The dominant theme in the historical literature on agricultural production for export is the fast-expanding demand by Europe in the course of the industrialisation during the nineteenth century of agricultural goods originating in Asia, Africa as well as the Regions of Recent Settlement. In a large number of cases, the growing supplies of agricultural export were put together through recourse to the plantation system. The colonial governments often played an important, and sometimes a decisive, role in the rise and the smooth functioning of this system. This could be in the form of liberal land grants, the delegation of coercive authority to the management over the labour supply and so on. The direct, including entrepreneurial, role of the government was often evident also in arrangements which were not of the usual plantation variety, but which operated on the basis of accommodation, and indeed integration, with the existing organisation of traditional peasant agriculture. An outstanding example of this is the well-known Cultivation System introduced by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in Dutch Indonesia in the 1830s. The common theme that cuts across the bulk of the great diversity of arrangements of the use of coercive power by the colonial state in a variety of ways and often in fairly liberal doses.
Chinese Firms' Entry to Export Markets: The Role of Foreign Export Spillovers
