Dirk van Hogendorp

Who was Dirk van Hogendorp?

Dirk van Hogendorp was the brother of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, in their youth both trained as soldiers in Prussia. Dirk joined the navy and was stationed in the Dutch Indies. In 1786 he became the resident assistant in Bengal and later resident on Java. He sharply criticized VOC rule on Java for its 'feudal' exactions from the population. He proposed extensive changes to the structure of government and finance on Java, including property rights for the Javanese, transforming the 'bupati' into a salaried bureaucracy, and reforming the taxation system, many of which foreshadowed the ideas of Daendels and Raffles. In 1798 he was jailed for these views by the conservative commissioner-general S.C. Nederburgh but in 1799 escaped on a Danish ship to the Netherlands where he continued his campaign in a series of polemic brochures, in 1803 joining a committee ordered to dismantle the Dutch East India Company.