The Making of a Periphery

How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor

Ulbe Bosma

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547901
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Imperialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region with products that found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one?

In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region's contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.

CHAPTER ONE

Smallpox Vaccination and Demographic Divergences in the Nineteenth Century

The way in which Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson formulate the “reversal of fortune” thesis not only overstates the importance of property rights—or, to put it more precisely, the importance of their codification—but also takes for granted the claim made by the dependency school that colonization in early modern history led to the destruction of local commerce and manufacturing.1 This point also remained almost uncontested in the case of Island Southeast Asia. Reid wrote extensively in his classic The Age of Commerce about how European intrusions played a major role in destroying the once flourishing maritime world, initiating the peripheralization of the Malay world.2 In fact, as Lieberman has emphasized, the economic centers of gravity were not the trading emporia but the consolidated territorial polities, and thus the impact of the European chartered companies could not have been as dramatic as Reid suggests.3 Moreover, from recent historical research it appears that precolonial port cities were not as magnificent as Reid portrayed them.

This is not to deny the plunder, violence, and demographic contraction that attended the early European encounters with Island Southeast Asia and also took place in Latin America and Africa. The northern Philippines were sliced up into encomiendas and divided among the conquistadores, while the spice islands of the Moluccas were ruthlessly incorporated by the VOC (the Dutch East India Company). Yet despite all the death and destruction wreaked in these early stages of colonialism, Wallerstein’s observation that in the case of Southeast Asia a meaningful colonial territorialization and incorporation of local labor and land in global capitalism only occurred by the late eighteenth century is still valid. Until that time, Island Southeast Asia was still part of the external arena of the modern world-system.4 After all, the Philippines produced little for Spain except losses, and the VOC’s exports from its extensive territories accounted for a marginal 2 percent of local net domestic product. The main commodities this trading company was interested in—namely, pepper, cloves, and sugar—represented just 11 percent of Southeast Asia’s exports.5 The presence of the European trading companies was local and confined to particular sectors of commerce and manufacturing.

Nonetheless, the marginality of the VOC’s trade within the economy of Southeast Asia does not exclude its potentially ruinous effects on urban life, maritime trade, and artisanship. The violent monopolization of clove cultivation and the enforced concentration of sugar production around Batavia, for example, were indubitably detrimental to Indonesia’s economy. The decline in Java’s exports was temporary, however, and was followed by a recovery after 1740. There is, further, no reason to assume, as some historians have done, that the VOC brought about an atrophy of once flourishing port cities or, for that matter, of the textile sector of Southeast Asia.6 The perception that cities with over one hundred thousand inhabitants crumbled under the weight of seventeenth-century European colonialism has been disavowed by more recent scholarship for being colored by early-modern European discoverers, who did not mind exaggerating the size of the Asian cities they visited in order to secure their place in the explorer’s hall of fame.7 The emporia were neither as large as suggested by contemporary travelogues, nor were they manifold. Usually, only one or two acted as the hubs for the most valuable items, such as pepper and sandalwood, luxury cloth, gold, and camphor—the latter used as a disinfectant during a plague epidemic. Maritime leadership was ephemeral because competitors were quick to take over the leading positions: between 1511 and 1683, Malacca, Brunei, Makassar, Banten, and Batavia succeeded one another as trading hubs for Indian textiles, Chinese ceramics, and Southeast Asian sea and forest products. There is nothing specifically Asian about this, because centers of maritime commerce are by nature unstable, as we have also seen on the other side of the globe, in the Low Countries. There, within a period of 120 years, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Amsterdam succeeded one another as the dominant commercial centers of their time.8 One port’s loss was another’s gain.

Precolonial cities were particularly vulnerable if they relied on maritime food imports. The trading hubs of Palembang and Makassar still had their own bases of rice production, but Malacca, Banten, and Aceh were heavily dependent on rice imports, and Brunei notoriously so.9 It is true that in Island Southeast Asia an important rice trade existed, carried by tall ships built with the craftsmanship for which this part of the world was known.10 However, to feed cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants through overseas rice imports was logistically a daunting task, one exposed to naval threats and the superior firepower of European ships in particular. This is what the proud sultanate of Banten, at the center of the pepper trade, experienced during repeated Dutch blockades in the seventeenth century.11 Compact cities of over fifty thousand inhabitants, resembling those in Europe, were the exceptions or even nonexistent in Island Southeast Asia. Instead, all over Southeast Asia—and South Asia, for that matter—settlements showed a mix of rural and urban, which scholars have termed “rurban” and which could be economically advanced and monetized.12

The corollary of this is that the colonial capital Batavia, founded by the VOC in 1619, yielded in nothing to any of the emporia it had blockaded, destroyed, or brought under its control. With fifty thousand inhabitants, it was probably the largest city of Island Southeast Asia around 1700, but while on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest colonial towns, its health conditions deteriorated, probably because of the rapidly expanding number of fishponds near its outskirts. These offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes, turning Batavia into a malaria-infested place, where in bad years 80 percent of the newly arrived Europeans lost their lives. The rich citizens and their slave retinues moved out of the city to their mansions in the so-called Ommelanden (surrounding districts), which were dotted with sugar mills and where another hundred thousand people lived.13 This unique situation of 150,000 people largely dependent on outside food supplies owed its existence to adequate rice supplies arranged by the powerful VOC. It is inconceivable that any of the grand emporia that preceded Batavia—with the possible exception of Makassar—could ever have procured such stable supplies for so many people.

Batavia’s example might raise the question why Manila did not live up to its promise of becoming the central entrepôt of Island Southeast Asia after the Spanish had subdued its main competitor, Brunei.14 Initially, the town followed the Asian model of attracting merchants and their retinues, and it was an example for the founders of Batavia. In the course of the sixteenth century, Manila emerged as the trading hub of Chinese traders. Some forty or fifty ships per year called at its port at that time, and an extensive Chinese quarter was inhabited by 16,000 people: a community annihilated by the massacre of 1603.15 The murder of its Chinese population was the immediate cause of the town’s demise, but it was not the only factor. Manila’s aspirations were also thwarted by competition from Malacca, Makassar, and the VOC. Last but not least, Spanish trade policies that had established the so-called Galleon Trade between Manila and Acapulco across the Pacific only seemingly gave the city its global stature, while they actually severely limited its trade and condemned the city to a languishing existence. With its commerce more or less confined to the transshipment of goods from Asia destined for Mexico, the town’s population size stayed below ten thousand until it mushroomed into a primate city in the nineteenth century.

DEMOGRAPHIC STAGNATION

Although the European intrusions did not destroy urban life, artisanship, and commerce, Southeast Asia certainly went through a phase of demographic decline and economic contraction between 1600 and 1750. Climate change, smallpox epidemics, and frequent military conflict were responsible for this. For obvious reasons, the relative weight of these factors remains obscure, and the extent of the demographic decline can only be sketched in rough figures. Data are particularly scarce for the years before 1800, with the notable exception of the northern Philippines, where tributary registers and parish records kept track of the number of inhabitants and of their marriages, births, movements, and occupations. Based on this data, Newson concludes in her thorough study that the population of Luzon and the Visayas, which still numbered 1.4 million in the 1560s, had been almost halved by 1700. Smallpox was a major cause, because of intensifying trade contacts with China by the late sixteenth century, but the ravages of the Spanish conquest and piracy were, at the least, important additional causes.16 The disasters that befell the Filipinos were immense and wiped out the positive effects of enhanced agricultural production through the introduction of the plow by the Spanish authorities in the final decade of the sixteenth century.17

Maritime raiding as such was rooted in ancient habits. Long before the Spanish conquest, slave raiding was endemic all over the Philippines, but it reached unprecedented heights during the so-called Spanish–Moro Conflict that began in 1569 with the first sea battle between Spanish and Brunei vessels. Pirates from Mindanao, North Borneo, and the Sulu sultanate relentlessly attacked Luzon and the Visayas. The attacks were not only aimed at the churches, with their gold and silver treasures, but also—or even mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Maps, and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Smallpox Vaccination and Demographic Divergences in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Two: The External Arena: Local Slavery and International Trade
• Chapter Three: Saved from Smallpox but Starving in the Sugar Cane Fields: Java and the Northwestern Philippines
• Chapter Four: The Labor-Scarce Commodity Frontiers, 1870s–1942
• Chapter Five: The Periphery Revisited: Commodity Exports, Food, and Industry, 1870s–1942
• Chapter Six: Postcolonial Continuities in Plantations and Migrations
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Methodological Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List