The Netherlands' colony in what is now Indonesia, born from the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) chartered in 1602 and lasting until Indonesian independence in 1949. A small European nation extracted the wealth of a vast tropical archipelago for three and a half centuries — first through what is often called the first great multinational corporation, then as a colonial state running forced-cultivation systems — and in the process drew the borders that became the modern Indonesian republic.
A single corporation once held the power to wage war, sign treaties, build forts, and coin its own money. In 1621 the governor of the Dutch East India Company, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, had most of the people of the tiny Banda Islands killed, enslaved, or driven out, because the Banda Islands were the near-exclusive source of the nutmeg and mace he meant to monopolize, and would not trade on his terms. From that violence grew a colony that lasted three centuries, and the boundaries the Dutch consolidated across the archipelago became the main territorial framework that modern Indonesia inherited, though that inheritance was contested and incomplete.