Of Sugar and of Bullet: Tracing the consequences of 1740 Batavia Massacre

The 1740 Batavia Massacre, which took place in what is now Jakarta, Indonesia, resulted in the extermination of the local Chinese community. While various interpretations exist regarding the motivations behind this massacre, the Dutch authorities described the event as a spontaneous incident officially. However, it has been widely proposed that the Dutch orchestrated this event to maximize the trade profit for the VOC (Dutch East India Company). As a key player in the Euro-Asia trade, VOC gained substantial profit from transporting commodities from Asia to Europe, including those are closely related to the Chinese group, such as pepper. By employing difference-in-differences to study the price of pepper and white pepper, commodities generally handled by Chinese worker, we observe that the massacre led to both short-term and long-term price increases in profits for VOC. We further investigated historical accounts, which verified our findings in the commodity price using quantitative methods. Our paper suggests that the massacre was most likely not an accident, instead being a result of corporate profiteering.