00074918.2015.1111790

(1)

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbie20

Download by: [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] Date: 17 January 2016, At: 23:18

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Promises and Predicaments: Trade and

Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent

Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Ulbe Bosma

To cite this article: Ulbe Bosma (2015) Promises and Predicaments: Trade and

Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:3, 479-480, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1111790

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1111790

Published online: 29 Nov 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 24

View related articles

(2)

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 51, No. 3, 2015: 479–91

ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/15/000479-13

BOOK REVIEWS

Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Edited by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen

Touwen. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. Pp xiv + 334. Paperback: $38.00.

Over the past 30 years the economic history of Indonesia has become a buoyant ield of research, engaging historians from Indonesia, Australia, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. It covers a wide range of approaches, from business history to the econometric analysis of growth performance. Framed within the larger theme of Indonesia’s intense engagement with the global economy for many centuries, if not millennia, the debates focus on an array of topics, from cross-ethnic trade, business, and monetary systems to colonial drain and Lewisian turning points.

The edited volume Promises and Predicaments was written as a tribute to the distinguished economic historian J. Thomas Lindblad, who has dedicated much of his academic career to bridging the gap between the ields of Indonesia’s colo-nial and postcolocolo-nial economy and to exploring the understudied topic of the economy of Indonesia’s outer islands. Apart from giving an excellent overview of the state of the art of the ield, this book broaches themes that are largely absent in earlier anthologies like The Emergence of a National Economy (2002), by Howard Dick, Vincent J. H. Houben, Lindblad, and Thee Kian Wie.

The irst such theme is that political considerations igured higher in the Sukarno republic (1945–65) than the need to forge a national economy, with all the negative economic ramiications. The second, which is more or less a corollary of the irst, concerns the fact that raising agricultural output—and rice, in particu-lar—only received the political attention it deserved from the late 1960s onwards. Sukarno allowed this to happen, even though, as Ewout Frankema (chapter 16) points out, he was deinitely more aware than his successor Soeharto that his political fate hinged on food security.

The late Thee Kian Wie, whose contribution to this volume (chapter 12) is sadly one of his last, and Farabi Fakih (chapter 13) do not mince words in their judge-ment that under Sukarno the university-trained experts were no match for the leftist nation-builders and the army. The Cold War and its non-alignment rhetoric can be held partly responsible for the failure of the ‘technocrats’ to ind support for their economic pragmatism, which, with the beneit of hindsight, we can say would have served Indonesia well.

In addition, the Netherlands did little to provide a good start for its former colony; it burdened the new state with outstanding debts and an expensive administrative corps of expatriates. As Pierre van der Eng (chapter 15) points out, donors were much more pragmatic and forthcoming towards the government of Soeharto than towards that of Sukarno, who did little to placate Western investors.

(3)

480 Book Reviews

On the other hand, Sukarno’s economic nationalism, which aimed for food self-suficiency for Indonesia, was not entirely unjustiied. Van der Eng describes how donors channelled much of their aid in the form of food, which nicely served their interests by disposing of food surpluses but had the predictable consequence of disturbing Indonesia’s food market.

In sum, this book offers a valuable overview of the development options and dilemmas of Indonesia in the 1950s and the early 1960s, during its transition from a colonial to a postcolonial economy. In a way, this narrow framework makes this book more coherent than it would have been had it adopted a longue durée per-spective, which the editors admit is absent in most contributions. In fact, only 3 of the 17 contributions deal exclusively with the colonial period. I nonetheless think that scholars working on the economic history of Indonesia should not neglect the longue durée; important questions relating to social inequalities, demography, ecology, and migration, for example, all beneit from a broader temporal frame-work. What also deserves greater prominence is the comparative ambition, which I found only in the contributions by Hal Hill (chapter 3) and Frankema, although I grant that several contributors—among whom Anne Booth not the least—have published excellent comparative work elsewhere.

Rather than as a critique of this volume, my observations should be read as desiderata for the coming years of this prospering ield of economic history. The editors deserve credit for offering the reader a preview of fascinating new research questions about the 1950s and 1960s that promise an important cross-fertilisation between economics, history, and development studies.

Ulbe Bosma

International Institute of Social History

Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics. Edited by Michele Ford and Thomas B. Pepinsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 178. Paperback: $23.95.

‘Oligarchy’ has been the key word in the analysis of Indonesia’s now not-so-new democracy. A number of scholars, most notably Jeffrey Winters, Vedi Hadiz, and Richard Robison, have argued that democratisation, which began with the fall of Soeharto in 1998, has changed the form of Indonesian politics without eliminating oligarchic rule. Their works, largely informed by political economy in the British and European tradition, have inspired many Indonesianists while at the same time attracting ierce criticisms—particularly from those informed by the plural-ist tradition, who have argued that Indonesia has made a steady transition to a greater democracy but is still crippled by structural problems. For a long time, lit-tle productive engagement has occurred between these camps, which essentially constitute parallel universes.

It is against this backdrop that Beyond Oligarchy, which brings together leading scholars in the ield, makes a welcome attempt to move past the dichotomy that has characterised the literature. This book is an essential read, not only for new