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Coffee has been grown on Java for the commercial market since the early eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company began buying from peasant producers in the Priangan highlands. What began as a commercial transaction, however, soon became a system of compulsory production. This book shows how the Dutch East India Company mobilised land and labour, why they turned to force cultivation, and what effects the brutal system they installed had on the economy and society.
List of contents
Prologue, Chapter I. The Company as a Territorial Power Chapter II. The Introduction of Forced Cultivation Chapter III. From Trading Company to State Enterprise Chapter IV. Government Regulated Exploitation versus Private Agribusiness Chapter V. Unfree Labour as a Condition for Progress Chapter VI. The Coffee Regime under the Cultivation System Chapter VII. Winding Up the Priangan System of Governance Chapter VII. Eclipse of the Coffee Regime from the Sunda Highlands, Epilogue, Bibliography
About the author
Jan Breman is emeritus professor of comparative sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He continues his scholarly research, mainly focused on work and labour in Asia, as Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and as a Honorary Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam
