Indonesian Population and the European Industrial Revolution

Abstract

facts of Java's asphyxiation for want of land or of excess of population, are easily set forth. What is more difficult is to explain them. While that explanation remains to be worked out in future research, enough has been done to suggest its main lines. Within the world economy Europe's demand led to explorations from the 15th century onwards, at first especially for condiments. Increasing wealth, at first in American gold, meant an increase in Europe's effective demand, and the result came to be not merely trading, but plantations, in distant parts of the world. In the beginning the most substantial output in this strange collaboration of Europe and the third world was by African slaves on American soil; but with the ending of slavery the somewhat freer labor of the Indies became important in world commerce, and Dutch sugar took the place of Brazilian. The establishment of the independence of the American colonies, followed by the abolition of slavery, brought on a very serious crisis on plantations in the New World and attracted the attention of European investors to the immense possibilities of Indonesia.' Using the most ingenious of post-slavery devices, the Netherlands East Indies regime was so well adapted and so flexible that with little capital and little social turmoil it made the archipelago a foremost producer of sugar, coffee, rubber, and numerous other items. The Javanese cane-worker remained a peasant at the same time as he became a coolie; he had one foot in the rice terrace and the other in the mill.2 For a time the rapid growth of the world's industry took all of these products it could get. But Western demand could not increase fast enough to occupy profitably an exponentially increasing population, and a crisis was foreseen even as the system attained its height in the 1920's. immediate cause of the collapse of the system seemed to be the depression of the 1930's, the war and occupation and the expulsion of the Dutch. Far more fundamental, however, was the completion of a cycle of Western technology. need of industry for the sorts of raw materials that the