Beneath the surface of apparent unity of the colonial empires of Britain and Holland in India and Indonesia, there existed a wide variety of relations between the Western power on the one hand and indigenous political structures on the other. A colonial power could control its territorial possessions in several ways, usually classified in terms of either direct or indirect rule. Furnivall, in his famous comparative study of British Burma and the Netherlands East Indies, saw Burma as a ‘typical example’ of direct rule and Java as exemplary of fhe system of indirect rule. In the same work the author, however, acknowledged that in general there was no clear distinction between the two systems of government and that colonial practice was determined more by, what he calls, ‘economic environment’ rather than philosophies of empire. Indeed, the terms direct and indirect rule can be seen as extreme opposites. in the realm of ideas, while in reality colonial rule was always something in between. This explains partly the confusion about the form of government in nineteenth century Java, which, in view of its dualistic features, was classified by some authors under the system of indirect rule while others (with an eye upon less solidly controlled areas within Indonesia) thought it more in tune with theories of direct rule.

Millenarian movements appeared in a number of European countries during the early modern era, but only in Portugal are any of them known to have manifested themselves in a colonial empire. In fact, one form, known as Sebastianism, persisted in Brazil longer than it did in the metropolis and even outlived the colony's independence in 1822. This article, however, does not concern itself with the belief that King Sebastiāo would return miraculously from the battlefield of El Ksar-el-Kebir to rule over his people and indeed all Europeans for a thousand years – a superstition already known well enough to Iberianists and to historians of witchcraft and the occult. Instead, it will deal with something much less familiar.

A comparison between the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago is for several reasons a rather awkward venture. The sheer difference in size alone, and all that such a difference implies, is enough to deter even the most cautious researcher. Another cause for hesitation is the varying quality of the population data: good statistics for most regions of the subcontinent from 1881 onward, bad statistics for almost all'regions before that date, compared to fairly good statistics for Java for the entire nineteenth century, but virtually worthless data for the Outer Islands during the same period. Finally considerations of a more personal nature can not be regarded as unimportant: I am familiar with the peculiarities of Javanese statistics, much less confident where the Outer Islands are concerned, and more than entirely ignorant of all things Indian. Fortunately I could rely on recent studies regarding the subcontinent, but research on nineteenth century population statistics for the Indonesian Outer Islands is all but non-existent. The sorry state of nineteenth century statistics for the Outer Islands makes one wonder whether anybody can be so foolhardy as to even start sorting them out. So it is hot without serious misgivings that this article has been written.

The drive towards the abolition of the slave trade at the beginning of the 19th century was not effective until the 1850s. It was perhaps the only migratory intercontinental movement in history which came to a complete stop because of political pressures in spite of the fact that neither the supply nor the demand for African slaves had disappeared.

Because of the continuing demand for bonded labour in some of the plantation areas in the New World (notably the Guiana's, Trinidad, Cuba and Brazil) and because of a new demand for bonded labour in the developing sugar and mining industries in Mauritius, Réunion, Queensland (Australia), Natal (South Africa), the Fiji-islands and Hawaii an international search for ‘newslaves’ started.

The comment in the title of this article was made by James I after having been shown a ‘long scrole of fyne paper’, probably a Japanese almanac, and an account of the estates and revenues of the daimyo ‘most of them equally or exceeding the revenues of the greatest princes of Christendom’, and a letter, all of which had been sent by Richard Cocks, head of the English East India Company's factory at Hirado during its entire existence from 1613 to 1623. Cocks's letter and the two enclosures had been sent to his patron, the then Keeper of the Records, Sir Thomas Wilson, who had shown the letter to James with a covering note stating that he had received it ‘from the most remote part of the world’. The letter describes, in considerable and acutely observed detail, the new capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo, the shogun's magnificent retinue as he led a falcon-hunting party (hunting was a pastime he had in common with the British monarch), the great daibutsu of Kamakura, the sights of Kyoto, including Sanjusangendo, and recent political developments relating to the banishment of the Jesuits and friars. Wilson, rather obsequiously, felt that the letters, written in January 1617, ‘were a good recreation for Your Majesty (if you had any idle hours)’ and declared that ‘neither our cosmographers nor other writers have given us true relation of the greatness of the princes of those parts’. But James could ‘not be induced to believe’ what was written, and dismissed the letter as ‘the loudest lies that ever [he] heard of.

Until fairly recently, histories of European imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean region have been written largely in terms of the endeavours of Europeans in creating and controlling empire. Only in the last couple of decades has recognition been given slowly to the role of the indigenous economic and political compradors, both large and small, who were vital to the evolution and sustenance of European colonial empires.

Western expansion and the large-scale cultivation of tropical crops for the world market gave rise to a strong demand for labour — plantation labour in particular. The commercial production of sugar(-cane) and other tropical produce more often than not was concentrated in areas that could not provide themselves adequate supplies of suitable labour: the Caribbean zone can serve as a model in this respect. Distance and the unattractive character of work on the fields and plantation life as such militated against the recruitment of voluntary workers on any scale. So the massive mobilization of bonded labour from more populous areas imposed itself on the planters. The extent and form of bonded migrant labour are determined both by the character of unequal power relations and significant differences in the quality of demand and supply. This subject, that is the successive stages of the recruitment and transport of non-voluntary labour (from Africa, Europe and India) to the Caribbean plantation world (including the adjacent continental zones) has been thoroughly studied. The export of Indian labour, bonded or ‘free’, in the post-slavery period has been dealt with by Tinker in a competent way. Modern scholarship only recently started to show an interest in the mobilization of labour, bonded or free, within the great Asian colonies of which two became important suppliers of overseas labour: India and Java. In the Caribbean zone, in Mauritius and similar plantation colonies, the West was in a position to create by forceful means, new plantation societies, fitted to its needs. In Asia one was confronted with states long established, ancient civilizations and relatively large populations.

The seven districts of present-day Assam state, comprising 7.8 million hectares (78,496 km2), lie in the valley of the Brahmaputra river in the extreme northeast of India. On the map they form an extended finger of riverine land pointing toward the mountain boundary. Assam has been a steadily developing frontier region since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. One arm of this development has been that of the plantation economy devoted to tea production in the highlands. British capital, British managers, and Indian coolie labor formed the essential elements in this growing export-oriented economy. From 1870 another settler-based frontier society emerged when peasant migrants from Bengal and ex-tea-laborers took up government-owned wastelands along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries to grow paddy rice. Together these two forces have transformed the face of the land and created a new society in Assam over the past century. The British colonial regime's policies generally favored the development and growth of both the estate and the smallholder sectors of Assam's economy. In this process the indigenous Assamese — whether peasant cultivators or tribal hill peoples — have faced immense pressures on their society and way of life. The purpose of this essay is to delineate the transformations in the land and the agricultural economy that accompanied this process in Assam.

Until quite recently India used to be depicted as an area of developmental darkness, a pool of mute tradition, stubborn stagnation and general failure. To be sure, it had known a glorious past, but that made the contemporary picture even more dismal. It can not be said that India's propaganda efforts have done much to dispel this picture. In the popular imagination it remains a country of marvels – mostly of the past – and monstrosities determining the present. So we seem to stay with the zoo of wonders and monsters that the name of India has evoked since antiquity. However, there are now signs of a weather change. It has become clear that present-day India can boast significant achievements in a number of important fields such as food production, industry, export trade, science and technology. Last but not least, the maintenance of civil liberties - which according to some observers should have properly fallen victim to India's undeniable problems already long ago – is a remarkable and to many a puzzling feature. But these same liberties have in no small measure helped to confirm the received image by highlighting India's problems and failures, which less liberal regimes would hide from the public eye. At any rate, there is perhaps no third world country that is known, warts and all, in such profuse statistical details and yet is so little understood.

Certain European notions of the nature of the Asian economies — especially the peddling character of Asian trade and its contrast with the rational capitalist business organization which was supposed to be a purely European enclave superimposed by conquest on the peddling, precapitalist basis of Asian production and exchange — were formulated most clearly of all by Dutch sociologists and economists from their experience of Netherlands India of the nineteenth century and of the Eastern Archipelago in the age of Portuguese and Dutch voyages. They were not unaware of the existence of Chinese and Indian business groups in Southeast Asia with some of the features of early modern capitalism, but these were regarded as the bastard offspring of developed European capitalism. Such immigrant Asian groups were supposed to have sprung from the need of the Europeans for intermediaries to deal with the economically innocent natives and were thought to be completely dependent on servicing the European enclave with no autonomous business concerns of their own. This essay focusses on the Chinese financiers and Chetti bankers operating long distance credit networks in the Southern Ocean (Nanyang) before and after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). The aim is to show that these immigrant business groups derived from a sophisticated financial and mercantile background in their home countries and that they conducted autonomous operations in the Eastern Archipelago with their own capital and business techniques: a large volume of such operations were conducted within a purely inter-Asian framework quite apart from the colonial trade with Europe, and in their dealings with the Dutch and the English banks and corporations, these towkays and nagarathars showed a strength and resilience which made ‘dependence’ and ‘collaboration’ a mutual process.

Decolonization has finished. It definitely belongs to the past, but somehow it has refused to become history. A great deal has already been written on this subject, and yet it seems that there is little to say about it. After the Second World War, the colonized countries wanted to become independent, struggled with their oppressors and threw off the yoke of colonial rule. Within a few years they all achieved their aim. That is the song that has now already been sung for about thirty years, in various keys, it is true, but with a remarkable consistency of tune and melody. The entire colonial history seems to have been no more than a prologue to an inevitable and triumphant independence. A new Whig interpretation of history has come into being.

Some methodological remarks at the outset should help in the appreciation of the study. Indigenous systems have been presented in simplistic manner, not merely in terms of their differences with Western societal systems but in terms of their internal structures, too. Our use of certain terms like ‘community’, or the topic itself, may evoke popular images like homogeneity or Asiatic mode. But it should be remembered, that such images were often built upon skeletal knowledge about indigenous societies and are, in effect, deterrant to further development of substantive understanding. A second precaution needed is about concepts of development and evolution. The development theories including the Marxist one, have been accused of West-centricity. It will now be rather easily accepted, that the Western experience of development may not be the universal course of development, even though there may exist some fundamental similarities. We shall be concerned here with environment-specific development possibilities. Undoubtedly, they differ from region to region2 and to that extent at least, developmental alternatives available to different regions are different.

When one looks at the phenomenon of declining handicrafts either in terms of the impact of modern technology or in terms of the onslaught of imperialism, India and Indonesia are obvious cases to examine in relation to the nineteenth century. For India there is a well developed literature, much of t i of contemporary nineteenth and early twentieth century vintage; the literature for Indonesia, however, appears somewhat thin in comparison. On closer examination there appear to be many questions of a common nature raised by the literature on the two countries and potentially fruitful issues awaiting investigation in a comparative perspective. To illustrate these possibilities and to stimulate discussion I attempt in this paper to draw upon some work I am doing on two major Indian handicraft industries, textiles and rice processing, and relate some findings of mine and of others to what has been done (or can be done) on these industries in Indonesia.

In most studies of land policy in Asian nations, there is general recognition that agriculture is troubled by problems of landownership, particularly in the landlord-tenant relationship. Many observers point out that these are the principal issues confronting agriculture and the peasantry in most Asian countries. Looking at India and Indonesia, there are a number of problems with differing characteristics in the both areas, such as reform in land tenure and rural social structure, production increase and improvement in marketing distribution, and the credit system.

Dealing with peasant rebellions as a universal historical phenomenon, it is quite appropriate to raise the problem whether despite great differences in cultural settings those phenomena still show common characteristics. A multitude of peasant studies in general, and on peasant movements in particular, will facilitate our comparative study on the same subjects in India and Indonesia.1 The very nature of such phenomena lends itself very well to a comparative investigation. Guided by some general findings of previous studies we will be able to sort out general characteristics of peasant rebellion in both countries. Our comparative study immediately calls for an analytical framework, referring to concepts such as: (1) theologies, religious beliefs and ideologies; (2) leadership and the kind of authority it possesses; (3) the mobilization system including the kind of leader-follower relationship; (4) the structure of organization; (5) the rationale behind the action. This cluster of conceptual tools will assist in unravelling the complex currents of historical events, and also ‘in looking beyond the trees at the wood’. Without disregarding the unique character of every single case, for our purpose we have to concern ourselves with the general features. It would not be superfluous to say that doing comparative history methodologically implies an analytical approach.