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Coolie or Worker? Crossing the Lines in Colonial Java, 1780–19421

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

G. Roger Knight
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Extract

In the historical context of colonial Indonesia, Coolie as a way of designating labour has been associated primarily with indentured, migrant, plantation workers in the so-called Outer Islands, principally Sumatra, where coolies from Java and southern China were the mainstay of the workforce on the island's tobacco, rubber and palm oil ‘estates’ from the 1880s through to the end of the colonial era more than half a century later.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 62 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1999

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References

Notes

2 On the Sumatra plantation regime in particular, see Stoler, A.L., Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven 1985)Google Scholar; Breman, J., Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek (Dordrecht 1987)Google Scholar; Idem, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi & New York 1989); Idem, ‘Controversial Views on Writing Colonial History’, Itinerario 16/2 (1992); Houben, V., ‘“Colonial History” Revisited: A Reply to Breman’, Itinerario 17/1 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Important collections of research and commentary on plantation labour in the Asia-Pacific region – inter alia concerning coolies – are Lal, B.V., Munro, D. and Beechert, E.D. eds, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accomodation (Honolulu 1993)Google Scholar and Daniel, E.V., Bernstein, H. & Brass, T. eds, Plantations, Peasants and Proletarians in Colonial Asia (London 1992)Google Scholar. For the broader frame of the extensive debates on ‘servile’ labour, see for example the contributions of Emmer, Piet et al. Itinerario 21/1 (1997) passim.Google Scholar

3 Ong, Hok Ham, The Residency of Madiun: Pryayi and Peasant in the Nineteenth Century (PhD Thesis, Yale University 1975) 196–203Google Scholar, represents one of the few attempts to grapple with the historical etymology of Coolie in the Java context, while Wertheim, in a stimulating but all too brief account (Wertheim, W.F., ‘Conditions on Sugar Estates in Colonial Java: Comparisons with Deli’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24/2 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar) has essayed an important comparison between coolies in Java and Sumatra. Beyond that, the pickings are slim.

4 Cooper, F. & Stoler, A.L. eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley 1997) 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Given a wider circulation by way of an English translation: van Niel, R. (translator), Living Conditions of Plantation Workers and Peasants in Java in 1939–1940 (Cornell University 1956)Google Scholar Wertheim had already drawn attention to the existence of the Report some years earlier Wertheim, W.F., ‘The Coolie-Budget Report’, Pacific Affairs 26/2 (1953).Google Scholar

6 Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch Oost-Indië II (The Hague 1918) 360.

7 Tinker, H., A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London 1974) 41–43.Google Scholar

8 Kim, Hyung-Chan,Dictionary of Asian American History (New York 1986) 211Google Scholar, also draws attention to ‘a Chinese term k'u-li, meaning “bitter strength” or “bitter labour”, as is often misunderstood by Westerners’.

9 See Yule, Henry and Burnell, A.C., Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (London 1886Google Scholar; new edition edited by William Crooke: London 1903); the only difference of substance in their respective entries relates to the omission of dates from the usages quoted in the earlier edition [!]. Among the significant early usages cited is Valentijn [1726] on coolies as ‘bearers of all sorts of goods […] and Palankins’; Carraccioli's Life of Clive [1873] on payments to ‘every cooly or porter employed’ and Munro [1789] on ‘as common cooly or porter’.

10 Coolie was certainly in use in the early nineteenth-century colonial archive in Java but predominantly in the quite restricted sense. Ostensible examples pointing to the contrary need to be treated with some caution. It is noteworthy, for example, that while Boomgaard, in his well-known monograph, mentions ‘coolies’ in an early nineteenth-century context at the state engineering works in Surabaya, he offers the word as a latter-day translation of the Javanese term batur (Boomgaard, P., Children of the Colonial State: Population Growth and Economic Development in Java 1795–1880 (Amsterdam 1989) 121Google Scholar). Similarly, it would appear that the ‘coolies’ present in Blussé's discussion of the sugar industry in the eighteenth-century Batavia Ommelanden (Blussé, L., Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht 1987) 27, 114Google Scholar) represent the adoption of a later terminology rather than contemporary usage, or that the term is one very specific to migrant Chinese labour in the area. This is hinted at, for example, in the fleeting reference to ‘coolies or labourers’ in Thomas Stamford Raffles's History of Java (Raffles, T.S., The History of Java 1 (London 1817) 205Google Scholar; also cited in Hobson-Jobson – see above), from the context of which it would appear that Java's former British Lieutenant-Governor had in mind the quite specific case of recently arrived Chinese migrants in the districts surrounding Batavia/Jakarta rather than the colony's Javanese workforce as a whole. This conclusion is reinforced by the placing of ‘coolies’ under the section of his History relating to commerce rather than to agriculture or the classification of the indigenous population. Significantly, in view of later developments within the industry, the Javanese workers who came into the Batavia district (the Ommelanden) during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to work its many sugar plantations and mills, were almost universally described by colonial Europeans as ‘boedjangs’ (bujang) and rarely or never as coolies (see for example Knight, G.R., ‘From Plantation to Padi Field: The Origins of the Nineteenth Century Transformation of Java's Sugar Industry’, Modern Asian Studies 14/2 (Cambridge 1980) 187–188).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 ‘Provisional […] View of the Regency of Samarang and its Dependencies [by Mr. Knops, 1812]’, India Office Library, London, Mackenzie Collections (Private) 79: 287–292. Raffles thought well enough of Knops (d. 1814 and a one-time Resident of Jepara) to laud his ‘long experience and thorough knowledge of the detail of the districts’, as is noted in de Haan, F., ‘Personalia der Periode van het Engelsch Bestuur over Java 1811–1816’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indie 92/4 (The Hague 1935) 591.Google Scholar

12 van Doren, J.B.J., Reis naar Nederlands Oost-Indie, of Land en Zeegetogen gedurende de Twee Eerste Jaren mijn Verblijfs op Java II (The Hague 1851) 21–22.Google Scholar

13 van Eysinga, P.P. Roorda, Handboek der Land- en Volkenkunde, Geschied-, Taal-, Aardrijks- en Staatkunde van Nederlandsch Indië III (Handbook for the Geography and Ethnology, History, Language, Geography and Politics of the Netherlands Indies) (Amsterdam 1841) 333.Google Scholar

14 On the general history of colonial sugar production in Java, see for example Elson, R.E., Javanese Peasants and the Colonial Sugar Industry: Impact and Change in an East Java Residency, 1830–1940 (Singapore 1984)Google Scholar; Idem, Village Java under the Cultivation System (Sydney 1994); Fasseur, C., The Politics of Colonial Exploitation (Ithaca 1992)Google Scholar; Soetrisno, L., ‘The Sugar Industry and Rural Development: The Impact of Cane Cultivation for Export on Rural JAVA, 1830–1934’ (PhD thesis, Ithaca 1980).Google Scholar

15 This is the figure for households recorded as being assigned to work in sugar cultivation throughout Java in 1850. A decade later the figure had risen to nearly 190,000 (Fasseur, The Politics of Colonial Exploitation, 246). Notionally, Government Coolies were levied from the same households, though in fact they were often drawn from the landless strata of the rural population not (notionally) subject to state levies.

16 van Deventer, S., Bijdragen tot de Kennis van het Landelijk Stelsel op Java 2 (Zalt-Bommel 1866) 159.Google Scholar

17 Even a fairly big factory like Sf. Wonopringo (Residentie Pekalongan) seems to have had a workforce in field and factory of little more than around 1000 people during the mid-century Campaign, and though a high percentage of these would have been Government Coolies, they were not exclusively so (Knight, G.R., ‘Peasant Labour and Capitalist Production in Late Colonial Indonesia: The “Campaign” at a North Java Sugar Factory, 1840–1870’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 19/2 (Cambridge 1988) 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

18 See for example Edwards to Factorij 15.12.1858/1322 in Notulen Factorij Batavia 18.12.1858/9252 General State Archive The Hague (ARA) Archive NHM.

19 Edwards to Factorij 19.3.1859/1348 in Factorij to Amsterdam 26.3.1859, ARA, Brieven NHM Eerste Afdeeling, ARA Archive NHM.

20 In the mid-1850s, Umbgrove investigated the social and economic situation in the procurement zones (beschikkingkringen) of some ninety sugar factories working on state contract in the lowlands of Eastern and Central Java. Its extensive reportage on the Javanese workforce drawn into the industry's orbit had negligible recourse to the term ‘coolie’. For the purposes of this paper, I have checked the ‘Umbgrove Monographie’ of the sugar factories Gemoe (Kendal kebupaten, Central Java), Wonopringo and Sragie (both Pekalongan kebupaten, Central Java), Kalimatie (Batang kebupaten, Central Java), Bandjardawa (Pemalang kebupaten, Central Java) and Adiwerna (Tegal kebupaten, Central Java) (ARA Collectie Umbgrove). For a general introduction to the Commission's reportage, see Fasseur, ‘Organisatie en Sociaal-Ekonomische Betekenis van de Governments Suikerkultuur in Enkele Residenties op Java omstreeks 1850’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 133 (The Hague 1977). The term ‘cooliediensten’ appears, significantly alongside ‘fabrieksdienst’ (suggesting that it was thought of as a quite specific form of ‘service’ rather than as a general designation for ‘native’ labour), in one of the printed sub-rubrics of the standard ‘Monographie’. It is entirely absent, however, from the listing of the various classes (standen) of the village population contained in each ‘Monographie’ (Section III/B & C) and is not even used to designate the rather small numbers of workers drawn into the procurement zone from elsewhere.

21 Most likely, this expansion in usage was connected with the contemporaneous withdrawal of the Indies state from the direct organisation of cane-growing. One result of this was ‘peasant’ landholders ceased to be directed by state officials to work in the cane fields, their place taken by hired hands hired by the factories' owners to work fields which they now rented directly from the landholders themselves. The Netherlands Colonial Office's annual report to the Dutch parliament for 1883 reflects the development quite neatly: ‘[…] on occasion, agreements for the field-preparation and [cane] planting are made with the people who rent the land, but in most instances the entrepreneurs employ coolies [bezigten de ondernemers daarvoor eigen koelies] who are to be obtained in sufficient numbers from among the poorer part [niet gezetenen] of the populace’ (Koloniaal Verslag V 1883 (The Hague 1852–1931) 182).

22 Knight, G.R., Colonial Production in Provincial Java: The Sugar Industry in Pekalongan-Tegal, 1800–1942 (Amsterdam 1993).Google Scholar

23 As was the case, for example, at the (then) relatively isolated Sf. Soemberhardjo (Pemalang kebupaten, Central Java), Jaarverslag Sf. Soemberhardjo 1921:41, ARA Archive NHM 9228.

24 Jaarverslag Sf. Kalimati 1913:9, ARA Archive NHM 9206.

25 Onderzoek naar de Mindere Welvaart der Inlandsche Bevolking op Java en Madura: Samentrekking […] Den Landbouw in de Residentie Pekalongan (Batavia 1907) 11.

26 Ham, Ong Hok, The Residency of Madiun: Pryayi and Peasant in the Nineteenth Century (PhD thesis, Yale 1975) 196–203Google Scholar. Some of the sources which Ong cites suggest that this may be pressing the argument too far. Apropos the ‘standsverdeeling’ among the village populations of Central Java, for example, van den Berg, L.W.C., ‘Het Inlandsche Gemeentewezen op Java en Madoera’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indie 52 (Den Haag 1901) 97Google Scholar in fact noted ‘Men heeft aldaar als eerste stand in de gemeente de gezinshoofden, bezitters van bouwgrond met een eigen erf. Deze heeten in de verschillende streken: gogol, siekep, koeli kentjeng, koelie bakoe, koeliekoewat enz’. (The highest class in that community consists of the heads of family, landowners with their own premises. In the various areas they are called: gogol, siekep, koeli kentjeng, koelie bakoe, koeliekoewat et cetera.) None of this seriously detracts, however, from Ong's general conclusions that ‘Village society itself became graded according to the labour each [household] had to perform’ and that the use of the term coolie was integral to this development. It remains the case, of course, that the period c. 1880–1940 saw a very considerable decrease in the amount of labour service demanded on the native population by the Indies government, as argued in Wolters, W., ‘From Corvee to Contract Labour’ in: Cribb, Robert ed., The Late Colonial State in Indonesia (Leiden 1994).Google Scholar

27 Breckenridge, C.A. and van der Veer, P. eds, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia 1993) 5–6Google Scholar. In more elaborated form: ‘[…] Colonial discourses are not only interconnected but productive discourses which create new kinds of knowledge, expression, political practice and [subjugation] […]. Orientalism is thus not just a way of thinking. It is a way of conceptualising the landscape of the colonial world that makes it susceptible to certain kinds of management […].’

28 Thomas, N., Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Melbourne 1994) 36.Google Scholar

29 Ashcroft, B., ‘Globalisation, Post-Colonialism and African Studies’ in: Ahluwalia, Pal and Nursey-Bray, Paul eds, Post-Colonialism: Culture and Identity in Africa (New York, 1997) 11–25.Google Scholar

30 Kelly, J.D., ’“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (1992) 253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Breman, J. and Daniel, E.V., ‘The making of a Coolie’, Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (1992) 269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Gouda, F.G., Dutch Culture Overseas (Amsterdam 1995) 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Yule, Henry and Burnell, A.C. eds, Hobsonjobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (London 1903) 249–250.Google Scholar

34 Daniel, E.V., Bernstein, H. and Brass, T. eds, Plantations, Peasants and Proletarians in Colonial Asia (London 1992) 281.Google Scholar

35 Chakrabarty, D., Rethinking Working Class History (Princeton 1989) 93Google Scholar. Jute industry sources, cited by Chakrabarty, estimated c. 1900 that it took a week to train a ‘coolie’ and that ‘the “learning” involved was […] was purely experiential’. Hence, ‘The task of structuring a labour force was therefore largely a supply problem to the mills; and not a question of skill formation, training and efficiency’. Inter alia, he quotes a 1893 source as claiming that ‘there are 100 percent more hands employed in every Jute Mill in Bengal than is required to work a similar sized mill in Dundee’.

36 See the British colonial administrator John Crawfurd's remarks on the coolie-porters of ‘up-country’ Central Java (Kadu), penned in 1812: ‘[…] they have no fixed habitation, and by the wandering and unsettled life they persue, have contracted the most inveterate habits of idleness, dissipation and profligacy. No sooner is their hire paid to them, than they may be seen sitting in groups to gamble it away, and they are altogether so improvident, that they go nearly naked. With such habits, it is no wonder that they are accused of being the principal agents in the crimes and irregularities which are so prevalent in the countryside. [Crawfurd's report on Kadoe, 15.11.1812, India Office Library, London, Mackenzie Collection (Private) 79: 287–288.

37 Kelly, J.D., ‘“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (3&4) (1992) 523–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 The expression, though not the context, is again Thomas's discussion of ‘cannibal’ in late nineteenth-century Fiji (1994) 35.

39 Gouda, F.G., Dutch Culture Overseas (Amsterdam 1995) 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Cooper, F. and Stoler, A.L. eds, Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (London 1997) 34–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Munro, D., ‘Patterns of Resistance and Accomodation’ in: Lai, B.V., Munro, D. and Bleechert, E.D. eds, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accomodation (Honolulu 1993) 13.Google Scholar

42 Wertheim, W.F., ‘Conditions on Sugar Estates in Colonial Java: Comparisons with Deli’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24/2 (Cambridge 1993) 279–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 In the 1860s diverse sources mention the presence of skilled Javanese in the colony's quasi-industrialised sugar factories. The British traveller W.B. D'Almeida, for example, recorded a visit to ‘a sugar factory worked by steam, which had all the newest inventions […] the most important branches of the machinery are managed by Javanese’ (D'Almeida, W.B., Life in Java: With Sketches of the Javanese (London 1864) 1Google Scholar: 268–270). On the broader front, the Dutch politician Gevers Deynoot, visiting ‘the Indies’ at around the same time, was clearly impressed by the predominantly Javanese workforce he encountered at one of the East Java city of Surabaya's few ‘industrial’ premises (Deynoot, W.T. Gevers, Herinneringen eener Reis naar Nederlandsch Indie in 1862 (The Hague 1864) 95)Google Scholar.

44 ‘Rapport […] bezoek aan Soemberhardjo […] 29–31 Juli 1913’, ARA Archive NHM 3120 (dossier 559).

45 Jaarverslag Sf. Tjomal 1920:39, ARA Archive Tjomal 22.

46 See for example Jaaruerslag Sf. Bandjaratma (Brebes kebupaten, Central Java) 1927:10. ARA Archive Koloniale Bank 943.

47 The key descriptions here are to be found in J. Ingleson, In Search of Justice: Workers and Unions in Colonial java, 1908–1926 (Singapore 1986) 154–209; and Levert, P., ‘Inheemsche Arbeid in deJava-Suikerindustrie’ (PhD thesis, Wageningen 1934) 107–117.Google Scholar

48 Thomas, N., Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Melbourne 1994) 36–37.Google Scholar

49 For example used as an alternative to the term wong boerooh [burah], the terms wong ngoelie or ngollie appear in the Monographie of Sf. Sragie and Sf. Wonopringo, ARA Collectie Umbgrove.

50 Wolters, W., ‘From Corvee to Contract Labour’ in: Cribb, R. ed., The Late Colonial State in Indonesia (Leiden 1994) 176.Google Scholar

51 In fact, industrial unrest in the sugar industry had a provenance extending back into the nineteenth century. Ingleson, In Search of Justice, 163–164 details a ‘strikewave’ in the Yogyakarta region of Central Java early in the 1880s.

52 Ibid., 155–209.

53 Ibid., 193.

54 Ibid., 180.

55 Ibid., 68.

56 Ibid., 3.