Spanish East Indies together with the Spanish West Indies, were administered through the Viceroyalty of New Spain based in Mexico City. After Mexican independence, they were ruled directly from Madrid. As a result of the Spanish–American War in 1898, the Philippines and Guam were occupied by the United States while about 6,000 of the remaining smaller islands were sold to Germany in the German–Spanish Treaty of 1899. The few remaining islands were ceded to the United States when the Treaty of Washington was ratified in 1901. Spanish contact began on , when a Spanish expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan reached the Mariana Islands.
Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Bali was finally taken under full control with the Dutch intervention in Bali (1906) and the final Dutch intervention in Bali (1908). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the KNIL resumed the conquest of the Indonesian archipelago. After 1904 the Netherlands East Indies were considered pacified, with no large-scale armed opposition to Dutch rule until World War II, and the KNIL served a mainly defensive role protecting the Dutch East Indies from the possibility of foreign invasion. Once the archipelago was considered pacified the KNIL was mainly involved with military policing tasks. To ensure a sizeable European military segment