Comments on Benjamin White's ?demand for labor and population growth in colonial Java?

Abstract

The historical demography of Java reminds one of what Voltaire said of etymology-that it was the science in which the vowels count for nothing and the consonants for not much more. The data are execrable enough to make an original scholar out of anyone. If Peper wants to slow down the growth rate, he raises the 1800 figure; if Wertheim wants to speed it up, he lowers it; if Geertz has a thesis with which the received rate fairly well comports, he concludes that, for all their admitted faults, et cetera, the early estimates are probably not that far off; if Widjojo wants to start the serious demographic history of Java with the 1920 census and then read the modern pattern back, all he has to do is describe the imaginative ways in which population estimates before that time were arrived at-and who is to say any of them nay? Thus White, trying to strengthen the plausibility of a rather special, rather ambitious, and rather controversial theory of population growth-that it is a response to the demand for labor-on the basis of the reproductive behavior of Javanese peasants in the nineteenth century, has at once his work cut out for him and a fair certainty of not being disproved, so long as he is careful to stick to strictly demographic arguments. For the first half or so of his paper, White does so stick and the result is the expected inconclusiveness. He succeeds in suggesting that there might be something to the labor-demand theory, by showing that the alternatives-improved health, pax Neerlandica, famine control, and so on-are as difficult to establish on the basis of the nineteenth-century figures as it is. The advocacy of these other theories is thus condemned as "ethnocentric-an execration of some power in anthropology-though it is diffucult for me to see why they are more so than the labor-demand theory, which is not itself exactly a