In the mid-1880s, when most sugar manufacturers in Java were in extremis on account of a sudden and dramatic fall in world sugar prices, an apologist for the industry published a book in Amsterdam under the polyglot title of Suikerlords [Sugar lords]. It was a spirited defence of Java's sugar manufacturers and traders, whose purportedly profligate behaviour over the preceding years was widely blamed for the financial predicament in which they now found themselves. Yet the book was no mere polemic, since it drew on the author's extensive experience of the Indies over the preceding twenty or more years, and came from the pen of a man who was wellknown and respected in Dutch business circles. He had been the founder, a few years earlier, of the Koloniale Bank, an enterprise that became one of the major pillars of the Java sugar industry for the next half-century of its colonial-era existence. The title that Jan Hudig had chosen was deliberately ironic. Indeed, the whole point of his account was to establish the solid bourgeois rather than quasi-'Asiatic’ or seigniorial credentials of the Indies sugar manufacturers who had dominated the Java industry over the last few decades. It was to their formidable accumulation and investment of capital that he now he sought to draw attention (and to which we shall return later in the chapter).

Despite the efforts of Hudig (and, until recently, very few others), the colonial or 'Indies’ bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Java have enjoyed a mixed history. Indeed, according to some accounts they scarcely figured at all. Rather, the bourgeoisie were judged to have been marginal to projects for large-scale commodity production in the colony, since such projects continued to be masterminded by the Indies state through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This judgement is simply wrong. Between the 1840s and 1880s, Java sugar had been transformed (as we have seen) by an industrial project, grounded in the state's commandeering of land and labour and, initially, by the state's direct provision of finance. Contrary to some lingering notions about the dynamics of capital in Java in the mid-nineteenth century, however, this industrial project was closely linked to the spawning of a bourgeoisie, without whom it would scarcely have reached the stage of development that it did.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century (1830s-1880s), Java became, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a world leader in the industrialised manufacture of sugar. It thereby laid the foundations for the Dutch colony's transformation into the ‘Oriental Cuba’, an Asian counterpart of the foremost of the sugar industries in the New World. It did so, as we have seen in the preceding account, on the basis of a number of complementary developments. One was the determination in Dutch colonial circles from the late 1820s onward to develop a proto-command economy in the Indies, with a view to exploiting the agricultural resources of Java, in particular, as the basis for large-scale production of ‘world’ commodities — the profits from which would flow back to an impoverished Holland. Though not envisaged initially as such, sugar became the centre-piece of the new Cultuurstelsel or System of [State] Cultivations (even though coffee continued to supply the greater part of the island's exports until sometime in the 1880s); and the state's largesse, in the form of capital loans, working capital, commandeered access to land and to local, servile labour was absolutely crucial to the establishment of the industrial project.

The Indies Government's achievement was twofold. Its ability to harness to the Stelsel — and in so-doing greatly expand — an elaborate labour-service regime that it had inherited from the pre-colonial state combined with a transformative ‘peasantisation’ of the island's rural social-economic formation. In tandem, these developments created an agrarian basis for sugar production which had few or no parallels elsewhere in the international sugar economy of the period. The upshot was a sugar complex, embedded in a much larger ‘peasant’ economy based on the cultivation of rice and second crops, which eschewed plantations and slaves and operated instead in the context of the forced labour of peasants and of ‘cane-gardens’ comprising fields taken from peasant farmers on a rotational basis. Very neatly, though largely contingently, the Stelsel exploited peasants without (formally) expropriating them, though its effective operation depended to a degree on a skewed access to resources in ‘village’ Java which was vital to the supply of labour that the industrial project required.

During the course of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, sugar reinvented itself as an industrially manufactured product. Together with the applied sciences that sustained them, steam and steel — beginning, initially, as iron — characterised a sugar 'revolution’ that took place globally during a period that began around 1780 and reached its apogee circa 1914.

The term ‘revolution’ seems appropriate even though the time span was lengthy. Much has been written about this revolution in the context of cane sugar in the Caribbean and the New World in general (the production areas, that is to say, which since the sixteenth century had supplied the commodity to the Atlantic Zone and its hinterland). Nonetheless, the revolution also had a significant impact throughout Asia and the Indian Ocean, in areas as diverse as Mauritius, the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia (and in the neighbouring north-east of Australia).

In Dutch controlled Java, however, the impact was particularly pronounced and sustained. There, a singular industrial project — singular in respect to its combination of scale, output and technological-scientific advance — took shape during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and reached a precocious florescence toward the century's end. Indeed, by the 1880s the developed state of manufacturing on Java placed the island well ahead of any of its erstwhile counterparts elsewhere in Asia or its Indian Ocean counterparts and roughly on par with the most advanced sugar industries of the New World. The Dutch colony had become, in effect, the ‘Oriental Cuba’, with an exported output of cane sugar that was only exceeded by that of its Caribbean antipode.

Sugar's Reinvention as an Industrially Manufactured Commodity

Until the nineteenth century, the commodity we know as ‘sugar’ was derived exclusively from the sugar cane, which in turn was selectively bred from grasses found, it seems most likely, on the south-eastern fringes of Asia, possibly New Guinea.1 The use of cane to make sugar appears to have originated in various regions of Asia in premodern times, and to have been transmitted from there to the Middle East, then into the Mediterranean and eventually from there into the New World.

For centuries, sugar was manufactured worldwide by artisans using essentially handicraft techniques. In some places, it still is. Though these techniques varied considerably from place to place as well as over time, there were some essential similarities.

This is a book about cane sugar and the transformation of an Indonesian island into the ‘Oriental Cuba’ during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, sweetener manufacture in Dutch-controlled Java — the crown jewel of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies — drew decisively away in matters of technology and sugar science from other Asian centres of production which had once equaled or, more often, surpassed it in terms of both output and know-how. Along with its larger and altogether more famous Caribbean counterpart, Java's industry came to occupy a position at the apex of the trade in what had become by this date a key global commodity. Along with the beet sugar producers of (post-1870) Imperial Germany, Cuba and Java accounted for a little over one-third of the world's recorded output of the industrially manufactured kind of sugar usually referred to as 'centrifugal'.

'Industrially manufactured’ is the key phrase here, since during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it was these two island producers that became the prime centres of industrialised manufacture of cane sugar in their respective hemispheres. In neither case has this fact always been grasped. Cuba, along with the United States, was the nineteenth century's greatest holdout of slave-based commodity production, and the institution of slavery there outlasted its American counterpart for the better part of two decades, only coming to a (de facto) end in the 1880s. As a result, the industrial dimension of the Cuban ‘project’ in sugar has been obscured by notions — now largely exploded — that slavery and technological advance were incompatible.

In respect to Java, the focus of the present discussion, the parallel development of industrialised sugar manufacture has been obfuscated for reasons not dissimilar to those operating with regard to its Caribbean antipode. At least until recently, a parallel historiography charting a different kind of servility likewise had the effect of obscuring the industrial evolution of sugar. This occurred due to a near-exclusive concentration on the role played in the expansion of its production by commandeered inputs of land and labour under the aegis of the so-called Cultuurstelsel or System of [State] Cultivations.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Prometheus came to Java, and did so in the shape of the technologies of steam, iron and (eventually) steel. In so far, moreover, as it invoked colonial ingenuity and invention as well as metropolitan transfer, Prometheus took on a distinctively Creole, hybrid character. As one recent writer has remarked of technology (and much else):

His point provides an apt motif for what follows, specifically in its applicability to the men and machines not only of the colony's sugar industry in the mid-nineteenth century but also of the larger imperialism of which they formed an essential part. The history of the Dutch colonial presence in nineteenth-century Java has been occluded to a degree by notions of a Tempo Doeloe — literally a ‘time past’, but with similar connotations to the myth of the ante-bellum American South — which became the subject for a deal of post-colonial nostalgia in the Netherlands itself. On this reading, a largely ‘pre-modern’ order prevailed in the colony during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and was swept away only toward the century's end by economic crises and a sharp increase in the inflow of European capital and, subsequently, of self-consciously ‘expatriate’ personnel. The colony was not the sort of place, in short, where an industrial project was likely to thrive: on the contrary, in such a location sugar production was likely to be a thoroughly old-fashioned affair.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Metropolitan Holland itself may have been slow to take up the advances of the industrial revolution. In its Asian colony, however, Prometheus was clearly in evidence on the frontiers of Dutch power in the Indonesian archipelago by the middle decades of the century.

Paddle Boats and Sugar Factories

In the West, the nineteenth-century advance of steam and steel came to be epitomised in the cotton mill, at least in so far as the sphere of large-scale commodity production was concerned. Worldwide, on the other hand, the major connotations of steam power in the mid-century decades arguably had more to do with transportation (including its military applications), in the form of railway engines and steam boats.

As late as the 1870s, a painter's representation of a sugar factory on the north coast of Central Java made conspicuous reference to its purportedly picturesque aspects. The place appears to be located in wilderness; a few ‘blacks’, as they would have been referred to then (it might be a particularly remote part of the Caribbean), are scattered in desultory fashion in the foreground; and a ‘pioneering’ European cabin bravely flies the Dutch flag. Although a belching chimney forms part of the picture, it is possible to feel that it is only there out of a need somehow to add variety to a scene otherwise totally lacking in animation or purpose. In fact, however, it is the vital clue to what was actually being depicted: an industrial site in constant dayand- night operation for a substantial part of the year, operating with a disciplined workforce of several hundred labourers, its grinding mills fed with rail-hauled cane and, within its walls and in day-and-night operation, an array of apparatus that was fully the match (by the time the painting was made) for most other leading sectors of the contemporary international sugar economy.

The rise of the industrial factory was central to all this. As has been widely observed, the arrival of steam operation and more specifically, though not exclusively, the steam engine, entailed the need for economies of scale to justify its use wherever it was installed. Technological advance necessitated larger units of production and the concentration of production in one place. It also raised issues of how to concentrate labour in a single location and how to subject labour to the degree of discipline which large units of production require if they are to operate smoothly — or indeed, operate at all. Unsurprisingly, these were all issues played out within the context of the industrial project in sugar which got underway in Java during the 1830s and 1840s and developed exponentially thereafter.

There is, of course, no single pace-setting model of what constitutes 'industrialisation', and the immediate focus here is on technological innovation. This, far from constituting a clean and decisive break with the past, took place (at least until late in the nineteenth century) on a largely incremental basis that mixed the new with the old in a myriad of possible permutations.

In July 1870, the fifty-year-old Jan Louis van Gennep, President [CEO] of the NHM's Batavia factorij, left Batavia by coastal steamer to begin a tour of inspection of his company's investments on the island's Northeast Coast. On his way back, he travelled inland through the Vorstenlanden of South-Central Java. Late in the month, having arrived by rail on a recently opened section of the line being built from the Vorstenlanden down to the coast at Semarang, he stayed for some days at the Courtcity of Surakarta (Solo). The city, the seat of the Soesoehoenan, head of one of South-Central Java's two ruling families, was also at the centre of a considerable belt of plantation activity that had begun there several decades earlier, in which coffee, indigo and sugar were well to the fore.

Commensurate with his important position in colonial circles in the Indies, van Gennep, an old Indies hand who (as we saw earlier) had been in Java for over a quarter of a century, evidently spent some time with the Resident Tobias, the Dutch representative at the Soesoehoenan's Court. Indeed, he may well have stayed with the Resident, and it was presumably Tobias who suggested that he might visit the Colomadu factory at Malangjiwan, a few kilometres to the east of the city. This enterprise was unusual in that it was the only industrial sugar factory in the colony owned by a Javanese, having been established almost ten years earlier by the Solonese aristocrat, Pangeran Adipati Ario Mangkunegra IV, in whose Principality it stood. What made Colomadu even more unusual, however, was that it also boasted the first ‘Triple Effet’ apparatus — the sine qua non of ‘modern’ sugar manufacturing from the 1860s onward — to be installed anywhere in the colony. Within the three interconnected, pressurised tanks of the Triple Effect, cane-juice from the mills was both cleansed and concentrated before being pumped to the Vacuum Pans, where it was further reduced into a mix of quasi-crystalline sugar and molasses. Its advantage, along with offering a much more fail-safe method of operation than had previously been available to sugar manufacturers, was that it worked on the basis of the recirculation of steam-heat between the various phases of its operation, thereby greatly reducing the factory's expenditure on fuel.

Sugar is associated — perhaps indelibly — with plantations and slaves. Java, as things developed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, had neither: or, at least, not in any way that related to the production of sugar. The ‘sugar plantation’ as conceived in the heavily Caribbean-centric literature did not exist there (or was found only on the margins of the industry). Neither did slavery, nor the indentured forms of labour that (in part) supplanted it in the New World and elsewhere. Ostensibly at least, commodity sugar production, as it developed on Java, belonged instead to a general, long-established, ‘Asian’ pattern, in which cane was raised by a ‘peasant’ workforce, utilising existing farm-land in conjunction with other crops.

As we shall see, a generalisation as broad as this runs the risk of seriously misrepresenting the agrarian basis of production that evolved in Java through the mid-century decades. Nonetheless, it does serve to highlight the major disparity between how the industry's raw material was produced and the classic situation of contemporaneous New World sugar manufacture. In the Dutch colony, the sugar industry expanded rapidly between the 1830s and 1880s, primarily but not exclusively under the aegis of the Cultuurstelsel or System of [State] Cultivations, which was inaugurated at the beginning of the period by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch and his lieutenants. In contrast to the barrack slavery of transported Africans and the dominant monoculture of contemporary Cuba — Java's Caribbean antipode — Java sugar's expansion was predicated on raw material produced by local, peasant labour from cane fields that were created by the temporary amalgamation of scores of often minute irrigated rice fields or sawah. The sawah amalgamated in this way, however, remained within the domain of peasant agriculture and reverted to ‘peasant’ cropping once the cane had been harvested — whereupon a fresh set of fields was prepared for the planting of the next season's sugar harvest. This was the famous system of wisselbouw or crop rotation which singled out Java's sugar industry from virtually all its major global counterparts.

Production of the industry's raw material did indeed take on some plantation-like characteristics, particularly after the Cultuurstelsel began to be phased out from about 1870 onwards. Over the course of time, cane ceased to be a ‘peasant’ crop in any meaningful sense of that word and came under the direct and close supervision of industry personnel.