Illiberal Trade, Creole Chinese Middlemen, and Agrarian Social Relations in the Java Hinterland, 1830–1914

This paper examines agrarian social relations forged by the creolized Chinese commercial class in the context of Dutch colonial Java's illiberal system of production and circulation in the nineteenth century. For close to a century (1830-1914), Chinese traders dominated the colonial sphere of circulation in Java by their urban-hinterland networks and calculative spirit in handling contracts, auctions and credit-relations with European wholesalers, colonial officials, Javan aristocrats and indigenous peasants. Alongside the colonial-feudalist Cultivation System (1830-70), select Chinese merchants won exclusive access to the Javan hinterland to operate bazaar, opium, pawnshop and other revenue farms. This illiberal commercial dominance began to unravel after 1870 with the arrival of private Dutch capital and a liberal discourse of indigenous protectionism in the colony. Social economic surveys by colonial officials in the 1880s and 1890s into the "Chinese Question" reveal more complex relations of credit and dependence between Chinese commercial capital and indigenous peasants than racialized theories of Chinese exploitation had accused. Rereading the colonial social-economic surveys of the turn of the twentieth century, this paper argues that the "Chinese question" was resolved by the replacement of feudal relations of production and circulation with twentieth century cosmopolitan capitalist relations of production, against which the Javan peasantry was to be protected under the newly recast village level adat-law.