Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries ed. by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen (review)

The well-drawn Introduction by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen gives two reasons for bringing together the seventeen essays that make up this anthology. The first gives recognition to the economic historian J. Thomas Lindblad, to whom the collection is dedicated. His work on Indonesian economic history is widely accepted as an important contribution to Indonesian studies. Second, the volume was intended to present material on Indonesian economic development by contemporary scholars who would follow the path already described by Howard Dick et al.¹ Their critical study on national Indonesian economic history defined the important periods of that history and detailed the main characteristics of each period.

Nearly every article in the anthology mentions or pays tribute to Lindblad. The Introduction, of course, succinctly outlines his work on the emergence of an Indonesian national economy, starting with globalization in early history, but failing until the early twentieth century to coalesce into an overall economy because of parochial demands within the archipelago. Beyond this introduction, however, the only other author going beyond simple laudatory remarks is Freek Columbijn. In a fine piece of research using legal cases in Medan, Columbijn shows participation in the Medan workplaces by race and ethnicity. The research reveals that there was a brief period in the 1940s and 1950s when the Dutch, the Chinese, and Indonesians shared many workplaces in a complementary manner—termed complementarisasi by Columbijn—but that this stage passed away relatively quickly for full Indonesianization, which was Lindblad’s contention.

All the chapters fit with the second goal, that is, contributing to a fuller understanding of Indonesian economic history a la Dick et al. Specifically, some articles outline the major issues and challenges of the past two hundred years. The Introduction certainly does, and the opening article by Anne Booth does so as well, as she describes the entire epoch in a lean, straightforward essay. Particular periods are covered equally well by several authors. Dick provides considerable detail on the development of statistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Dutch colonial administration, which later served as a baseline for Indonesian efforts in the field. Robert Cribb contributes a nicely crafted essay on the role of rice in the early days of the Indonesian republic in the late 1940s, when ideology was often set aside for practical results in feeding urban populations. Thee Kian Wie revisits failed US policies toward Indonesian development in the 1950s and early 1960s, concluding that those policies had no chance against the economic nationalism of President Sukarno. Ewout Frankeema explores the astounding “green revolution” in Indonesian agriculture during the New Order years in the last quarter of the twentieth century and assesses the remarkable convergence of factors that made it possible.

While all of the essays in this volume have academic worth, several of them fail to fit the editors’ premise to provide the historic overview they sought. For example, one article, by Leonard Blusse, related a neat case study of a single—and minor—historic event about employment of Chinese sailors aboard a Dutch ship in the late-colonial era. The study had almost no relevance to long-term economic developments and might have been a footnote, at best. Another article, by Alexander Claver, marked by solid description and insight, outlined money usage in the precolonial and colonial periods, noting bifurcated use by the internationalized economy and by the local economy. But the postcolonial era, where the same phenomenon of different money usage, albeit with different currencies than earlier, but with profoundly different outcomes, was not covered by Claver or by any complementary article. A significant failing. Roger Knight’s chapter tracks the early twentieth century competition initiated by Japan to pit Formosan and Javanese growers against one another to supply the Japanese home islands’ need for rice and...