The Context of Change: Politics, Economics and Demography

Abstract

Before we can begin the task of charting changes in peasant life and production over the two centuries since 1800, we need, in addition to a general sense of the setting of peasant life and livelihood around the turn of the nineteenth century, an outline of the broader context which shaped those changes. There are two components of this context which are of particular importance for my purpose, and to which I shall devote this chapter. The first is a schema of the economic and political developments which conditioned the manner and speed of changes to peasant livelihood. For the most part, those developments were themselves a function of the mostly burgeoning power and reach of the state in Southeast Asia, first in its colonial (and quasi-colonial) and later in its independent mode, as it sought in various ways to enhance its dominion over people and to inte-grate them with a commerce which was now of global dimensions. The second, in important senses a condition of the first, was the onset of continuing and rapid growth in population in the region, which was to have a fundamental impact on the nature and function of the peasantry itself. This chapter, then, seeks to periodise the years since 1800 according to a variety of phases through which various states passed as they con-structed the broad contours within which the transformation of peasant life and livelihood took place, and concludes with a summary discussion of the nature and extent of population growth throughout the region. This context in place, we shall be better positioned to assess the broad outlines of social and economic change among Southeast Asia’s peasantry over the last two hundred years.