Finding Captivity among the Peasantry: The Malay/Indonesian World 1850–1925

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of a progressively ‘captured peasantry’ in the Malay world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper argues that peasant incorporation into regional and global modes of production, as well as into changing political and cultural milieus, can be examined through three useful lenses. These lenses are, first ‘Traditional’ modes of captivity, based in long-standing area patterns; second, a process that will be referred to as ‘Plantationization’; and a third process, to be called ‘Proletarianization’. This last process analyses shifts in regional forms of urbanization, proletarianization, and the effects on the peasantry of the maturation of high colonial states.