On November 2, 1949, delegates from the Netherlands and the Republic of Indonesia signed the Hague Agreement, by which the Dutch crown gave up sovereignty over the East Indies after a bitter war that had run since 1945. A United States of Indonesia came into being under a federal form.
The transfer followed a round-table conference held in the Dutch city, where pressure from the United Nations and from the United States pushed the two sides toward a settlement neither fully liked.
The war was costly. The deal was uneasy. The empire ended there. Jakarta kept the paper.
The Dutch kept some economic ties and New Guinea remained outside the new state for the time being, but the agreement ended more than three centuries of Dutch rule in the archipelago, and the republic led by Sukarno moved quickly to replace the federal structure with a unitary state that matched the boundaries of the old colony.
Indonesia's path after independence was far from smooth, with rebellions, politics, and later turmoil, yet the date closed a colonial chapter that had begun with the spice trade centuries earlier. The Dutch flag came down, and a new one went up over a country the size of a continent. The handover ended a rule that had lasted more than three hundred years and set the new state on its own, uneven course.