On Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits from an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java by Jan Breman (review)

Review Essay I: Nancy Lee Peluso

Professor Emeritus Jan Breman, historian of land and labour relations in colonial and contemporary India and Indonesia, has written another important book on Java. This time he has taken on a detailed revelation of the growth and transformations in the notorious but under-studied, two-hundred-year-long coffee production regime known as the Priangan System (Preangerstelsel), the first and future model of the various crop production and delivery systems later known as the Culturstelsel or "Cultivation System" and implemented across Java in the early years of Dutch colonial control (1830–70). The story stretches over two long periods of colonial rule between the eighteenth century and the second decade of the twentieth century: that under the VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the United East Indies Company or the "Dutch East Indies Company" [p. 11]) and the first half of the period that Java was ruled as part of the Dutch colonial state known as the Netherlands East Indies (NEI). He also covers the interregnum of Dutch power, when two short-term but important governors — the French-appointed Herman Willem Daendels and the Briton Thomas Stamford Raffles — served as successive Governor-Generals of Java between 1808 and 1816. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of the agrarian transformations that rendered the volcanic and mountainous Priangan region of West Java a model of extreme colonial exploitation. Breman tracks the nearly two hundred years over which the colonial overseers levied their most violent and deadly exactions on the labour and land of Priangan's peasants, labourers and indigenous rulers.

Professor Breman takes us on a 350-page journey that traverses time rather than the space of the mountains that were once visible from Batavia — today's Jakarta — on Java's north coast. These historical landscape views are hidden today, not only by the thick smog that usually fills the air from the coast to the island's interior, but also by the ways in which Java and the production of the crop often called by that same name tend to be currently imagined. A good portion of this eastern part of West Java's highlands now comprises urban, periurban, and rural spaces packed chock-full of people. Much of the land is paved over by a network of highways and byways, while every remaining inch of cultivable land is planted in something consumable; some areas are still home to plantations of tea, coffee and other tree crops once exotic to the island. The region today is a symbol of rural and urban industrial production, and a major exporter of labour into global markets. Yet, while the contemporary Priangan is the homeland of peasant movements fighting for access to land such as the Serikat Petani Pasundan (Pasundan Peasant Union), it was a nearly empty "frontier zone", as Breman (p. 12) calls it, as late as the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Breman exhumes West Java's forgotten frontier landscapes from the archives and critiques other historians' and officials' mis-remembered and mistaken views of the system as one benefitting the region's most marginalized denizens. Instead, Breman reveals the violence that repeatedly characterized VOC and colonial state rule in the Priangan, as the VOC and the Dutch colonial state successively created a class of middle managers in the persons of the indigenous rulers in and around the uplands. "The Company" forced the land and people of this region into harsh labour service, sedentarized a highly mobile population, and expropriated control of their land to produce a tropical colonial crop that would change the world and put the Dutch colonial empire at its centre, if only for a relatively brief historical moment. The author clearly meets his objective of...