JAKARTA: Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said on Wednesday that the Netherlands extracted as much as $31 trillion in wealth from Indonesia during more than 300 years of its colonial rule over the region.

Indonesia declared independence in 1945, following centuries of Dutch colonial exploitation that began at the end of the 16th century.

With the archipelago being its primary source of spices, the Dutch East India Co. established a virtual monopoly on the global spice trade, when nutmeg, cloves and pepper were considered the most expensive and luxurious spices in Europe.

Its profits were so vast that they made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest European powers in the 17th century.

Prabowo highlighted the impacts of the colonization of Indonesia in a speech at the opening of a defense exhibition in Jakarta.

“There was just one research from a few weeks back, which says that during the period of Dutch colonization, the Netherlands took away $31 trillion of our wealth,” he said, but did not reference the quoted study.

“When the Dutch occupied Indonesia, the Netherlands enjoyed having the world’s top GDP per capita … (History) teaches us that if we had been able to protect our wealth, maybe our GDP would have been among the highest in the world.”

Prabowo, who formerly served as Indonesia’s defense minister before assuming the country’s top office, was making a case on the importance of defense spending.

“A nation that does not want to invest in its defense usually will experience their independence being stolen away, will experience the nation being subjugated to the will of others (and witness) the wealth of the nation being stolen — this is the lesson of humankind,” he said.

The period included schemes like the “Cultivation System” — locally known as the “Forced Planting System”— in Java, under which Indonesians were forced to grow export crops like coffee and sugar cane for the Dutch at the cost of their own livelihood and staple food crops to make significant profits for the colonial power. The system led to widespread famines on the island of Java.

According to a study by British historian and economist Angus Maddison, the Forced Planting System in Indonesia significantly drove up the Dutch state income, contributing to about 31.5 percent of its gross domestic product between 1851 and 1870.