Purse or Principle: Dutch Colonial Policy in the 1860s and the Decline of the Cultivation System

In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.