According to the UN's FAO Statistical Data (retrieved on 7 August 2014), India was the second largest producer of sugar cane in the world in 2010 after Brazil, producing 20,637 thousand tons of sugar (raw centrifugal). Meanwhile Indonesia was merely the tenth largest producer of sugar cane in the world, producing 1,770 thousand tons of sugar (ranking the sixth largest in Asia and Oceania after India, China, Thailand, Australia and Pakistan). However, in terms of net export (export minus import) in the same year, India imported 469 thousand tons and Indonesia also imported 1,380 thousand tons of sugar. The most significant exporters of sugar in Asia and Oceania were Australia and Thailand whose amounts of net sugar exports were 2,773 thousand tons and 2,074 thousand tons respectively.
In contrast, the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) had exported 2,403 thousand tons of sugar in 1929, the heyday of its colonial sugar production. It was the second largest sugar exporter in the world after Cuba. British India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh) produced 1,697 thousand tons of raw cane sugar (gur and white sugar) in 1930/31, ranked as the third largest producer in the world after Cuba and the Dutch East Indies. However, because of huge domestic consumption, it imported 906 thousand tons of sugar in 1930 mostly from the Dutch East Indies (Imperial Economic Committee, Plantation Crops: A Summary of Figures of Production and Trade Relating to Sugar, Tea, Coffee, Cocoa, Spices, Tobacco and Rubber, London: 1938, pp. 18–23). Thus, a close nexus used to exist in the sugar trade between these two largest Western colonies in Asia, which make a comparative sugar industry study between them an interesting topic of research. Ulbe Bosma's book The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–2010 is a remarkable achievement in this field.
After the end of the eighteenth century when abolitionist campaigns emerged against Caribbean sugar production by slave labor, European colonial powers began attempts to import Asian sugar through the introduction of industrialized plantation production. At first, Mauritius and Java, under British and Dutch rule respectively, became the most important industrial sugar producers. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern industrial production of cane sugar expanded to Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan and India. The author details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in their Asian colonies and readjusted it over time.
The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 is titled “Producing Sugar for the World.” After dealing with the historical origin of the sugar plantations as the “Atlantic plantation system” mainly developed in the Caribbean area, it explains how property relations and financial circuits (such as networks of landlords and moneylenders) were crucial determinants in the successful introduction of plantations and industrial methods of sugar production.
Chapter 2, “East Indian Sugar versus Slave Sugar,” details the introduction of industrial sugar production in India by discussing plantation experiments in the late eighteenth century by the East India Company, ryotwari taxation system and sugar experiments in South India, the role of the abolitionist movement against slavery in the rise of the sugar industry in India, the downfall of industrial cane sugar in North India due to low prices on the world market and competition with traditional gur (brown sugar) or khandsari (white sugar) production, together with the survival of sugar manufacture in Madras that used date or palm gur as raw materials.
Next, Chapter 3, “Java: From Cultivation System to Plantation Conglomerate,” also describes the industrialization of Java sugar production by examining the expansion of wage labor under the Cultivation System introduced in 1830, advances in manufacturing technology and the growth of wage labor, the provision of labor by marginal peasants and sharecroppers, rotation cropping of sugar cane with rice on the sawah (irrigated paddy fields), and the limitations of colonial liberalism and continuation of coercive elements in wage labor.
Chapter 4, “Sugar, Science, and Technology: Java and India in the Late Nineteenth Century,” discusses innovations in sugar production itself by analyzing the role of irrigation, the introduction of new types of mills, improvements in agricultural statistics and sugar cane varieties, the introduction of iron plows, the development of labor-intensive cultivation methods (particularly in Java), and other advances.
These developments notwithstanding, in Chapter 5, “The Era of the Global Sugar Market, 1890–1929,” it is explained how by around 1900 India could no longer satisfy its own domestic demand for sugar and began to import rapidly increasing quantities from the Dutch East Indies, i.e. Java as its near-exclusive site of sugar production. By that time, the Java sugar mills (“factories” to use the author's phrase) had reached the vanguard of sugar production, by successfully forcing down wages and by investments in cane processing and botany.
However, as explained in the last chapter titled “Escaping Plantation,” the worldwide overproduction in sugar that had become so serious during the course of the 1920s eventually brought the Java sugar industry to the brink of collapse in the 1930s. A direct cause of this downfall was that India, the largest importer of Java sugar, fenced off its home market by a protective tariff to develop its own industrial sugar sector, alongside traditional gur production.
In postcolonial Indonesia and India, the governments of both countries made attempts to escape the colonial plantation model, but as a business model for cash crop production in the global economy it proved long lasting. Its overall colonial aftermath was often equally resilient, so that alliances between factory management and richer peasant strata were still crucial to the development of sugar production and remained in place during postcolonial times as exemplified by cases of the factory zones system and cane planters' cooperatives in both countries.
The outline of this book can roughly sketched in this way. To depict the comparative history of sugar industry in two countries, it is essential to explore the full variety of source materials that cover each country. These materials were written not only in English, but also in Dutch. In this regard, the author has a distinct advantage over non-Dutch researchers, and his extensive learning on the sugar industry history of the two countries is genuinely admirable. In addition, to cover a time span as long as 340 years, it is also necessary to have a global vision of the development of the modern sugar industry in that period. It seems that with the idea of the transfer of the Atlantic plantation system into Asia and its persistence even in the postcolonial age, the author has been able to achieve consistency in the grand design of this book.
However, such advantages and assumptions might also prompt further debate. First, the choice of India and Indonesia as objects of comparison for the entire period of 340 years is debatable. It is of course appropriate to compare the introduction and development of industrialized sugar production in these two countries under colonial rule. In its considerations of a solid nexus in the sugar trade between India and Java for the first two decades of the twentieth century, such comparison is all the more meaningful. However, its significance for the more than sixty years of the postcolonial period is questionable. As pointed out at the beginning of this review, nowadays neither India nor Indonesia is a star player in the international sugar trade of Asia and Oceania. And, sixty years seems too long a period for a sequel to colonial history.
Second, the author's concept of the “plantation system” also seems debatable. He defines a plantation as “an entity in which the management of the cash crop growing unit is in complete control of every aspect of the work process, as well as of the applied technologies” (pp. 26–27). Does not conceptual ambiguity remain in the phrase “complete control of every aspect”? In Southeast Asia, the author frequently points out Negros Island in the Philippines as a case of a sugar plantation model other than Java (pp. 28, 74, 262, 266). Sugar haciendas in Negros depend entirely on wage labor in cane cultivation. However, in Central Luzon, another center of sugar industry in the Philippines, cane cultivation depends on the labor of share tenants (not sharecroppers as laborers who never own the means of production). Is the plantation concept also applicable to such a case? In Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, cane cultivation was entrusted to local peasants and wage labor was seldom used on their farms. Japanese specialists on the sugar industry in that age never applied the concept of the “plantation” to the Taiwan sugar industry. Can we discover the plantation complex in sugar production in Thailand or Australia as the star player of sugar export in present-day Asia and Oceania? As a matter of fact, such questions require further study.
