This is an ambitious work that traverses pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial years in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. A short review scarcely does justice to a wide-ranging and thought-provoking comparative history that will be of great interest not only to scholars of Southeast Asia but also to all who are interested in the history of globalisation and inequality.
Ulbe Bosma is a member of a group of social and labour historians at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam who are engaged in a long-term project that they have called Global Labour History. As part of the project they have developed a longitudinal statistical database on labour throughout the world. Making of a periphery is the latest work by Bosma which makes use of this IISH database to complement his detailed research in Dutch colonial archives and wide reading of the existing literature. Bosma is generally sensitive to the limitations of statistical data for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (particularly that for Java), though of necessity these limitations — especially on population growth and rice-production in Java — mean that some of the conclusions remain tentative.
This comparative study of labour migration in Island Southeast Asa links the migration flows in the colonial era to the pre-colonial structures of slavery, in all its variations, with colonial plantation systems that depended on indentured labour. Bosma argues that ‘The institution of slavery was both reshaped and strengthened through the incorporation of the region into the global economy’ (p. 55). The fundamental question posed by the book is summed up in its subtitle — ‘How Island Southeast Asia became a mass exporter of labor’. Bosma argues that ‘While the traditional debate on peripheralization places much emphasis on deindustrialisation, the argument proposed in this book is that population densities and modes of labor control — particularly plantations versus smallholder cultivation — should take central stage in our attention’ (p. 131).
Bosma traces the origins of post-colonial global inequalities to their pre-colonial and colonial roots. A central argument is that the real change in Southeast Asia — its ‘reversal of fortune’ or peripheralisation — occurred not in the seventeenth century, as most scholars have argued, but two hundred years later, in the nineteenth century. Southeast Asia, he states, went through a period of demographic decline and economic contraction between 1600 and 1750 because of climate change, smallpox epidemics and frequent military conflicts. This changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century for Java and the northern Philippines when the colonial regimes of The Netherlands and Spain began widespread smallpox vaccinations. This led to demographic growth unique in Asia ‘twice as high as the already remarkable annual demographic growth of 0.7 percent attained by China at that time’ (p. 21). By the mid-nineteenth century this demographic growth created an excess of labour that was forced to migrate from overpopulated rice-growing areas to the commodity-producing frontiers being opened up by Western capitalism in East and West Java, Luzon and the Visayas.
Bosma distinguishes between the labour recruitment practices for plantations in East and West Java, Luzon and the Visayas and those for the huge plantations that were carved out of the jungles of Sumatra from the late nineteenth century. Labour for the former was recruited through the established patron–client system. In Java, for example, people from overpopulated areas were recruited as seasonal labourers through networks controlled by village heads and native officials while still remaining part of the village economy and social structures. However, there were no patron–client relationships in underpopulated Sumatra that foreign-owned plantations could use to acquire a cheap and submissive labour force. Labour had to be imported, initially as indentured labour from southern China, but by the 1890s primarily from overpopulated Java. Bosma states that this recruitment of Javanese labour outside the patron–client system was unique to Sumatra. Recruiting indentured labour from Java was expensive — the plantation owners had recruitment agencies in the major port-cities and engaged contractors to round up impoverished villagers who then had to be shipped to Sumatra. The plantations compensated for the high cost of recruitment with appalling low wages and conditions, backed by a notorious penal sanctions regime to prevent their ‘assets’ from absconding or slacking on the job. The exploitation of people recruited from the overpopulated areas of Java and the northern Philippines into Western plantations is compared to the lives of smallholders who also produced export crops in the thinly populated areas of Sumatra, the eastern islands of Indonesia and the southern areas of the Philippines. Smallholder cultivation of export crops was not only free from colonial exploitation of labour but also was more efficient.
Bosma argues that the demographic imbalance in Island Southeast Asia continues to shape migration and labour trafficking systems. In chapter 6 and the conclusion he discusses the continuities in contemporary labour recruitment systems and those of the colonial era, with well organised and officially endorsed recruitment systems operating alongside unofficial and often illegal networks of traffickers. For many Indonesians and Filipinos working in Malaysia, Hong Kong or the Gulf States, sometimes illegally and often as a contemporary version of indentured labour, is an important source of income for themselves and their families, though rarely enough to set them free from an exploitative labour market.
This is an excellent comparative history that builds on many local studies. It contributes to a deeper understanding not just of the transformations that occurred in Island Southeast Asia over the last three hundred years but also their ongoing consequences.
