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Gully Coolies, Weed-Women and Snijvolk: The Sugar Industry Workers of North Java in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

G. R. Knight
G. R. Knight
Affiliation:
University of Adelaide, South Australia
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Extract

The issue of who constituted the workforce employed in the Java sugar industry during the late colonial era remains a controversial one. Almost thirty years ago one leading Indonesian scholar made the eminently plausible suggestion that ‘on the whole, those who sought work in the sugar industry… were those who had no land. They were for the greater part recruited from the landless… who were eager to sell their labour to anyone prepared to pay wages’ [Selosoemardjan 1962: 271]. Since that time, however, the waters of debate have become a great deal murkier. In particular, the legend that the industry's workers remained ‘peasants’ is one which dies hard [e.g. Knight 1989]. Indeed, if there can be said to be a single image illustrative of the prevailing orthodoxy concerning the relations between labour and capital in late colonial Java, it is that of the peasant-worker who ‘persisted as a community-oriented household farmer at the same time that he became an industrial wage labourer’ and who ‘had one foot in the rice terrace and the other in the [sugar] mill’ [Geertz 1963: 89]

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 51 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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