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The Demography of Ambon in the Seventeenth Century: Evidence from Colonial Proto-Censuses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Gerrit Knaap
Gerrit Knaap
Affiliation:
Koninklijk Instituut vool Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Leiden)
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Extract

In modern Indonesia the demographic study of the population has become a major field of academic interest. The reason is obvious: the endeavour to develop the nation's economy in order to give every citizen a proper standard of living and to guarantee this in the future, bears a strong relation to the size of the population and the desire to stem the tide of excessive population growth. Demographic studies are only recent and the same is true for the statistical material with which these studies work: censuses at a national level and regular registrations of births, marriages and deaths at the basic local level. In Indonesia the first, still imperfect, censuses date from the final decades of the nineteenth century, while regular registration of births, deaths and marriages for the indigenous population has only taken place from the 1930s onwards.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , September 1995 , pp. 227 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1995

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References

This article is a re-interpretation of earlier research on the demography of Ambon. The results of this earlier research, as far as Ambon's indigenous population is concerned, can be found in Chapter V of Knaap, G.J., Kruidnagelen en Christenen. De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie en de Bevolking van Ambon 1656–1696 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1987), pp. 99–123Google Scholar. As far as Kota Ambon is concerned it has been published in a separate article, see Knaap, G.J., “A City of Migrants: Kota Ambon at the End of the Seventeenth Century”, Indonesia 51 (1991): 105–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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