the capital, which was then called Batavia. The larger island of Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land, with a dazzling constellation of cities, many of which are thousands of years old, but Batavia was never an important city for any of its local kingdoms. It was an outpost of the major pepper port of Banten when the Dutch East India Company, one of the most important organizations in the development of both global capitalism and colonialism, took over in 1619.2 The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the
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