A Brief History of the Dutch East Indies Part 3: The Arrival of the Europeans.
By Kathryn Pentecost Fig.1: Dutch architecture, Yogyakarta 2011 (Collection: The author) The Dutch were certainly not the first Europeans to trade in the archipelago; English and Portuguese traders were also keen to exploit the natural resources of the archipelago. The Dutch, however, created the first multinational trading empire with the purpose of breaking the Portuguese…