The fall of the Netherlands to France during the Revolutionary Wars and the dissolution of the company led in due course to significant changes in the administration of the Indies. Under Napoleon's "Kingdom of Holland," one of his marshals, Herman Willem Daendels, was appointed as governor-general. Daendels strengthened Javanese defenses, raised new forces, built new roads within Java, and improved the internal administration of the island. He attempted to formalize the position of the Javanese regents, subordinating them to Dutch prefects and emphasizing their character as civil servants of a central government rather than as semi-independent local rulers.

Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1811 Java fell to a British East India Company force under Lord Minto, governor-general of India, who, after the surrender, appointed Thomas Stamford Raffles as lieutenant governor. Raffles approached his task in the conviction that British administrative principles, modeled in part on those developed in Bengal, could liberate the Javanese from the tyranny of Dutch methods; he believed that liberal economic principles, by ending compulsory cultivation, could simultaneously expand Javanese agricultural production, improve revenue, and make the island a market for British goods. Along with his doctrinaire liberalism, he brought to his task a respect for Javanese society. Before his appointment, he had been a student of Malay literature and culture, and during his period in Batavia he encouraged the study of the society he found about him. Raffles rediscovered the ruins of the great Buddhist temple Borobudur in central Java and published his History of Java in 1817, a year after his return to England.

Raffles carried further the administrative centralization begun by Daendels and planned to group the regencies of Java into 16 residencies. By declaring all lands the property of the government and by requiring cultivators to pay a land rent for its use, he proposed to end the compulsory production system. This, he believed, would free the peasants from servility to their "feudal" rulers and from the burden of forced deliveries to the Dutch and allow them to expand their production under the stimulus of ordinary economic motives. Unfortunately, Raffles oversimplified the complexities of traditional land tenure. He misread the position of the regents, whom he at first wrongly believed to be a class of feudal landholders rather than an official aristocracy. (The regents, in fact, had no proprietary rights in the land of their subjects.) He was concerned to replace what he saw as a tribute system, paid in the form of forced deliveries, by the payment of a fixed and regular rent that would leave the landholders more free to enjoy the fruits of their enterprise than they had been in the past. But despite a series of adjustments in his original plan, Raffles failed to devise an effective means of applying his theories before the return of Java to Dutch hands as part of the general settlement following the defeat of Napoleon.