Dutch Colonial Rule and Development of Paddy Fields in Priangan, Java

Abstract

This essay sketches the changing relationships among the Dutch Colonial Government and among native chiefs and their people in early 19th Century Priangan. This is a time when paddy fields were rapidly spreading to this area.Wet rice cultivation in Priangan started to spread in the middle of the 18th Century, and after the turn of the century, Dutch officials reported construction of various scale irrigation facilities. The Dutch Government began to construct large irrigation canals and dams, limiting its role to planning the works and supplying the necessary funds and goods for the projects. The native chiefs, who had been organizers of irrigation works throughout the 18th Century, undertook the projects. They organized their people's corvee labor, and arranged for native irrigation specialists to supervise the work. Besides these large facilities, many small scale irrigation facilities were constructed; some of them were planned by the chiefs, and others by the people. These small facilities seem to have contributed to the expansion of paddy fields far more than did the Govern ment's large facilities.Although irrigated paddy fields expanded with these facilities, the basic tax system in Priangan didn't change in these decades. Dutch sources show that most of the arable lands irrigated with these facilities were reclaimed by individual settlers who owned the lands. The poll-tax system survived as the main tax system in Priangan at least to the 1820s.During these decades the Government succeeded in expanding coffee cultivation with the people's corvee labor. This was not done by introducing land tax system, but by extending its patronage through the chiefs to the people. The chiefs obeyed the goverment because of their economic dependency. They could'nt manage their finances without the rights and interests given by the Government, which included funds for irrigation works and coffee plantations, concessions of coffee transport and trade, and a coffee production percentage. The people in turn obeyed their chiefs by producing coffee. The reason of their obedience partly because they could get far more profit from wet rice cultivation than from slash and burn. And partly, most of them couldn't run the rice cultivation without agricultural credits given by the chiefs, and part of them couldn't run the cultivation without the facilities constructed by the chiefs.Thus, the relationships between the chiefs and their people in early 19th Century Priangan seemed to be far different from M. C. Hoadley's “Feudal Mode of Production” (1994). On the other hand, this chief to people relationship shows some similar points to these depicted in Y. Breman's “patron-client relationships” (1978, 1982). However, the relationships in early 19th Century are not the same ones as the pre-colonial relationships, but are relationships transmuted under the influence of Dutch colonial rule.