The Cultivation System and its Impact on the Dutch Colonial Economy and the Indigenous Society in Nineteenth-Century Java

1986 ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Fasseur
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Indigenous Society ◽  
Dutch Colonial

The Cultivation System (1830–1870) and its private entrepreneurs on colonial Java

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
Colonial Government

AbstractEver since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

scholarly journals Governors, Regents, and Rituals: an Exploration of Colonial Diplomacy in Ambon at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Philip Post
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Abstract This article analyses how the Dutch colonial state in Ambon in the early nineteenth century tried to reestablish relations with local regents, making use of already existing protocols that were produced during the period of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1602–1799). Engaging in colonial diplomacy was very important because the demise of the voc (1796) and two short periods of British rule in Ambon (1796–1803 and 1810–17) had shaken Dutch rule to its foundations. To reestablish its legitimacy with these local rulers, the colonial state made use of diplomatic protocols, documents and rituals which had been drawn up and negotiated by the voc. This article will focus on comparing the so-called “Instruction for the Regents,” which was drawn up in 1771 by a voc administrator, with one that was reissued in 1818 by the colonial state and will analyze a number of rituals and protocols which played an important role in defining the relationship between the governor and the regents.

Sugar Factory Workers and the Emergence of ‘Free Labour’ in Nineteenth-Century Java

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Elson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Productive Activity ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Sugar Factory

The Cultivation System, introduced by the Dutch in Java in 1830, was grounded on peasant coercion. Capitalizing on the colonial government's ability to force peasants to produce large, cheap and regular quantities of tropical agricultural goods and to labour unrelentingly at a great variety of other tasks, the System succeeded in its aim of transforming Java from a financial millstone around Holland's neck into a highly profitable resource. Coercion, in the eyes of the Cultivation System's founder and guiding light, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch (1830–33), was the most appropriate and effective means of creating wealth from Java's peasant masses. The power of incentive alone, he argued, had failed in the recent past to spur the Javanese to greater productive activity because the peasant had not reached the required stage of social development. ‘Never forget’, he remarked in 1830, ‘that the javan has progressed no further in intellectual terms than our children of 12 or 13 years old, and possesses even much less knowledge than they do. They must be led and governed as children…’. Van den Bosch's branch of coercion, however, was not a blunt instrument. It was based upon the time-worn notion of domesticating the indigenous elite and employing its customary authority over the peasantry to achieve Dutch ends. Under the overall direction of the colonial authorities and their officials, then, peasants were to be ‘led and governed’ by their own leaders, for whom, Van den Bosch claimed, they possessed a ‘childlike respect’.

From Plantation to Padi-field: The Origins of the Nineteenth Century Transformation of Java's Sugar Industry

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
West Indian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Chinese Entrepreneurs

Java's long-established sugar industry was transformed almost beyond recognition during the course of the nineteenth century. Under Dutch East India Company rule, which effectively lasted until the arrival on the island of Governor-General Daendels in 1808, sugar production had been organized almost exclusively by Chinese entrepreneurs, whose dozens of small sugar factories and plantations were scattered across the lowlands around Batavia (present day Jakarta). Their output played a subsidiary role in the prevailing pattern of colonial exploitation, was unable to compete in Europe with the production of West Indian sugar colonies and consequently found a sale, for the most part, only in other ‘protected’ Asian markets. During the nineteenth century, all this changed. First under government auspices—the so-called Cultivation System—and later under the direction of metropolitan-owned Sugar Corporations, the industry was transformed into a paradigm of colonial economic ‘development’. It was efficient, immensely profitable and productive (vast quantities of sugar were exported to the West), heavily capitalized and equipped with the best and most up-to-date machinery.

East of the Cape in 1832: The Old Indies World, Empire Families and “Colonial Women” in Nineteenth-century Java

Itinerario ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Roger Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Netherlands Indies ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Dutch Colonial

This paper deals with several themes central to recent debate about Dutch colonial society in Java, the key island of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies. Primarily, these themes relate to the colonial-metropolitan nexus, and my discussion seeks to illuminate these themes with particular reference to the documented experiences of three women who were either on their way to the Indies—or making their way back from there—early in the 1830s. The paper's fundamental argument concerns the importance of the concept of “Empire Families” to an understanding of Dutch colonial communities in the Indies. It is an understanding that serves to correct some misconceptions about the dynamics of those societies in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period. Among other things, building on the work of others and drawing on unpublished documentation, it seeks to locate some aspects of colonial “discourse,” particularly those relating to “colonial women,” in the broader framework of social history.

scholarly journals Dutch Colonial Anthropology in Indonesia

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-369
Author(s):  
Jean Kommers ◽  
Léon Buskens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Essential Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive History ◽  
Dutch Colonial

AbstractAttempts to assess the results of colonial anthropology in Indonesia faced some problems, which, until recently, have not been dealt with properly. Therefore, in a newly published comprehensive history of anthropology in the Netherlands, several studies focused on the character, rather than on the substance of colonial anthropology. In the case of Dutch colonial representations of Indonesia, 'colonial anthropology' appears to be an assemblage of various disciplines that constituted a fragmented whole (Indologie; Dutch Indies Studies) from which today's Dutch academic anthropology emerged. However, projection of current conceptions of anthropology into the colonial past resulted in a tendency to neglect some major characteristics of early representations that are imperative for the interpretation of these representations. Besides, a rather limited familiarity amongst present-day anthropologists with the way in which Dutch colonial politics became immersed in international discourses resulted in misappraisal of an essential change in colonial knowledge: the shift from local to analytical representations, deeply affecting the portrayal of Indonesian cultures. In colonial knowledge production, emphasis moved from ethnographic particularism to essentialist conceptions like 'Knowledge of the Native'. This shift also had serious consequences for the academic position of ethnology amongst other colonial disciplines. Until recently, this misappraisal could escape notice because students of Dutch colonial anthropology were insufficiently aware of the effects on interpretation of the great variety of disciplinary discourses, so characteristic for Dutch colonial studies. Therefore, we will here concentrate on these effects and on the growing intertwinement of knowledge and politics which was directly related to the international orientation of colonial policy that became increasingly prominent after the mid-nineteenth century.

Captive and client labour and the economy of the Bida Emirate: 1857–1901

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Population Transfer ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Using Data

The purpose of this essay is to discuss a number of aspects relating to the client and captive labour force in the Bida emirate in the immediate pre-colonial period. Using data collected in surveys of 1611 captive and client villages in the 1930s, it has been possible to estimate the origins of a large part of this force and to establish the different periods of its recruitment. Comments are made regarding the role of this labour force in the pre-colonial economy of Nupe, on the position of slaves and clients in the society of the emirate, and on the effects of the extensive population transfer on the ethnic demography of Nupeland. It is hoped that this essay will contribute to the contemporary discussion regarding indigenous slavery in Africa, and will lead to an accelerated abandonment of simplistic notions concerning the nature of African economy and society in the late nineteenth century.

Purse or Principle: Dutch Colonial Policy in the 1860s and the Decline of the Cultivation System

1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Fasseur
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Annual Series ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Flaw ◽  
Dutch Colonial

In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.

The Minangkabau Response to Dutch Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth Century.

1982 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 529
Author(s):  
R. H. Barnes ◽  
Elizabeth E. Graves ◽  
Tsuyoshi Kato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Dutch Colonial
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