The VOC founds Batavia (Jakarta)

On 30 May 1619 the soldiers of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, led by its governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen, drove the troops of the sultanate of Banten out of the Javanese port of Jayakarta and burned the town to the ground. On its ruins the company built Batavia, a walled town with a castle and canals that became the capital of its trading empire in Asia and is today the old town of Jakarta. Jayakarta lay at the mouth of the Ciliwung river on the north-west coast of Java. The city counts its history from 1527, when Banten's forces defeated the Portuguese there and renamed the old port Jayakerta, 'glorious fortress'; by 1619 it was ruled by a prince who was Banten's vassal.

The Dutch had traded first at Banten, the great pepper market of western Java, but its sultan would not let them set the terms of the pepper trade. Coen, governor-general from 1617, wanted a base where the company answered to no Asian ruler, a fixed headquarters where its ships from Europe and its trade across Asia could meet, so he moved his headquarters to the company's post at Jayakarta and fortified it. At the end of 1618 an English fleet under Sir Thomas Dale arrived to contest the place, and the prince of Jayakarta's men joined the English. After an indecisive fight at sea Coen ordered the fort held and sailed east to the Moluccas for more ships. In February 1619 Banten took Jayakarta from its own prince, sent the English away and laid siege to the fort. When Coen came back at the end of May the garrison was still holding out, and on the 30th he took the town.

Batavia was a company town from the start. The old fort became the core of a larger castle, whose plan Coen sent home in October 1619; canals were dug and streets laid out on the east bank of the river, and by 1650 the town plan was complete. In June 1620 the first bench of aldermen was named, two company officials and three free citizens with the captain of the Chinese at their side, and in January 1621 the first church council met. The town was named after the Batavi, the ancient tribe the Dutch took for their ancestors. Coen hoped for an eastern Amsterdam full of Dutch settlers, but the town that grew was Asian: Chinese settlers, whose quarter was 'already full of houses' within months of the conquest, enslaved people and company soldiers; around 1700 only about 6,000 of its 70,000 people were of non-Asian origin. In 1628 and 1629 Sultan Agung of Mataram besieged it twice and failed, and Coen died during the second siege.

Batavia remained the company's capital until the company was dissolved in 1799, then the capital of the Dutch East Indies until the Japanese occupation of 1942; the Dutch name stayed until 1949, when Djakarta was proclaimed the capital of independent Indonesia. The castle was pulled down under Governor-General Daendels in 1808–11, but the town hall of 1710 still stands on the old square as the Jakarta History Museum, and wooden sailing ships from all over Indonesia still unload at Sunda Kelapa, the harbour at the river mouth. The city was Dutch for more than three centuries; Indonesia was not. The company held its forts, the spice islands and, step by step, much of Java, but most of Sumatra, Borneo, Bali and the eastern islands came under Dutch rule only between 1870 and 1910.