donn@utah-gr.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (12/03/84)
I've been digging through my library and recently I found a few passages which might be of interest to readers of the recent flap over the effects of imperialism. The fact is that the US once rebelled against the control of colonialist England, but so much time has passed that no one in this country seems to realize just how terrible a situation it was. We prize free enterprise, but the effect of colonialism is to stamp it out; we prize individual rights, but colonialism reserved those rights for the masters; we prize democracy, but the colonial powers denied it even to their own settlers. It is interesting to reflect on our heritage from the 'enlightened' and 'civilized' cultures of Europe in the 16th-19th centuries... The following quotes are about the Dutch in Indonesia, and are pretty much representative of colonial practices elsewhere in the world. Keep in mind that while the Dutch colonialists were cruel and brutal, they were by no means the worst of the lot (the French in Vietnam and the Belgians in the Congo are hard to beat...). This first passage is from Kahin's NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION IN INDONESIA, pp. 3-6: 'The objective of the [Netherlands East India] Company being trading privileges, it had no inclination to sink its limited resources into developing political control over Javanese territory, except insofar as this was necessary to secure and maintain such privileges. But it soon became clear that unless these could be exercised as monopolies vis-a-vis competing traders from other countries they were of little value. In order to eliminate competition from Javanese, Arab, Chinese, and non-Dutch European traders and to ensure an implementation of agreements made with local rulers most suited to its own interests, the Company gradually found it necessary to intervene politically more and more decisively over wider and wider areas of Java. 'Fortunately for the Dutch, Java in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was politically unintegrated. Moreover, Mataram, the largest of the Javanese states, was during much of this period seriously weakened by civil wars. Initially, only by playing off the Sultanate of Bantam against Mataram were the Dutch able to maintain their trading post at Batavia. It was to an important extent because of the division and mutual enmity of the chief Javanese states that they were thereafter, by playing one state against the other, eventually able to dominate the island completely. 'Between 1677 and 1777, the Company extended its political and economic control over two-thirds of Java, while it dominated, for the most part, the economic life of the remainder of the island, the truncated and nominally independent state of Mataram. Mataram was totally excluded from commercial relations with the outer world. Its commerce was vigorously suppressed: "... merchants, and shipbuilders lost their occupation, and the fisheries and forests were no longer profitable. The Javanese became a people of cultivators and the economic content of their social life was stunted." [Furnivall, 1941, NETHERLANDS INDIA, A STUDY OF PLURAL ECONOMY] 'Commanding very limited resources and expected to show a high annual profit on its small capital, the Dutch East India Company was not in a position to pay the high costs that a system of direct administration would have entailed. Sufficient to secure the political control necessary for attainment of its economic objectives was the inexpensive system of indirect rule that it came to follow. The essence of this system consisted in the utilization of the indigenous power structure for its own interests. More precisely this meant the maintenance and reinforcement of the position and power of the amenable elements of the Javanese aristocracy. Their power had to be enlarged, for the Company's interests called for new and additional burdens being placed on the peasantry. The power of this aristocracy was strengthened by Dutch military force, which stood ready to back it against the populace so long as it controlled the economic activities of the latter in accordance with the interests of the Company. 'Thereby Javanese society was thrown seriously out of balance. The formerly strong peasantry could no longer curb the arbitrary actions of the aristocratic elite; the balance that previously had given its interests protection could not be maintained, for the aristocrats, backed as they were by the Dutch, could now muster overwhelming force against it. ... As a consequence the pattern of social relationships among the population of Java underwent important changes, and the structure of Javanese society became strongly distorted. ...' With this general colonial strategy in mind, let's take a look at a few specific examples of Dutch administration. The following is from Hall's A HISTORY OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA, p. 333: '... [I]n 1740 Governor-General Valkenier and the Council of the Indies decided ... [that all] Chinese unable to prove that they were suitably employed were to be deported to work in the cinnamon gardens in Ceylon. The regulation was carried out with gross unfairness: greedy officials seized Chinese long resident in Java in order to squeeze money out of them under threat of deportation. And when a baseless rumour went round that the deportees were thrown overboard as soon as their ships were out of sight of Java, large numbers of Chinese fled from Batavia and organized armed resistance. 'The Dutch authorities discovered that those still remaining in the city were in league with the rebels and were preparing to defend themselves. A chance fire which broke out in a Chinese house was taken as a sign that those within the city and those without were to make a concerted attack. Thereupon the infuriated population, supported by soldiers, seamen, slaves and Javanese, fell upon the Chinese, and for a whole week massacre and plunder went on unchecked. Governor-General Valkenier lost his head so completely as to order the massacre of all Chinese prisoners and did nothing to prevent the Company's troops from participating in the bloodbath.' What were economic conditions like in the Dutch East Indies? Hall again (pp. 331-2): 'The ... manipulation of the coffee trade by the Company during the eighteenth century is a sorry tale of measures taken to ensure a high price in the European market and a mere pittance for the producer, who was at the mercy of a government which changed its policy from time to time in such an arbitrary fashion as to make it impossible for him to cultivate on economic lines. Moreover, as the Dutch worked through the local chiefs, who in equally arbitrary fashion fixed their own share of the proceeds, the cultivator's position was worse than that of a slave. Furnivall [op. cit.] sums up the final position thus: "The net result was that for every pikol of 126 pounds shipped, the cultivator had to supply 240 to 270 pounds and was paid the equivalent of 14 pounds.' Keep in mind that the profits made by the intermediaries in this business were not a result of supply and demand -- the Company practiced an arrangement of trade monopolies and forced deliveries that made it impossible for a farmer to opt out of the cruel system. A 20th century example is cited by Kahin (p. 23): 'Though the annual rate of production [of rubber] by Indonesian growers had been 300,000 tons as against 220,000 by the Western-owned estates, the government in 1934 (in meeting the quota assigned it under the international rubber control regulation to which it was a party) restricted the native producers to a quota of 145,000 tons while allowing the estates to produce 205,000 tons. Between June, 1934, and December, 1936, native rubber exports were kept in check through "a special export tax designed to depress local prices sufficiently to keep native exports within the permissible level." [Bauer, 1948, THE RUBBER INDUSTRY, A STUDY IN COMPETITION AND MONOPOLY] In order to keep this production by Indonesians down the government imposed a progressively stiffer tax, so that in 1936 over 95 percent of the export value of the rubber produced by them was absorbed by the tax. Estate rubber was subected to a much smaller tax. The minimum disparity in this taxation allowed the estate owner to realize thirty cents on each kilo produced and the Indonesian twenty cents, while the maximum reached was sixty-two cents for the estate owner and five cents for the Indonesian producer. The consequences for the Indonesian population were so severe that in some areas famine and hunger riots resulted.' With all this Company control of the means of production, you might expect that the Dutch made a hefty profit on its colonies. In fact the Dutch usually lost money, and at times lost it heavily, due to corruption and inefficiency. According to Hall the Company had a deficit of 74 million guilders in 1789, which increased to 96 million guilders in 1791 and finally 134 million guilders in 1799, when it was nationalized by the government in an effort to bail it out. Only with the advent of the Culture System in 1830, with its extensive forced cultivation of cash crops for sale to the government at fixed prices, did the system really show a a profit. Of course between 1843 and 1850 there were massive famines in Java because the natives were unable to raise rice to eat instead of coffee for export, but the treasury benefited to the tune of 900 million guilders; the fact that those who enforced the taxes paid little attention to regulations which limited the quotas was a major factor in this profitability. Despite the seemingly large amount of cash raised this way, when the government opened up the economy in 1870 after a series of reforms, the value of the exports from the colony rose dramatically, from 107.57 million guilders in 1870 to 258.23 million in 1900. (All of these numbers are from Hall.) Well, enough axe-grinding. I hope this superficial account gives an idea of the costs of imperialism... Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn