Herman Warner Muntinghe (1773-1827), the protagonist of this study, was the main architect of the new colonial state that emerged in the Indonesian archipelago in the early nineteenth century. This book focuses on the question of how ideas from the Enlightenment took shape in the Dutch colonial state formation in the Indonesian archipelago and how Muntinghe, between 1806 and 1827, collaborated with his superiors, to develop and implement these ideas. The key to this development of ideas about colonial governance was not primarily in The Hague or in Batavia, but in the interaction between contemporary political theory and practice in the Indies themselves and the rest of the European colonial world. Many concrete plans did not originate from the drawing boards in The Hague, but from the colonial experience in the archipelago. Therefore this study pays special attention to the opposing forces in the Indies. The response of the population to colonial policy largely determined the leeway of the government in Batavia. The early nineteenth-century debate on the future of the former VOC possessions in the Indonesian archipelago was pre-eminently transnational in character. Ever since the 1770s, Batavia has been closely monitoring the rapid changes taking place in British India and the new forms of exploitation being tested in that colony. The British example was frequently quoted in the publications of Dirk and Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and later in Muntinghe's writings. The major issues concerning the British East India Company were the subject of debate in the British Parliament, and they were well covered in the newspapers. The colonial discourse thus had a much more public character in England than in the Batavian Republic. My research confirms how the ideas in the British and Dutch colonial worlds around the Indian Ocean influenced each other. In this study I use Muntinghe's biography as a lens to better understand the origins of the colonial state. By connecting his personal history with the political and ...