History Of Java Research Articles

The Appendices of Empire: Why Writings from the Colonial Era Need to be Read in their Entirety

Among the many outcomes of the critique of Orientalism and the writings that emerged from the colonial era is the view that most, if not all, works that were published during the era of Empire are tainted by racial prejudice and Orientalist tropes and stereotypes of the non-Western Other. While this may be the case, this paper argues that there are still many reasons for postcolonial scholars to read such works today, from an informed and critical postcolonial perspective. This paper will look at three works by three colonial-era writers – Thomas Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java (1817); John Crawfurd’s Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava (1829); and Henry Keppel’s The Expedition to Borneo of the HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy (1846) – and show how, through a deep and critical reading of the texts, we can see the contradictions, ironies and uncertainties of the imperial project; and by so doing debunk the notion that Western colonialism in Southeast Asia was a linear, organised and systematic process entirely determined by the colonial powers themselves.

Sunan Giri dalam Legitimasi Kekuasaan Mataram pada Babad Tanah Jawi

Sunan Giri was the Islamic priest in Java who had enough enormous influence especially in 15-17 th AD century. The name of “Sunan Giri” is not limited referring to Raden Paku (Sunan Giri I) who started the political entity of Giri Kedhaton, but also refers to almost all of the sunans from Giri who are also descendants of Sunan Giri I. The Babad Tanah Jawi (BTJ) as a historical literature book of the Mataram palace in addition to telling the history of Java from the pre-Demak era to Mataram, on the other hand also mentions a lot about the existence of Sunan Giri. This research seeks to reveal the legitimacy narratives of the Islamic Mataram Kingdom in BTJ involving Sunan Giri as a religious figure who can exert political influence on them. By using a qualitative-descriptive method, the writer analyzes the text data of BTJ's narratives that contain elements of legitimacy involving Sunan Giri. From the philological data, it is then balanced with historical data from several historical works to find out how the socio-political conditions occurred in the 15th-17th century AD, especially in Java. The mention of legitimacy related to Sunan Giri in BTJ occurred in the early of Demak, early of Pajang, early until the mid of Mataram. Those stories are closely related to the existence of Sunan Giri as a priest with enormous influence both in Java and outside Java. Therefore, BTJ, which contains such information, has become one of the media for the legitimacy of power by the kings of Mataram.

Representasi Tokoh Cakraningrat dalam Sajarah Proza Begin Brawijaya

This paper is the result of a study of the Nusantara manuscripts using the historical text sources of Madura. The object of this research is the transliteration of a manuscript from the collection of the Central Library of Indonesia entitled Sajarah Proza Begin Brawijaya (SPBB) code SJ.230 Novarina edition (2020). In examining the manuscript, the philological method and literary theory framework were used. From the field of literature, Jan van Luxemburg's structural theory, Julia Kristeva's intertextuality, and Teeuw's concept of literary representation are used. From the structural study, it can be seen that the SPBB text framework is composed of literary structures and content structures (history), which as a whole serve to legitimize the power of the 17-18 century Madurese king. Meanwhile, the results of the intertextual analysis showed that the elements built into the content structure (history) of the SPBB text were connected with M.C. Ricklefs and H.J. De Graaf in representing Cakraningrat as the main figure in the history of Java, Madura, and VOC based on the author's life view to raise one of the values of the Javanese philosophy of life in this text. This linkage results in the conclusion that as a traditional Javanese historical literary work, the SPBB text is representative of its creator's culture, one of which is as a representation of the philosophy of mikul dhuwur mendhem jero in the Javanese view of life.

Inventing Narratives, Inventorying Natural Resources: Colonial Economic Exploitation in Conrad’s Malay Fiction

Literary narratives had accompanied global economic exploitation of natural resources since the rise of Britain as an imperial force in the late sixteenth century marked by Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), in which Hariot narrates, describes, and inventories natural and human resources in Virginia to invite economic interest and to justify colonization. The tradition of writing a descriptive overview of conquered lands was then furthered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Raffles’s History of Java (1817) as British colonial rule extended to the Malay Archipelago. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, as economic and political rule inevitably gave way to complex socio-cultural interaction, the fiction of Joseph Conrad set in the Archipelago, being novelistic in nature, provides a more dialogic portrayal of British colonial presence, particularly in Java and Borneo, which goes beyond mere justification for the exploitation of local resources. Following the cue from the work Edward Said in identifying textualization as a mode of colonial intellectual domination and Benita Parry in revealing the “ghostly” presence of empire in colonial fiction, I would like to argue that Conrad’s Malay fiction both justifies and problematizes the relationship between British colonial enterprise and the natural as well as socio-cultural environment in the Archipelago.

Wali, Sultan, Kiai, dan Santri dalam Tadisi Agama dan Politik Islam Jawa

The article discusses the role of wali (the Muslim saints), sultan, kiai, and santri within religious tradition and politics in Java. The wali (commonly known as Walisongo or “the Nine Saints”) were people who initially spread Islam in Java. In their efforts to develop Islam, Walisongo also equipped their pupils with religious knowledge to spread Islam in the future. This is from such process the transfer of Islamic knowledge was primarily set off. Once the transition periods began, the role of wali had subsequently vanished and replaced by the formal ruler, namely sultan. The Mataram Sultanate was the biggest Islamic sultanate ever in the history of Java. Owing to the supremacy of the Sultan, Kiai Kasan Besari—as an ample example of kiai mentioned in this article—built a pesantren in an area called tanah perdikan (a tax haven) in Tegalsari Ponorogo, East Java, which became an origin of institutionalization of the pesantren in Java. The Sultan provided the pesantren both material aids and other kinds of support, including entrusting his sons to learn religious knowledge in it. It had been also followed by the royal courtiers and the best cadres of the sultanate who subsequently became litterateurs of the Kingdom.

Java's ruined candis and the British picturesque ideal

AbstractWhen Thomas Stamford Raffles published his seminal text The History of Java in 1817, ruins were a favourite leitmotif in British art, forming an important element within the visual vocabulary of the picturesque. Given the fascination in this period for the ruin, fuelled by a tradition of antiquarian enquiry, the newly developing science of archaeology, and the increased possibilities for travel in the wake of imperial expansion, it is not surprising that Raffles chose to devote a whole a chapter of his publication to Java's ruined candis. The plates and vignettes which illustrate the chapter, created according to pictorial conventions that were ordinarily applied to the crumbling remains of Europe's classical past, are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of South-East Asia's architectural remains. This paper examines how these images elicited set emotional responses associated with the idea of ruins and ruination and confirmed key stereotypes associated with the region, linking the candis, and by implication the Javanese themselves, with a vanished past rather than with a dynamic and forward-looking present.

The Volcano Lover: Climate, Colonialism, and the Slave Trade in Raffles'sHistory of Java(1817)

The Volcano Lover: Climate, Colonialism, and the Slave Trade in Raffles's<i>History of Java</i>(1817)

The Volcano Lover: Climate, Colonialism, and the Slave Trade in Raffles's History of Java (1817)

This essay revisits Montesquieu's racialized theories of climate in the context of the British Interregnum in Java, 1811–16 and the devastating eruption of Mt. Tambora. In his History of Java (1817), Stamford Raffles, would-be empire builder in Southeast Asia, positions himself as a revisionary reader of The Spirit of the Laws (1748): one who accepted Montesquieu's progressive understanding of the link between human societies and their material conditions but who, as a self-made bureaucrat of empire, upheld government, not climate, as the nurse of culture. Raffles writes as a European governor seeking to embody in his liberal reforms and georgic representations of Java the mildness of his own native climate, but his romantic depiction of Javanese agriculture and society is haunted by the island's volcanic geology and its cataclysmic manifestation in the Mt. Tambora eruption of 1815. The devastating human impact of the Tambora event entirely overawed his colonial administration, seriously thwarting his globalizing agenda for the Dutch East Indies, and consolidating instead the indigenous systems of slavery and maritime raiding. As an eco-historical case study, this essay offers an example of the regressive impacts of ecological disaster on the development of Western-driven global trading networks and their liberal political apparatus.

Cassava in Indonesia: its Economic Role and Use as Food

Cassava, Manihot esculenta crantz, is not native to Southeast Asia. It was imported from the New World as were sweet potatoes, white potatoes, corn or maize, peanuts and tomatoes. The exact timing of this importation is not clear. One author suggested that cassava came to Java in Indonesia as early as the seventeenth century from the Moluccas1 while another author implied that cassava was introduced into Java in the later eighteenth century.2 At about the same time that cassava was arriving in Indonesia it also reached other parts of Asia. In 1786 cassava was reported in Ceylon after arriving via Mauritius; in 1794 it was planted in the East India Company's new botanic garden in Calcutta. Sir Stamford Raffles does not mention cassava in his History of Java,1 but he does mention other New World imports such as corn and sweet potatoes. While the use and spread of cassava has been fairly recent in many of the countries of Southeast Asia, it is now grown in all of them. However, it is a major agricultural product only in Thailand and Indonesia. Table 1 gives comparative details of cassava, rice, and corn for various Southeast Asian countries. Thailand's production of cassava is almost entirely exported to several of the European Common Market countries to be used as an animal feed; some quantities are also turned into starch. In Indonesia, however, cassava is a basic staple for the population. This paper examines the use of cassava as human food in Indonesia, how it is grown and processed, its nutritional aspects, the economics of the substitution between cassava and the other staples, and the possibilities of increasing demand and consumption of cassava in the future.

Comments on Benjamin White's ?demand for labor and population growth in colonial Java?

The historical demography of Java reminds one of what Voltaire said of etymology-that it was the science in which the vowels count for nothing and the consonants for not much more. The data are execrable enough to make an original scholar out of anyone. If Peper wants to slow down the growth rate, he raises the 1800 figure; if Wertheim wants to speed it up, he lowers it; if Geertz has a thesis with which the received rate fairly well comports, he concludes that, for all their admitted faults, et cetera, the early estimates are probably not that far off; if Widjojo wants to start the serious demographic history of Java with the 1920 census and then read the modern pattern back, all he has to do is describe the imaginative ways in which population estimates before that time were arrived at-and who is to say any of them nay? Thus White, trying to strengthen the plausibility of a rather special, rather ambitious, and rather controversial theory of population growth-that it is a response to the demand for labor-on the basis of the reproductive behavior of Javanese peasants in the nineteenth century, has at once his work cut out for him and a fair certainty of not being disproved, so long as he is careful to stick to strictly demographic arguments. For the first half or so of his paper, White does so stick and the result is the expected inconclusiveness. He succeeds in suggesting that there might be something to the labor-demand theory, by showing that the alternatives-improved health, pax Neerlandica, famine control, and so on-are as difficult to establish on the basis of the nineteenth-century figures as it is. The advocacy of these other theories is thus condemned as "ethnocentric-an execration of some power in anthropology-though it is diffucult for me to see why they are more so than the labor-demand theory, which is not itself exactly a

The History of Java. By Thomas Stamford Raffles, with an introduction by John Bastin. Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, 1965. Two volumes, pp. xlviii + 479 and ccix + 291, map, plates and appendices. £21. - Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India. By John Cameron, with an introduction by Wang Gungwu. Oxford

The History of Java. By Thomas Stamford Raffles, with an introduction by John Bastin. Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, 1965. Two volumes, pp. xlviii + 479 and ccix + 291, map, plates and appendices. £21. - Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India. By John Cameron, with an introduction by Wang Gungwu. Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1965. Pp. x + 408, plates and appendices. 48s. - Volume 1 Issue 1

The working of the early land rent system in West Java

I cannot but look upon accomplishment of this undertaking as most conspicuous and important under my administration; and in its success or otherwise I am willing to stand or fair'.1 Thus Raffles wrote to Lord Minto on 13 February 1814, with reference to new land rent system which was then being introduced into Java to replace Dutch system of forced deliveries and contingents. Three years later in The History of Java, he left no doubt in minds of his readers that system had been successful. course of years 1814 and 1815, he wrote, the new system was introduced into Bantam, Ch?r?bon, and eastern districts, over a population of a million and a half of cultivators, not only without disturbance and opposition, but to satisfaction of all classes of natives, and to manifest increase of public revenue derivable from land. In several journies which I undertook into different provinces, for purposes of examining in person effect of progressive system of reform which I had happiness to introduce, and of lending sanction of official authority to such modifications of it as local circumstances might render advisable, I was a pleased spectator of its beneficial tendency, and of security and satisfaction it univer sally diffused.2 The documentary evidence in India Office Library, London, and State Archives (Arsip Negara), Djakarta, which relates to land rent system in west Java, would appear to warrant a somewhat different conclusion.

The Pitt-Rivers Collection: Bell-Clappers–the Tooth-Ornament

In the account lately given in your columns of the Pitt-Rivers Anthropological Collection I find it stated, in speaking of bells: “The clapper is a late addition to the bell which does not exist in Japan or China.” When in West Java a year ago I saw in the possession of a gentleman there a bronze (?) bell dug up on the site of one of the old Hindoo settlements, of which now only the graves remain. It had lost the clapper, but the hook, to which I have no doubt a clapper originally was attached, existed still. The form of the bell was much like those figured by Raffles in his “History of Java.”