Early modern globalization is not only about exchange of goods by seas and circulation of knowledge by urban elite, it also took place in remote commodity frontiers where unique frontier society...Show moreEarly modern globalization is not only about exchange of goods by seas and circulation of knowledge by urban elite, it also took place in remote commodity frontiers where unique frontier society had formed because of the convergence of influence from different agricultural traditions. This thesis aims to fill a gap in the studies of frontier society, that is, the absence of plantation society in early modern Asian history. By exploring the archives of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) in Den Haag and Jakarta, the untold history of the emergence of Asian sugar plantations in the Dutch East Indies is for the first time fully exhibited. This history offers us an intriguing perspective to think how Chinese agricultural tradition and Dutch rural instituion converged and how that convergence led to divergent sugar societies in Dutch Formosa and in the Ommelanden of Batavia. It also gives us a unique example to compare with the well-known plantation society in the Atlantic and the so-called small-household economy in China. It is after all a global history in a rural society.Show less
This is a study of a colonial economy from an agricultural perspective, focusing on the interaction and conflicts between rice and sugarcane production in Java during the late colonial period. Rice...Show moreThis is a study of a colonial economy from an agricultural perspective, focusing on the interaction and conflicts between rice and sugarcane production in Java during the late colonial period. Rice is the most important staple food, while sugarcane has been the principal cash crop between 1870s and 1920s. Since the natural habitats for two crops are similar in many respects but large-scale intercropping was precluded due to different irrigation practices, rice and sugarcane have been competing for the limited resource of land since the dawn of mass production at the end of the nineteenth century. This thesis attempts to answer whether the proliferation of sugar plantation contributed to the rice shortage in Java, and how the shortfall in rice might influence the distribution and expansion of sugar plantation in the tropical island. Besides the quantitative analysis with agricultural statistics, it also investigates the process of policy-making, in which the colonial government exerted regulatory influence over different interest groups as far as the production of rice and sugar were concerned in the 1910s and 1920s.Show less
