Backdrop as foreground: environment and histories of imperialism
For 350 years the natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies (the Indonesian archipelago) were a significant source of wealth for the Netherlands. The natural environment of the Indies is thus a central component of any historical understanding of Dutch colonialism in South-east Asia.1 In the late sixteenth century, it was cloves, mace and nutmeg—the buds and seeds of trees indigenous to a cluster of tiny islands in what is now Maluku Province, Indonesia—that attracted Dutch traders to the Indies in the first instance.
These plant products sold as luxury spices for very high prices on the European market. Exclusive access to them motivated the formation of the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) in 1602. In the seventeenth century, profits from the Indies spice trade carried out by the VOC contributed to the rapid transformation of the tiny Dutch Republic into a leading European power.2In subsequent centuries, wealth continued to flow to the Netherlands from the natural products of Indies landscapes, particularly from commercial estates owned or managed by Europeans. Profits from commercial crops reared under a government scheme of compulsory deliveries called the Cultivation System (cultuurstelset) paid for the reconstruction of the Netherlands after its temporary annexation to France (1806-1813) under a Bonapartist regime, and for various modernisation and urbanisation projects to follow in the nineteenth century.3 In this period, Java became the chief source of Dutch plantation wealth, providing some of the staples of European middle-class consumption, such as sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco. Following the liberal economic reforms of the 1870s, export agriculture accelerated in the ‘Outer Provinces’ beyond Java, on islands such as Sumatra, Celebes (Sulawesi) and Dutch Borneo (Kalimantan), and fed Europe’s second industrial revolution with products including rubber, palm oil and petroleum.
Throughout the colonial period, export agriculture constituted the most important segment of the Netherlands Indies economy.4 The strength of this sector distinguished the Netherlands Indies from other European colonies in South-east Asia, especially for the period between 1914 and 1940, when the Indies was one of the most export-reliant economies in the region.5The long ‘colonial century’ that commenced with the introduction of the Cultivation System in 1830 and ended in 1949 with the attainment of Indonesian independence from Dutch rule constitutes the focus of this chapter. In this period the Indies emerged as the Netherlands’ chief overseas possession, after the Dutch first consolidated and then aggressively extended the territories formerly claimed by the VOC, which was dissolved in 1799. The colonial era was characterised by political paradoxes, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards. On the one hand, the exploitative nature of the Cultivation System provoked mounting criticisms that eventually resulted in its abolition. Liberal protests bore fruit in the 1870s, when private commercial interests obtained entry to the Indies economy for the first time, and again around 1900, when a new rhetoric of ‘ethical’ governance gained favour in elite circles.6 On the other hand, Dutch conquests gained in rapidity and violence during the period of European ‘high imperialism’ between 1870 and 1914.7 The Outer Provinces constituted the principal theatre of Dutch expansion in these years. ‘New’ lands were opened in regions like Deli, East Sumatra, where an agri-industrial complex of plantations staffed with imported Asian labourers (most of them unfree) and European managers nourished the assembly lines and factories of Europe and North America.8
Transformation and exploitation of the Indies’ natural environment were central outcomes of Dutch rule throughout the long colonial century. Economic, environmental and social histories of Java and Sumatra, the two islands that were arguably of the greatest economic and strategic importance to the Dutch, have illustrated this point time and again.
On Java, forests had been subject to widespread clearance under the Dutch since the time of the VOC. Tropical hardwoods such as teak were in strong demand to provide timber for the VOC’s shipping fleet, as well as the building of ports, cities and transport infrastructure.9 Forests also came under pressure from expanding plantation agriculture, a process that accelerated with colonial rule in the nineteenth century. The introduction of the Cultivation System only partly accounts for this process. Rapid population growth on Java led to more land being cleared for agriculture and grazing, and the construction of railways in the late nineteenth century imposed new demands for timber.10The successful establishment of commercial tobacco plantations on Sumatra in the 1860s paved the way for transformation of the island’s landscapes over the next half century, particularly in the eastern district, around the city of Medan, known as Deli. Old-growth forests, which covered a large portion of the island, made way for large-scale plantations of tea, tobacco, rubber and oil palms. Local farmers became increasingly marginalised on less fertile lands. This process was the outcome of political tactics (planters aggressively lobbying the colonial government to maintain their interests), and of territorial expansion (large-scale estates established on long leases) enabled by the contracts indigenous elites negotiated with foreign companies.11 A ‘dual economy’ emerged in which foreign (European, and to a lesser extent, American) companies dominated the lucrative export sector in goods like latex, the raw material required to make rubber, while smallholders produced lower-grade materials for the regional market.12 New social conditions also emerged on large estates because of the importation of ‘coolies’ (indentured labourers) fleeing poverty in southern China and Java. This largely male workforce of contract labourers was strictly regulated by penal sanctions, including corporal and capital punishment for infringements such as leaving the plantation before their term of service had ended.13
The natural environment has often formed the backdrop to narratives of dramatic economic and social changes in studies of these developments on Java and Sumatra.
With the rise of environmental history in recent decades, however, landscape has become the subject of analysis in its own right. Histories of forests and conservation on Java, for example, have provided important insights into how local customs—such as the designation of haunted, ‘taboo’ forests exempt from cultivation, or the maintenance of game reserves for elite Javanese—pre-existed and later informed Dutch conservation practices.14 Studies of Dutch forest exploitation on Java have revealed the complex processes of trial, error, conflict and adaptation that characterised the VOC era—indeed, some scholars have identified this period as one of ecological ‘disasters’—and laid the foundation for more formal regulatory frameworks in the nineteenth century.15 Colonial policies in turn connected to the rise of an increasingly interventionist state apparatus for forest management, which implemented ‘protections’ that often excluded local populations from precious resources. The legacies of such developments for post-colonial governments in Indonesia—which have needed to balance the often competing interests of companies, local communities and conservationists—form another important line of enquiry.16