Censorship in the Dutch East Indies was significantly stricter than in the Netherlands, as the freedom of the press guaranteed in the Constitution of the Netherlands did not apply in the country's overseas colonies. Before the twentieth century, official censorship focused mainly on Dutch-language materials, aiming at protecting the trade and business interests of the colony and the reputation of colonial officials. In the early twentieth century, with the rise of Indonesian nationalism, censorship also encompassed materials printed in local languages such as Malay and Javanese, and enacted a repressive system of arrests, surveillance and deportations to combat anti-colonial sentiment.

History

Dutch East India Company rule (1600s–1799)
Although the Dutch started to establish a presence in Southeast Asia at the turn of the seventeenth century, there was no functioning European printing press in their settlements there for several decades, and the first government bulletins were handwritten circulars.
The Dutch East India Company contracted the first European bookbinder in the Indies, Hendrick Brandt, in Batavia in 1668. The first Indies censor Peter Pauw was appointed that same year to read and approve any materials printed by that press, and the others which were founded in the following years. Although the rules were not as clearly codified as in later eras, they operated under the principle of preventive censorship. Under the authority of the Governor General, materials deemed unsuitable for publication could be held back and printers could be imprisoned or deported. The East India Company did have a veto on such cases but rarely involved itself. Pauw's duties were taken over in 1692 by Abraham van Riebeek. After contracting with various private printers in Batavia over the next decades, authorities finally established a government printing house in the Batavia Castle in 1712.

The first newspaper in the Indies was the short-lived  (1744–6); being printed in Dutch, which was understood by only a tiny minority in the Indies, it did not have a wide distribution. Its content consisted mainly of government bulletins, auction news, and advertisements. However, as the Dutch East India Company became afraid that such a paper would reveal trade secrets to other European powers in Asia, its three-year contract was not renewed in 1746 and it was forced to close. The only other independent newspaper to appear in the Indies in this era was the  which appeared in 1776. Published in Batavia, it only covered auctions and other business bulletins; nonetheless, it was closely scrutinized by censors.

Christian printed materials in the Indies were also subject to censorship by the Dutch Reformed Church. However, very little religious material was printed in the Indies during this era, due to the lack of printing capacity and skilled workforce.

French and British interregnum (1799–1816)
After the Dutch East India Company defaulted in 1799, the colony was taken over directly by the Dutch crown. However, starting in 1806, the colony was occupied by France and then Britain during a period called the French and British interregnum in the Dutch East Indies. Herman Willem Daendels was appointed Governor General of the Indies by Napoleon in 1807.  He purchased the City Printing House in Batavia and merged it with the Castle Printing House to form a new government printer, the, and began to publish a new government bulletin after 1810 (the ). He seems to have continued to organize the small printing industry in Batavia according to the principle of preventive censorship., which was still being published in the Castle Printing House, shut down during the transfer of assets to the new administration, as its functions were assumed by the Courant. However, that publication only lasted until August 1811, when the British conquered Java.
 
During the period of British rule over the Indies, printing house was taken over by W. Hunter, who had additional equipment and workers brought from Bengal. In February 1812 a new English-language government publication was created, the Java Government Gazette. That publication had a very different tone from the Dutch ones that had preceded it; it included commentary about politics, Indies folklore, and humour on top of the usual business news.

Dutch control and development of colony (1817–55)
When the Dutch took control in the Indies again in 1817 they continued to operate the Government Printing Office  in Batavia and launched an official publication, the  (called the  after 1828). This new publication included submissions from readers as well as government and business news. The Dutch resumed their censorship of printed works; because the industry and press were still so small, it did not require specialized legislation.

As the colonial economy developed, and the civil service was greatly expanded, the European population in the Indies became much larger and more literate. At first, short-lived independent newspapers started to appear in Batavia, including the  (1825) and the  (1829). The Java War against Diponegoro took place during this time. It was not until the 1840s and 1850s that longer-lasting papers began to establish themselves, such as another paper named the  which launched in 1851 and became  after 1852;  which appeared in Surabaya in 1831; and the  in Semarang in 1845 (known as De Locomotief after 1852). Nonetheless, where previous newspapers in the Indies had been limited to simply trade and civil service notices with a handful of reader submissions, this new generation of papers covered European and Indies news. This was made easier with the introduction of the telegraph in 1856 and modern postal service to the Indies in 1869.

An 1844 rule prohibiting the printing of any government materials, even benign ones, by independent printers put yet another burden on these publications. The journal, published at the government printing house, was one publication targeted by that rule; its editor W. R. van Hoëvell tried to get around censors and publish honest criticisms of abuses in the colonial system and was faced with repeated censorship and threats of criminal sanctions. In 1848 he was elected to Dutch parliament and returned to the Netherlands.

Roughly a dozen newspapers and journals appeared in Java during this period. These publications were generally only read by Europeans, not Indonesians, who were excluded from European schools and who could generally not read Dutch.

Rise of newspapers and press regulations (1856–1905)
This rise in the number and complexity of newspapers and the printing industry in the Indies led to the development of a more codified set of press censorship regulations in the early 1850s. The first draft of these regulations was written in October 1851, with debates in Dutch parliament and a Royal Proclamation in April 1852 and further debates in 1853 and 1854. It came in force by decree of the Governor General of the Indies on 10 November 1856 as the Regulation on Printed Matter in the Netherlands Indies (, often abbreviated as Printing Press Regulations ). Further ordinances relating to press freedoms were added in 1858. The penalties for these Press Offences () were quite strict; anyone operating a printing press had to register with authorities, pay deposits, and provide copies to censors before publication; in case of severe violations the press could be shut down by censors before a printed item reached the public, with fines of up to 500 guilders or three years in prison. Many of these rules had been enforced before but were now made more explicit.

The main worry of policymakers and censors was the European press in the Indies, since there was not yet a vernacular-language newspaper industry. They worried that an aggressive press in the colony could undermine the government with criticism of the Aceh War, the opium monopoly, or defamation of local officials (which could include mere reporting on abuses or corruption); the interests of public order and the state were considered to be above free speech. In the Netherlands, which generally enjoyed freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution of the Netherlands, some critics saw the strict censorship in the Indies as regressive and contrary to liberal ideals; opposition leader Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, who had lost his campaign to extend press freedom to the Indies, called it "the work of darkness" (). Other restrictive measures were codified in the 1850s; an 1854 constitutional regulation denied the right of freedom of association or assembly in the Indies, rights which would not be granted until after World War I. 

Authorities faced challenges in implementing these regulations on daily newspapers as they became more numerous; a court decision in 1869 removed the obligation of newspapers to submit copies to censors after a long dispute with. Nonetheless, by the 1870s and 1880s, the editors most of the major Dutch-language newspapers in Java had faced criminal charges, with some being imprisoned for as long as a year, had their offices closed by force, or were deported; in lesser cases many spent a month in prison or paid fines. For example, in 1879 an editor of  in Semarang was jailed for six months for criticizing the Governor General; another editor of the paper was deported in 1881 for printing an article deemed libelous to a local Sultan. The punishment could fall upon various people depending on who could be identified as responsible: the writer, then the editor, then the publisher, and finally the printer and distributor if none of the others could be identified or tried. Some of the jailed editors could have avoided their sentence by giving up the name of anonymous contributors who they had printed, but due to their journalistic ethics none of them ever did so. Some printing houses were forced to close permanently under these regulations, as in the case of Jonas Portier & Co. in Surakarta whose press was closed after their newspaper  went too far in criticizing the government. In other cases journalists were also arrested over penal code violations that predated the censorship regulations; the Governor General also made use of his "extraordinary