Bali kept its independence long after most of the Indonesian archipelago had fallen under European control, protected by its warlike kingdoms, its lack of a single obvious prize and the reefs that guarded its coasts. When the reckoning came in the early twentieth century, it was brutal and swift, and it produced one of the most harrowing episodes in the island’s history. The colonial conquest of Bali is a story of trade rivalries and salvage disputes that ended in the mass ritual deaths known as the puputan.
What follows traces the long European contact and the slave trade, the Dutch wars in the north from the 1840s, and the destruction of the southern kingdoms of Badung and Klungkung in 1906 and 1908. Then comes the island under Dutch rule, and the unexpected consequence of conquest: the deliberate promotion of Bali as a cultural paradise, and the arrival of the first tourists.
Early contact and the trade in people
Europeans had known Bali since the late sixteenth century, when Dutch ships first called at the island. For the next two hundred years the relationship was largely commercial. Bali exported rice, cloth and, above all, slaves, and Balinese kings sold captives taken in war and debt to Dutch and other traders, who carried them to Batavia and across the region. This traffic made some rulers wealthy and gave the Europeans a reason to keep dealing with the island’s fractious courts.
Bali in this period was not a single state but a cluster of rival kingdoms, among them Buleleng in the north, Badung, Tabanan, Gianyar, Bangli, Karangasem and the senior house of Klungkung, heir to the old Gelgel line described in our history of Hindu Bali and the Majapahit refuge. These kingdoms fought and allied among themselves, and their divisions would later make it easier for a determined outside power to pick them off one by one.
The northern wars
The Dutch move from trade to conquest began in the north. In the 1840s the Netherlands, anxious to secure its authority across the archipelago, pressed the Balinese kings to accept its overlordship and to give up the custom of tawan karang, the claiming of shipwrecks and their cargoes as royal property. The kingdom of Buleleng resisted, and the Dutch launched a series of military expeditions between 1846 and 1849.
The fighting was hard, and a Balinese defence at Jagaraga under the general Gusti Ketut Jelantik inflicted early setbacks before superior firepower told. By 1849 Buleleng and neighbouring Jembrana had been brought under Dutch control, giving the colonial power a foothold in the north of the island. For half a century afterwards the southern kingdoms kept a wary independence, but the pattern of pretext, ultimatum and expedition had been set.
The road to the southern campaign
The final crisis grew out of another salvage dispute. In 1904 a small trading vessel was wrecked off Sanur, in the territory of Badung, and its cargo was plundered by local people according to the old custom. The Dutch demanded compensation from the Raja of Badung, who refused to pay for acts he did not consider crimes. The quarrel dragged on, and the colonial government resolved to settle the matter by force.
In September 1906 a Dutch expedition landed on the south coast and advanced on Denpasar, the seat of Badung. The kingdom’s ruler faced a stark choice: surrender to an overwhelming enemy or make an end on his own terms. He chose the second, and what followed shocked even those who ordered it.
The puputan of Badung and Klungkung
On the morning of 20 September 1906 the Raja of Badung, his family, priests and followers came out of the palace in procession. They were dressed in white, the colour of cremation, and carried krisses and their finest jewellery. As they advanced towards the Dutch line the troops opened fire, and the Balinese pressed forward into the guns. Those who were not shot down turned their blades upon themselves and one another. Hundreds died in a single morning, and a second court at Pemecutan met the same fate. This was the puputan, the fight to the finish.
Tabanan fell soon after, its raja taken prisoner and dead within days. The senior kingdom of Klungkung held out until April 1908, when a fresh dispute brought a Dutch expedition to its gates. The Dewa Agung, heir to the prestige of Gelgel, led his court out in a last puputan, and the ruler and his family were killed. With the fall of Klungkung the last independent Balinese kingdom was gone, and the conquest of the island was complete.
Bali under the Dutch
After 1908 Bali became a residency of the Netherlands East Indies. The Dutch governed partly through surviving aristocratic families, whom they restored to ceremonial roles as intermediaries, and they took a deliberately conservative approach to the island’s society. Stung by the reputation the puputan had earned them, they promoted the idea of Bali as a precious living relic of Hindu civilisation that needed shielding from the modern world.
Outside settlement was discouraged, missionary activity was restricted, and colonial scholars and officials worked to document and, in their view, preserve Balinese religion and art. This policy was paternalistic and served Dutch interests, but it did help keep the island’s ceremonial culture intact through the colonial decades. It also produced the seductive image of a timeless island paradise, an image that would soon be put to commercial use.
The first tourists
From the 1920s that image began to draw visitors. Steamship companies and the colonial government marketed Bali as an exotic and artistic destination, and a small stream of European and American travellers, writers, scholars and artists arrived. Some, like the German painter Walter Spies, settled around Ubud and involved themselves closely in local artistic life, helping to shape both Western pictures of Bali and the island’s own dance and painting.
This pre-war tourism was modest, a matter of a few thousand well-off visitors a year, but it fixed Bali’s reputation abroad and laid the groundwork for the mass tourism that came much later. That gentler interlude did not last. The colonial order, and the fragile peace it imposed, would be swept away by the Japanese occupation and the fight for Indonesian independence, the subject of our next history, war and independence.