Petroleumscape as Battleground: Pladjoe, Pearl in the Crown of the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (BPM/Shell) in the Dutch East Indies

Oil fields can easily turn into battlefields. This happened more than once in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies (Nederlands-Indië, now Indonesia) in the turmoil of the 1940s, when Japanese, Dutch, Allied, and Indonesian forces fought fierce battles over the control of
local oil facilities—with good reason, because in the 1940s the Dutch East Indies was one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. Centered on the oil industry city of Plajoe, this portion of the global petroleumscape, a multilayered network of spaces made possible by petroleum
and facilitating its flow, was designed to support a country on the other side of the world.
It was then reshaped by war and revolution, in the context of changing global actors. This chapter tells a largely unknown story about the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of the petroleumscape in what is now the province of South Sumatra in Indonesia. It is
a story of how oil fields can become battlefields and of how even in peacetime a petroleumscape is shaped by attempts to protect and defend sources of wealth and power.