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 Global Factory and Local Field: Convergence and Divergence in the International Cane-Sugar Industry, 1850–1940

2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma ◽  
Roger Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Technological Convergence ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Key Aspects

Technological convergence in the international sugar economy began in the 1830s and was substantially complete by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialized sugar factory was a global phenomenon like the steamship and the railway engine (to which key aspects of its innards were closely related). We will argue that the single most important fact about nineteenth-century sugar industries was the degree of technological convergence that came to characterize their manufacturing sectors, regardless of the type of labour involved. A revisiting of the literature of the past twenty-five years, both in the New and Old Worlds, suggests that historians have yet fully to come to terms with the global character of this convergence and with the question of why convergence in the factory had no parallel in the field, where there continued to be a striking global divergence between the means and modes by which the industry was supplied with raw material. This problem in the recent historiography of the subject also highlights issues relating to the “proletarianization” of labour and the assumption that industrial capitalist modernity was inextricably associated with the development of “free labour”. More specifically, it draws attention to major flaws in the terms of reference of the now classic debate about the nexus between technological change and the predominant forms of labour in the Caribbean production area. In so doing, it underlines the need for a global rather than simply regional approach to the dynamics of change in the international sugar industry of the late colonial era. The latter part of our article outlines the broad historical parameters of this divergence in the sugar-cane field, and suggests the need for exploring the political economies surrounding the sugar producing areas and their mechanisms of ethnic segmentation of the labour force in particular.

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.

Contemplation and Criticism: Coleridge, Derrida and the Sublime

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
David Vallins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era

Recent criticism has often contrasted both deconstruction and Romantic idealism with diverse ‘progressive’ ideologies, whether historical-materialist in origin, or associated with the economic liberalism of British Whigs in the early nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Romantic idealism is often seen as involving a Platonic essentialism which distinguishes it from deconstruction as much as from historical materialism. My essay seeks to unravel these dichotomies and paradoxes, highlighting the political ambiguity of the advocates of Romantic-era political economy, as well as the anti-essentialist aspects of Coleridge's idealism, and the important elements it has in common with Derrida's questioning of ‘self-presence’ and logocentrism. The principal form of the sublime that I explore arises from Coleridge's and Derrida's recognition of the indefinableness of the origin of consciousness or the source of meaning in language – a recognition which, I argue, is progressive in its resistance to reductive and instrumentalizing definitions of humanity.

Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica's Agricultural Development from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verene A. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Development ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Agricultural History ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Livestock Industry ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Livestock Farmers

The study of the agricultural history of Jamaica, particularly after the seventeenth century when England seized the island from Spain, has traditionally been dominated by investigations of the sugar industry. Recently a few scholars have deviated from this path to examine in varying degrees of detail, agrarian activities which did not represent the standard eighteenth-century West Indian route to wealth. Foremost among this growing body of literature are articles and papers on the livestock industry (and livestock farmers), arguably the most lucrative of the non-sugar economic activities in rural Jamaica, perhaps until the advent of coffee later in the eighteenth century. Intended as a contribution to the historiography of non-staple agricultural production in colonial Jamaica, this article traces the early establishment and expansion of the important livestock or ‘pen-keeping’ industry. But the history of pens must also be located within the context of the dominant sugar economy; for during the period of slavery, pens were largely dependent on the sugar estate to provide markets for their outputs. Indeed pens expanded as a result of the growth of the sugar industry and, therefore, the importance of the livestock industry in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Jamaica is best appreciated by examining its economic links with the estates.

Peasant Labour and Capitalist Production in Late Colonial Indonesia: The ‘Campaign’ at a North Java Sugar Factory, 1840–70

1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Commercial Scale

The mid-nineteenth century saw the establishment in Java of one of the world's major sugar industries. Indeed, prior to the Great Depression of the 1930's, which reduced it to a shadow of its former opulance, the Java industry was second only to that of Cuba as a producer of cane sugar for the world's markets. It was essentially the creation of nineteenth-century Dutch colonialism. Sugar manufacture on a commercial scale had already been underway in Java a full two centuries earlier. However, the modern industry of large, centralized units of production and a massive ‘peasant’ workforce dated only from the inauguration of the state-sponsored Cultivation System by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in the 1830's. From then on, progress was rapid. Within less than a quarter century, some hundred or so sugar ‘factories’, solid stone places full of European machinery and Javanese ‘coolies’, had been established in the lowlands of Eastern and Central Java, and twenty-seven thousand hectares of peasant farmland requisitioned to provide them with cane. The whole enterprise dug deep into the innards of rural Java. As well as peasant land, the labour of the rural population was commandeered in unprecedented quantities. By the early 1860's, when sugar production under the auspices of the Cultivation System was reaching its peak, some 100,000 Javanese peasants were engaged in growing cane for the industry, and nearly that many again employed for between three and five months of the year, as cane-cutters, carters and factory hands during the manufacturing season or ‘Campaign’.

THE CHARACTER OF PITT THE YOUNGER AND PARTY POLITICS, 1830–1860

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL LEDGER-LOMAS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Clear Link

William Pitt the Younger died in 1806 but had a long afterlife in political argument. Historians have argued that a reactionary cult of Pitt in early nineteenth-century toryism died with Catholic emancipation, but this article suggests that invocation of Pitt's character was more widespread and durable, because linked to the assertion and defence of party identities. Whig hostility to Pitt remained strong even in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lord John Russell attacked his character flaws to celebrate the continued vigour and distinctness of Foxite political culture within the Liberal party. Conversely, use of Pitt in argument about what the tory party should be like did not end with reform. In the 1830s, traditional celebration of Pitt as a stern opponent of revolutionary agitation survived within a supposedly moderate conservatism. In Peel's second administration, arguments about whether Pitt had been firm or flexible, liberal or intransigent, reflected and added to disputes about how much religious and economic liberalism Peel should endorse. It was schism between Peelites and protectionists, the article suggests, which broke the clear link between celebration of Pitt's character and one party, allowing a more wide-ranging, because less politically charged, appreciation of Pitt to develop.

Socioeconomic Status and Group Belonging: Evidence from Early-Nineteenth-Century Colonial West Africa

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Stefania Galli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Census Data ◽  
High Status ◽  
Unskilled Labor ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Time Component ◽  
Heterogenous Population ◽  
Socioeconomic Strata

Abstract This study provides a novel analysis of occupational stratification in Sierra Leone from a historical perspective. By employing census data for early-nineteenth-century colonial Sierra Leone, the present study offers a valuable snapshot of a colony characterized by a heterogenous population of indigenous and migratory origin. The study shows that an association between colonial group categorization and socioeconomic status existed despite the colony being of very recent foundation implying a hierarchical structure of the society. Although Europeans and “mulattoes” occupied most high-status positions, as common in the colonies, indigenous immigrants were also represented in high socioeconomic strata thanks to the opportunities stemming from long- and short-distance trading. However, later arrivals, especially liberated slaves, belonged within the lowest socioeconomic strata of the society and worked as farmers or unskilled labor, suggesting that the time component may also have influence socioeconomic opportunities.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

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