Dirk van Hogendorp (3 October 1761: Heenvliet – 29 October 1822: Rio de Janeiro), comte de l'Empire, was a Dutch officer and secretary of War. In 1812 he was governor of Vilnius, in 1813 he was appointed as the governor of Hamburg. Early life In the Prussian Army Van Hogendorp the brother of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, in their youth both trained as soldiers in Prussia (1773–1783). In the Dutch East Indies Van Hogendorp joined the navy and was stationed in the Dutch Indies. In 1786 he became the resident assistant in Bengal and later resident on Java. He sharply criticized VOC rule on Java for its 'feudal' exactions from the population. He proposed extensive changes to the structure of government and finance on Java, including property rights for the Javanese, transforming the 'bupati' into a salaried bureaucracy, and reforming the taxation system, many of which foreshadowed the ideas of Daendels and Raffles. In 1798 he was jailed for these views by the conservative commissioner-general S.C. Nederburgh but in 1799 escaped on a Danish ship to the Netherlands where he continued his campaign in a series of polemic brochures, in 1803 joining a committee ordered to dismantle the Dutch East India Company. Critique of the colonial government Van Hogendorp is most known for a critique of the colonial government in the Dutch Indies which drew on the ideas of French liberalism then in vogue. This report, commonly known as the 'Bericht' (), was published in 1799 after van Hogendorp had spent some 15 years as a navy officer and an administrator in the colony. During that time, he had developed ideas considered troublesome to the authorities and was arrested on account of them. He drafted the 'bericht' while on the ship that brought him back to the Netherlands after his escape from colonial custody. The 'Bericht' argued for significant reforms of the regent system in place in Dutch Java, opposed slavery, and called for a more liberal system of government. The previous system was essentially feudal, in which indigenous regents or lords were supported by the Dutch in return for tributes. Pointing to British successes in India, van Hogendorp suggested that by redistributing land to the common Javanese 'serf', there would be much more individual incentive to work and thus increased productivity, making the colony more profitable. Under van Hogendorp's plan, the Javanese would be encouraged to plant rice as