Knight has spent much of his scholarly efforts on the study of sugar production on the island of Java; and this depth of knowledge is evident in this book, the title of which reminds one of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. In his latest work on sugar, Knight examines the interstices between sugar manufacturing in Java, dubbed the “Oriental Cuba”, and technology in the mid-nineteenth century. He draws extensively on Dutch, British and Indonesian archives to trace how sugar production developed and was sustained to make these innovations in sugar production possible. Java sugar had been made under some very rudimentary conditions prior to the 1830s in the Netherlands East Indies. Knight traces how these conditions were modernized using a combination of technology and technicians and certain regimes of financing, labour and land use, thus propelling Java into becoming one of the world’s top three sugar producers alongside Imperial Germany and Cuba.
The world that Knight sketches in this book is an exciting one in which transnational finance, technology, and technicians came together in the mid-1800s to make sugar manufacturing in Java as advanced as it was in Cuba, the-then largest manufacturing base for sugar in the world, behind which Java had lagged far behind. Knight sets out his case by, in the first part of his book examining technology such as the introduction of boilers and the vacuum pan, powered by steam, in the process of boiling sugar cane juice and making sugar. The vacuum pan process was a much more effective and quicker way of extracting sugar from the cane juice, rather than relying on evaporating cane juice in large open pans heated over a wood fire, a process which was slow and labour-intensive and produced poor quality sugar. Later in the 1860s and 70s, the Multiple Effect apparatus opened the way to continuously process and manufacture, expanding the sugar mills’ productive capacity rapidly.
Steam supported sugar production in several ways, not only in mechanizing the production of sugar but also by powering shipping that enabled exports to be sent faster to European markets and allowed managers, scientists, and technicians to travel to various parts of the sugar-manufacturing world. Englishman Thomas Edwards was one of those men. The knowledge and expertise of these men helped, for example, to create a modern, industrialized sugar mill at Wonopringgo in Central Java. This multinational workforce of men like Edwards and technicians such as Alexander Lawson traded on their managerial and mechanical skills to operate enterprises based on new machinery and technology and creating for themselves social and economic mobility. Many of these European migrants (whose ranks included women) intermarried and formed families in Java, and some settled in Java for the rest of their lives as part of that European milieu which was an integral part of sugar production.
One of the most insightful sections of this book is the exploration of the connection between the notorious Dutch cultivation system (Cultuurstelsel) and the system’s contribution to placing sugar production on a firm footing, providing it with access to land, capital, and labour. Through a complex network of local Javanese leaders and bureaucracies and their cooperation with the Dutch, Javanese sugar manufacturers secured a stable access to agriculture land and water, ensuring that sugar cane could be cultivated when other crops were being rotated. Unlike Cuba and Brazil, Java did not have to rely on slavery, in the production of sugar; but Javanese farmers, in being required to supply their labour to meet their tax obligations, experienced other forms of servility. Knight points out that due to different levels of land ownership, some peasants supplied more labour to the sugar process than others, a process that led to proletarianisation of a section of the peasantry.
In tracing the money trail that supported sugar investment and production to occur on a substantial scale in Java, Knight also shows the vibrancy of the private sector, primarily a cosmopolitan Dutch bourgeoisie who accumulated wealth by owning the sugar mills and winning government concessions for sugar production and supply. They raised funds from major Dutch financiers such as banks and commercial trading companies. As well as these European private interests, the suikerlords, a topic of Knight’s earlier work, local Indies families of mixed race and indigenous (Chinese) entrepreneurs also played a role in financing sugar production in the Indies.
Knight is meticulous in charting the grand old families involved in sugar production, aided impressively no doubt by the records kept in the Netherlands and in Britain—sometimes imparting an admirably detailed knowledge about particular families which may throw the reader off the main story somewhat. Greater disciplining of the text in the service of the main story seems to be required in parts of the book. Given the reliance on colonial records, it is difficult to find indigenous voices of those involved in sugar production in the years Knight covers in this book, let alone those rank and file workers who worked in the mills themselves. Those topics are outside the scope of this book.
There is voluminous material here and the author’s deep knowledge about Java sugar is evident. The structure of the book, however, seems to leave the major, exciting story way down when it should be put front-and-centre and told in all its exciting glory much earlier on. The coming together of the various elements of money, science, and technology, land and labour arrangements creating what the author terms a “metamorphosis” in Javanese sugar production is left to Part III of the book, while much scene-setting takes place in Parts I and II. The reader should persist in valiantly making his or her way through the text, as there is a wealth of fascinating titbits along the way as well a major story awaiting.
Though Java sugar no longer represents the pinnacle of industrial progress, this book should appeal to scholars in diverse fields, including those studying the production of sugar in other geographic contexts as well as histories of industrialization in Asia. Those interested in family history and social history in Asia would also find this work highly relevant in examining the formation of those European communities in the Indies whose presence was not directly related to the colonial bureaucracy. Scholars who are intent on examining the rise of Creole societies in the Caribbean and Latin America that arose around plantation economies would also find this book of merit.
