The author is grateful to his colleagues Dr. P.L. Burns, Dr. Doug McEachern and Dr. Adrian Graves for their comments on various drafts of this manuscript, which had been typed with unfailing good humour by the secretarial staff of the Adelaide University History Department. Thanks are also due to archivists and librarians in The Hague and Jakarta for invaluable assistance in the research behind this article, in particular Mona Lohanda and M.G.H.A. de Graaff. In Indonesia, my work was also greatly facilitated by the kind co-operation of the officials of Lembaga Ilmu Pegetahuan Indonesia, Jakarta. Thanks are also due to the University of Adelaide's Study Leave Fund, for generously providing me with the money for overseas research.

¹ The Cultivation System (1830-c.1870) was in essence a scheme for promoting the massive expansion of Java's agricultural exports devised by Van den Bosch, who was Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies from 1830 until 1833, and thereafter Minister of Colonies in The Hague until 1840. The colonial government played the key role in organizing and financing production under the aegis of the System, the profits of which were designed to flow into the Dutch treasury. In the case of sugar, however, the involvement in the production process of European ‘Contractors’ — who manufactured the cane grown for them by Javanese peasants — meant that by the 1850's a substantial portion of the profits from this area of Cultivation System production was flowing into private hands in The Netherlands and Java. As to the ‘System’ itself, one of its foremost modern historians has remarked that it was rather a set of local accommodations, designed for the most effective exploitation of the very diverse economic and social arrangements prevailing in mid-nineteenth century Java. In the case of sugar industry, the System was formally abolished in favour of non-government plantation enterprise in 1870: it was not finally phased out, however, until well into the following decade. General introductions in Van Niel, R., “The Effects of Export Cultivation in Nineteenth Century Java”, Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1981): 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Niel, R., “Measurement of Change under the Cultivation System in Java”, Indonesia 14 (1972): 89–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fasseur, C., Kultuurstelsel en Koloniale Baten (Leiden: Universitaire Pers, 1975)Google Scholar. For the industry prior to 1830, see Knight, G.R., “From Plantation to Padi-Field: The Origins of the Nineteenth Century Transformation of Java's Sugar Industry”, Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1980): 177–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Fasseur, C., “Organisatie en Sociaal-Economische Betekenis van de Governments-Suikerkultuur in Enkele Residenties op Java omstreeks 1850”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en-Volkenkunde 133 (1977): 285Google Scholar quotes figures for the Campaign workforce at the Pandji Factory in East Java c. 1855 of around 700 people daily. My own calculations suggest that for a large factory like Wonopringo the figure was probably nearer 1000.

³ Geertz, C., Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 89Google Scholar.

⁴ Geertz, C., The Social History of a Javanese Town (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965), p. 46Google Scholar.

⁵ In the literature reviewed here, the term ‘pre-capitalist’ is much more widely used than ‘noncapitalist’, but its meaning is often ambiguous. I take the former term to mean ‘on the path to capitalism’ and the latter to mean ‘quite different to a capitalist order’. Geertz, for instance, in the reference cited above appears to use the term with both meanings, i.e., pre-Cultivation System Java is ‘pre-capitalist’, in that prior to 1830 — in Geertz's analysis — it stood on the threshold of capitalist development. He still uses the term ‘pre-capitalist’, however, to describe the situation prevailing in late colonial Java when — again in his own analysis — any pre-disposition to capitalism in rural Java had been nipped in the bud and Javanese society and economy were no longer progressing in a capitalist direction. I have retained the term ‘pre-capitalist’ in the present paper only with grave reservation, since I believe that Java prior to the mid-nineteenth century expansion of production for the world market is most usefully understood to have been non-capitalist in the sense defined above. For arguments on this score, see, e.g. McEachern, D., “Capitalism and Colonial Production: An Introduction”, in Alavi, H. et al. , Capitalism and Colonial Production (London & Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 6–9Google Scholar.

⁶ Tichelman, F., The Social Evolution of Indonesia (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 114 & 122–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Gordon, A., “The Collapse of Java's Colonial Sugar System and the Breakdown of Independent Indonesia's Economy”, in van Anrooij, F. et al. , Between People and Statistics: Essays on Modern Indonesian History (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 251–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Indonesia, Plantations and the ‘Post-Colonial’ Mode of Production”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 12, no. 2 (1982): 168–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gordon argues that plantations [under which category he subsumes Java sugar] do not operate on normal capitalist lines, in that they depend on paying rent/land price and wages below the normal market or hypothetical level. The colonial state provides the legislation, administration and force to ensure this. I find this contention unacceptable. If the use of state power to force access to resources rules out the “purity” of capitalist enterprise, colonial or otherwise, then there would be few such enterprises which at one time or another in their history would pass this test. What Gordon is in fact describing in late colonial Java is a stage of capitalist development, not a peculiarly “colonial” form of quasi-capitalism.

⁸ For a succinct discussion of dualist and articulationst arguments, see Scott, C.D., “Peasants, Proletarianisation and the Articulation of Modes of Production”, Journal of Peasant Studies 3, no. 3 (1976)Google Scholar, on the articulation debate in particular, see Wolpe, H., ed., The Articulation of Modes of Production (London & Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 1–43Google Scholar.

⁹ Notable examples (many of which will be discussed below) include: Breman, J., Control of Land and Labour in Colonial Java (Doordrecht: Floris Publications, 1983)Google Scholar; Elson, R.E., Javanese Peasants and the Colonial Sugar Industry (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Fasseur, , KultuurstelselGoogle Scholar; Fernando, M.R., “Peasants and Plantation Economy: The Social Impact of the European Plantation Economy in Ciribon Residency From the Cultivation System to the End of the First Decade of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Monash University, Melbourne, 1982)Google Scholar; Van Niel, R., “Measurement of Change”, and “The Regulation of Sugar Production in Java, 1830–1840”, in Van Niel, R., ed., Economic Factors in Southeast Asian Social Change (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1968)Google Scholar and “The Introduction of the Government Sugar Cultivation in Pasuruan, Java, 1830”, Journal of Oriental Studies 7 (1969): 261–76Google Scholar.

¹⁰ E.g. Elson, , Peasants and Colonial Sugar, pp. 80–83Google Scholar.

¹¹ Van Niel, R., “The Function of the Landrent under the Cultivation System in Java”, Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 3 (1964): 357–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, pp. 20–25Google Scholar.

¹² E.g. Breman, , Land and Labour, pp. 18–19Google Scholar; Van Niel, , “Effects of Export Cultivation”, pp. 42–43Google Scholar

¹³ See below.

¹⁴ Elson, , Peasants and Colonial Sugar, pp. 36 & 46Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, pp. 17 & 63–76Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Early contracts stipulated that the Indies Government would provide not only the requisite workforce but also the carts used in the Campaign. See Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, p. 66Google Scholar. By 1834, the government was already becoming more circumspect with regard to its obligations to provide Campaign labour, and various ‘model’ — as well as many actual — Contracts from 1836 onward contained clauses placing “all aspects of harvesting, transport and manufacture squarely on the shoulders of the manufacturers”. In line with Van den Bosch's publicly expressed view of two years earlier, factory work, as far as possible, should be performed by volunteers (i.e., vrijwilligers) and therefore “on the basis of free agreements with peasants … and wage payments”. Elson, R.E., “Sugar Factory Workers and the Emergence of ‘Free Labour’ in Nineteenth Century Java”, Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (1986): 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, p. 178Google Scholar; Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, pp. 144–46 & 151–52Google Scholar; Levert, P., Inheemsche Arbeid in de Java Suiker industrie (Wageningen, Veenman, 1934), pp. 78–82Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See note 38, below.

¹⁹ For the background to this development, see Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, pp. 102–109Google Scholar.

²⁰ Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, pp. 159–60Google Scholar.

²¹ Fasseur, , Kultuurstelsel, p. 148Google Scholar.

²² Van Niel, , “Effects of Export Cultivations”, p. 52Google Scholar; Van Niel, R., “The Legacy of the Cultivation System for Subsequent Economic Development” (Paper presented to the Conference on Indonesian Economic History during the Colonial Period,Australian National University,Canberra,1983), pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

²³ Breman, , Land and Labour, pp. 13–36Google Scholar.

²⁴ Elson, “Sugar Factory Workers”; Peasants and Colonial Sugar; “Sugar and Peasants: The Social Impact of the Western Sugar Industry on the Peasantry of the Pasuruan Area, East Java, from the Cultivation System to the Great Depression” (Ph.D. diss., Monash University, Melbourne, 1979)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, pp. 142 & 171–74Google Scholar.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 155.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 162.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Elson, R.E., The Cultivation System and Agricultural Involution (Melbourne: Monash University Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Working Papers no. 14, 1979)Google Scholar.

³⁰ A great deal obviously hinges here on the definition of ‘proletariat'. The objection to its use in this context appears to be two-fold and to reflect articulationist reservations about the ‘full’ development of capitalism in Third-World circumstances: (i) that landless labourers who took up work in the Campaign were ‘only’ employed by the industry for part of the year, and therefore formed a ‘part-time proletariat’ of ‘peasant-workers’ who retained a footing in the ‘pre-capitalist’ order of dependent-labourers and sharecroppers etc. which continued to exist within the villages, (ii) that ‘marginal’ landholding peasants who were drawn into Campaign work still remained landholders of sorts, and were not ‘completely separated’ from the means of production. See, e.g., the discussion of theories of the articulation of modes of production in Wolpe (Articulation, pp. 1–19) and the specific discussion of the formation of the ‘Third World’ proletariat in Munslow, B. and Finch, H., ed., Proletarianisation in the Third World (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 1–14Google Scholar. An alternative conceptualization of the ‘proletariat’, on the other hand — and one which underscores the present argument — is to be found in Cohen, G.A.'s remark [Karl Marx's Theory of History (London, 1978), p. 72]Google Scholar that “the lack of means of production is not as essential to the proletarian status as is traditionally maintained. It is better to say that a proletarian must sell his labour power to obtain his means of life….”

³¹ This factory, some sixteen kilometres south of the Residency capital of Pekalongan itself, was built in 1838–39 by European concessionaires and came in 1843 into the hands of the Nederlandsche Handelsmaatshappij or NHM, the Dutch trading company which dominated the Java trade — and marketed in Europe the government's share of the output of the Cultivation System — in the midnineteenth century. They effectively re-built the factory c. 1850, turning it into a colonial showpiece, having first renewed — on very favourable terms — their manufacturing contract with the Indies Government. This contract expired in 1867 and, after considerable but eventually abortive negotiations, the NHM failed to renew it, sold the factory at auction in 1869 and temporarily severed their contact with Wonopringo in the following year [see Mansveldt, W.M.F., Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Handel — Maatschappij (Haarlem, Joh. Enschedé, 1924), Vol. 1, pp. 263–65Google Scholar]. The factory itself was apparently closed for good during the Great Depression, and razed to make way for military installations c. 1958.

³² Mid-nineteenth century estimates of the number of landless households within the Wonopringo kring range from less than twenty per cent to nearly fifty per cent, the higher figure coming from Residency ‘Statistics’ of the late 1860's and the lower from the data collected by the so-called ‘Umbgrove Commission’ a little more than a decade earlier. The higher figure, in turn, almost certainly reflects a statistical redefinition of the ‘household’ by Residency officials in Pekalongan c.1866, because although the data for the relevant Residency Districts (Pekadjangan and Sawangan) show a marked increase in the number of households after that date — the great majority of them in the ‘landless’ category — they reveal no comeasurate increase in the total population. Indeed, this showed only a minimal recorded growth. See: Monographic Fabriek Wonopringo, section III, Exh. 24.4.1862/40, Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague [hereafter ARA], Archief Kolonien [hereafter MK], 1181; Statistiek Pekalongan 1862–1867, Exh. 20.10.1869/4, ARA MK 2264. See also Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, p. 149Google Scholar and, for some preliminary remarks on the structure of the Pekalongan peasantry in the nineteenth century, see Knight, G.R., “Capitalism and Commodities in Java”, in Alavi, H. et al. , Capitalism and Colonial Production (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 121–26 and 132–37Google Scholar and so the issue of landlessness within peasant communities generally, see Mintz, , “The Rural Proletariat and the Problem of Proletarian Consciousness”, Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 3: 304–307Google Scholar. Circa 1860 Wonopringo appears to have employed daily more than one thousand Javanese for much of the duration of the five-month Campaign. The great majority of them were said to be men, about 500 of whom worked in the fabriek itself — which included a gas-plant (for lighting), a charcoal kiln and an ampas yard in which expressed cane was dried for use in the furnace, as well as the mills and boiling houses which comprised the heart of the factory — while a further 500 were employed as cane cutters and haulers. The population of five villages within the kring was charged with the work of carting sugar from Wonopringo to the wharves at Pekalongan, and an unspecified number of women and children were employed in packing sugar into containers at the factory. See Monographie Fabriek Wonopringo.

³³ For the source of Edward's remarks, see note 34, below. Very similar contemporary comments on the ‘uselessness’ of itinerant labour are quoted in Breman, , Control of Land and Labour, p. 20Google Scholar. At Wonopringo in the mid-1850's, the ‘Umbgrove Commission’ reckoned there to be no more than 130 itinerants, out of a total population of nearly 24,000. See Monographie Fabriek Wonopringo, III/A & B, ARA MK 1181.

³⁴ Edwards had made a similar point to his employers only a few days earlier: “I have had a mandoor the whole of this year looking out for men. I have given these men a piece of work by which they could gain 35 to 45 doits per day — but I have never succeeded in getting more than five men per day, and generally the mandoor came back without one. The regular sekaps of the fabriek get f.6 per month when they first enter — they are employed about the machinery and have nothing to do but watch it, to oil it and to turn a cock now and then. Even with this light work I have never been able to get a sufficient number — they work for five or six days and then stop for two or three days. When I ask men to enter as sekaps they always give one answer. They will enter as sekaps if I can get them freed from all government work [i.e., from corvee requirements].” See: Edwards to Batavia, 11.12.1858/1320 & 15.12.1858/1322, both in Notulen Batavia Factorij NHM, 18.12.1858/430, ARA Archief Nederlands Handelmaatschappij [hereafter NHM] 9525.

³⁵ Heijning to Batavia and [1864], quoted in Batavia [Factorij NHM] to [Company Headquarters] Amsterdam, 29.12.1864/1315, ARA NHM 4893.

³⁶ See note 34, above.

³⁷ Edwards to Batavia, 15.12.1858/1322. In Notulen Factorij Batavia, 18.12.1858/430, ARA NHM 9252.

³⁸ Mid-1850's data on labour arrangements at Wonopringo from: Monographie Fabriek Wonopringo, B/II/C & B/II/L, ARA MK 1181. The Residency authorities never formally involved themselves in the provision of cane-carters, whom the fabriek notionally obtained through ‘free’ contracts with village headmen and ‘elders’. But see, e.g., the NHM's comments in 1853 that such contracts were concluded “with the foreknowledge and, indeed, through the intermediary [tussenkomst] of the Resident”, in Batavia to Amsterdam, 25.6.1853/213, ARA NHM 4886. Reasons of space preclude a fuller discussion of cane-haulage in the present paper, despite its obvious importance to the development of labour. A valuable introduction to the subject is to be found in Elson, , Peasants and colonial sugar, pp. 47–48, 74–75 & 110–13Google Scholar.

³⁹ See Heijning's letter [n.d.] to the Batavia Factorij of the NHM, quoted in Batavia to Amsterdam, 14.10.1863/1197 & 1.3.1865/1334, ARA NHM 4892 & 4894. For similar comments from the Residency authorities in Pekalongan on the finding of ‘substitutes’ from among the landless to perform corvee, see, e.g., Kultuurverslag Pekalongan 1862, Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Jakarta [hereafter ANJ], Archief Cultuures 1624.

⁴⁰ Batavia to Amsterdam, 27.7.1866/1479 & 14.5.1867/1564, NHM ARA 4895–6; Nota Betreffende de Kultuurondernemingen, 10.6.1868 & 7.7.1869, enclosed in Batavia to Amsterdam, 13.6.1868/1676 & 17.7.1869/1764, ARA NHM 4897; Jaarverslag Batavia Factorij NHM, 43 (1867–68), pp. 195–202; Jaarverslag NHM Factorij Batavia, 42 (1866–67), pp. 197–99, ARA NHM; Resident Pekalongan to Director BB, 20.2.1869/684, Exh. 7.3.1870/82, ARA MK 2301.

⁴¹ The NHM ran three sugar factories in the Kendal division of Semarang Residency in the late 60's: Tjipiring, Gemoe and Poegoe. Mansveldt [NHM, pp. 365–66]. On labour there, see Van Gennep, “Nota Betreffende de Kultuurondernemingen”, 10.6.1868, in Batavia to Amsterdam 13.6.1868/1676; Batavia to Amsterdam, 31.3.1870/1848, 19.4.1870/1853 & 13.8.1870/1898, ARA NHM 4897–8.

⁴² “Nota van der Heer H.F. Morbotter” [n.d.], in Batavia to Amsterdam, 14.12.1867/1627, ARA NHM 4896. Remarks such as this form a valuable qualification to the manufacturers’ complaints cited by Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, p. 164Google Scholar

⁴³ Elson, , “Sugar Factory Workers”, p. 163Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ One important reason why ‘extra-economic’ coercion should have remained so important in the mobilization of labour is briefly alluded to by Breman, , Control of Land and Labour, p. 21Google Scholar, who argues that “the attempt to accomplish a more direct mobilisation of the agrarian subaltern classes through redistribution of agrarian resources … had not yet been completed when the Cultivation System was abolished (i.e., by 1870)” and that the rural landless still “remained under the authority” of the peasant householders. In short, it was necessary for the sugar industry to rely on ‘extra-economic’ coercion to prise the kring's large numbers of dependent labourers away from their peasant ‘masters'. The contention of the present paper, as will be apparent from the subsequent analysis of the development of labour at Wonopringo, is that after the mid-century this landholder authority over the landless was significantly weakened in Pekalongan, as a result of the crisis in ‘peasant’ agriculture.

⁴⁵ At the Sragie factory ostensibly ‘free’ labour was being provided for the Campaign, according to the Resident, “by persuading the [Javanese] district officials to give orders on their own authority to the village governments to supply the so-called menoempang [i.e., landless peasants] … to the factory….” At Kaliematie factory, peasants called up for corvee were being ‘diverted’ to the fabriek by the local Javanese officials who were “enjoying the monetary advantages thereof”. See Politiek Verslag Pekalongan 1859, pp. 6–8, ANJ, Pekalongan Archief 1.

⁴⁶ Batavia to Amsterdam, 29.12.1864/1315, ARA NHM 4893.

⁴⁷ On the system of bonuses [cultuurprocenten] ‘earned’ by the priyayi in relation to the output of their district's sugar factories, see Reinsma, R., “De Cultuurprocenten in de Praktijk en in de Oogen der Tijdenooten” in Fasseur, C. (ed.), Geld en Geweten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 59–89Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Edwards to Batavia, 11.12.1858/1320, in Notulen Factorij Batavia, 18.12.1858/430, ARA NHM 9252.

⁴⁹ Rush, J.R., “Opium Farms in Nineteenth Century Java: Institutional Continuity and change in a Colonial Society” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1977), pp. 118–55Google Scholar; Sutherland, H., ‘The Priyayi’, Indonesia 19 (1975): 57–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sutherland, H., The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 3–18Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See, on the attempts in Pekalongan to reduce priyayi claims on corvee labour, Kultuurverslag Pekalongan 1862, ANJ AC 1624; Politiek Verslag Pekalongan 1869, ANJ Pekalongan 2; G.G. to M.K., 18.7.1868/91, Exh. 7.10.1868/34, ARA MK 2145. For a short discussion of parallel developments in east Java, see Elson, , “Sugar and Peasants”, pp. 242–45Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Edwards to Resident Pekalongan, 24.1.1857, in Batavia to Amsterdam, 11.3.1857/533, ARA NHM 4888.

⁵² [Extract] Heijning to Batavia 10.8.1866, in Batavia to Amsterdam, 27.8.1866/1488, ARA NHM 4895.

⁵³ Jaarverslag NHM Factorij Batavia, 41 (1865–66), pp. 255–58, ARA NHM.

⁵⁴ It is quite apparent, e.g. from the studies of both Elson, R.E., “The Impact of the Government Sugar Cultivation in the Pasuruan Area, East Java, during the Cultivation System Period”, Review of Indonesian and Malay Affairs 12 (1978): 28–29Google Scholar and Fasseur, C., ‘The Cultivation System and its Impact on the Dutch Colonial Economy and the Indigenous Society in Nineteenth Century Java” (Mimeo, 1981), pp. 7–8Google Scholar that they consider the role of the lurah to have been substantially re-constituted during the period of the Cultivation System, though they draw different implications from this than the ones advanced here. Likewise, in this part of the pasisir at least, very heavily exposed to Dutch and Chinese influences in the mid-nineteenth century, it would be hard to maintain that the priyayi of Pekalongan remained ‘traditional’ leaders in any meaningful sense of that word. See Knight, , “Capitalism and Commodities”, p. 147Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ ‘Traditional’ prescriptive right will scarcely suffice as an explanation. For one thing, the degree to which corvee was exploited under the Cultivation was entirely innovatory — for the labour involved in the plantations, the Dutch authorities even invented a new ‘traditional’ term, cultuurdienst or cultivation-service. Likewise, prescriptive right hardly explains the apparently increasing ease and effectiveness with which priyayi and headmen were able to raise corvee labour after the mid-century. Similar problems arise, of course, once we postulate that these rural elites continued to play a role of some kind of mobilization of labour for the sugar industry when the colonial state itself began to stand aside in the mid-1860's.

⁵⁶ See [fragment] Kultuurverslag Pekalongan 1865, ANJ Pekalongan 69. Three years earlier the Resident had reported that the factory ‘dole’ (of twenty cents per day) was “sufficient for the feeding of one worker, who in most cases has to expend less than a half of his received wage for that purpose”. See Kultuurverslag Pekalongan 1862, ANJ AC 1624.

⁵⁷ Batavia to Amsterdam, 14.10.1863, 1197, ARA NHM 4893.

⁵⁸ Resident Pekalongan to Director B.B., 22.8.1867/3347, Exh. 12.2.1868/658, ARA MK 2036.

⁵⁹ Batavia to Amsterdam, 29.12.1864/1315, ARA NHM 4893.

⁶⁰ The development of ‘new wants’ among the peasant population of Java's mid-nineteenth century sugar districts — and the effects of this on the mobilization of labour — has been stressed by both Elson and Fasseur. As far as the mobilization of Campaign labour in particular is concerned, however, there are a number of fundamental problems arising from such a hypothesis. The first is that it does not adequately explain why ‘new wants’, if such there were, required to be satisfied through labour in the Campaign rather than through the more ‘traditional’ means of working the village fields. Second — and both Elson and Fasseur are evidently both aware of this problem — it would still need to be shown that an increased circulation of consumer goods (i.e., salt and cloth) was indeed catering to the demand of the mass of the sugar workers. It seems, on the face of it, that they catered for the expanding tastes of the rural elites.

⁶¹ Crop-failure was more or less endemic in the many parts of the Pekalongan lowlands from the mid-1840's to early in the 1860's and was widely attributed by contemporaries to the Ommo Mentek, a breakdown in the metabolism of the padi plant, which causes it to yellow and die out before it matures. Why the Mentek should have apparently been so prevalent in this part of the pasisir in the mid-nineteenth century is something which needs further investigation. It may have been related, however, to the contemporary prevalence of the so-called gaga-rantjah [i.e., dry-swamp], methods of cultivating padi, which was apparently very widespread in the mid-nineteenth century Pekalongan lowlands, quite probably in response to the need to clear sawah early of rice so that sugar and other Government crops could be planted. This method of cultivation, involved the planting of ‘dry’ padi before the monsoon rains had set in, resulting in the development of a wholly new set of roots once the sawah was flooded, and may well have pre-disposed the plant to fall victim to the Mentek. Equally, however, the much-reported yellowing of the leaf of the young padi may have resulted from a calcium deficiency in the soil, in turn related to the heavy (and for the pasisir quite exceptional) exploitation of Pekalongan sawah-land for indigo production from the 1820's until the mid-1850's. A fuller, documented discussion of these points will be found in Knight, G.R., “The People's Own Cultivations: Rice and Second Crops in Pekalongan Residency, North Java, 1780–1870”, Review of Indonesian and Malay Affairs 19, no. 1 (1986): 1–38Google Scholar.

⁶² In the heartland of the Wonopringo kring [i.e., in the sector of the kring lying immediately to the north of the factory itself, where two-thirds of Wonopringo's cane was grown] in the late 1850's, at least fifty per cent of the sawah was removed from the cycle of padi-palawija cultivation each year, so that sugar could be grown on it. On the impact of sugar on ‘peasant’ agriculture generally, see Alexander, J. & Alexander, P., “Sugar, Rice and Irrigation in Colonial Java”, Ethno-History 25 (1978): 207–233Google Scholar and Dekker, W., “Tussen Zelfvoorziening en commerciele Landbouw” (Docteraalscriptie, Vrije Universitiet, Amsterdam, 1978), pp. 20–52Google Scholar.

⁶³ Batavia to Amsterdam, 9.5.1857/550, ARA NHM 4888. In August of the same year, the Batavia factorij again informed Amsterdam headquarters that the “people are setting about their [Campaign] work with a will … to which the failure of the rice harvest perhaps contributes”. See Batavia to Amsterdam, 25.8.1857/577, ARA NHM 4888. There was, of course, a reverse side to the equation, noted by Edwards for instance in 1859, when it was said to be difficult to get enough firewood for the fabriek because rice was cheaper. Likewise, in 1861, a good harvest was blamed for a shortage of factory hands. See Batavia to Amsterdam, 7.11.1859/791 & 2.5.1861/951, ARA NHM 4889 & 4891.

⁶⁴ Colonial statistics suggest a marked fall-off in padi production in the district of Pekadjangan, the centre of Wonopringo's operations, during the course of the nineteenth century. Figures for the early 1820's show Pekadjangan producing around 42,000 piculs of padi annually whereas in the early 1860's harvests of around 15,000 piculs or even less were being experienced. Even by the end of the decade, when the Residency authorities claimed that harvest failure was on the decrease and that the output of the sawahs was generally rising, Pekadjangan (with a considerably increased population) still managed to produce significantly less rice than it had done forty years earlier — a ‘good’ harvest in 1869 amounted to a recorded 33,300 piculs. See Algemeen Jaarverslag Pekalongan, 1823, p. 33, ARA Schneither Verz. 90; Kultuurverslag Pekalongan 1862, ANJ AC 1624; Aantooning Uitkomsten … Rijstkultuur … 1864, ANJ Pekalongan 62; Director B.B. to G.G., 8.5.1871/3331, Exh. 1.7.1871, ARA MK 2409.

⁶⁵ The relevant statistics are to be found in the Koloniale Verslag from 1852 onwards. For elaboration and commentary, see Knight, , “The People's Own Cultivations”, pp. 1–24Google Scholar.