The Dutch colonial economic policy, according to Clifford Geertz, resulted in Javanese peasants being forced to eke out a meagre living on miniscule plots of farm land while earning a small money income from growing export crops, which led to a stasis in economic development or ‘agricultural involution’, a process that allegedly began in the 1830s and reached its apogee in the 1920s.Footnote ¹ The indigenous population never achieved prosperity let alone progress towards industrialisation, Geertz argues, but its subsistence needs were ensured by the colonial state, which was humane in its demands on the land and labour of Javanese peasants to produce agricultural crops for sale in the world market. James Scott refines Geertz's argument and says that, with the exception of the Dutch colonial state in Java, colonial rulers elsewhere in Southeast Asia did not ensure the subsistence needs of the indigenous population.Footnote ²

While many aspects of Geertz's neo-conventional involution paradigmFootnote ³ has come under severe criticism, its main thrust of the colonial state ensuring the subsistence of indigenous people has been overlooked, because both Geertz and his critics have been preoccupied with the ways in which production of agricultural crops for export on a large scale affected the Javanese peasants. The revisionists claim that the Javanese peasants who produced export crops on a large scale for the world market enjoyed a degree of prosperity and were economically and socially differentiated, instead of being reduced to an undifferentiated mass of agricultural population living on the brink of subsistence under colonial rule.Footnote ⁴ While it is indeed true that the tremendous expansion in the production of sugar, indigo and coffee after 1830 was arguably the deus ex machina, which produced both positive and negative effects in Javanese economic and social life, people who did not produce export crops were also affected by the commercialisation of economic life. They supplied agricultural crops and products of domestic industry for the local market, bought and sold a wide range of consumer goods and services, acquired consumer habits and use of money, just like their peers involved in growing export crops. There were, however, significant differences in the commercialisation of indigenous economic life across Java, which produced strikingly different modes of economic behaviour, defying any effort to coax them into a broad pattern of economic transformation.Footnote ⁵

This is particularly true for rice growers, who usually sold a portion of the rice crop in increasing amounts from the 1820s onwards. Rice produced on the northeast coast of Java from Cirebon to Surabaya was exported to other islands via the major markets of Makasar, Johor-Riau and Melaka in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶ This trade was interrupted, apparently due to a slump in rice production in Java, in the l790s, and following its slow recovery in the next decade, locally-produced rice in excess of consumption needs was sold in local markets across Java, where the demand for rice began to rise steadily with the rapid expansion in production of export crops after 1830.Footnote ⁷ While rice producers consumed most of rice produced locally, peasants in some parts of the island such as Cirebon, Semarang and Surabaya sold a portion of their rice crop on a regular basis to supply growing demand.

Were the effects of commercial rice production different from the effects of producing sugar, indigo, tobacco and rubber for the world market? What impact did the commercialisation of rice production have on the peasants who sold a large part of rice crop? Did they succumb to involution or achieve economic prosperity, as did the peasants in the Burma Delta in the second half of the nineteenth century?Footnote ⁸ Did they fare better in safeguarding their subsistence requirements than their peers involved in the production of agricultural crops for sale in the world market, if it was indeed true that the colonial state consistently pursued a policy of protecting Javanese peasants from the market economy and ensured their subsistence requirements?

Most peasants across Java sold a certain amount of rice in order to procure some cash money, apparently in increasing quantities, from the 1860s onwards mainly due to the rising demand for rice which rose as the number of non-agricultural workers increased. But the number of commercial rice producers, i.e. peasants who produced rice exclusively for local trade and export to Europe, was indeed small vis-à-vis the number of peasants who produced sugar, indigo, coffee and so on for the world market. The economic metamorphosis of commercial rice-growers in Java is rather difficult to discern, because the bulk of colonial reports on economic matters are focused on the production of export crops and its effects on peasants. While it is relatively easier to construct a broad narrative of the economic vicissitudes of indigenous people, let alone a colonial economy without indigenous people, from a vast amount of information enshrined in regular colonial reports,Footnote ⁹ it is rather difficult to elucidate the dynamics of indigenous economic life, because colonial officials probed into such matters under special circumstances such as scandals involving the production of export crops. People who were beyond the fringe of export agriculture appear in silhouette even in reports produced at the local level of colonial administration, which provide inadequate information to construct a clear narrative of the ways in which their economic life changed as a result of the increasing production of export crops. Furthermore, bewildering local variations on the theme of how the Javanese peasants adapted themselves to the sweeping changes makes it harder still to present a generalisation for Java as a whole. Occasionally, however, when a long series of documents focusing on a particular issue or theme encompassing a particular area is serendipitously preserved – and found after painstaking search through the thousands of metres of records – one has a rare opportunity to examine what colonial officials called the ‘domestic economy’ (huishouding) of the indigenous people.

Commercialisation of rice production seems to have transformed both land and labour into commodities, promoting consumerism and the use of money in daily economic activities, progressively weakening the subsistence ethos of the rural population. Whereas peasants growing export crops were able to retain their rice crop for consumption – income from leasing land and supply of labour to grow export crops was more than enough to pay the land rent on all arable land – peasants who grew rice for sale had to sell it to pay the land rent and to obtain money for their material needs, perhaps accelerating the process of commercialisation more than in areas where export crops were produced side by side with rice and secondary food crops. There was noticeably little diversification of economic activity in exclusively rice growing areas, where people could find enough to live on from selling rice, as the demand for rice in local markets across Java rose after 1850. Therefore it is not surprising to find a relatively larger proportion of peasants earning their means of livelihood from small plots of wet-rice land in a manner reminiscent of the Geertzian involution phenomenon. There was, however, little or no sign of ‘shared poverty’ arising from accommodating practically all the economically active population in agriculture, as argued by Geertz, although being relatively free in decision making does not seem to have provided peasants a better opportunity to achieve economic progress. The case of west Indramayu illustrates a pattern of change in indigenous economic life in areas where peasants produced rice for sale significantly different from the pattern of change in areas where peasants were involved in the production of crops such as sugar for export on a large scale since 1830. That paradigm of socio-economic changes has been widely assumed to encompass all Java, probably due to the paucity of information on socio-economic changes in areas where the production of agricultural crops for export was insignificant. But such a view is untenable in view of the vicissitudes in the economic life of people who produced rice, other crops and other consumable articles for sale in local markets in many parts of Java.

This paper explores the experience of a small community of commercial rice cultivators in west Indramayu, part of Cirebon Residency in west Java. It describes economic changes among peasants who grew rice for sale from the mid-1880s through to the 1930s, fortuitously recorded in great detail in the wake of several episodes of scarcity of food, prompting agrarian reforms to bolster the export rice industry under the aegis of the colonial state bent upon improving the well-being of indigenous people. The reforms failed miserably because the colonial state itself tried to exploit the rice producers as much as private rice traders, who managed to eliminate all competitors and bind peasants securely to them through a vicious cycle of debt, to the disadvantage of the peasants. The colonial state could not protect or help peasants exposed to the risk of subsistence crises as more and more rice came into the hands of traders and, worse still, this forced peasants to live at subsistence level as they were unable to derive the full benefit of producing rice for sale under more favourable terms enforced by a regime following a laissez-faire economic policy. The experience of rice growers in west Indramayu, and perhaps elsewhere in Java too, reveals limits to benevolence under colonial rule and a pattern of economic change for indigenous people far closer to the Geertzian notion of agricultural involution than anywhere else in Java, where people were engaged in the production of sugar alongside rice for sale in the world market.

Transition to commercial rice production

The area of west Indramayu consisted of two large private domains (particuliere landerijen), Indramayu and Kandanghaur, outside government control before 1911.Footnote ¹⁰ Located on the west bank of the River Cimanuk, the two private domains were under nominal control of the local government (residency) of Cirebon. The area was ideal for rice cultivation so it was not surprising that the landlords were disinclined to produce other crops, such as sugar for export, which would have required large amounts of capital, entrepreneurial skills and administrative forces. The landlords kept the local population confined to the cultivation of rice, exacted prime-quality rice for export to Europe and effectively closed off the area to traders from outside, who played an important role in the process of commercialisation of economic life elsewhere in Java. The primitive state of the roads made it easy for the landlords to keep people isolated from outside influence. The local peasants produced no more rice than necessary for their subsistence and to fulfil their obligations to the landlords, in striking contrast to the diversified economy elsewhere in Java in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹

West Indramayu was a sparsely populated area – only a small portion of its total area, especially in Kandanghaur, was under cultivation in the early 1880s, when nearly all households had access to wet-rice (sawah) land, and the majority of peasants held more than 0.7 hectare per person and many peasants held larger areas of wet-rice land. Many peasants claimed to have produced a rice crop sufficient to last from one harvest to another into the early 1870s, but had virtually no other means of income and were locked into a narrow subsistence economy seen nowhere else in Java around 1880. The narrow subsistence economy aggravated the economic hardship of peasants in Indramayu and Kandanghaur private domains, as in the case of the subsistence crisis of 1883–84, caused by a large amount of rice being extracted for export at times of falling rice production.Footnote ¹² The landlords continued to monopolise the rice crop in excess of peasants' subsistence needs in lieu of land rent, which increasingly affected the food supply of peasant households as rice harvests became erratic in the 1890s.

The colonial government's conscience was disturbed as never before by the plight of people in the aftermath of the subsistence crisis of 1883–84. But it could do very little to help people, except persuade the landlords to let peasants sell some rice to traders from outside to earn a little cash money to survive in difficult times. This limited freedom to earn a money income, which brought local peasants into closer contact with the market for rice, and with consumerism, proved a mixed blessing. Peasants with larger holdings of land, enough labour to cultivate it and produce a large rice crop probably welcomed the opportunity. Most peasants, whose rice crop was small, readily sought credit from traders to overcome their current difficulties, forfeiting their rice crop in advance, which caused more hardship as rice production became increasingly erratic during the quarter century after the subsistence crisis of 1883–84. This state of affairs was at least partly responsible for the slow increase in population, which was just a little over 1 per cent a year, from 114,475 in 1885 to 149,202 in 1909, slower than the population growth in west Java as a whole during the same period.Footnote ¹³ It seems also that increasing difficulty in securing subsistence needs caused a fall in natural fertility, for the average family size declined from 4.6 persons in the mid-nineteenth century to 3.7 persons per household by 1905, and the proportion of children in the total population declined from 49 to 43 during the same period.Footnote ¹⁴

The area of sawah in west Indramayu rose in proportion to the population growth,Footnote ¹⁵ but the rice cultivation was plagued by crop failures due to the drought, flood and lack of irrigation facilities.Footnote ¹⁶ Rice production was erratic and falling in the 1880s, and the larger than usual rice crops in 1890 and 1893–95 were exceptions to the norm of low crops of about 39,000 tons of paddy for a decade after the subsistence crisis of 1883–84.Footnote ¹⁷ The erratic rice production was a worrying concern for people, because it was inadequate for family consumption after payment of the rising land rent, and did not allow them to extricate themselves from spiralling debts, a state of affairs confounded by the abuses that crept into assessment and collection of the land rent.Footnote ¹⁸ The only course of action peasants could follow was to borrow money, often on unfavourable terms, binding them to a vicious cycle of debt against the background of frequent crop failures.Footnote ¹⁹ Borrowing money and rice had become widespread after the subsistence crisis of 1883–84, for most peasants lost their cattle and finished all their food stocks during the crisis.Footnote ²⁰ ‘The circumstances under which Kandanghaur domain is being managed causes the wellbeing of people to decline’, one official observed, ‘and people are prostrated under the burden of heavy taxation, compulsory public labour services and the ubiquitous system [of] money lending’.Footnote ²¹ The repayment of debt reduced the amount of rice at their disposal in the 1890s, when rice production was plagued by frequent crop failures. In Kandanghaur private domain, debt repayment required from between 248 to 620 tons of rice a year,Footnote ²² while peasants in Indramayu borrowed a great deal more – from f.80,000 to f.100,000 a year – and repaid their debts at the rate of 62 kilogram of prime-quality rice or 1.24 kilogramme of paddy for each f.5.00 borrowed.Footnote ²³ Agricultural indebtedness increased with frequent crop failures, revealing the effects of commercialisation of rice production, which exposed peasants to the risk of subsistence crises in the early 1900s.

In early March 1903, C.J. Hoekendyk, a missionary, wrote about a scarcity of food in the Indramayu region, where the rice crop had failed for two consecutive years. Some 600 people walked daily to Indramayu town, hoping to find odd jobs to feed their families, and those who could not walk so far ate leaves and roots to appease their hunger. It was so hard to find food that one man forced his wife to become a prostitute in order to earn money to feed the family. Hoekendyk's mission post in Indramayu was a haven for the starving people, but his funds were inadequate to provide food for more than a few hundred people.Footnote ²⁴

Rice production in Indramayu and Kandanghaur private domains halved between 1900 and 1902.Footnote ²⁵ In 1900, peasant had at their disposal 26,253 ton of rice, enough for consumption after paying the land rent, which amounted to 5,295 tons of rice.Footnote ²⁶ But the situation changed dramatically in the following two years. In 1902, people had 10,878 tons of rice at their disposal to last six months.Footnote ²⁷ It would have been barely enough to feed the local population until the next harvest, which was expected to be equally bad. In 1903, one-quarter of the area of land planted under rice was expected to fail due to flood, drought and pest.Footnote ²⁸ Therefore Hoekendyk's claims of a severe shortage of food in some parts of the Indramayu region had a ring of truth, but the local government was reluctant to admit it and made an unsuccessful effort to quash Hoekendyk's claims. The management of private domains was impervious to the difficulties of people trying to weather the shortage of food.Footnote ²⁹ The landlords, allegedly suffering from diminished income, were forced to initiate relief work, usually building canals and roads, and provide the peasants with seed paddy in the next season.Footnote ³⁰

The mission workers fed a lengthening queue of starving people, mostly old men, young women and children, who went away looking for work, or another shelter once rested and fed for a few days.Footnote ³¹ Hoekendyk's shelters for needy people were disagreeable to the administrators of private domains, who forced him to dismantle them by persuading people to leave in an attempt to refute the claims of a subsistence crisis.Footnote ³² The central government was reluctant to consider the situation serious enough to warrant any relief operation and shrugged off the vociferous claims of mission workers as a storm in a teacup, but not for long.Footnote ³³

In mid-1903, W.H. Jacometti, a lawyer acting on behalf of some European and Chinese rice traders in the Indramayu region, complained about the interference of the local government in his clients' operations by prohibiting the sale of rice before peasants saved 2 ton of paddy per household in the village rice barns.Footnote ³⁴ The fear of scarcity of food in the area was, according to Jacometti, exaggerated, and no different from the situation every year to require special measures. The local government disagreed with this view, for rice production in the entire Indramayu area was significantly lower than the normal level of production.Footnote ³⁵ The local government also pointed out the insignificance of cultivation of secondary crops in this area, which Jacometti cited as evidence for sufficient food supply, and observed that a serious shortage of rice was the likely outcome of increased acquisition of rice by traders, regardless of the plight of people, so it was necessary to limit the amount of rice traders procured from peasants.

One might hesitate to trust the local government's solicitous efforts to bolster food supply in view of its reluctance to admit a scarcity of food in the area less than a year previously. The local government did not comment on its volte-face, but it might have underestimated the gravity of the situation and have been trying to make amends for its mistake by reacting quickly, as soon as it became evident that the crop failure was more widespread than initially assumed.Footnote ³⁶ The cause of the scarcity of rice for consumption was, the local government appears to have assumed, the increased sale of rice by peasants in the private domains, oblivious to their precarious food supply at times of falling rice production. Colonial officials were blind to the increasingly commercialised character of indigenous economic life, which forced peasants to sell a larger portion of the rice harvest in order to earn money to meet their material needs in the early 1900s.

East Indramayu, or Indramayu Regency, had been a major rice producing area that boasted a coterie of Chinese rice traders and rice millers since the 1820s, and was a prime field of operation for rice traders.Footnote ³⁷ Their operations enlarged considerably as the demand for prime-quality rice for export to Europe rose significantly after 1880,Footnote ³⁸ in addition to the growing demand for rice in local markets in Java and in other Indonesian islands.Footnote ³⁹ The Chinese traders, who roamed in rural areas and conducted commercial activities with indigenous people with little official interference, were indispensable in collecting rice from peasants.Footnote ⁴⁰ The restrictions circumscribing the activities of Chinese traders had gradually fallen by the wayside as indigenous economic activities became commercialised.Footnote ⁴¹ Both European and Chinese rice traders in Indramayu town, who were keen to export the highly sought-after prime-quality rice from west Indramayu,Footnote ⁴² conducted a brisk business through Chinese intermediaries. They penetrated into the hitherto isolated areas of Indramayu and Kandanghaur private domains and drew the local peasants within the orbit of their commercial operations, once the landlords allowed them into the private domains after the subsistence crisis of 1883–84. While some traders such as Kwek Tjin Siang were leading members and even office holders of the Chinese community – he was the Lieutenant Captain of Chinese in Indramayu – most traders were small operators, such as Oey Tjin Kie, who travelled back and forth between the towns of Lelea and Indramayu, or Tan Mi Nio and Tjan Hie Nio, who lent peasants money and collected repayments in rice.Footnote ⁴³ The local peasants probably did not need much encouragement to sell rice, for they were hard pressed to procure funds to produce rice as well as to survive in times of crop failures. Some peasants familiar with the rice trade in east Indramayu were probably aware of the potential income from selling rice to traders at market price.Footnote ⁴⁴ The peasants apparently responded enthusiastically to the overtures of Chinese traders and sold whatever rice they could spare after payment of the land rent, sometimes without keeping enough rice to feed their families, knowing that they could procure easy credit from traders to buy rice for consumption.

The Chinese traders are invariably depicted in colonial reports as exploitative moneylenders whose hold on the Javanese peasantry was detrimental to its wellbeing. This stereotypical view conceals the fact that the Chinese traders cum moneylenders performed a rather useful service in rural credit at a time when the need for credit was great among the peasants – a need the local government of Cirebon emphasised in numerous reports in the early 1900s – and served as conveyers of agricultural products to local markets, no doubt with a keen eye to maximise their profits. In the early 1900s, ‘the influence of Chinese in economic affairs is not insignificant’, one perceptive local official wrote, ‘mainly due the custom of lending money on the crops, so it is not surprising that we find a large number of Chinese in remote rural areas’ of the Indramayu region.Footnote ⁴⁵ The rising demand for rice apparently intensified the competition among traders, whose ability to control the supply of rice was dependent on access to the rice harvest in remote villages. The scale of rice traders' operations can be gauged from the fact that the rice stores in Indramayu town had 6,200 tons of rice ready for export after the rice harvest was gathered and, at the current prices, 30,000 ton of rice would have brought f.4,000,000 to the traders.Footnote ⁴⁶ Therefore anything that interfered with the rice trade was unacceptable to traders playing for high stakes. It is difficult to say to what extent the scarcity of rice in the private domains during 1901–03 was due to selling rice, but it undoubtedly exacerbated the problems of food supply. The peasants were perhaps not ignorant of their plight in a case of scarcity of rice, but sold rice none the less in order to obtain money to meet their increasing material needs, and to overcome the perennial shortage of funds to open up new land for cultivation, to buy cattle, tools and seed paddy to continue rice production under the difficult circumstances of frequent crop failures.

Even a small peasant household, with a miniscule holding (0.2 hectare) of wet-rice land, in a fertile rice-growing area, sold a large portion of its rice crop, which yielded almost 80 per cent of its income, and bought its food and other domestic necessities, suggesting a significant degree of commercialisation of household economic activities.Footnote ⁴⁷ The degree of commercialisation of domestic economic activities and consumerism proportionately increased with a family's larger holding of wet-rice land, its area of dry arable land and house-yard.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, use of money, consumerism and market economic forces had penetrated even into the remote parts of Java in the 1880s, a state of affairs further advanced in the following decades of rapid economic growth.Footnote ⁴⁹ The degree of commercialisation of the economy in coastal areas such as Indramayu was conceivably far greater, given their proximity to markets and the opportunities they provided to people for buying and selling. Therefore it is not surprising that the peasants in Indramayu region as a whole were accustomed to produce rice for sale with borrowed money, sold rice in increasing quantities and bought cheaper varieties of rice for consumption.

In the early 1880s, only a small proportion of peasants in west Indramayu held plots of wet-rice lands below 0.7 hectare, which produced enough rice to feed a family of average size of 4.5 people; the rest of the peasants held plots of wet-rice land ranging from 0.7 hectare to 2.4 hectare per peasant.Footnote ⁵⁰ This pattern of land holding was quite similar to that in east Indramayu in the early 1900s, when 44 per cent of all peasants in east Indramayu, just like their peers in west Indramayu, held under 0.7 hectare per peasant, while 17 per cent of households held 0.7 hectare per peasant and 38 per cent of households held farms ranging from 1.4 hectare to over 8 hectare per peasant.Footnote ⁵¹ In east Indramayu, all peasants were accustomed to sell rice in varying quantities, and peasants with larger holdings of arable land were regular commercial rice producers, who probably had funds and were less dependent on credit, while most peasants with smaller holdings of wet-rice land were dependent on credit to produce rice to a large extent. Marginal peasants would need funds to lease or rent land and to meet all the expenses and the cost of living, and even small peasants with holdings of 0.7 hectare needed funds to buy or hire cattle, seed and tools, in addition to cash money for their material needs. It is very likely that the latter segment of peasants was more vulnerable to the effects of crop failures and yet had no choice but to borrow money and sell rice to survive.Footnote ⁵² The situation in west Indramayu would not have been much different, either in terms of distribution of wet-rice land by size of holding or the way most peasants disposed of their rice crop in the early 1900s.

It was against this background of the growing rice trade in the Indramayu region that the local government imposed restrictions on the movement of rice traders beyond the perimeter of district towns, and the sale of rice before a certain amount of it was saved in village barns, a measure which raised the ire of rice traders, who realised this would mean a considerable loss of profit if they could not collect rice from peasants.Footnote ⁵³ Traders also pointed out, quite correctly, that the restrictions on the rice trade would not only affect them but also the well-being of the local population. The local government of Cirebon relaxed restrictions on the rice trade in 1904, only to find a great scarcity of rice for consumption among people in the wake of another crop failure three years later.Footnote ⁵⁴

The sale of rice was increasing apace, because apart from the Chinese traders the landlords had also been buying rice from peasants in addition to the rice supplied in lieu of the land rent, probably to eliminate rice traders who were increasingly active in west Indramayu. Peasants sold not only the prime-quality rice but inferior quality rice as well, to obtain money for their seemingly increasing material needs. The opening of private domains to rice traders brought about rapid changes in the consumer habits of the local population through circulation of money, encouraging peasants to sell rice and procure credit to meet their needs, which were exacerbated by periodic crop failures and falling rice production. The subsistence rice economy that sustained generations of people had been consequently eroded substantially by 1911, when the government repurchased Indramayu and Kandanghaur private domains, almost a century after they were sold out, and integrated them into east Indramayu, creating a very large area producing rice for sale.Footnote ⁵⁵

Rapid commercialisation of rice industry

The repurchase of Indramayu and Kandanghaur private domains occurred under the aegis of a new turn in colonial policy aimed at improving the wellbeing of indigenous people.Footnote ⁵⁶ They ought to remain peasants, the colonial state still insisted, but should be stronger economically to withstand the pressures of commercialisation. Continuous subdivision of smallholdings of wet-rice land and increasing agricultural indebtedness due to the commercialisation of economic life was considered to have adversely affected the Javanese peasants, encouraging rural protests.Footnote ⁵⁷ Injecting large sums of funds to improve the irrigation facilities, and the rural credit services, and agrarian reforms to strengthen a class of enterprising and contented peasants were considered to be effective measures to prevent the growing agrarian radicalism.Footnote ⁵⁸ The local government of Cirebon introduced a set of reforms with the blessings of the central government in Batavia, which was liberal with funds, to protect the lucrative rice industry in west Indramayu from ‘unscrupulous’ rice traders and to ensure the wellbeing of peasants. The government felt that a fair system of land rent together with an efficient credit service would encourage peasants to produce more rice and sell rice in excess of consumption needs to the government at reasonable prices.Footnote ⁵⁹ The colonial officials were in fact proposing to create a government monopoly of the local rice industry, attesting to its development during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The government allocated f.200,000 to provide credit and stipulated that money borrowed should be repaid at interest of 20 per cent in prime-quality rice, valued at the rate of f.2.50 per pikul (62 kilogrammes) of paddy and f.5.00 per pikul of rice.Footnote ⁶⁰

The rural credit scheme was popular with peasants, despite the high interest rate, and nearly 15,000 peasants borrowed f.103,703 during the first year of its operation.Footnote ⁶¹ Before long, however, it became evident that peasants were reluctant to sell rice to the government at what they considered to be low prices. They paid back their debts in low-quality paddy and sold the prime-quality paddy to traders for a higher price than that offered by the government. Traders were aggressive competitors who had a much wider network of agents to provide credit and collect rice compared with official agencies. The government offered low prices and regulated credit and collection of debts, which constrained peasants who needed easy access to credit, and disliked being paid less for rice when they could sell it at a higher price.Footnote ⁶²

Traders appear to have redoubled their efforts to secure rice, for exporting rice to Europe was highly lucrative well until the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ⁶³ The demand for rice in local markets all over Java was also rising as a result of the increase in number of non-agricultural workers dependent on the market for rice, and the Indramayu region became a major centre of rice trade in Java during the inter-war years.Footnote ⁶⁴ By 1919, 11 new rice mills had been established in the area, and some of them were located far away from the district towns in order to capture rice production in remote villages. The government could not compete with the rice traders, for it had insufficient resources to acquire paddy and to overcome the peasants' reluctance to sell their paddy at a low price. The government's plan to control the lucrative local rice industry consequently suffered a major setback when the rice mills operated by the government became a liability, because more and more peasants sold their paddy to traders.Footnote ⁶⁵ Failure to secure enough paddy to process at the new big mill, built by the landlords at such expense and inherited by the government,Footnote ⁶⁶ proved beyond doubt that the government's plans had no hope of success against peasants trying to raise their income from selling rice, with the help of astute traders determined to force the government out of competition. The new rice mill lent a great deal of money, but received less and less paddy to process,Footnote ⁶⁷ and was sold within a year after it came into operation.Footnote ⁶⁸ The old rice mill in Losarang continued to operate, perhaps because there was little competition for paddy in the area and the local peasants were content with supplying paddy to the government in return for credit.Footnote ⁶⁹ The need for credit among local peasants was as great as ever so the government decided to maintain a credit service through the village rice barns, but to collect the debts in money instead of paddy so the peasants were free to dispose of their paddy or rice as they wished.Footnote ⁷⁰ To the dismay of local officials, the prospects of running a rice industry under government control encountered a severe obstacle in the flourishing rice trade, now encompassing both east and west Indramayu, a place which soon became attractive to people from adjacent areas with little or no new arable land to earn their means of livelihood from growing rice for sale.

Improved roads and railway lines linking the western and southern parts of Kandanghaur with Indramayu, and both areas with the rest of the island, within a decade of west Indramayu coming under the direct government rule brought about a dramatic change in population growth and economic development.Footnote ⁷¹ West Indramayu came to boast a sizeable population, which rose from 79,224 in 1900 to 97,542 in 1920 and then to 172,862 in 1930, largely as a result of migration of people from the nearby over-populated areas into this new frontier of settlement.Footnote ⁷²

It seems that a large number of people from east Indramayu, where the production of rice for sale had long been entrenched, where wet-rice land was at a premium and nearly all land suitable for wet-rice cultivation had already been cultivated, moved into west Indramayu. Many people eking out a meagre living from wage labour and petty trade in the nearby areas of central Java moved into west Indramayu in large numbers, established new settlements and brought under plough a large stretch of new land in the 1920s.Footnote ⁷³ The area soon became thickly populated in comparison with the situation half a century earlier, although population density was nowhere as high as in some parts of Central Java in the 1920s.Footnote ⁷⁴ The early migrants settled in Indramayu despite its relatively small area of arable land suitable for reclamation, but after 1920 more and more people appear to have moved into Kandanghaur. In the western part of Indramayu many new settlements came into existence, prompting the local government to build roads linking new villages with the central part of Indramayu that served as the hub of rice industry.

The area of wet-rice land in west Indramayu increased substantially from 46,090 hectares to 117,210 hectares, an increase of 5 per cent a year at a rate commensurate with the population growth between 1910 and 1930.Footnote ⁷⁵ The expansion of area of land cultivated, however, did not necessarily bring economic prosperity to the inhabitants of west Indramayu. Slow progress in improving irrigation facilities, for instance, had disastrous consequences, as shown by a large-scale crop failure in 1916.Footnote ⁷⁶ The irrigation facilities improved slowly in several phases in the 1920s, but much of the wet-rice land dependent on rainfall for irrigation was still subject to crop failure.

The wet season of 1920–21 was notoriously bad for the peasants in Cirebon Residency as a whole and for the inhabitants of Indramayu Regency in particular, where crop failure on a large scale brought great hardship to the local population.Footnote ⁷⁷ The previous rice crop was affected by heavy rainfall in the east monsoon of 1920, causing the entire rice crop of 187,513 hectares of land to fail completely and another 21,420 hectares of land to fail partly. In the subsequent year, the rainfall was late to begin cultivation of rice and peasants consequently gathered a smaller rice crop. In the districts of Jatibarang and Indramayu alone, as much as 80 per cent of the rice crop was destroyed as a result of inadequate irrigation, which set in motion a series of events with far-reaching consequences for people now dependent on the sale of rice for their livelihood.Footnote ⁷⁸

Falling rice production may not have had much impact on the rice trade, because traders always collected rice immediately after the harvest, when peasants were easily pursuaded to sell rice. It was only several months later, when a subsistence crisis loomed large, that people found themselves without adequate food supplies and no money to buy food.Footnote ⁷⁹ They had sold 25,520 tons of rice, presumably for export, in addition to another 3,720 tons of rice that was sold locally. The amount of rice at the disposal of peasants was consequently small and they had insufficient means to buy rice, which had become expensive in the local markets. The situation fortunately was improved by the timely arrival of imported rice causing prices to fall slightly towards the end of 1920.Footnote ⁸⁰ The government came to the rescue of people with a subsidy of f.2,000 per peasant to buy seed paddy and to cultivate some secondary food crops until the next rice harvest. This measure was supplemented by another f.70,000 made available to peasants to cultivate land the following year without difficulty.

Many peasants, nevertheless, encountered difficulties in feeding their families, procuring their material needs other than food and, perhaps more importantly, continuing rice production into early 1921.Footnote ⁸¹ They had lost access to credit because of their inability to repay debts to the rice traders, who were hard hit by falling rice exports due to the difficulties in shipping rice to Europe after 1914; and exports plummeted to a new low level as a result of falling rice production in rice exporting areas such as Indramayu. In 1921, the amount of rice exported from Java amounted to a mere 1,000 tons, a far cry from over 50,000 tons exported in 1910.Footnote ⁸²

Falling rice exports clearly suggest a major crisis in Java's rice industry, which boded ill for the inhabitants of Indramayu region. The rice traders and peasants alike appear to have suffered heavy financial losses, to judge from the small amount of rice that found its way to the local market between 1915 and 1920.Footnote ⁸³ Fortunately, the crisis was brief due to the timely relief measures undertaken by the government and the revival of the rice industry itself. The government tried with some success to raise rice production in Java, and it restricted rice imports and regulated the price of rice in local markets.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the 1920s, rice production in west Indramayu was static, due largely to frequent crop failures and inadequate irrigation facilities,Footnote ⁸⁵ but probably much of its rice production was exported, mainly to Europe, until the onset of the Great Depression in late 1928. The collapse of European markets for rice, and other commercial crops, made traders seek markets nearer home in Java and other Indonesian islands, which sustained the rice trade at a modest level for a decade from 1928 to 1939.Footnote ⁸⁶

Rice production in the entire Indramayu region probably continued unabated in the 1930s, although production figures are not available for the entire decade. Rice production rose from 231,000 tons in 1936 to 282,000 tons in 1937, faster than that in west Java as a whole, but it declined a little to 270,000 tons in 1938.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1933, west Indramayu exported the largest amount of rice from Java, 5,768 tons of rice, to Batavia, the largest market in Java, in addition to another 678 tons of rice to other Indonesian islands.Footnote ⁸⁸ The amount of rice exported from Indramayu harbour rose from 21,272 tons in 1936 to 49,616 tons to 1937, declining to 24,532 tons next year; no other area in West Java exported as much rice, and very few areas in all Java did so during this period.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rice exports from Indramayu region as a whole most probably increased for the next few years, when local rice mills were busy milling rice in increasing quantities. Indeed, the amount of rice milled and exported by West Java, which produced the bulk of rice milled in Java, surged after 1930, from a little over 100,000 tons to nearly 400,000 tons in 1937.Footnote ⁹⁰ There were 14 mills in west Indramayu by 1933, but only 10 of them were actually operating during the rest of the decade.Footnote ⁹¹ They appear to have increased their milling capacity, for the amount of rice processed by mills rose from 13 per cent to 26 per cent of all rice production in West Java between 1928 and 1938.Footnote ⁹²

Most rice mills in west Indramayu were under the control of the Chinese, and only one mill, R. & C., belonged to a European company, which offered serious competition to the Chinese entrepreneurs.Footnote ⁹³ The rice mills were located in places where several roads met and regular markets were held, so it is not surprising that centres of commercial activity developed around rice mills. Twenty Chinese wholesale merchants had established themselves in the district towns and dealt with local rice producers through petty traders, rice collectors and moneylenders, linking peasants and traders with the markets. They had a degree of influence on trade and commerce far beyond their numerical strengthFootnote ⁹⁴ through supply of credit unfettered by legal restrictions that accompanied some other economic activities.Footnote ⁹⁵ The success of the rice trade was dependent on acquisition of paddy in sufficient quantities at a low price, and the best means of gathering rice was by supplying credit to the peasants, who could not easily avail themselves of the services of official credit services. The amount of money Chinese rice traders made available to the local peasants was considerable, to judge from the fact that one Chinese rice mill alone provided no less than f.855,000 in six months. Most Chinese traders could supply the peasants with money in small amounts, for it was difficult for them to muster large amounts of credit without borrowing from European rice mills and local banks. The aforesaid R. & C. rice mill played a major role in lending money to the rice mills operated by the Chinese, who obtained more money on promissory notes or by mortgaging the valuables of their women folk.Footnote ⁹⁶

The expansion of the rice milling industry in west Indramayu, and in Java as a whole, after 1930 was a matter of great concern for the officials who had been monitoring its consequences for the indigenous people. They acknowledged that the need to find local markets for rice in the wake of the depression led to a rapid expansion in rice milling. The danger was, however, that over supply of rice would cause a sudden drop in prices, creating a chain reaction that would bring about considerable economic difficulties for people.Footnote ⁹⁷ Those gloomy predictions proved justified before long, not due to a glut of rice in the market but to the rice growers' dependency on selling rice, with the result that much of local rice production was not at the disposal of the peasants, who encountered yet again a severe shortage of food verging on famine in 1935.

The rice crop in the entire coastal belt from Kerrawang to Cileduk in east Cirebon was devastated by disease in 1934.Footnote ⁹⁸ The food supply in the Indramayu region was critical in February 1935. There was no sign of hunger as yet and some people managed to eat just a small amount of rice earned from working for others while many people ate roots and leaves. The government supplied 600 tons of rice to feed people, whose plight worsened as little cash money was in circulation, and only those who had a regular income could afford to buy rice at the prevailing market prices.Footnote ⁹⁹ The scarcity of rice was widespread in the Indramayu region and people ate rice only when they could obtain some rice from working for the peasants who had ample resources, sometimes after walking 15 kilometres or more.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The local government immediately began to gather more rice to alleviate the severe shortage of food and organised relief work to help people with food and cash money. These measures prevented the outbreak of a famine affecting 50,000 people in the area, whose plight could have been similar to that of their less fortunate peers in some parts of Indochina had the local government been less caring about people.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The local peasants no longer had enough rice to feed themselves until the next harvest, being hard pressed to hand over the bulk of the crop to rice traders immediately after the harvest. Peasants' cash income was depleted and their ability to secure credit diminished after the crop failures. The local shops conducted very little business, for only people with a regular income and ample money patronised shops, which is not surprising in view of the high price of rice consumed by people in the mid-1930s.Footnote ¹⁰²

The crop failures reduced the amount of rice peasants could keep for their needs after meeting their obligations. They had been keeping less and less rice for consumption, being forced to give up more and more rice to repay debts. The peasants consumed a relatively small portion of the prime-quality rice they produced and ate cheap imported rice, bought with the money earned from selling their own produce or, more than likely, obtained from traders on credit. The peasants in Indramayu region had become firmly bound to the rice trade through credit, which had become a major operation with a great deal of money at stake for rice traders. They were less sympathetic towards peasants when the interests of the rice industry were in jeopardy. The subsistence crisis in 1935 was indeed a crisis caused by the sudden erosion in ‘exchange entitlements’ between peasants and the rice traders, who could not repay their debts so easily against the background of falling production and depressed economic conditions.

The ways in which peasants were integrated into the rice trade through credit probably deprived most small peasants of an adequate food supply and income to buy food in case of a crop failure. The peasants also are not likely to have received the maximum price for rice when they paid back their debts in paddy, because the traders took into account the delay in repayment of debts and adjusted the price accordingly. This explains why the inhabitants of west Indramayu experienced a low level of purchasing power, despite the rapid expansion of the rice trade. The majority of people could not buy rice at the prevailing high prices in the mid-1930s, and the local shop owners observed a considerable fall in income due to the scarcity of cash money among people.Footnote ¹⁰³

Peasants who produced rice for sale are said to have suffered much less, for they at least had their food supply assured, compared with people who were involved in the production of commercial crops for the world market during the Great Depression.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The rice growers in west Indramayu nevertheless suffered a fall in money income just as much as their peers in rice growing areas elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The Dutch colonial officials provided some help to people in sugar producing areas in Java but left the rest of the indigenous population to their own devices to survive the effects of current economic hardship. The economic prospects of rice growers in Indramayu indeed looked better than the prospects of people involved in production of sugar elsewhere in Java hard hit by the depression. The food supply of rice growers was virtually guaranteed, colonial officials believed, and their ability to earn more money from selling rice was potentially greater than before, now that rice imports had been reduced with a view to stimulate the local rice industry.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The real situation was, however, radically different: the rice growers in west Indramayu experienced perhaps the worst ever scarcity of food to occur in the region and found their money income severely undermined during the depression years.

The level of salt consumption in Indramayu Regency was well below that in the adjacent Regencies of Cirebon and Majalengka, which enjoyed a greater degree of money income generated by the sugar industry. Its collapse reduced the money income of people in those areas, but the reduced money income did not seriously affect the consumption of essential food items such as salt. The inhabitants of Cirebon Regency consumed 2.37 kilogrammes of salt per person in 1933, which rose to 2.45 kilogrammes per person by 1938. In contrast, it declined from 0.66 kilogrammes to 0.51 kilogrammes per person in Indramayu Regency between 1933 and 1936 and rose only to 1.64 kilogrammes per person by 1938.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indramayu Regency was the only area in West Java that registered such a low level of salt consumption, which is difficult to explain except in terms of low purchasing power of people. The amount of rent collected from markets (pasar), which declined from f.25, 901 in 1930 to f.17,007 in 1938 – only 66 per cent of the income in 1930, also implies a low level of money income among people.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The shortage of cash money was so acute in the entire Indramayu region that people were forced to mortgage their goods in order to obtain some money. The amount of money borrowed in Indramayu Regency rose from 85 cents per person to 119 cents per person between 1936 and 1938, just a little better in comparison with the situation in Cirebon Regency, where it rose from 105 cents per person to 159 cents per person during the same period.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This resulted in a higher level of indebtedness, including unpaid land rent, which amounted to 21 cents per person in Indramayu Regency by 1936, declining sharply to just 1 cent per person two years later. This suggests a dramatic turn around in the means to pay debts towards the end of the decade, the rice trade gathering momentum as it reoriented itself towards the domestic market in the Indonesian islands. The shortage of cash money among rice growing peasants in the entire Indramayu region was no less acute in comparison with peasants involved in commercial agriculture, and, worse still, the local population encountered severe difficulties in procuring their food, whereas people in areas where commercial agriculture even if their money income suffered considerably during the 1930s. The commercialisation of the rice industry in the entire Indramayu region apparently deprived local peasants of their subsistence as well as a degree of material wellbeing from the 1890s through to the 1930s.

Colonial officials saw the rapid growth of commercial rice production in west Indramayu as a highly undesirable development from the paternalistic point of view, which guided colonial policy in the early twentieth century. They argued that rice traders exercised a pernicious influence on peasants, enticed them with easy credit and obtained rice under terms disadvantageous to peasants, perpetuating a vicious cycle of debt and reducing peasants to poverty. If the colonial perspective is assumed to be correct, then, it is difficult not to conclude that, being exposed to the vagaries of market economic forces peasants pursued a strategy to ensure their survival by sharing land among more and more people, as the commercialisation of rice industry accelerated in the early twentieth century. Indeed, it can be argued that peasants with miniscule plots of wet-rice land produced just enough rice to live from selling rice and found themselves entrenched in a state of poverty and economic stasis that can be aptly described as ‘involution’, whereas elsewhere in Java peasants whose economic activities were diversified enjoyed a greater degree of economic prosperity, albeit without development, contrary to the Geertzian hypothesis. But such a view does not quite capture the real situation of commercial rice growers, because even miniscule plots of wet-rice land seem to have produced an income sufficient for people to live at a level above subsistence, except in times of hardship caused by crop failure, and a fairly large number of peasants with holdings of farm land above the average size seem to have enjoyed a considerable income by rural standards.

The experience of peasants in west Indramayu was not unique, for their peers in east Indramayu, which had been the centre of a flourishing rice trade since 1820s, were equally ‘involuted’ in the sense that the majority of the local population were found earning its means of livelihood from growing rice on miniscule plots of wet-rice land with diminishing returns in the early 1900s. There was little diversification of economic activity in east Indramayu unlike elsewhere in Cirebon Residency.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The economic difficulties of the local population mounted with steady population growth, forcing the government to introduce a set of reforms aimed at bolstering an economically viable peasantry by reducing fragmentation of arable land and redressing agricultural indebtedness in the early 1900s.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A similar situation is observed in yet another rice-growing area, Semarang Residency in Central Java, perhaps with a greater degree of agricultural indebtedness comparable with west Indramayu, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹¹¹

There are several features common to all three cases: commercial rice production, agricultural indebtedness, steady population increase vis-à-vis a static area of wet-rice land, fragmentation of wet-rice land among the majority of people and a small class of prosperous large landholders who controlled the rest of the peasantry in collision with rice traders. The standard of living of the rural population was also markedly lower than that of people in areas with a greater degree of diversification of economic activities. Perhaps west Indramayu represents the adverse consequences of commercialisation of rice production in stark fashion, because commercialisation of the rice economy in the area developed within a few decades, whereas in east Indramayu and Semarang people had found it easier to cope with adverse effects of commercialisation, which had begun in the 1820s.

Perhaps the conduct of commercial rice growers in west Indramayu, and elsewhere in Java too, can be explained in a positive manner if we discount the moral overtones in the discourse of colonial officials with a crusading mission to ‘liberate’ peasants from the clutches of ubiquitous Chinese rice traders cum money lenders. The notion of peasant victimisation pervasive in the literature ignores the vital fact that peasants are rational in conduct, do not always operate on the ‘safety (of subsistence) first’ principle and are not averse to profit making.Footnote ¹¹² The cumulative impact of commercialisation of indigenous economic life characterised by increasing use of money and consumer habits of the rural population proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Javanese peasants were not so concerned about subsistence, but enthusiastically availed themselves of the opportunity to earn a money income.Footnote ¹¹³ The peasants in west Sumatra were equally if not more adept at manipulating commercial agriculture to improve their standard of living in the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The pace at which peasants in west Indramayu responded to the access to a market economy by increasing rice production with borrowed money to buy cattle, seed and tools as well as by selling rice at competitive prices, bears witness to rational conduct in decision making in economic life quite typical of people who had been accustomed to commerce for a very long time.Footnote ¹¹⁵

There is no denying the fact, however, that rapid commercialisation of the rice industry in west Indramayu from the mid-1880s onwards caused problems and hardship for peasants, often due to circumstances beyond their control, such as inclement weather and ensuing crop failures. Those problems were exacerbated by peasants' inability to withstand such difficulties and the pressure of market economic forces in the form of repayment of debts, more often than not in paddy, immediately after the rice harvest at the risk of scarcity of food before the next rice crop. This state of affairs affected different groups of peasants in different ways, relative to their circumstances, as shown by the experience of peasants in west Indramayu as commercialisation of the rice industry gathered pace in the early 1900s. The reason why the commercial rice industry caused so much hardship, verging on subsistence crises at times, and a relatively low standard of life, for commercial rice-growers vis-à-vis other peasants needs explaining. In most parts of Java, where peasants sold some rice on a regular basis, they rarely risked a scarcity of food even against falling rice production on account of crop failures, because they had the bulk of the rice crop at their disposal and were not forced to sell a greater proportion of it to meet their financial obligations, such as land rent. They had several other means of earning a money income such as growing sugar cane, tobacco, wage-labour and producing articles for domestic consumption. The commercial rice growers, in striking contrast, had no recourse to money income other than from the sale of rice and were entirely dependent on it to meet their obligations. Consequently, their subsistence was at risk once the greater part of the rice harvest was sold and the prospects of the next rice harvest was under some threat, jeopardising their purchasing power, or what Amartya Sen called the ‘exchange entitlements’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The course of economic changes in commercial rice-producing areas in Java depicts a pattern quite different from that of people involved in the production of agricultural crops such as sugar for export. The latter is emphasised both in conventional and revised wisdom on Java's economic transformation, which ignore other patterns of economic changes in Java under colonial rule. The case of west Indramayu, eloquently documented, provides a close-up view of one segment of the complex view of Java's economic transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.