The cultivation system (1830-1870) and its private entrepreneurs on colonial Java

Ever since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba. © 2007 The National University of Singapore.