On the very first page of the Introduction, Ulbe Bosma lays down very clearly the book's two concerns. The first: What caused the “reversal of fortune” of Island Southeast Asia, which saw it decline from a prosperous region prior to colonial conquest to become a poor region that relied on the export of agricultural commodities produced by cheap labor? While many will point to colonialism as responsible for the making of such a “periphery,” Bosma disagrees. In fact, he seeks to rebut the argument of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson that the “reversal of fortune” was “the upshot of colonial powers recasting existing extractive systems or institutions in exploitation colonies [in contrast to settler colonies] for their own purposes, which inflicted lasting damage on the institutional arrangements” (p. 5). Bosma argues that poverty is due neither to the economic hegemony of the Global North nor to colonial domination, which was “often a limited and negotiated phenomenon” (p. 4). Colonial powers merely used extant modes of labor control “to mobilize rural populations for commodity production on a massive scale” (p. 4).

With his analysis concentrating on Java and what he refers to as the “northern Philippines” (a discomforting term to Filipino readers as it is made to encompass the central Visayas), Bosma's answer is found in “high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor embedded in patron-client relationships” (p. 1) that predated colonial conquest. He then links this answer to the second question: Why is Island Southeast Asia a massive exporter of labor today? The first five chapters are devoted to answering the first question, while parts of chapter 4, the concluding section of chapter 5, and all of chapter 6 are focused on the second question, a dispersed response that consequently fails to deliver an adequate answer.

Chapter 1 explains the indubitable rise in population growth after “Southeast Asia … went through a phase of demographic decline and economic contraction between 1600 and 1750” (p. 26) due to smallpox as well as piracy. But nutritional levels improved with increased food production, plus “a reasonably effective smallpox vaccination program” (p. 38) in the places that became “the earliest adopters of vaccination” (p. 43). “By the end of the eighteenth century, Java and the northern Philippines were the first to show signs of economic and demographic recovery” (p. 29). In the nineteenth century, “growth returned to Java and the Philippines” (p. 32). With demographic growth, “servile labor” became abundant in “the colonial heartlands of the Philippines and the Netherlands Indies” (p. 69).

The second chapter turns to slavery as engendered by global capitalism, boosted by “a growing overseas demand for rice and sea and forest products” (p. 44). Bosma states, however, that “once these territories were relatively safe and yielded sufficient revenue, the battle against slave raiding and trading could be gradually expanded” (p. 45), resulting in autonomous sultanates such as Sulu getting quashed. With Bosma's tacit assumption of economic rationalism holding sway, he portrays slavery as a “transient phase,” as it was “far more costly as a production system” (p. 61) than sharecropping, which emerged “as the most cost-effective way of producing agricultural export crops in bulk” (p. 69). Nonetheless, slavery “lingered on in servitude and patron-client relationships,” this “very malleability” allowing “labor to be incorporated in colonial commodity production all over Island Southeast Asia” (p. 63). Note that slavery and sharecropping are held as distinct production systems, but the proposition that slavery “lingered on” in patron-clientage, often imbricated in sharecropping, is asserted without being explained and demonstrated.

“The story of how Java and parts of the northern Philippines became plantation peripheries is the subject of” (p. 72) chapter 3. Bosma contends that “we need to understand the plantation in Asia in a broader sense, namely, as a conglomerate of estates firmly entrenched in the colonial state and capable of controlling a countryside and a labor force, even without being the proprietor of either of them” (p. 14). This view is exemplified by the Cultivation System (1830–1870) in Java, which “did not establish a regime of free labor” (p. 78) but relied on “bonded labor for commodity production” (p. 77) in a context of “land scarcity” (p. 78). Bosma admits that the plantation economy was “ill-suited to the Philippines as it was to Java, simply because there was neither slave nor proletarian labor available” (p. 83). Although working “slightly differently in the Philippines than it did in the Netherlands Indies,” export crop production “had to be operated via state coercion and patron-client relations” (p. 83).

Bosma's economic history of the Philippines misses several salient points. The state's role could have been linked to the huge friar estates in the Southern Tagalog region, but they are missing in this narrative, except for a passing mention (p. 88). He calls Chinese mestizos as forming a “nonindigenous parasitic landed class” (p. 85), which is inaccurate because they were considered natives rather than Foreign Orientals as in the Netherlands Indies. Madrid even considered the Cultivation System, but decided against employing it in the Philippines. Despite its avowed intentions, the Spanish colonial state did not support native planters, especially those involved in sugar production (alluded to in the next chapter [pp. 120–121] but without challenging his view about the state). State coercion in the tobacco monopoly, which Bosma omits from his narrative, ended in 1882 to give way to free enterprise. Because of the Spanish colonial state's role, which can be described as at best ambiguous, the “northern Philippines” was hardly a plantation economy. The comparison with Java rests on soft ground that cannot sustain a historical edifice.

A shift of focus is made in Chapter 4, titled “The Labor-Scarce Commodity Frontier, 1870s–1942.” Bosma argues that “plantation estates and corporate capitalism did not bring all of Island Southeast Asia under its sway, as it had done in Java and the northern Philippines” (p. 103). In other words, “Smallholder cash-crop production was resilient,” resulting in a “slow process” of “peripheralization” (p. 103) that saw colonial centers “engineering migration” (p. 111). Bosma uses the plantations in North Sumatra and their privilege of penal sanctions as demonstrating “how the combination of plantations’ unwillingness to pay market wages and colonial governments’ anxiety to control migration engendered a world of trafficking and deceit” (p. 104), where it was hard to draw the “legal boundary between labor recruitment and enslavement” (114). Bosma presents no comparable case in the Philippines.

Chapter 5, dealing with the 1870s–1942 period, which as in the previous chapter follows a periodization more suitable to Indonesia than the Philippines, picks up from where chapter 3 ended, but focused on “the question of why Java fell behind the Philippines economically in the early twentieth century” (p. 134). Because of “population pressure,” which cramped access to land, and “distortions in Java's rural economy, which was dominated by plantation interests” (pp. 134–135), Bosma argues that “rural conditions as well as per capita income in Java compared unfavorably with the relatively densely populated northern Philippines” (p. 131). “Low food prices and the influx of cheap [imported] rice” made Java's export crops competitive (p. 133). Bosma argues that poor living conditions were also not caused by a “putative deindustrialization” (p. 135) because the female-dominated artisanal industries, which accounted for most of manufacturing employment, were resilient in both countries (pp. 137–140). Poverty in Java was also not due to dependence on commodity exports as evinced by the relatively better situation in the Philippines, which by 1930 “surpassed Java in terms of dependency on export crops” (p. 144).

Chapter 5 ends by discussing international migration. While Bosma argues that “structural economic convergences” between Java and the Philippines occurred in the 1930s (p. 151), he does not directly associate international migration with the plantation economy or mechanisms of labor control. Instead, the crucial variables are rising educational levels and rates of urbanization in the context of high demographic growth. The inclusion of British Malaya in the picture implies that the plantation economy could be linked to international mobility, but no direct attribution is made except for the suggestion that the planter class moved to form the rich core of primate cities (p. 155). The rise of international migration is said to be due to an “outward-looking orientation” (p. 156) among the populace that, despite their education, suffered “low wage levels” (p. 157) – with Ilocanos as the prime example.

In chapter 6, Bosma takes us to “Postcolonial Continuities in Plantations and Migrations,” as the title declares. This period saw “a renewed drive toward the frontiers and the return of the plantation” (p. 161). Development strategies faltered, inducing migration. “The scale of today's coercion, fraud, deception, and abuse of power cannot leave a shred of doubt about the persistence of human trafficking” (p. 172). While trafficking does occur, its intensity and extensity is not discussed. Unauthorized migration is mentioned, but its scale is also not tackled. Other types of migratory movements do not enter Bosma's reckoning. More than being analytical, the chapter is a lament about the transhistorical existence of evil and the persistence of antediluvian systems of “patriarchy, clientelism, and debt bondage” (p. 175).

A serious problem in the conceptual scaffolding of this book is the fact that the putative preconquest golden age that abounded in fortune produced through harsh labor conditions is not well established. Quoting Wilbur Zelinsky, Bosma assumes “the antiquity of a stable rice culture” (p. 6) – which is not the case in the Philippines as roots crops were the precolonial staple and the wet rice cultivation complex involving plow technology and irrigation was a product of the colonial era. Bosma alludes to the Ifugao rice terraces, among other examples, as evidence that this “stable rice culture” was due not to “specific ecological conditions” but to “successful modes of labor control” (p. 7). He has missed the evidence from carbon dating studies that points to a colonial-era provenance for these terraces, with their building starting in the sixteenth century, probably as communities retreated away from Spanish rule. Additionally, the contention about slavery ignores the simultaneous existence of nonslave labor in the precolonial age. The inordinate emphasis on labor control and its persistence in patron–client relationships conjures the specter of Oriental Despotism, bequeathing a supposedly intractable cultural practice stronger than even the colonial state. The argument is a variant of cultural determinism, a largely untestable proposition.