Abstract
We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using international market prices for coffee and sugar for predicting labor demands, addresses potential endogeneity concerns. Our estimates suggest that without the abolition of the Cultivation System average overall mortality in Java would have been between 10 and 30 percent higher by the late 1870s.
Highlights
How have colonial policies and institutions affected development in colonized countries? Were these institutions the main reason for poor long-run economic performance in many former colonies, or are other factors, like human capital formation, more important? these questions have drawn the attention of many scholars, a consensus in the field has failed to emerge yet (e.g., Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Chanda, Cook, and Putterman 2014; Dell and Olken 2020; Easterly and Levine 2016; Glaeser et al 2004)
We include a measure of the volume of cash crop production under the Cultivation System in the analyses to rule out other aspects of the system that may have impacted mortality and that are unrelated to labor demands, our main independent variable
Where i and t index residency and time respectively; CDR refers to crude death rates per 1,000 people; forced labor refers to the total number of laborers working for the Cultivation System in a residency per 1,000 inhabitants
Summary
The Cultivation System was devised in the late 1820s to bolster Dutch government revenues by forcing Javanese peasants to grow and deliver cash crops. In return for the delivery of these crops to the government, peasants received a certain amount of cash (crop payment, or plantloon) for their produce. These payments could differ from one place to the but were generally well below market value Forced sugar production is the most well-known element of the Cultivation System and has featured prominently in the research on the system (Geertz 1963; Elson 1985; Bosma 2013; Dell and Olken 2020).
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