Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits From an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java by Jan Breman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits From an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java by Jan Breman Ben White (bio) Jan Breman. Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits From an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. 404 pp. Research and debates on colonial labor regimes in Java have focused overwhelmingly on sugar cane, while for long periods coffee production involved more rural households and generated greater profits than did sugar.1 The regime of forced coffee deliveries in the Priangan (Dutch: Preanger) highlands of West Java, initiated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the eighteenth century, was a forerunner and model for the Cultivation System later established all over Java by Governor-General van den Bosch. For West Java at least, the research gap regarding coffee production is amply filled by Jan Breman's Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market, originally published in both Dutch and Indonesian.2 The book is the outcome of a project started forty years ago by the Department of Comparative Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), but interrupted by the department's closing in 1987.3 Jacques van Doorn (1925–2008) began research on the opening up of the Priangan region for coffee cultivation, aided by his friend and former comrade-in-arms Wim Hendrix.4 With the withdrawal of van Doorn, the project was taken over by Breman in 1993. Handsomely produced by Amsterdam University Press with numerous maps and illustrations,5 the book reflects the unique and long-standing collaboration of two researchers, quite different in background and character but both completely engaged in their mission. Working behind the scenes, the autodidact Hendrix burrows tirelessly in the colonial archives, adding his own uniquely critical reading (as anyone who has seen his internal working papers and pungent hand-annotations on [End Page 201] photocopied archive documents will understand), working avant la lettre, "along the archival grain."6 Breman, a "defiant sociologist" and "indefatigable scribe of the labouring underclasses,"7 is best known for his landmark works on Indian labor. But he has also produced two important historical works on labor and land in the Dutch East Indies, on both of which Hendrix also collaborated: one on Sumatran plantation labor and the "coolie contract" system, and another on "upside down" 1920s' colonial land reform in West Java, in which the government took land from the poor and gave it to the less poor.8 Mobilizing Labour has been the subject of at least two detailed review essays that readers may consult for a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the book.9 In brief, the first third of the book (chapters I–III) sets the scene, and takes the reader from the first ventures of the Batavia-based VOC into the hinterlands of western Java up to the arrival of Governor Daendels in 1811. One key argument here is the role of the VOC in sedentarizing the peasantry and limiting their mobility, and thus, in turn, their room for maneuver by switching patrons. That is, while their previous relatively nomadic existence as shifting cultivators allowed the possibility of moving from one patron to another when exaction became too harsh, sedentarization "not only made it easier to cream off the greater agrarian surplus […] but also to tie them down in servitude" (37). Furthermore, "sealing off the highlands as a sort of reservation and forcing the inhabitants to stay put were the main instruments used by the Company to collect the colonial tribute" (93). Chapter IV describes the dynamics of the Raffles interregnum and the debates that followed between advocates of forced and free cultivation. Chapters V and VI then describe the triumph of the advocates of "unfree labour" and the coffee regime as it expanded and evolved during the period of the Cultivation System (1830–70), and chapters VII and VIII describe the winding-up of that forced-labor system. Three important reports, all commissioned by the colonial government and all in varying degrees critical of the Priangan system, are the basic sources for Breman's book, expanded with additional library and archive sources (particularly for the later chapters). For the period up...