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To the outside world, as to later Balinese writers, the period following Gelgel’s Golden Age was one of chaos — in which fractious kings ruled from courts scattered about the island. This was not necessarily so in contemporary Balinese terms, where the new states must have represented a more dynamic way of conducting the affairs of state and external trade. Bali became famous on the international scene at this time as a source of slaves, savage fighters, beautiful women and skilled craftsmen.

According to traditional accounts, the fate and status of present-day Balinese families was also largely determined at this time. Kingdoms rose and fell with alarming rapidity, clans split and were demoted or even enslaved, aspiring princes waged war and organized lavish ceremonies. Such human dramas were punctuated by a series of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, epidemics and volcanic eruptions.

Bali’s principal export throughout the 17th and 18th centuries was slaves. Warfare and a revision of Bali’s Hindu law codes helped provide a steady supply of slaves to meet an ever-increasing overseas demand. War captives, criminals and debtors were sold abroad indiscriminately by Balinese rulers, who maintained a monopoly on the export trade. In north Bali, Europeans were even invited in to oversee the trade, and the Dutch in particular purchased large numbers of Balinese to serve as laborers, artisans and concubines in their extensive network of trading ports — especially their capital at Batavia (now Jakarta), where Balinese slaves made up a sizeable portion of the population. Balinese were even sent to South Africa, where in the early 18th century they constituted up to a quarter of the total number of slaves in that country.

Likewise, Balinese wives and concubines were very much favored by wealthy Chinese traders, for their industriousness and beauty, and the fact that-they had no aversion to pork, unlike the Muslim Javanese. An early 19th-century trader noted that Balinese women were among the most expensive slaves, costing “30, 50 and even 70 Spanish dollars, according to her physical qualities.” The same observer later comments that the Balinese “regard deportation from their island as the worst possible punishment. This attitude results from their strongly-held conviction that their Gods have no influence outside Bali and that no salvation is to be expected for those who die elsewhere.”

The principal kingdoms which emerged during this period were Buleleng in the north, Karangasem in the east and Mengwi in the southwest. At various times, these realms expanded to conquer parts of Bali’s neighboring islands. Mengwi and Buleleng moved westward into Java, where they became embroiled in conflicts with and between rival Muslim kingdoms. The Dutch came to play an ever larger role in these conflicts, until eventually the Javanese rulers discovered that they had mortgaged their empires to the gin-drinking Europeans. The Balinese were finally pushed out of eastern Java by combined Dutch and Javanese forces.

In the east, Karangasem conquered the neighboring island of Lombok, and at one point even moved into the western part of the next island, Sumbawa. It also annexed Buleleng, and knocked at the gates of Bali’s august, but largely impotent central kingdom, Klungkung.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the island’s changeable political landscape had stabilized to an extent, as nine separate kingdoms consolidated their positions. A massive eruption of Mt. Tambora on Sumbawa in 1815 — the largest eruption ever recorded — proved to be a catalyst. A tide of famine and disease swept Bali in the wake of the eruption, shredding the traditional fabric of Balinese society, and with it many of the fragile political structures of the two previous
Paradoxically, Tambora’s devastating eruption brought in its aftermath a period of unprecedented renewal and prosperity Deep layers of nutrient-rich ash from the volcano made Bali’s soils fertile beyond the wildest imaginings of earlier Balinese rulers. Rice and other agricultural products began to be exported in large quantities, at a time when vociferous anti-slavery campaigns throughout Europe were bringing an end to Bali’s lucrative slave trade.

Two other factors served to transform the island’s political and economic landscape. The first was a dramatic decrease in warfare, as ruling families focused more and more on internecine struggles and competing claims for dynastic control, and the monopolies on duties, tolis and corvee labor that came with it. The second was the changing nature of foreign trade, particularly with the founding of Singapore as a British free trade port in 1819. To Singapore went Bali’s pigs, vegetable oils and rice. Back came opium, Indian textiles and guns. Bali was now integrated with world markets to a degree unknown in the past, a fact that did not escape the ever watchful eyes of colonial Dutch administrators in Batavia.

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