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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

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

Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development:

The Belgian Congo and Netherlands Indies

Compared; The Sugar Plantation in India and

Indonesia: Industrial Production 1770–2010

Anthony Reid

To cite this article: Anthony Reid (2014) Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: The Belgian Congo and Netherlands Indies Compared; The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production 1770–2010, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 50:3, 487-489, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2014.938412

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.938412

Published online: 03 Dec 2014.

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2014: 487–506

ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/14/000487-20

BOOK REVIEWS

Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: The Belgian Congo and Netherlands Indies Compared. Edited by Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens. Routledge

Explorations in Economic History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xix + 296.

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production 1770–2010. By

Ulbe Bosma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 323.

Sub­Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia have seldom been compared, though the economic loundering of the former and the success of the latter during 1970–95 have recently raised important questions about the postcolonial tropics. As the edi -tors of Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development point out, Belgium and the

Netherlands still ‘know so little about each others’ colonial history. Apparently, states and nations … have their own ways of digesting the past and are typically not keen to share the most shameful aspects with outsiders’ (p. xviii). Yet the Bel -gian Congo and colonial Indonesia were the two largest resource­rich tropical colonies, and bywords for cynical exploitation for the beneit of the metropolitan country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In ighting to obtain his slice of Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) was hoping to replicate the Cultivation System that had so enriched his Dutch neighbour, the twin from which Belgium had been separated only in 1830. The postcolonial ‘amnesia’ about this record inspired the economic historian editors of this collection, Dutch Frankema and Belgian Buelens, to undertake a serious comparative study. They brought together 15 researchers, including themselves, half of whom are based in the Low Countries while the remainder are among the usual suspects in area studies, including Indo -nesianists Anne Booth, the late Thee Kian Wie, and Vincent Houben.

The most innovative of the chapters are those that compare the two colonies directly. William Clarence­Smith, already exceptional in writing about both African and Southeast Asian history, asks why rubber did so much better in 20th­century Indonesia than in the 19th­century Congo, where it had started promisingly. The Franco­Belgian giant Société Financière de Caoutchouc (Socin) even switched its major ield of operations from the Congo to Indonesia after 1905. The key to Indo -nesia’s success was not Socin and the other estates, however, but the freedom for smallholders to grow rubber trees on hillier land as a supplement to ongoing subsistence food crops on the valley loor. The Congo’s rubber estates became a byword for unproductive coercion of labour and land; whereas Indonesia became by the 1930s the world’s largest rubber producer, on the back of free smallholders. In a comparative chapter on labour, Houben and Seibert show how forced culti -vation was reintroduced to the Congo around 1917, as it was being phased out

488 Book Reviews

in Indonesia. The apparent phenomenal drop in the Congolese population from 14 million to 10 million between 1890 and 1920 (p. 11) made colonial employers desperate to use force to make the ‘lazy African’ work in mines and plantations instead of in his own village.

Anne Booth ambitiously summarises the economic record of the two colonies, conirming the impression of the introductory chapter that the Congo was exploited in 1890–1940 rather as Java was in 1830–80, its sparse labour resources coerced to maximise revenues for Belgian companies and the state. In the Congo, the copper bonanza in underpopulated Katanga absorbed most of the Congolese wage­labour force of some half a million, causing far more disruption of families and socie -ties through the forced migration of workers than initially occurred in Indonesia through the recruitment of workers for tobacco estates in North Sumatra. In terms of infrastructure provided, however, the Belgian Congo caught up with Indonesia by the 1930s. The last phase of Belgian colonial policy, 1945–60, could be considered an economic success, with GDP, exports, industrial production, and infrastructure development all expanding rapidly while the ex­colonies of Asia (except Taiwan and Korea) loundered. In the changed moral climate after 1945, as Belgian reform -ers sought to justify their welfare policies to a postcolonial world, this phase might be compared to the Ethical Policy period of colonial Indonesia after 1900—though with more obvious economic successes thanks to the high copper prices. Hav -ing asked the question whether the disastrous performance of the Congo under Mobutu compared with Indonesia under Soeharto should be attributed to political mistakes and greed or to colonial inheritance, Booth in effect answers—some of both. She sees the key in agriculture, largely neglected by the Belgians in favour of mining, which collapsed when copper prices dropped in 1974. Dutch investment in irrigation made it easier for Soeharto to capitalise on the green revolution in the 1970s, but undoubtedly his decisions (which on agriculture investment were better than Mobutu’s) had an enormous effect on the radically different outcomes.

Frankema’s comparison of the colonies’ vital education records shows how completely the Belgian Congo depended on Christian mission schools, whereas Dutch policy needed to outlank Islamic education by developing a neutral and secular school system. Nevertheless, school participation rates appeared higher in the Congo from the time statistics became available (about 1920) until the 1970s, though Indonesia made up ground rapidly in the 1950s. The Congo was something of a colonial star in Africa, whereas colonial Indonesia lagged behind its Southeast Asian neighbours. Frankema attributes the collapse under Mobutu (1965–97) of educational enrolments, and of the economy overall, to the lack of opportunity for higher education in the colonial Congo, so that independence leaders were mark -edly less educated and capable than those in Indonesia. Moreover, Indonesians had a greater stake in their own education through Islamic, Taman Siswa, and nationalist school systems, spreading the conviction that education was the key to progress and emancipation.

Overall, Colonial Exploitation raises many questions for Southeast Asianists as

well as Africanists. The period 1970–95 saw many tropical African economies decline, just as Southeast Asia at last began its economic take­off and started to close the gap with the rich North. The Congo–Indonesia (speciically Mobutu– Soeharto) comparison is an extreme expression of the contrast. Congo’s GDP per capita was still 20% higher than Indonesia’s in the 1960s but only one­seventeenth

Book Reviews 489

as high in 2009. It is dificult to escape the conclusion that colonial governments in Asia, for all their economic failings, understood that they had to build states that would be viable alongside Japan, China, and Siam (Thailand). Even so, the economic take­off of Southeast Asia after 1970 deserves far more study in light of the African contrast.

Ulbe Bosma’s careful study of the sugar plantation goes over better­worked terrain. Its novelty lies in a long­term economic perspective of how sugar produc -tion changed loca-tion as it adopted new technologies over the centuries. Sugar cane began as a peasant crop in Bengal thousands of years ago, and the domestic, small­scale production of India, southern China, and Chinese colonies in South -east Asia continued to dominate world supply as late as 1800. In the 19th century, however, demand for sugar soared as a sweetener for tea, coffee, and other drinks and foods, with England in the lead. Production was reorganised on the basis of a plantation model transferred from older Mediterranean models to the Caribbean. ‘A plantation’, Bosma declares, ‘is an entity in which the management of the cash crop­growing unit is in complete control of every aspect of the work process, as well as of the applied technologies’ (pp. 26–27). Developed using African slave labour in the Caribbean, this model was adapted to Asia in the early 19th century, using various other forms of coerced labour.

The core of The Sugar Plantation in Indonesia and India explains this process in both India and Java—the latter becoming the 19th­century success story unusu -ally well covered in the literature. Much less well known is the survival of the two sugar industries (in Bihar and in Central and East Java) after independence, discussed in the inal chapter. In both cases, there was an initial period of nation -alist experimentation with more adequate returns and agency for poor peasants, followed by the reestablishment of hierarchies that beneited government and the richer farmers. In Java, Soeharto’s smallholder sugar­cane intensiication pro -gram (Tebu Rakyat Intensiikasi) in 1975 in effect brought the government hier -archy back into organising land and labour for sugar factories, even though the program’s declared intention was to empower smallholders.

Both books show the value of broad­brush comparative study. The Indonesia– Congo contrast, in particular, should stimulate further questioning of how Soe -harto’s Indonesia managed to do some things right, despite all the corruption and repression.

Anthony Reid

The Australian National University

© 2014 Anthony Reid http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.938412

Competitiveness Analysis and Development Strategies for 33 Indonesian Provinces. By Tan Khee Giap, Mulya Amri, Linda Low, and Tan Kong Yam.

Singapore: World Scientiic, 2013. Pp. xxi + 803. Hardback: $168.00.

Studies of the competitiveness of local governments are becoming increasingly important—especially for countries adopting large­scale decentralisation poli -cies, such as Indonesia. A competitive local government can attract and maintain