User:Mhatopzz/Governorate of Sumatra

Governorate of Sumatra (Gouvernement Sumatra) was a governorate of the Dutch East Indies comprising the entire island of Sumatra. The first Dutch East India Company possession in Sumatra can be traced back to the 17th century where settlements and trading posts were established on the west coast of Sumatra under the treaty of Painan in 1663. By the 19th century, the Dutch began their expansion in Sumatra, beginning with Belitung, and later Palembang, by 1824 the British and the Dutch made an agreement that Bencoolen should be exchanged by Malacca. The first Governorate to be established in Sumatra was Sumatra West Coast (Sumatra Westkust) in 1837, followed by Aceh in 1898, and the rest were governed as residencies. Finally in 1938 all the governorates in Sumatra were merged into one governorate and governed by Dutch governors until the Japanese occupation in 1942.

The Governorate of Sumatra consisted of ten residencies of which two were former governorates before the merger, with the capital of Medan. Sumatra hosts over nine native kingdoms, tied to a political contract with the Dutch Empire, the number of native states were originally ten but the Dutch abolished the Sultanate of Riau Lingga in 1911, which was then under the Residency of Riouw and Dependencies.

Sumatra was one of five Dutch East Indies governorates created in 1938, along with Borneo, Great East, Surakarta, and Yogyakarta, the rest being provinces in Java.