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Shallow roots: The early oil palm industry in Southeast Asia, 1848–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2021

Jonathan Robins
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Abstract

In most narratives, the beginning of the oil palm industry in Southeast Asia boils down to entrepreneurial spirit, scientific research, and good fortune. The colonial context in which the industry emerged barely figures in the story. This article argues that colonial power was critical, providing access to land and labour that proved more important than plant selection, capital, or technology. The plantation model pushed the region ahead of Africa as the leading exporter of palm oil by the late 1930s, but its future was in doubt as the Depression and Second World War shattered the colonial order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 538 - 560
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2021

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Footnotes

This research was supported in part by an American Philosophical Society/British Academy joint fellowship, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. The author thanks David Biggs and fellow panelists and commentators at the ‘SE Asian Natures’ workshop and 2018 ASEH conference for comments on early versions of this article.

References

1 Amanda Machin, ‘Palm oil and politics in the Anthropocene’, White Horse Press Blog, 2019, https://whitehorsepress.blog/2019/03/22/palm-oil-and-politics-in-the-anthropocene/.

2 For a critique of the plantation progress narrative, see Khiun, Liew Kai, ‘Planters, estate health and malaria in British Malaya (1900–1940)’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 83, 1 (2010): 93Google Scholar; for examples of the ‘conventional’ narrative, see Henson, Ian E., ‘A brief history of the oil palm’, in Palm oil: Production, processing, characterization and uses, ed. Lai, Oi-Ming, Tan, Chin-Ping and Akoh, Casimir C. (Urbana, IL: AOCS, 2012), p. 4Google Scholar; Henderson, Janice and Osborne, Daphne J., ‘The oil palm in all our lives: How this came about’, Endeavour 24, 2 (2000): 63–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Malaysian Palm Oil Council, ‘About’, The Oil Palm, http://theoilpalm.org/about/; Socfin Indonesia (Socfindo), ‘History’, https://www.socfindo.co.id/about-us/history.

3 Compare essays in Jorgensen, Dolly, Jorgensen, Finn Arne and Pritchard, Sara B., eds., New natures: Joining environmental history with science and technology studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Uekötter, Frank, ed., Comparing apples, oranges, and cotton: Environmental histories of the global plantation (Frankurter am Main: Campus, 2014)Google Scholar.

4 For example, Tate, D.J.M., The RGA history of the plantation industry in the Malay Peninsula (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Susan Martin squarely engages with the issue in the introduction of The UP Saga (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003), but later chapters say little about colonial policy. In recent work like Giacomin, Valeria, ‘The transformation of the global palm oil cluster: Dynamics of cluster competition between Africa and Southeast Asia (c.1900–1970)’, Journal of Global History 13, 3 (2018): 374–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the colonial state is treated simply as a government, without probing the significance of imperial power.

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6 See Tobias Hunger, Friedrich Wilhelm, De Oliepalm (Elaeis Guineensis): Historisch Onderzoek over Den Oliepalm in Nederlandsch-Indië, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1924)Google Scholar; and on the work at Buitenzorg generally see Maat, H., Science cultivating practice: A history of agricultural science in the Netherlands and its colonies, 1863–1986 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goss, Andrew, The floracrats: State-sponsored science and the failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

7 Hunger, Oliepalm, p. 8.

8 For more on the origins of these palms, see Jonathan Robins, Oil palm: A global history (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming, 2021).

9 Hunger, Oliepalm, pp. 37, 73. Teysmann's pollinating may well have favoured one or two parent palms, rather than all four, thinning the gene pool.

10 ‘Java’, Straits Times, 21 Mar. 1863, p. 1.

11 Teysmann, 1858, quoted in Hunger, Oliepalm, p. vii.

12 Hunger, Oliepalm, pp. 102, 124–5.

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15 ‘Palm cultivation in Sarawak’, in ECB/8/0/1, RBGK, and Ooi Keat Gin, ‘An economic history of Sarawak during the period of Brooke Rule, 1841–1946’ (PhD diss., University of Hull, 1995), pp. 194, 330n22; Jagoe, R.B., ‘Deli oil palms and early introductions of Elaeis Guineensis to Malaya’, Malayan Agricultural Journal 35 (1952): 5Google Scholar; ‘Oil palm in Labuan: A success and a failure (Elæis Guineensis)’, Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) 35 (1889): 259–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/4113311.

16 See also ‘Notes on products and soils’, Straits Times, 13 Mar. 1895, p. 3; ‘Mr. Von Donop in North Borneo’, Straits Times, 11 June 1884, p. 10.

17 G.C. Allen and Audrey Donnithorne, Western enterprise in Indonesia and Malaysia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), p. 140.

18 Corey Ross, Ecology and power in the age of empire: Europe and the transformation of the tropical world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 104.

19 For doctrinaire accounts of rubber in Malaya, see Tate, RGA history; Colin Barlow, The natural rubber industry: Its development, technology and economy in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1978); for more critical accounts of Malaya and beyond, see J.H. Drabble, Rubber in Malaya 1876–1922: The genesis of the industry (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1973); John Tully, The devil's milk: A social history of rubber (New York: NYU Press, 2011); and Michitake Aso, Rubber and the making of Vietnam: An ecological history, 1897–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), chap. 1.

20 Allen and Donnithorne, Western enterprise, p. 119; William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Rubber cultivation in Indonesia and the Congo from the 1910s to the 1950s: Divergent paths’, in Colonial exploitation and economic development: The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies compared, ed. Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 41–59.

21 Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting empire, cultivating subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 43; Jan Breman, Taming the coolie beast: Plantation society and the colonial order in Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16.

22 Ann Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation in Sumatra's plantation belt, 1870–1979, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 16; the 999-year lease was offered by Perak in 1879; the lease in perpetuity became typical of FMS (Selangor, Perak, Negri Sembilan and Pahang) districts in the late 1890s. Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja, The economy of colonial Malaya: Administrators versus capitalists (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 170, 189; Allen and Donnithorne, Western enterprise, p. 115.

23 Nancy Lee Peluso and Peter Vandergeest, ‘Genealogies of the political forest and customary rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand’, Journal of Asian Studies 60, 3 (2001): 766–7; Michael Dove, The banana tree at the gate: A history of marginal peoples and global markets in Borneo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); T.N. Harper, ‘The politics of the forest in colonial Malaya’, Modern Asian Studies 31, 1 (1997): 111; Peter Boomgaard, ‘Land rights and the environment in the Indonesian Archipelago, 800–1950’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54 (2011): 484–85.

24 M.C. Cleary, ‘Plantation agriculture and the formulation of native land rights in British North Borneo c. 1880–1930’, Geographical Journal 158, 2 (1992): 170–81; See Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li, Powers of exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011).

25 Raja, Economy of colonial Malaya, pp. 158–65.

26 Keith Sinclair, ‘Hobson and Lenin in Johore: Colonial Office policy towards British concessionaires and investors, 1878–1907’, Modern Asian Studies 1, 4 (1967): 344–5.

27 See for example I.H. Burkill's Malayan diary, 1914, BUR/1/5, RBGK.

28 By the twentieth century, the FMS agriculture department managed research and policy in the four British-administered federated states; the department also worked with officials in the rest of ‘British Malaya’, including the Straits Settlements and the five unfederated, indirectly-ruled states. James C. Jackson, Planters and speculators: Chinese and European agricultural enterprise in Malaya, 1786–1921 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968), p. 224.

29 Karl Josef Pelzer, Planter and peasant: Colonial policy and the agrarian struggle in East Sumatra 1863–1947 (Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 42–3.

30 Pelzer, Planter and peasant, pp. 52–3.

31 László Székely, Tropic fever: The adventures of a planter in Sumatra, trans. Marion Saunders (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 274–5.

32 Harper, ‘The politics of the forest’, p. 7.

33 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 234.

34 I use ‘unfree’ here following Tania Murray Li, ‘The price of un/freedom: Indonesia's colonial and contemporary plantation labor regimes’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 2 (2017): 245–76; see also Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation, pp. 8–9; Lees, Planting empire, pp. 55–9.

35 Cyril Baxendale, ‘The plantation rubber industry’, Agricultural Bulletin of the Federated Malay States 1, 3 (Dec. 1912): 186.

36 Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Servants to slaves to servants: Contract labour and European expansion’, in Colonialism and migration, ed. P.C. Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), p. 266; or as Gordon put it: ‘With minor exceptions no locals were mad enough to work on plantations on the terms of the planter whilst they retained ownership of their own land.’ Alec Gordon, ‘Towards a model of Asian plantation systems’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 31, 3 (2001): 314.

37 See in particular Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some aspects of their immigration and settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); P. Ramasamy, ‘Labour control and labour resistance in the plantations of colonial Malaya’, Journal of Peasant Studies 19, 3–4 (1992): 87–105; Breman, Taming the coolie beast; Amarjit Kaur, ‘Plantation systems, labour regimes and the state in Malaysia, 1900–2012’, Journal of Agrarian Change 14, 2 (2014): 190–213; Engerman, ‘Servants to slaves’.

38 Breman, Taming the coolie beast, p. 32.

39 Kris Manjapra, ‘Plantation dispossessions: The global travel of agricultural racial capitalism’, in American capitalism: New histories, ed. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 361–87.

40 Bruno Lasker, Human bondage in Southeast Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), p. 210.

41 Lees, Planting empire, p. 47.

42 The firm insisted this mortality was ‘unprecedented in the history of the estate’, but the estate was not that old, and the figure was not an extreme outlier. Reprint from Financial Times, 26 Sept. 1912, in Straits Plantation papers, MS37737, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA).

43 Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, p. 171; Liew, ‘Planters, estate health and malaria’; B.H. Kwa, ‘Environmental change, development and vectorborne disease: Malaysia's experience with filariasis, scrub typhus and dengue’, Environment, Development and Sustainability 10, 2 (2008): 209–17.

44 Breman, Taming the coolie beast, p. 59; but see revisionist interpretations in Marieke van Klaveren, ‘Death among coolies: Mortality of Chinese and Javanese labourers on Sumatra in the early years of recruitment, 1882–1909’, Itinerario 21, 1 (1997): 111–24; Nicole Lamb, ‘A time of normalcy: Javanese “coolies” remember the colonial estate’, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 170, 4 (2014): 530–56. Klaveren's mortality figures are lower than Breman's, but still startling high.

45 Used here in Amartya Sen's sense of limited social, political, and economic opportunities.

46 Amarjit Kaur, ‘Tappers and weeders: South Indian plantation workers in peninsular Malaysia, 1880–1970’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, special issue, ‘Across the Kala Pani: Indian Overseas Migration and Settlement’, 21 (1998): 73–102; Ramasamy, ‘Labour control and labour resistance’.

47 Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 89–93, 96; Lees, Planting empire, pp. 189–204.

48 Alec Gordon, ‘Contract labour in rubber plantations: Impact of smallholders in colonial South-East Asia’, Economic and Political Weekly 36, 10 (2001): 847–60.

49 Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation, pp. 25–30; Breman, Taming the coolie beast, chap. 4.

50 See Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants and their agricultural economy in colonial Malaya, 1874–1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977); Lees, Planting empire, pp. 47, 204–14.

51 Quoted in J. Norman Parmer, Colonial labor policy and administration: A history of labor in the rubber plantation industry in Malaya, c.1910–1941 (Locust Valley, NY: Association for Asian Studies, 1960), p. 244.

52 Newspaper clipping, Golden Hope Minute book, 27 Sept. 1949, MS37703, LMA.

53 Martin, UP Saga, p. 79, and see Martin's general defence of plantation labour systems, pp. 81–2.

54 See Tania Murray Li, ‘Intergenerational displacement in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zone’, Journal of Peasant Studies 44, 6 (2017): 1158–76; the best collection of colonial-era worker management texts can be found in back issues of The Planter, still published and widely read by plantation managers today.

55 Hunger, Oliepalm, pp. 266–7; Pelzer, Planter and peasant, p. 55.

56 Egerton to Thiselton-Dyer, 7 June 1904, Director's Correspondence, RBGK.

57 Nigel P. Taylor, ‘The environmental relevance of the Singapore Botanic Gardens’, in Nature contained: Environmental histories of Singapore, ed. Timothy P. Barnard (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), p. 125; Timothy P. Barnard, Nature's colony: Empire, nation and environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), p. 87.

58 H.N. Ridley, ‘The oil palm’, Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits Settlements and FMS 2 (1907): 37.

59 ‘Oil palm seeds’, c.1909, Arkib Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (ANM), 1957/0615552; J.B. Carruthers to Kew, 9 Jan. 1909, ECB/8/1, RBGK.

60 Arthur W. Hill, Ass Dir, Kew, to Undersec for Colonies, 27 Aug. 1908, ANM, 1957/0591061; See also ‘African oil palm in Malaya’, Malaya Tribune, 10 Feb. 1914, p. 10.

61 FMS Annual Report for 1909, 11, CO1071/236, UK National Archives (TNA); Agricultural Bulletin of the FMS 1, 1 (Aug. 1912): 31.

62 ‘Palm oil from Malaya: Ten years’ progress, Straits Times, 27 June 1929, p. 9.

63 Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, The traders: A story of Britain's South-East Asian commercial adventure (London: Newman-Neame, 1971), p. 252; Geoffrey Pakiam, ‘Smallholders and the making of Malaysia's oil palm industry’, paper presented at the Agricultural History Society conference, 5–8 June, Washington, DC, 2019.

64 Hunger, Oliepalm, pp. 266–7.

65 T. Fleming to Nickalls, 13 July 1987, MS37394-005, LMA.

66 Adrien Hallet, ‘Note sur le palmier a huile’, Bulletin de l'Association des Planteurs de Caoutchouc 5, 11 (Nov. 1913): 279; Henri Fauconnier, ‘Essais de culture du palmier à huile en Extrême-Orient’, Bulletin des Matières Grasse 1 (1920): 21.

67 Clarence-Smith, William G., ‘The Rivaud-Hallet Plantation Group in the economic crises of the inter-war years’, in Private enterprises during economic crises: Tactics and strategies, ed. Lanthier, P. (Ottawa: Legas, 1997), pp. 117–32Google Scholar.

68 Hallet, ‘Note sur le palmier a huile’, p. 279. Exactly when Hallet's car broke down is the subject of some controversy: Rival and Levang say 1905 (Palms of controversies: Oil palm and development challenges [Bogor: CIFOR, 2014]), but Hallet's own account (in Hunger, Oliepalm [p. 268]) suggests the breakdown occurred in 1911. Fauconnier's account does not mention the incident, but he insists that he was with Hallet in June 1911, when they tested the oil palm fruit.

69 Fauconnier, ‘Essais de culture du palmier à huile’, p. 21; compare with Tate's account in RGA History, pp. 452–3.

70 Rutgers, A.A.L., ‘The cultivation of the oil palm on the east coast of Sumatra’, in Rutgers, A.A.L., LePlae, Edmond and Tingey, Paul, Oil palms and their fruit (London: Griffith & Co, 1922), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

71 Rutgers, A.A.L., ‘African oil palm: Developments in Sumatra’, The Planter 3, 11 (1923): 595Google Scholar.

72 Van Pelt puts the date of Hallet's first oil palm plantings at 1910, not 1911, but most sources point to 1911. See Gaston van Pelt, ‘La culture et l'exploitation moderne du palmier à huile, situation respective des Indes Néerlandaises et de l'Afrique Occidentale Française’, in Mémoires et rapports sur les matières grasses. T. III. Le Palmier à huile (Marseilles: Institut colonial de Marseille, 1928), pp. 157–86.

73 Hunger, Oliepalm, pp. 268–9.

74 Adrien Hallet, ‘Les plantations d'Elaeis en Malaisie’, Revue de Botanique Appliquée 29 (Jan. 1924): 47.

75 See for example, ‘The palm nut tree’, Straits Times, 13 Dec. 1913, p. 7; Harry Clyde Billows and Harold Beckwith, Palm oil and kernels: ‘The consols of the West Coast’. An exposition of the palm oil industry, &c (Liverpool: C. Birchall, 1913).

76 See Eelco Boss, ‘The scramble for palms: A comparative historical investigation. Two companies sourcing two commodities in two colonies’ (MA thesis, University of Utrecht, 2014), pp. 46–50, 54.

77 Van Pelt, ‘La culture et l'exploitation moderne’, p. 162.

78 A.A.L. Rutgers, ‘Crop records of the oil palm’, Agricultural Bulletin of the FMS 8, 4 (Dec. 1920): 247–55; see bibliography in Hunger, Oliepalm.

79 Lewis Smart, in Rutgers et al., Oil palms and their fruit (London: Griffith & Co, 1922), p. 37.

80 L. Henderson, ‘The African oil palm in Malaya: An attractive alternative to rubber and coconuts’, The Planter 1, 9–12 (July 1921): 53.

81 Quoted in Edmond LePlae, Le palmier à huile en Afrique: son exploitation au Congo Belge et en Extrême-Orient (Brussels: Librairie Falk fils, 1939), p. 27.

82 The Planter 1, 2 (1920): 43.

83 Guthrie to London, 19 Nov. 1920, G/COR/5, School of Oriental and African Studies Archives and Special Collections.

84 W. Arthur Wilson, ‘A slump soliloquy’, The Planter 1, 6 (Jan. 1921): 21.

85 Minute, 9 Oct. 1920, ANM, 1957/0609646; one official with ‘some considerable knowledge of West Africa’ said he was ‘not at all inclined to believe that the plantation of the African Palm Oil tree will ever be able to compete’ with Africa and its ‘teeming population’. Extract from ‘Mr. James, re: residents conference’, 30 Sept. 1920, ANM, 1957/0213249.

86 Mr. James's report on Resident's Conference, 30 Sept. 1920, ANM, 1957/0213249.

87 In the 1910s, estates interplanted rubber and coconuts: ‘it was usually the coconuts that were condemned’. Baxendale, ‘Plantation rubber’, p. 185; Nicholas J. White, British business in post-colonial Malaysia, 1957–70: ‘Neo-colonialism’ or ‘disengagement’? (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 85. For interplanting cases, see Brooklands Estate to DO Talok Datok, 30 June 1925, 1957/0237140; Shand, Halldane and Co correspondence 1926–27, ANM, 1957/0242280.

88 Fauconnier to Selangor Resident, 21 May 1917, 1957/0195159, ANM.

89 LePlae, Palmier à huile, p. 29.

90 E.L.B. to Resident, Selangor, 28 Aug. 1917, 1957/0604273; African Oil Palms Syndicate to Resident, Kuala Lumpur, 6 July 1917, 1957/0195775, ANM.

91 Guthrie to Sec. Res. Selangor, 9 June 1920, ANM, 1957/0210077.

92 Duff Development Co to British Adviser, Kota Bharu, 30 May 1921, ANM, 1957/0501458. The district official agreed to pay the bill, though he noted ‘that this payment must not be considered as creating a precedent’.

93 C.W. Harrison to Sec. Res. Selangor, 9 Oct. 1923, 1957/0227176, ANM.

94 Watkins, Case, ‘Landscapes and resistance in the African diaspora: Five centuries of palm oil on Bahia's Dendê Coast’, Journal of Rural Studies 61 (2018): 137–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zeven, A.C., The semi-wild oil palm and its industry in Africa, Agricultural Research Reports 689 (Wageningen: Centre for Agricultural Publications and Documents, 1967)Google Scholar.

95 See for example, Agricultural Bulletin of the FMS 4, 8 (May 1916).

96 A Dutch authority stated: ‘As to the native population, the coconut is a better palm for them to grow than the oilpalm. Even now, in places where Europeans are growing oilpalms the Javanese and Malays do not take to cultivating that plant, whereas they started to plant rubber practically everywhere, even in the most unsuitable localities.’ A.A.L. Rutgers et al., Investigations on oilpalms made at the General Experiment Station of the A.V.R.O.S. (Batavia: Ruygrok & Co., 1922), p. 3. For efforts to convince Asians to eat palm oil, see ‘Palm-oil chop: The food value of the African oil-palm’, The Planter 10, 3 (Oct. 1929): 80–81; Geoffrey K. Pakiam, ‘Why don't some cuisines travel? Charting palm oil's journey from West African staple to Malayan chemical’, Journal of Global History 15, 1 (2020): 39–60.

97 Tate, RGA History, p. 451; Martin, UP Saga, p. 6.

98 White, Post-colonial Malaysia, p. 172; Booth, Anne, Colonial legacies: Economic and social development in East and Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), p. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99 T.N. Harper, The end of empire and the making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 26; Pelzer, Planter and peasant, p. 50.

100 D.H. Grist, ‘Agricultural education’, Agricultural Bulletin of the FMS 9, 2 (June 1921): 127; Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants.

101 C.C. Malet, ‘The palm oil planting industry in Malaya’, The Planter 8, 11 (June 1928): 324.

102 D.O. to Sec. Res Selangor, 20 July 1923, 1957/0227176, ANM.

103 G.G. Auchinleck, ‘The plantation oil-palm industry in the East’, Gold Coast Department of Agriculture Bulletin 8 (Accra: Gov. Printer, 1926), p. 12. The extent to which this was true was hotly debated in the 1920s–30s. Manufacturers preferred oil low in free fatty acids because they could extract more glycerine from it and because they appreciated the flexibility it provided, but soaps and other non-food uses did not need such a high level of quality. In the end soap firms wanted what was cheapest. See Olukoju, Ayodeji, ‘The United Kingdom and the political economy of the global oils and fats business during the 1930s’, Journal of Global History 4, 1 (2009): 105–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104 Belum Tentu (pseud.), ‘The oil palm’, Straits Times, 10 July 1920, p. 10.

105 Rutgers, ‘Crop records of the oil palm’, p. 248.

106 DO Kuala Langat to Secretary to Resident Selangor, 15 Jan. 1920, ANM, 1957/0206789.

107 Van Pelt, ‘La culture et l'exploitation moderne’, pp. 163–4.

108 Draft letter, A.H. Lemon, Resident Selangor, to Chief Secretary, 7 Apr. 1920, ANM, 1957/0206789.

109 Mr. Laurent to DC Selangor, 2 Aug. 1918, 1957/0200946; and application file, 1957/0186683W, ANM.

110 DO Kuala Langat to Sec Res Sel, 7 Mar. 1924, ANM, 1957/0230161.

111 Sec Res Sel to Undersecretary FMS, 22 June 1927, ANM, 1957/0242280.

112 Draft letter, A.H. Lemon to Chief Secretary, 7 Apr. 1920, ANM, 1957/0206789.

113 An agricultural officer was more optimistic, writing: ‘Providing the peat is not more than three feet deep and the land properly drained if necessary, there is no reason why oil palm should not thrive’. The district officer nonetheless suggested that the owner simply surrender the land owing to the cost of drainage. Extract in DO Ulu Langat to Sec Res Sel, 16 June 1930, ANM, 1957/0267968. Techniques for successful planting on deep peat were developed several decades later.

114 E. Bateson, ‘Report on oil palm cultivation, British North Borneo’, June 1925, TNA, CO 874/158.

115 B.H.O. Barnard, memo, 1 July 1920, ANM, 1957/0609646.

116 For example Hallet land application, 1957/0249532, ANM; see also Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Y.T. Chang, and K.J. Khoo, Deforesting Malaysia: The political economy and social ecology of agricultural expansion and commercial logging (London: Zed Books, 2004).

117 Allen and Donnithorne, Western enterprise, p. 126.

118 Pelzer, Planter and peasant, p. 45; Yves Henry, ‘Documents sur le palmier à huile à Sumatra’, in Le palmier à huile, vol. 3 (Marseille: Institut Colonial, 1928), pp. 199–215; Ross, Ecology and power, p. 111.

119 Van Pelt, ‘La culture et l'exploitation moderne’, p. 163.

120 Ooi Jin-Bee, Peninsular Malaysia (London: Longman, 1976), p. 104.

121 Le palmier à huile (Elaeis Guineensis): Huile et amandes de palme (Brussels: Office Colonial, 1935), p. 6.

122 Auguste Chevalier, ‘Le palmier à huile à la Côte d'Ivoire’, Journal d'agriculture traditionnelle et de botanique appliquée 11, 116 (1931): 225, https://doi.org/10.3406/jatba.1931.4976.

123 H.J. Simpson, State Agricultural Officer, Pahang, ‘Report by S.A.O. on Dura Oil Palm Estate’, 1039/32, ANM, 1957/0534106. Swidden cultivation was often used as a justification for displacing communities in the colonial era. Ross, Ecology and power, pp. 291–2.

124 DO to Sec for Res Selangor, 21 Aug. 1924, United Sua Betong Rubber — Application for Land, ANM, 1957/0232106.

125 The applications I examined mostly concerned Selangor and Pahang. See Dentan, Robert Knox, The Semai: A nonviolent people of Malaya (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), p. 43Google Scholar; and more broadly, Aiken, Robert, ‘Losing ground: Development, natural resources, and the dispossession of Malaysia's Orang Asli’, in A History of natural resources in Asia: The wealth of nature, ed. Bankoff, Greg and Boomgaard, Peter (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 172Google Scholar; Gomes, Alberto, Looking for money: Capitalism and modernity in an Orang Asli village (Melbourne: Trans-Pacific Press, 2004), p. 179Google Scholar.

126 A point developed in Robins, Oil Palm, chaps. 5–6.

127 Peluso and Vandergeest, ‘Genealogies’; Fadzilah Majid Cooke, ‘Maps and counter-maps: Globalised imaginings and local realities of Sarawak's plantation agriculture’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, 2 (2003): 265–84; Amity A. Doolittle, Property and politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native struggles over land rights (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); Anna Tsing, ‘Land as law: Negotiating the meaning of property in Indonesia’, in Land, property, and the environment, ed. John F. Richards (Oakland: ICS, 2002), pp. 94–137.

128 Rutgers et al., Investigations, pp. 15, 107. Rutgers noted that on the first estates, some bunches were 70% fruit by weight; on others they were only 32%.

129 Ibid., p. 103; Rutgers claimed Deli palms gave 50% more oil than typical African palms, but Fauconnier downgraded that estimate to 30%. He was more impressed with how early young palms bore fruit in Southeast Asia. LePlae, Palmier à huile, p. 26.

130 Henderson, ‘African oil palm in Malaya’, p. 23.

131 Rutgers admitted that data on Sumatran palms highlighted the best performers, and that undeveloped fruit were discarded from bunches before weighing. Reports on African palms showed yields from top specimens equal to the best Deli palms. LePlae, Palmier à huile, p. 33.

132 DO for Ulu Selangor to Sec Res Sel, 21 June 1920, ANM, 1957/0211073; Minute, 29 June 1920, ANM, 1957/0211073.

133 Oliver Marks to AB Voules, 12 Nov. 1920, ANM, 1957/020992; see also Application for land at Mukim Sungei Tiggi, Selangor, 1915–1918, ANM, 1957/0186683W; L.P. Jorgenson, 8 Sept. 1920, ANM, 1957/021107.

134 M. Ferrand, ‘L'avenir du palmier à huile’, in Le palmier à huile, vol. 3, Mémoires et Rapports sur les Matières Grasses (Marseille: Institut Colonial, 1928), p. 219.

135 Gaston Van Pelt, La culture du palmier à huile et la préparation des huiles et amandes de palme (Marseille: Institut Colonial, 1930), p. 57.

136 Tudhope to RBG Kew, 9 May 1910, ECB/8/0/1, RBGK; D. Prain to Under Sec for Colonies, 24 July 1917, MR/446, RBGK.

137 Henderson, ‘African oil palm in Malaya’, p. 21.

138 Milsum, J.N., ‘The African oil palm in Sumatra’, Agricultural Bulletin of the FMS 9, 2 (June 1921): 103Google Scholar; see also Henderson, ‘African oil palm in Malaya’; and Auchinleck, The plantation oil-palm industry in the East. Redecker noted in 1927 that the Handelsvereeniging ‘Amsterdam’ would not even disclose its planted acreage or plans for development. Redecker, Sydney B., Palm-oil industry of Sumatra and West Africa (Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, 1927), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

139 For example Malet, Letter to editor, The Planter 11, 2 (1930): 37, and F.W. Milligan, The cultivation of the oil palm (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Son, 1914), p. 45.

140 LePlae, Palmier à huile, p. 28.

141 Henderson, ‘African oil palm in Malaya’, p. 21.

142 Ibid., p. 23.

143 ‘The palm oil tree in Indo-China’, Straits Times, 9 June 1914, p. 12.

144 Rutgers et al., Investigations, p. 41; LePlae, Palmier à huile, p. 78; M.A. Luytjes, ‘La situation de la culture du palmier à huile sur la Côte Orientale de Sumatra et dans la province d'Atjeh’, in Mémoires et rapports sur les matières grasses. T. III. Le palmier à huile (Marseille: Institut Colonial, 1928), pp. 229–51.

145 A term coined by Ruf: see for example, Francois O. Ruf, ‘The myth of complex cocoa agroforests: The case of Ghana’, Human Ecology 39 (2011): 373–88.

146 Georgi, C.D.V., ‘The removal of plant nutrients in oil palm cultivation’, Malayan Agricultural Journal 19, 10 (1931): 484Google Scholar. The most critical assessment came from Henry (‘Documents sur le palmier à huile à Sumatra’, p. 205); rebuttals aimed at Henry's report did not refute his assessment of soil fertility, and candidly admitted that oil palm was a cash crop like any other, and would need fertilisers. Ferrand, ‘L'avenir du palmier à huile’, p. 226; Luytjes, ‘La situation de la culture du palmier à huile’, p. 241.

147 ‘The apparent freedom from disease of the native wild trees, as compared with plantation trees, has been referred to by many writers, and this fact is enshrined in proverbs, such as the Ghanaian [saying] “Should all trees wither, the oil palm will still remain”.’ W.D. Raymond, ‘The oil palm industry’, Tropical Science 3, 2 (1961): 74.

148 Rutgers et al., Investigations, p. 65. That said, Rutgers badly misunderstood how oil palms grew across West Africa, citing a case from Cameroon with only 3 palms per acre as typical for Africa, which was up to 30 times fewer than typically reported in dense palm groves further west.

149 ‘The Planter’, Straits Times, 8 June 1923, p. 10.

150 Alston, R.A., ‘Fruit-rot or bunch-rot of the oil palm’, Malayan Agricultural Journal 22, 10 (Aug. 1934): 360Google Scholar.

151 Ibid., p. 366.

152 Dir of Ag, FMS to Federal Secretary, FMS, 9 Jan. 1909, ANM, 1957/0591061.

153 Gater, B.A.R., ‘Insects on African oil-palms’, Malayan Agricultural Journal 13, 8 (1925): 254–5Google Scholar.

154 Heusser, in Rutgers et al., Investigations, p. 55.

155 Rutgers et al., Investigations, p. 3.

156 Jagoe, R.B., ‘Observations and experiments in connection with pollination of oil palms’, Malayan Agricultural Journal 22 (1934): 598–606Google Scholar; Ernst Fickendey, Die Ölpalme an der Ostküste von Sumatra (Berlin: Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, 1922).

157 Paul Tullis, ‘How the world got hooked on palm oil’, The Guardian, 19 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingredient-biscuits-shampoo-environmental; ‘We brought in the weevils from Africa’, http://mypalmoil.blogspot.com/2010/05/we-brought-in-bugs-from-africa.html (accessed 27 Mar. 2020); and see account in Mahbob Abdullah, Planter's tales: A plantation manager's stories (Kuala Lumpur: IPC Services, 2003).

158 Martin, UP Saga, p. 103.

159 Milsum, ‘African oil palm’, p. 99.

160 Huff, W.G., ‘Entitlements, destitution, and emigration in the 1930s Singapore Great Depression’, Economic History Review 54, 2 (2001): 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sundaram, Jomo Kwame, A Question of class: Capital, the state, and uneven development in Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 192Google Scholar.

161 Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation, p. 88.

162 See various advertisements in Malayan Agricultural Journal, 1936–38, and Pakiam, ‘Smallholders’.

163 White, Nicholas J., Business, government, and the end of empire: Malaya, 1942–1957 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Amarjit Kaur, ‘Order (and disorder) at the border: Mobility, international labour migration and border controls in Southeast Asia’, in Mobility, labour migration and border controls in Asia, ed. Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 23–51.

164 ‘Report on oil palm estates in Malaya’, 1955, ANM, 1957/0534468.

165 Cumberbatch & Co. (agents for Elmina Estate) to Resident Commissioner for Selangor, 14 Sept. 1946, 1957/0303479, ANM.

166 Notes of a talk delivered by Mr. T.M. Walker, Chairman of the board of directors, Guthrie Agency … 11 Oct. 1962 to Persatuan Ekonomi Malaya, ANM, 1957/0694520.

167 Yacob, Shakila and Khalid, Khadijah Md, ‘Adapt or divest? The New Economic Policy and foreign businesses in Malaysia (1970–2000)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, 3 (2012): 459–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yacob, Shakila and White, Nicholas J., ‘The “unfinished business” of Malaysia's decolonisation: The origins of the Guthrie “dawn raid”’, Modern Asian Studies 44, 5 (2010): 919–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Nicholas J., ‘Surviving Sukarno: British business in post-colonial Indonesia, 1950–1967’, Modern Asian Studies 46, 5 (2012): 1277–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Nicholas J., ‘The settlement of decolonization and post-colonial economic development: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore compared’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 173, 2–3 (2017): 208–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

168 Kaur, ‘Plantation systems’; De Koninck, Rodolphe, ‘La paysannerie comme fer de lance territorial de l'État: Le cas de la Malaysia’, Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 22, 3–4 (1986): 355–70Google Scholar; JDrabble, ohn, An economic history of Malaysia, c.1800–1990: The transition to modern economic growth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

169 Cramb and McCarthy, Oil palm complex, p. 1.