The development of government finances

Abstract

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the important change in the nature of the authority exercised by the government of Netherlands India was accompanied by a substantial change in the importance of the funds it spent in carrying out its administrative responsibilities. When the ‘Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie’ (United East India Company) was taken over by the Batavian Republic (Holland) in 1796, little essentially changed in the management of the ‘East Indian Possessions’. Nor was the administration changed when the Company was finally dissolved in 1798. In the first decades of the nineteenth century one still comes across the Company’s bookkeeping system, which was conceived primarily to administer its trading activities and from which it is almost impossible to infer the revenue and expenditure derived before 1795 from the Company’s responsibilities as territorial government or from its various other territorial claims (Mansvelt 38). Nor for the time being was much changed.