mid nineteenth century, after the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 (better known as the
Indian mutiny), the British government gained political control over what
had until then been a trading venture. From 1874 the British started a policy
of expansion in Malaysia that would endure for the next three decades. Burma
was annexed to the British Empire in 1886. Regarding The Netherlands, the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) established its base in the Indonesian
archipelago—mainly in Java—in the seventeenth century. Although no
longer a signiWcant colonial power from the eighteenth century, The Nether-
lands were given at least some pretensions to economic and political might in
the world by their imperial possessions in Indonesia. Echoes of the havoc
Napoleon was creating in Europe (Chapter 3) reached this area of the globe.
The French invasion of The Netherlands threatened the balance of power in
Southeast Asia. The seizure of the Dutch colonies by the French represented
an obvious threat to British interests in India, and the British East India
Company decided to invade Java. In 1815, after Napoleon’s downfall, the
Congress of Vienna returned Java to The Netherlands. Dutch colonies
expanded in 1871 when the Treaty of Sumatra between The Netherlands
and Great Britain made the northern part of the island Dutch. In 1901
Holland bought West New Guinea and incorporated it into The Netherlands
Indies. Australia ruled part of New Guinea from 1906 (see map 3).
In contrast to Britain and The Netherlands, France’s colonial presence in
Southeast Asia did not materialize until well into the nineteenth century, and
was based primarily on the mainland. The strategy followed by France was to
proWt from the weakness of the local chiefs and monarchs through establish-
ing protectorates while reserving some areas for colonization proper. Initially,
in 1863, the French established a protectorate over Cambodia (old Kampu-
chea), the main area where the ancient Khmer Empire had existed (although
it also expanded over Siam, Laos, and Vietnam). The policy of colonial
expansionism promoted by Jules Ferry resulted in the appropriation of
Annam and Tonkin (both in present-day Vietnam) in 1884. This led to the
proclamation of the French Indochina Union in 1887, a federation whose
capital was atWrst Saigon and then, from 1902, Hanoi. In addition to Annam
and Tonkin, Indochina comprised of Cochin China and the Khmer Republic
(Cambodia), with Laos added in 1893 and the remaining independent parts
of Cambodia in 1907 (map 3). Two later players in the colonialism of South-
east Asia were Germany and the United States. The former occupied Papua
New Guinea at the end of the nineteenth century, and the transfer of the
Philippines from Spain to the US in 1898 would mark the beginning of the
American presence in this area (OVner 1999). The only country to remain
independent throughout the history of modern European colonization in
Southeast Asia was Siam, present-day Thailand, in mainland Southeast Asia.
214 Colonial Archaeology