Book Description

This book examines the interwoven issues of sugar Java and the Dutch from a broadly post-colonial standpoint. Sugar's history forms one of the crucial meta-narratives of Western colonialism. The history of the commodity is integral to that long association between cane sugar and the overseas expansion of the Western powers that had its origins in the Atlantic islands in the fifteenth century. From there, it spread to the New World and, by the nineteenth century, into parts of Asia and the Pacific. The subsequent threat to cane sugar's pre-eminence as a sweetener, posed from the mid-nineteenth century onward by sugar made from beet, only served to further consolidate that connection. The colonial-metropolitan tie -- with its promise of protective tariffs and a secure home market -- became more than ever central to the industry's sustained development. In associated mode, colonial states renewed their efforts to subordinate land and labour to sugar's particular requirements. Only in the second half of the twentieth century was the nexus formally broken, leaving cane sugar as an often-potent legacy of colonialism for the post-colonial order. The commercial production of cane sugar in Java dated from the first half of the seventeenth century. It took place there until the early nineteenth century under the patronage of the Dutch East India Company and its successors. The actual business of manufacture, largely carried on by Chinese settlers, was working in rather varied relationships with Javanese workers and 'peasant' farmers. During the mid-nineteenth century decades, however, the industry was transformed. It became the first of its kind in Asia successfully to adopt the panoply ofsteam, steel and chemistry which formed the technological basis of industrialised sugar man