Colonial document box

This document box is made for the Dutch on Batavia (or perhaps another colonial area). East India Company officials that were stationed on or further away from Batavia were required to regularly send written reports on trade and local politics to Europe. The Dutch East India Company merchants were tasked with detailing the customs and habits of the indigenous population, covering aspects like their housing, the type of household items they used, clothing, food, drinks, and religion. Descriptions also included the temperament of the people—whether perceived as cruel, friendly, faithful, or deceitful—and closely observed child-rearing practices, especially concerning children born to Dutch or other European parents. Detailed accounts of agriculture, animal husbandry, mining, and industries were essential. The diligent need for copying these reports three or four times made writing desks and document boxes essential furniture items. Notes were stored in flat document boxes or writing desks with sloping tops. In Indonesia, small writing desks were often made out of teak or amboyna wood. They were placed on matching stands. The flat document boxes on the other hand were typically crafted from amboyna wood with brass mounts, occasionally incorporating precious wood such as satinwood or calamander. The boxes are finished with bronze or silver mounts. Various other exotic wood types, sometimes indistinguishable to the naked eye, were also used for these furniture pieces. European types of wood could not stand the humid and warm climate in the colonies. 

Padouk is a sturdy and dense tropical wood, also known as padauk or paduak. Padauk trees are mostly indigenous of Africa (African padauk) but also less of Southeast Asia (Burma padauk or Andaman padauk). During the colonial era, trade routes were extensive, and materials from various parts of the world made their way to different colonies due to commerce and colonization.

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A new administrative headquarter: Batavia
By T.M. (Toussaint) Verkoulen

Batavia was the administrative center of the Dutch East India Company from 1619 till 1799. The founding of Batavia by Jan Pieterszoon Coen on the island of Java played a major role in the prosperity of the Dutch trade. Coen saw the need of an eastern capital for the Dutch East Indian Company after their first settlement on Ambon Island in 1610. Coen chose an inhabited harbor on the northern coast of Java that was one of the larger islands. The nearly located mouth of the Ciliwung River was a great source for the supply of fresh water and an ideal location for a harbor connected to the inland. Batavia was (compared to Ambon) more centrally located in the Indonesian archipelago and had the possibility of creating a new urban planning. Thereby they could literally bypass the Strait of Malacca and control traffic passing through the Sunda Strait. Eventually Batavia grew out as an administrative center and warehouse, where goods could be collected and shipped back to Europe.
In the beginning, the residences and warehouses were in the previously established castle of Batavia. Around 1645 the historical center of the city of Batavia (now Kota) was completed. The river had been straightened and the walls surrounded a rectangular area. In the following time the completed walled city expands itself with more walls, streets, canals, and bridges. In the later 18th century, the expansion of Batavia took place mainly outside the existing walls. The population of Batavia began small but initially witnessed an explosive growth during the first decades after its founding. Numbers increased from a mere 8,000 in 1632, to 21,911 by 1699. Between 1700 and 1730 the population within the walls stagnated around 20,000 to 23,000. This stagnation was followed by a steep decline caused by environmental devastation in the so called ‘Ommelanden’ (area near Batavia), and the expansion of coastal saltwater fishponds (tumbaks) near the city that caused more waterborne diseases such as typhus and malaria. Mortality rates could surge to catastrophic levels in the colonial areas due to the collective effect of diseases transmitted through water. More than half of the population of Batavia were slaves. With the ‘Ommelanden’, the Preanger region, Bantam (Banten), Cheribon (Cirebon), and the Northeast coast of Java (Pasisir) together, the island of Java counted around 160.000 western and non-western inhabitants at the peak in the end of the 18th century.

Gezicht op Batavia, Robert Sayer, after I. van Ryne 1754.

Source: J. Veenendaal, "Furniture from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India during the Dutch period", 1985.
M.L. Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia: Exposing the hierarchy of the Dutch colonial city”, 2015.
M. Vink, “From the Cape to Canton: The Dutch Indian ocean world, 1600-1800”, 2019.