavians with only the eastern part of Java around the titular city of Batavia.
However, if this seemed to presage a continuation of conflict, it did not. With the Batavians weakened and Mataram and Sulu strengthened, the situation was ripe for Meridian ‘residents’ to play one off against the other. Indeed, the independent sultanates would go on to be equal partners of the Hermandad, on the same level as the Batavians. Perhaps it was a small comfort to see the Dutch on the receiving end of the same callous corporate treatment they had dealt out to many other peoples across the world, as the late nineteenth century era of Meridian corporatocracy inflicted itself on the islands. Plantations, on a new industrial level, were established for cash crops such as spices, gutta-percha, rubber and shellac.[9] Palm oil, and later mineral oil, were also important resources. Frequently the native people employed on such concerns were treated badly, and were something of a cause celebre for non-Jacobin Colorado thinkers, as well as many Societists (ironically), before the war. Meanwhile, the Siamese Empire had gradually pushed its way down Peninsular Malaya, expelling the French from Penang and leaving the only independent Malay state as the Sultanate of Johor. This was backed up by the French and other Europeans, who rebuilt the fortress city of Singapur as an ICPA base. Aceh also fell into Siamese hands, ironically after the Dutch and Portuguese had weakened one another fighting over it.
The fragmented and debatable control by the Batavian Republic and the two Sultanates, typical of the Hermandad of the period (an ambiguity ultimately responsible for the outbreak of the Pandoric War) meant that the islands were a popular site for pointless flag-waving colonies by rising nations, along with parts of Africa. The Riau Islands off Sumatra had been the only part of the former Dutch East Indies that the Belgians had managed to exert their authority over, which grew into a colony taking in part of mainland Sumatra (and providing a buffer against farther southern expansion by the Siamese). The Germans claimed Sukadana in Borneo—just a fragment of the former state by that name, now largely taken over by Sulu—and two-thirds of New Guinea, the latter being mostly an ineffectual claim with almost no influence outside their fort at Johann Georg Stadt [Port Moresby]. In practice, most coastal New Guineans who wished to trade did so with the Batavians or the visiting Mauré. As well as American Mempawah, the French also established a small colony on Borneo, at Sarawak.[10] The volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, devastating much of Sumatra and the surrounding area.
The islands were a largely forgotten front of the Pandoric War. Cygnian troops, facing little opposition, were able to take over the Batavian-controlled parts of Sumatra, which had been run to emphasise profit rather than defence. The peace treaties did not consider the East Indies except in the vaguest terms, not least because every power was jockeying for position and was uncertain of the situation there, with chaos between the Batavians, Mataramese and Sulu in the sudden removal of Meridian power. The Cygnians slightly expanded the Mempawah colony in Borneo, and Belgium theoretically acquired New Guinea from Germany (which meant precisely nothing beyong changing colours on a map and a flag on a fort) but, on the whole, the situation was left to resolve itself. It is likely that the French might have turned more attention here, as it seemed a prime problem in need of a Marseilles Protocol solution, had their focus not been consumed by the failure of the IEF intervention in South America. Even while the Societists were fighting for the survival of their movement,[11] Alfarus and other early leaders were less forgetful of the Nusantara.
Textbooks frequently pass over this period of history with a vague wave of a hand at a before-and-after map, giving the implicit message that the Combine simply inherited the Hermandad states overnight as some sort of legal heir to the UPSA. This is not only incorrect, but actively offensive to those peoples who suffered as a consequence. An opportunity existed for the former Hermandad states to be saved from Societist domination; an opportunity that was not taken by complacent European and Novamundine powers, licking their wounds and dreaming of the next conventional war, blind as to the new horror that had been unleashed on the world.
Alfarus and his early, now forgotten rivals saw the East Indies as an ideal place to send the former supporters of Carlos Priestley and the corporatocracy who had backed them out of fear of Monterroso’s Colorados. (Meanwhile, Alfarus was busy sending the former supporters of Monterroso, who had backed the Societists out of fear of the revenge of Priestley’s corporatocracy, to attack Portuguese-Brazil). Despite being launched early in the Combine’s history when its future looked uncertain, the operation was typically well-organised and insidious in its planning. There were already Societists active in the region, particularly in the city of Batavia itself (the so-called ‘Batavian School’ of Societism). There were two crucial points: firstly, these Societists included many powerful and wealthy people high up in the Batavian Republic hiearchy, including three of the Lords Seventeen themselves—though many of these people had likely only been active in the ‘harmless eccentric secret society’ nineteenth-century version of Societism. Secondly, those running the Republic were desperate. Sulu, Mataram and the Siamese—the latter trying to dispose of their riotous ‘Red Sash Brigade’ rebels—were all trying to carve up the corpse of the Republic in the absence of Meridian protection. Some Meridian loyalist forces were acting as warlords out of their former forts. The Batavians were willing to turn to anyone for help.
The Societists could not, initially, send much in the way of military—that is, “Celator”—aid. The conflict with the French and IEF was still ongoing for the early part of the struggle in the East Indies. Typically, their intervention more took the form of guile, with the advantage that they had inherited many of the experienced Batavian traders who knew the principals involved well. The Societists approached King Sanphet XII of Siam and were able to organise a number of agreements which played the Siamese, Mataramese, Sulu and rebel groups off against one another. The fact that the aid sent included many former Priestley loyalists made it relatively easy to gain control of the Meridian and Hermandad auxiliary military forces remaining, who would never have knowingly followed the Societist government in South America.[12] Before they knew it, they were trapped, separated and leavened with Celatores recruited from elsewhere.
As elsewhere, we should not ignore the fact that many people willingly flocked to the black banner. Much of the Mataramese empire-building, or local rebellions to resurrect the power of former sultanates, implicitly came with the message that those who had benefited from the status quo had better watch out. The wrong ethnic group in the wrong place at the wrong time could suffer a massacre, as had already happened many times in Nusantara history. For that reason, the East Indies Chinese in particular tended to throw their lot in with the Societists and fight on their side, which made a big difference. The Sundanese were also concerned about the idea of Mataramese overlordship, while Surabaya and Madura already saw the Matramese as more their direct colonial occupier than the Meridians had been, and took this opportunity to rebel against Sultan Pakubuwono IV in Yogyakarta. For this, they received aid from the Societists (and the Siamese, concerned about Mataram growing too powerful).
The new status quo did not happen overnight. As late as 1910, maps still showed something rather like the pre-war situation; but it was a lie, or a misunderstanding. President Faulkner of the ENA was criticised for the fact that American Sumatra and Mempawah, enlarged by Cygnian blood in the war, were allowed to fall into chaos on his introverted watch. Cygnian-born Jack Tayloe in part ran on using this to attack Faulkner’s legacy, but by the time he became President, it was too late. America had been shut out of the East Indies altogether, with the sole exception of North Celebes, whose people fought loyally for the Empire to avoid the risk of their Christian faith being persecuted by a potential Muslim takeover from the south. Belgium would only officially pull out in 1930, after the Black Twenties, but this was merely recognising a situation that had long been the case. Siam and Johor would also hold onto their lands and peoples, soon to be swamped with refugees. In later years, many of the Huaqiao Chinese of the East Indies would also find themselves refugees in China. There would be small wave in the immediate aftermath of the war to flee the chaos, then a pause before a much larger one following the Black Twenties, when many of the East Indies Chinese began to deeply regret their decision to back the Societists.
Another reason for the success of the Societists was their understanding that most outsiders’ business in the Nusantara, barring Germany and Belgium’s pointless flag-flying, was trade. They implemented a number of policies to take advantage of that. From a native point of view, they gave locally-appointed farmers governance over the plantations, and offered a small but guaranteed income with basic housing provided, with protection from physical mistreatment. For many plantation workers, who had listened to big dreams of empire and anti-colonial rebellion but privately just wanted better lives, this was a seductive message. For an outward-facing perspective, the Societists adopted a similar policy to that which they did elsewhere: they would allow ships from any nation to stop and trade in East Indies ports, providing they lowered their flags and renounced the protection of their governments first. They would also offer better trade deals and discounts to those, both native and European, Chinese or Novamundine trader, who would conduct their negotiations in the Novalatina language—thus incentivising them to learn. This went back to a very old monogramme by Sanchez himself in which he had predicted that such traders would be the vanguard of the Final Society, noting that many linguas franca had arisen from trade pidgins. Some traders at the time compared Societist rule in the East Indies to ‘a gigantic pirate republic’, evoking those of centuries past. This was not simply a punning note on the Societists using black flags, but reflected the effective governance of such ports. While Societists have historically been known for their opposition to democracy (something which began with Sanchez’s criticism of the 1843 Meridian general election)[13] when away from the central Combine and its meritocratic ‘tests’, they would use informal votes as a means to choose leaders. The continued use of this practice by the Batavians is one of the bigger aspects of their later being labelled as deviationists.
By the start of the Black Twenties, not only were almost all the islands under effective Societist control, but the former independent Sultanates had been silence. Mataram still existed on paper, but with Pakubuwono IV slain and his young son Amangkurat VII a puppet, it was only a matter of time. Her forces had fought valiantly and well, but her command decisions had ultimately been blindsided by how the Societists had manipulated rebellions against her. The Sultan of Sulu had also been caught offguard by Societist rebellions—unrelated to the Batavian School—which began among the usually loyal Moro peoples of the southern Philippines. The latter, meanwhile, had experienced an influx of Meridian Refugiados and become a subordinate ally of Siam, setting a northern limit for the expansion of Societism.
It is often unclear—and made deliberately so—at what point the Combine began actively and openly using the ‘Scientific Weapon’, as they euphemistically called death-luft. It would appear that in the immediate aftermath of the Scientific Attack, the Societists had taken a careful two-faced approach, in which they took full credit for the attack to the Meridian people to paint themselves as saviours, whilst attributing the attack to the Monterroso regime when addressing the outside world. Over time, these two narratives were slowly brought together and reconciled with one another, until something approaching the truth was used: that the weapon had been a creation of the old regime, but it had been used by the Societists to save the people of the ‘Liberated Zones’ from the Anglo-Americans. A few memos survive suggesting that the decision to go with this narrative was reached with some surprise, as the Societists had expected the Scientific Weapon to remain a taboo subject, yet while it was offically banned at the Ratisbon Conventions, many nations continued to secretly work on developing their own death-luft and countermeasures. In particular, the Ratisbon Convention only strictly forbade the use of death-luft in ‘warfare’, i.e. in armed conflict between recognised powers. It said nothing about its use against rebels within one’s own territory, something which was first taken advantage of by the Russians in 1912 in order to put down a revolt in Samarkand. Global condemnation was half-hearted, emboldening the Chinese to do the same to some Indian rebels the year later.
Around this time, the Societists began quietly using the Scientific Weapon once again. Occasionally this was used as a terror weapon in South America itself against rebellious villages, but much more often it was deployed abroad. As with Karlus Barkalus in Africa, the Combine at this time typically took pragmatic decisions about how to go about its stated aims of eliminating all differences between humans, in contrast to the later full-throated fanaticism of the post-Alfarus era. Just as the central Combine typically assumed that the eventual ‘perfect homogenised’ human culture would look suspiciously like the pre-war culture of an average person living in Cordoba, the Batavian Zones’ leadership tended to strike at cultures that deviated from the Javanese majority (excluding the Dutch and Meridians, of course). New Guinea was the obvious place to start, with its countless primitive tribes[14] isolated from the world. A few passing linguists had written of how the tribes had countless languages and dialects which few outsiders had ever experienced or written down. The Batavian Societists were keen to ensure that nobody ever would.
Thus the first major crime against the nations of the Batavian Societists took place in a land that was theoretically supposed to be a Belgian colony, without the Belgians holed up in Karl Theodor Stadt [Port Moresby again] even realising it. The Batavian Societists combined the use of death-luft with the pragmatic approach to Garderism that had developed in parallel in Africa; do not take away the children of true believers, but take those of outsiders or rebels and raise them in creches. Thousands died in the attacks on New Guinea, but thousands more were taken away to be raised away from their ancestral language and culture, immersed in Novalatina.
Emboldened by the lack of world reaction to this, during the Black Twenties the Batavian Societists would then target the island of Bali. It was at this point that tensions rose between Batavia (or ‘Zon9Urb1’) and the central Combine, as the targeting of Bali seemed to come with suspicious motivations. Yes, Bali stood out from its neighbouring islands as a survival of Hinduism, and had unique cultural aspects of dance and theatre, but it still seemed a lot more like the decision a Muslim Javanese cultural supremacist would make rather than someone judging all cultures to be equally worthy of annihilation.
Though the Black Twenties meant that central intervention took longer than it might have, what might have been the first Societist civil war was ruthlessly quashed. Many of the Batavian ringleaders were exiled for their crimes of ‘deviationism’ and had their own children taken away. The Combine took a clear position that just because the Javanese were in the majority did not mean their culture was not also worthy of destruction. In practice, the sheer numbers did mean that Javanese culture significantly influenced the eventual homogenised culture of the Combine, not least because of the later reaction against carrying on Meridian cultural practices. But in terms of specific examples of literary survival and so on, amid constant rebellions and unrest, the Javanese identity would be attacked as much as that of the Dayaks, Sundanese and others. Malay culture would survive in the Siamese lands no matter what happened, but the multitudinous other cultures of the East Indies—that fractured rainbow of endless diversity—would be ground down to mere suggestions of what they had been.
It was, in the words of the exiled Javanese poet Kenarok Saleh, “The murder of all it is to live as a human being…the holocaust of heritage…the massacre of memory.” The images of burning libraries and puppet theatres remain permanently ingrained into the global popular memory as a wake-up call to recognise the evil of the Societists. And yet, that is very much a hindsight view. As the Societists had calculated, few in Europe or the Novamund cared about the fate of the East Indies. So long as trade could continue—and it could—traders cared not for the smoke going up from burning villages behind the port. Only in California, where exiles taught local yachtsmen how to build ‘proa’ sailing ships with outriggers, did public awareness of the magnitude of the disaster become clear.
And so as the Black Twenties dawned, for so many countries, the biggest threat to the world seemed to come not from the Combine, but from Russia…
[1] Due to the Rosetta Stone not being discovered in TTL, and a suitable source for cracking hieroglyphs not being found until about a century later.
[2] In TTL ‘Nusantara’ has come to mean the whole Malay Archipelago / Maritime Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and so on. In OTL the term often more restrictively means only the Indonesian islands, plus Malaysian Borneo, East Timor etc.
[3] In OTL modern Indonesia, Gajah Mada is frequently treated as a national hero and unifying figure for his work in unifying much of what constitutes the modern country, but the Sundanese-dominated city of Bandung is one of the few to resist naming a street after him thanks to the ancestral memory.
[4] This is a rather rose-tinted way of putting it, of course, as the Batavians were quite happy to tell the native peoples they needed to get out of their houses right now because their village was being bulldozed tomorrow to build a railway line, and so forth.
[5] See Part #100 in Volume II and Part #121 in Volume III.
[6] The biggest OTL example of such tensions is the ‘Chinese War’ (or ‘Java War’) of 1741-43, in which the Dutch attempted to deport Chinese settlers, but rumours they were simply drowning them at see led to riots and revolt by the Chinese in Batavia followed by massacres by the Dutch. This conflict drew in the Sultanate of Mataram and the rival Cakraningrat princes of Madura, and was the ultimate trigger for the decline in Mataramese power and Mataram’s partition a few years later. In TTL it was avoided, which was important as it kept Mataram a viable power for long enough for Portuguese intervention to have an impact.
[7] Used in a broader sense to mean northern Brazil, the historiography influenced by the later borders. An OTL book would likely use the word ‘temporary’ to refer to the Dutch conquests at this time (as they were later won back by Portugal and inherited by Brazil), but, while this did happen in TTL, they later became part of the exilic Dutch-led Guyanese Republic, so the situation is a little more confused.
[8] This is described more dismissively than it would be in an OTL book, because in OTL the English colonies in Malaya would become the foundations of what became British Malaya (and thereafter the modern state of Malaysia), but in TTL trading outposts in wars and the expansion of Siam put paid to that.
[9] Shellac is of course an animal product, but the lac bugs are farmed on specially cultivated trees.
[10] This is in the older sense of the word, more referring to the city now known in OTL as Kuching rather than a much wider area of northern Borneo.
[11] This is expressing, perhaps unconsciously, the common (but incorrect) narrative assumption that the purpose of the French/IEF intervention was to strangle the Combine in the cradle.
[12] This is supposition, of course.
[13] See Part #162 in Volume IV.
[14] Using contemporary language.
Fantastic update, it really demonstrates the rather horrific implications of the spread of societism into an area as diverse as Indonesia.
I'm pretty sure it's just a typo but Batavia, modern day Jakarta, is located on the west side of Java.
Poor, poor Indonesia and New Guinea. I suspected that they would homogenise around Javanese culture, just because of population, but Zon1Urb1 insisted on ideological purity instead of practicality.
I'm now curious - if the Constantinople school was displaced into Darfur, how did the Eternal State end up.
I'm now curious - if the Constantinople school was displaced into Darfur, how did the Eternal State end up.
Jesus. Isn't New Guinea like the most linguistically diverse place (of comparable area) in the world?
So the Philippines and Malaya don't turn Societist. Presumably also Siam. (?) So that's something.
As I said, Russia is going to try reassert itself in Navarre and ends up screwing up the situation in Spain somehow.
So the Philippines and Malaya don't turn Societist. Presumably also Siam. (?) So that's something.
As I said, Russia is going to try reassert itself in Navarre and ends up screwing up the situation in Spain somehow.