FORCED LABOUR AND RISING FERTILITY IN COLONIAL INDONESIA

Abstract

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in nineteenth-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonial Indonesia must have reflected improvements in economic and health conditions under Dutch rule. The difficulty of testing the labour demand theory empirically, together with its counterintuitive quality and its ideological origins, led it to be sceptically received. However, newly-assembled statistical data from Minahasa—one of the few areas outside Java where compulsory cultivation services were introduced in the nineteenth century—suggest that the theory is in fact correct. The existence of a positive link between labour demand and fertility helps explain not only the paradox of population growth without rapid economic growth or public health improvements in nineteenth-century Java, but also the ‘involutionary’ cycle of agricultural intensification, population growth and impoverishment which seems to be a recurrent feature of Southeast Asian history.