New Thoughts on Colonial Labour in Indonesia

Abstract

The plantation economy and society in colonial Indonesia outside Java has been a rather neglected field of study until recently. If only for that reason this volume, which is the outcome of a Master's course offered in 1992 by two colonial historians of the University of Leiden, is a welcome contribution. The chapters on West Sumatra, Belitung and Southeast Kalimantan demonstrate how the plantations (rubber, tobacco, oil palm, fibres and copra) and mines (tin, coal and oil), in addition to the huge agro-industrial complex that had already arisen in East Sumatra, gradually overtook Java in the production of export commodities. Although Vincent Houben's promise in the introductory chapter to present a new, comprehensive interpretation of the system of bonded labour in the Outer Islands during the first four decades of the twentieth century is not fulfilled, facts and figures presented by the authors provide meaningful insights into the nature of the workforce, the social identity of the coolies, and their modalities of employment. On all these dimensions the regions differed from each other, and it comes as no surprise that conditions, which had been worse in the nineteenth century, only changed for the better in certain respects towards the final decades of colonial rule. For the purpose of this study the coolie is defined as an Asian labourer, nearly always of Javanese origin, contracted for a period of three years to work for an expatriate employer in the Outer Islands of colonial Indonesia. The initial workforce in the plantation belt, which first started to emerge on the east coast of Sumatra (Deli), consisted mainly of Chinese coolies recruited either in Malaysia or directly in China. Around the beginning of the twentieth century they were replaced by men and increasingly also by women from Java, who were even cheaper, and while less diligent supposedly more pliable, than the Chinese had been. An additional argument for this policy of replacement, not discussed in the book, was the geo-political realisation within the government that the further increase of the Chinese population close to the border of British Malaya might pose a threat to the future stability of Dutch colonial rule. The steadily growing number of female coolies (the sex ratio declined from 3.7 men for every woman in 1915 to 2.9 in 1920) must have changed the social climate in the coolie