The Tobacco Industry of North Borneo: A Distinctive Form of Plantation Agriculture

Abstract

Recently the validity of the standard portrayals of plantation agriculture — phrased as they are in essentially descriptive terms revealing little about the functioning of this particular system of crop production — was called into question. It was suggested that a deeper understanding of the nature and mechanisms of plantation agriculture required the explicit recognition that this is not an undifferentiated, unchanging agricultural system, but that there are in reality different types of plantation; in identifying these, it is essential to consider variations in the individual form and range of combinations of selected key elements central to the organisation of production. This led to the conclusion that in view of their structure and modes of operation certain large-scale agricultural enterprises producing for export which adopt rotational patterns of land use whereby specific sites are cleared, cropped, exhausted and then left to revert to secondary growth for varying periods should be seen not as commercial variants of shifting cultivation but as a distinctive type of plantation agriculture. Producing high-quality wrapper-leaf tobacco for cigars, the renowned plantations of the Deli region of north-east Sumatra provide a classic illustration of this point. Although, in the absence of a fully-documented review of its history and organisation, it rarely receives notice, a similar plantation industry also developed in what is now the Malaysian State of Sabah in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Roughly the size of Ireland, Sabah — then known as North Borneo — was administered from 1881 until 1946 by the British North Borneo (Chartered) Company and this tobacco industry was of crucial significance in the economic history of the Company's territory. “Tobacco in the eighties,” wrote Rutter half a century ago, “played an even more important part in the destinies of the country than rubber has in later years. Until ousted by rubber it was the country's foremost planting industry…” This survey of the tobacco industry of North Borneo has a double objective therefore; it investigates the role of the industry in the process of economic development in the State and also seeks to indicate the particular features of this form of plantation agriculture.