The continued existence of the Dutch East India Company has produced a thalassocratic free trade zone that is known colloquially by the inhabitants as Pax Hollandica, by the 1900s.

The Dutch East India Company jealously maintains the monopoly on trade through the Straits of Malacca, and only allows European powers to pass through leaving their military behind, and allowing only trading companies through for a passage tax. The result is that the Dutch East India Company becomes the sole protecting power of the China and Japan trade, and in the Taiping Rebellion eagerly sell weapons to both the Taiping and the Qing Dynasty resulting in a neverending Warring States period. This allows for the emergence of the China Treaty ports as the China Coast International Settlements, with the Dutch East India Company as the enforcer of the US proposed Open Door Policy, providing traders around the world visa free access to the China trade.

The Dutch East India Company is shattered by a traumatic and bloody decolonization process in the 1930s by the emerging Sultanate of Malaya, which blocks the Strait of Malacca. The inability to gather support from Europe and British India results in the initially temporary departure of European powers during WWII to the European theatres.

While The Dutch East India Company privatizes its East India holdings to local investors, its institutions remain active in successor organizations like the SEATO military union and the ASEAN free trade zone, led by Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and East Indonesia that continue the fight against the Sultanate of Malaya.

By the 2000s, the world order of Asia is flipped vs the original timeline (OTL) where the European influenced Southeast Asia under the civil union of ASEAN is the neoliberal resource rich industrial powerhouse, whereas Northeast Asia is its autocratic, disunited, unequal, traditional protectionist foil.

Prosperous Thai businessmen can be seen taking a vacation and enjoying the delights of the military coup prone but tourist friendly traditional Japan.

Overview

1800s-1930s

The divergence point begins in the Raid on Pandang, Sumatra by the British East India Company. In OTL, the superior Dutch East Indies Navy surrenders without a fight, despite the inferior numbers of the British force. In alternate history, the Dutch Navy puts up a fair fight allowing the Dutch East India Company to hobble along past the Napoleonic Wars.

• Napoleonic Wars
  • 1795 - French Revolutionary forces conquer the Netherlands, causing Stadtholder William V of Orange to issue the Kew Letters.
    • Accordingly, The former Dutch West India Company surrenders and is overrun by the British Empire.
    • The Dutch East India Company, so as not to antagonize the British Navy, becomes insubordinate to the Batavian Republic (akin to the Brazilian Empire when Portugal is conquered by France) and declares neutrality.
  • The relationship of the Company and Britain then becomes much like that of Argentina and Britain, nominally not part of the British Empire and with no responsibility to fight for it, but a useful neutral trading party closely aligned to Britain that helps prevent more hostile European powers from gaining control in East Asia.
  • The result is the Batavian rescinds the Company charter and ceases further trade for the duration of the Napoleonic Wars, which is deemed by the colonial officials to have been done under duress and ignored.
  • Adrift from European control and remaining at peace for decades, The Dutch East India Company raises a new investment capital round from Tamil, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka traders, raises a Dutch East Indies navy, and hires Balinese, Dayak, and Japanese mercenaries. This reenergizes the Company with a new locally focused merchant class, and begins a new era of Southeast Asian ownership and leadership within the company.
• British and Dutch Collusion
  • The British manage to conquer Dutch Ceylon as per OTL despite the governor planning to resist, ending the Dutch presence in India.
  • The experience leads the Dutch East Indies to put up a stronger fight in their remaining holdings. Dutch Malacca does not surrender to the British.
  • Sir Stamford Raffles finds Bencoolen to be the most wretched port he has ever known, and scouts out to find Singapore as a strategically significant site for a British trading posts.
  • The Dutch East India Company is incensed over the founding of Singapore. Not wanting to put up a further unnecessary fight, the British cede Bencoolen in exchange for Singapore and Dutch Ceylon.
  • The Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company make an agreement to jealously maintain its monopoly over the Strait of Malacca and Lombok Strait, preventing European navies from entering the China trade.
  • The end result is that the British only control Singapore and India, and have a diminished role in Malaya.
• China
  • Due to Dutch East India Company neutrality and eager trade of heavy weaponry to the Taiping Rebellion, China has permanently disintegrated into a Warring States period between Qing Manchuria, vs the early (Taiping descended) Republic of China and petty warlord cliques between them.
  • As a war torn shattered China splinters into the rule of warlords: Tibet becomes a client state of Britain, Manchuria becomes independent long before Japan reached its peak or power.
  • The biggest beneficiary is the Dutch East India Company which held a tightrope balance with the Taiping Empire by offering it Western profit, and operates as the protecting power for neocolonial interests in the China Coast International Settlements, maintaining the neoliberal order to the highest bidder of a new Southeast Asian middle class.
  • Eventually, by the 1890s any vestige of the Taiping Empire crumbles (akin to Oliver Cromwell's forces in England), but the destruction of Confucian principles, under the Hakka with influence from their brethren in the Dutch East India Company, has "rediscovered" the south's Song Dynasty era inclination towards capitalist industrialization.

1930s-1990s

During World War II European colonialism withdraws entirely from Southeast Asia to focus on the European front, and in its place by emerging local proxy states and business interests inherit their colonial leases, and continue where the European colonists left off.

• Dutch East Indies
  • Malayan and Javanese revolutionaries with the support of Vietnam and Manchuria, develop a well planned Jihad conspiracy to make a coordinated strike on Batavia during seasonal flooding, and use the confusion to sack the city and steal its silver reserves. The abject neglect of Dutch Malacca has left the Dutch East India Company blind to such proceedings in their Malay home defense units and the Dutch mercenaries are overrun by native Malay turncoats. Extreme atrocities occur across Java (to the same level as the Pacific War OTL) and the successful decolonization leads to the proclamation of the new Sultanate of Malaya.
  • The wholesale ruin of Dutch East India Company power in Java, Sumatra, and Malaya. With The Dutch East India Company vastly diminished, retreats to the Moluccas as its regional capital, Bali as its power base, outsourcing light manufacturing to Borneo and the China Coast International Settlements, and Dutch Formosa becomes its new core territory. It offers the a portion of the silver reserves of Batavia as a salvage prize to all regional powers that can defeat the Sultanate of Malaya.
  • During WWII, with extreme manpower shortages from Europe and increasing reliance on local labor and mercenaries, the Company provides increasing independence to East Indonesia, organizing their military mercenaries into a unified multinational SEATO command to defend free trade on the seas.
  • The British are in no position to defend Singapore and it is humiliatingly occupied by the Sultanate of Malaya, until later SEATO allies liberate it.
  • Protection dues instead of wily mercenary funds is raised by many sovereign wealth funds, putting them on the level of corporations more than governments. However this causes a tipping point in whereby so little funding and command comes from the occupied Netherlands, that Southeast Asia has become effectively independent from the Dutch East India Company.
• China
  • Manchuria becomes an awful fascist dictatorship on the levels of Myanmar, and hatches a plan to overrun the China Coast International Settlements and the (Taiping) Republic of China. It sacks Tianjin and pillages the city in medieval fashion, causing the China Coast International Settlements to resist all further attempts at annexation.
  • The (Taiping) Republic of China faces a surprise assault that easily overruns much of its provinces and allied warlords causing it to reduced to a rump state in Guangdong, pushing it out of the fight.
  • An enlarged united Korea is a backwards but ferocious power in the region which assists Manchuria with the Korean Navy in assaults on the China Coast International Settlements.
  • The China Coast International Settlements mount a bitter struggle where they assist the (Taiping) Republic of China to reconquer Nanjing, and proceed with growing momentum to force Manchurian forces to a stalemate. By the end of WWII, Manchuria only halts in an armistice and remains undefeated, and as tribute all future customs duties of the northern cities of the China Coast International Settlements are disbursed to Manchuria with some deductions for reparations.
  • Japan provides mercenaries and financial assistance to Manchuria, but is otherwise a neutral party.

During the Cold War, with the absence of major European powers and aiming to stem the spread of Communist ideology and reduce Soviet allies, the US calls for Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and East Indonesia to form the SEATO military union as a successor to the Dutch East India Company's military forces. (Due to the lack of destruction of the colonial power structure by the Japanese invasions, SEATO was able to unite the varied nations into a unified command of the Free World, instead of failing like it did in the Vietnam War.)

• The Union of East Indonesia achieves increasing independence from the Company as it provides the Molucca's primary defense against the Sultanate of Malaya. It is led by Bali, and Borneo with the White Rajahs of Sarawak, with Singapore as a uneasy frontline fortress in the pirate infested Strait of Malacca.
• Indonesian race riots occurring in Java lead the puppet Yogyakarta Sultanate to become independent after a long bloody struggle, causing Indonesia to descend into decade by decade race riot chaos akin to the Irish Troubles or Iraq, ripe field for communist and Islamist insurgencies, and brain drains to occur of decolonized Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakka: to Dutch Formosa, Borneo, the China Coast International Settlements, and the US.
• Harbin and Lushunkou via the Trans Manchurian Railway are leased to the Soviet Union to use as their ice free ports.
• By the 1950s, The Dutch East Indies now only retains the Moluccas and Dutch Formosa under direct Company Rule. A nostalgic sense of loss for the city of Batavia betrayed permeates the era.
• Military power in the East Indies is increasingly subcontracted to local Veldsknecht mercenary groups and postcolonial proxy states that fight a neverending war against the Sultanate of Malaya.

1990s-2010s

• Very few of the ASEAN and SEATO member states provide definitive full democracy to its citizens, more resembling corporatocracies or expeditionary armies fed by their holdings. SEATO is built to serve and protect the power brokers and mercenaries of each nation first, international corporations second, and the people third.
  • Burma is a fascist army with a country on the model of the Republic of China. However, with its military primarily based in China, its effect on the people is far lighter, and the Burma-India-Kunming Railway provides economic prosperity to Burma and Thailand.
  • Cambodian elites draft their people into endless war to subjugate Malaya in the style of Eritrea.
  • Thailand is far more democratic than in OTL as its military is too busy across southeast asia to interfere in its politics, but is no developed country either
  • East Indonesia has very mixed economic results generally living humble and peaceful but with severe corruption problems.
  • Singapore is the only true democracy, one in which only one party can be elected, but with the Strait of Malacca closed to trade and under constant threat of missile shelling from Malaya is far less prosperous or attractive to business.

In the 2000s, a new threat emerges from the Sultanate of Malaya that shatters the hard won peace achieved by ASEAN.

• The Sultanate of Malaya is an increasingly fundamentalist Islamic state that achieved its independence through and terrible atrocities, and hosts Al Qaeda which launches the Bojinka Plot against the SEATO military command, killing thousands.
• In the 1990s Bojinka Plot, the Pope is assassinated in the Philippines, and asian airliners from across the SEATO union flying to Dutch Formosa are to be hijacked and blown up mid air. Inspired by the stunning success of the past destruction of Batavia, the goal is to cripple the open borders of Southeast Asia by adding additional security, and lock SEATO into an eternal war with Islam to reconquer the rest of East Indonesia and parts of the Philippines. Instead of 9/11, 1/15 is the date to remember, a date living in infamy just like Batavia and Tianjin.

Languages

Common Melayu

The Melayu language (a constructed language of pidgin Malay) has been the working language of the Dutch East India Company since its conquest of Malacca. All schools teach primarily in Melayu and do not allow other languages in class, but outside of school no linguicidal policies are obligatory. The result is that in historic Melayu regions like East Indonesia or Formosa, diverse home languages are vibrant and provide loanwords at times, but Melayu provides a unifying common language.

Common Melayu thereby provides its users international trade and idea transfer between a diverse set of ethnic and national groups, but is always a second language allowing them to continue to speak their own home languages.

Company Melayu was standardized as the common language as a purely utilitarian language, and as the Company relinquished control of the language academy to SEATO, it forms the basis of their working language known as Common Melayu.

Due to the diversity of languages in Southeast Asia, Melayu was deliberately kept simple and nonpartisan to function as a common language anyone can learn, but that no single ethnic group has a particular advantage in. It also was meant to be a language that was obligatory in business and international relationship, but not imposed: The nationalist undertones and difficulty of Thai, Cantonese, Fujianese, all precluded them from imposition on other peoples. An austronesian language had to be chosen due to the Dutch history of ruling such peoples.

The base substrate of Melayu is Riau Malay just like with modern Indonesian and Malaysian Malay. Starting in the 1950s in a katharevousa style process, indigenous Austronesian terms primarily from Formosan languages are strongly preferred and loanwords from Dutch and English strictly limited to domain specific operations where possible.

However, basic Common Melayu lacks many important words, and thereby overturns, much like Simple English. It often is difficult for speakers to avoid using terms familiar to their variant of Melayu deriving from their own languages that are unknown to others.

English

British leased areas like Singapore, Penang, Hong Kong, Brunei, and Singapore have traditionally only spoken English as their sole colonial language and have only minimal Melayu comprehension as a third foreign language for trade purposes only.

This makes them part of the Southeast Asian Anglosphere and observer members of the British Commonwealth, with far closer links to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada than even their neighbors.

Hong Kong and Singapore has strongly resisted the imposition of Melayu or Fujianese despite its simplicity, and it has proven to be beneficial pre and post Cold War. The stubbornness matches that of Quebec Canadians in retaining French.

Therefore, the promotion of English as a Lingua Franca grew in popularity. As many of the premier SEATO nations like Thailand, Burma, Singapore, the Philippines, had ties to both Britain and America, English was already a significant minority language requiring translation, and in the rest of the world had reached the status of the Lingua Franca. Therefore many national curriculums faced the growing requirement to learn English, whereas Common Melayu was built to be simple.