The struggle known as the Java War (1825-30) is led by a disaffected prince of the Yogyakarta court, Diponegoro (1785-1855).

He is a complex figure who opposes rule by both the Dutch and the complicit Javanese ruler and aristocracy, and whose rebellion must therefore be seen as a Javanese civil war—although not one primarily concerned with questions of succession, as in the eighteenth century—at least as much as an anticolonial one.

Despite his modern Indonesian status as a national hero, Diponegoro apparently seeks merely to have relations with the Dutch return to the form they had assumed in late VOC times, and certainly has no conception of a broader Indonesian nation.