Banditry in West Java, 1869-1942

2 The Economics of Banditry

47 Pondering the prominent social status of certain known robbers in Javanese desas, the former Resident G.L. Gonggrijp remarked in 1911: ‘I have been thinking that we might convert all Java’s villeins into villains. Then they would all, perhaps, become prosperous.’1 In his regular column of ‘letters’ to the daily newspaper Bataviaasch Handelsblad, ‘Brieven van Opheffer’, Gonggrijp outlined his views regarding the everyday lives of the Javanese and the attempts of officials infused with a sense of high moral purpose to ‘elevate’ [opheffen] them. The irony of the above quotation reflects the scepticism with which he viewed such attempts. They nonetheless encapsulate the thrust of this chapter: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plain robbery — though obviously a criminal activity and part of an informal economy — was one of the few lucrative sources of income in the Javanese countryside. Robbery and economic cycles To clarify the financial incentives for taking up robbery as a livelihood, the following pages will examine the correlation between the economic cycle and the frequency of robberies. Since colonial statistics will be an important source, it is fair to start by questioning the value of crime figures gathered by colonial officials. Some studies, such as Robert Sindall’s Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, draw attention to the unreliability of crime statistics. They hold that the C H A P T E R 2 The Economics of Banditry 02 BWJ.indd 47 12/15/10 1:46:40 PM 48 Banditry in West Java, 1869–1942 figures reveal more about city-dwellers’ fear of social change than about the true state of affairs in relation to crime. Undoubtedly the urban population and the government sometimes saw things that were not there. But in Batavia in any case, the opposite is also true: attention was finally drawn to a problem that had existed for hundreds of years, one that had caused, and was still causing, real suffering to a large part of the Indonesian population. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss the reaction to robberies as ‘moral panic’. As far as the high incidence of robberies known as rampok in the crime statistics is concerned: according to the Welvaartsrapporten (colonial reports that focused on the problem of poverty), lower-ranking administrative officials tended not to report crime, which implies that the true figures must have been higher still.2 Several elements of colonial statistics require clarification. First, there is rampok, a term frequently encountered in colonial officialese. It derives from Javanese usage, in which it refers to a crime in which four or five men robbed a house at night. Administrative officials distinguished between various types of robbery, such as tunnelling under the wall of a house for the purpose of robbing it, robbery with violence, and robberies carried out by gangs. Large-scale robberies described as ketjoe, most notably in the Principalities area of Java, sometimes involved as many as ten perpetrators. In addition, rampok and ketjoe were distinguished from robbery without the use of violence, such as burglary, pickpocketing, shoplifting, and cattle theft, another prominent form of crime in the Javanese countryside.3 When considering standards of living in the rural districts surrounding Batavia (the Ommelanden), we should pause to consider the best criterion for measuring them. One useful criterion is the price of rice. It should be noted, however, that since Batavia was close to the supply routes, it was relatively immune to the effects of a failed harvest. We can probably state, with minor reservations, that the area around Batavia did not witness any ‘subsistence crises’ after 1850. Still, fluctuations in market conditions influenced living standards, and the region would certainly have been affected by job losses and rising prices. In his article ‘From Subsistence Crises to Business Cycle Depressions’, Peter Boomgaard describes a long succession of crises in Java.4 The early 1880s was a time of scarcity, caused by a series of failed harvests and rising rice prices. Ten years later (1890–92) came another poor rice harvest, accompanied by numerous outbreaks of disease. The 1880s are known as the Great Depression, which afflicted a range of crops in the Indonesian archipelago, most notably sugar. The year 1892 is associated with the 02 BWJ.indd 48 12/15/10 1:46:40 PM 49 The...