The Sugar Industry of Colonial Java and its Global Trajectory

Abstract

The last 30 years have seen the creation of a rich scholarly literature on the sugar industry of colonial Java. However, most of that literature has focused on the impact of the industry on the Javanese peasantry, on the economy and society of rural Java. In so doing it has paid insufficient attention to two of its crucial characteristics – the fact that from c. 1870 through to the inter-war depression, Java was consistently the world's second largest producer-exporter of cane sugar after Cuba; and, more importantly, that during the course of the nineteenth century, Java was far ahead of other Asian producers in the industrialization of sugar manufacture. This paper is concerned mainly to explain Java's singular trajectory – its precocious industrialization – and in doing this it pays particular attention to such issues as the mechanisms by which access to land and labour was secured, the shifting location of the markets for Java's sugar, the changing pattern of ownership in the sugar processing sector, and the emergence towards the end of the nineteenth century of a culture of management which rested, in part, on the notion of Western technological and scientific superiority.